Oh man, I feel this. Made me chuckle on an otherwise supremely bad day, thanks.

Back in the dialup days when brands were first coming online I used to have quite a thing for a Toffee Crisp. When I got a bar that was noticeably smaller than the last, I emailed them expecting a reply about market forces or cost of ingredients, but maybe they’d also send a voucher for a free bar or something.

Instead they tried to gaslight me, telling me they’d always been that size and that I must be imagining it. I was so put out by it that, other than a very occasional multi-pack for picnics, I haven’t bought a single-serve Toffee Crisp, Mars Bar, Snickers etc since.

When shrinkflation became a recognised term I felt so vindicated! I wish I still had that email so that I could shove it in their faces.

Yeah exactly this. A lot of the humour feels very dated today, even occasionally crossing the line into offensive, but at the time it was essential viewing. There’s a reason they were the most highly paid actors in TV comedy for a while (or TV in general?), later to be pipped by the cast of Frasier IIRC.

Speaking of Frasier, unlike its star, that has aged pretty well IMO, and I would still recommend it.

Those logs are insane! 1.6GB compressed?! Any idea what the load/throughput was like during that time?

O rly? I will look into this, thanks!

Maybe somebody’s asked this already but how come, in this day and age, there isn’t a way to snapshot your entire phone into some sort of encrypted blob for storage in a location of your choice? You could wipe your phone and setup a throwaway profile with some basic apps before traveling, and then restore the snapshot once safely through customs.

Border issues aside, it would be very handy to be able to snapshot a phone like that anyway…

Mythbusters did this, taking enough cars for one lane each in rush hour traffic, plus one car that was allowed to weave.

The weaving car was quicker by a not inconsiderable margin, so they kind of stumbled over the conclusion saying that yes, weaving is faster, but you probably shouldn’t.

I feel bad for laughing so hard at this. Bravo.

Yup, that’s one of the other things I wish I’d had the foresight to do.

My entire card details got stolen recently, including my name, address and phone number. The first I knew of it was when an email came in with a verification code for a multi-thousand £ purchase for a hotel reservation. I was just thinking it’s an odd looking phish when my phone rang. I ignored it as I always do and then it immediately rang again, so I answered it:

Them: Hello, is this Mr Zanzibar?

Me: Yes

Them: This is Amex fraud dept. We’ve noticed some odd activity on your card, did you make a purchase at x for y in the last few minutes?

Me: No.

Them: OK, great. It’s been flagged and declined on our end so your money’s safe. Just so that I can get this closed off, can you confirm the code that was sent to you?

Me: …Nnnnnooooooooo?

Them: immediately hangs up

Obviously then had to then call the real fraud dept and cancel my card, but I was annoyed by how little of a shit they seemed to give. No curiosity of where they could’ve got every detail of my card, no advice of what to do next, just cancelled the card and issued a new one. Thank you, next caller please.

Spent the rest of the day both relieved that I didn’t fall for it but also furious at myself because the best response I could come up with in the moment was “no”. I could’ve at least told them to get fucked!

Just to confirm: I tried this, it works.

Same. It’s incredibly bare bones and you have to supply your own domain, but the pricing structure makes a lot of sense and they offer some cool stuff that no other provider does, like wildcard subdomain support.

I tried Jellyfin once about a year ago and it was… OK I guess? Certainly nowhere near as polished as the rabid fan base would have me believe, and there was something in my library that it flat out refused to play.

If I didn’t already have a lifetime Plex Pass, and it was just me hosting my own media for a user count of one, then sure, I’d use it. But none of those things are true. I need something that “just works” and Plex fits that bill.

Like most people here, I bought a lifetime pass when it was $75 and it’s paid for itself over and over again in the time since. I honestly think I’ve had more than $750 worth of value from my purchase. Sure they’ve made some odd decisions recently, but until they start actively taking away functionality or rescind existing lifetime subs then I will continue to use it.

Meanwhile, not to belittle you personally, but the fact that every thread that mentions Plex in any way, good or bad, is guaranteed to be dominated by people circle-jerking over their beloved Jellyfin has put me completely off the project, to the point that I’ve had to add the word to my blocklist. Obviously that’s not working too well or I wouldn’t have seen this post!

Not a boss per se, but the first Marauder fight in Doom Eternal made me rage quit for a good 6 months.

This right here. In the UK we have a little box (ONT) where the fibre comes into the home that essentially acts as a modem and converts the fibre to ethernet and back again and then they provide a separate wireless router that plugs into it. Other than for my current ISP where I had to specifically request that they enable bridge mode (which they did for free), I’ve never had any issues plugging my own router into the ethernet side of this box.

If your ISP’s wireless router plugs directly into the fibre then you should be able to request that it’s set to bridge mode so that it becomes just a dumb ONT box like we have here. Albeit a large and clunky one.

Contacting the registrar is worth a shot and could be your best bet. I recently did a similar thing except the expiring domain was on a pretty obscure country-TLD with only one registrar. They told me how long the grace period was and then I setup a script to check the availability every minute and alert me when it came up.

Probably not feasible with a .com or similar but they might be able to help in some regard. Edit: though having read about drop catching, that’s definitely your best bet if it’s likely to be sniped!

“privacy items”. In other words it deletes your cookies and forces you to login to everything again.

My fancy toaster came with dire warnings to not leave it plugged in when it’s unsupervised, presumably because the cut-off on the mechanical timer can fail. Instead I plugged it into a smart socket with an automation to kill the power if there’s a continuous draw for more than 4 minutes.

Not for fun but probably my most pointless. Other than when I was testing it I don’t expect this automation to ever fire.

This is very impressive and I’m highly likely to give it a whirl. My question is, though: would it be something that my very non-tech savvy wife could use?

Eg. I’m thinking setup the app on her phone with a default location and when she asks me for a file I can just tell her that I’ve “put it in the app”, and she’ll be able to easily retrieve it. Also same thing but vice versa, though the video seems to cover that via the Android share menu…

Again, super impressive. Good job!

Yeah right? See also: Cryptocurrencies.