Until recently, I had a Ford Flex.

The only thing I didn’t like about it was the proud “powered by Microsoft” emblem (and its implications).

I’m old enough to have been a fan of Buffy, but didn’t watch TV back then. I also enjoy some modern pop music but, in the vast majority of cases, have never seen the artists. I’m also terminally bad at faces even if I have seen them (I’ve had to ask my wife whether a picture of her was her; she took it well).

I did actually recognize Alyson Hanigan, since she has a few distinctive expressions and features, but had no idea of the rest.

All that said to say: thanks for the explanation; me not getting the joke or reference doesn’t mean it was a bad one.

While grateful for the explanation, I find myself no less confused.

To be fair, I think there is a “shopping” tab when you perform a search through them.

If you haven’t, you should watch and/or read Altered Carbon.

If you choose to watch, it is my opinion that it’s primarily the first season that’s worth watching.

I was actually wondering, when the previous commenter referenced the setup menu, if the shift+F10 thing still worked. I know it brings up the command prompt in the install interface, but in case you didn’t know, it also brings up the command prompt in general use Windows. (Or it used to. Again, I’m very out of date on the subject.)

I think “not hard, just annoying” means that anything tech related is out of reach for most people, unfortunately. Plus, to be honest, most people probably won’t care about or see a problem with Microsoft forcing an online account on them. I’m happy they’re happy, but their privacy ends not with a bang, but a whimper.

Ah, fair enough.

I haven’t used, or especially installed, Windows in years. Wasn’t sure if what I described was still the case. Good to know there’s still a way, though, in case I get desperate!

This may not still be true, but previously if you disconnected or removed the NIC during installation, after some haranguing you could setup a local account. (Note that this is still obviously bad, but if you need a solution, it might provide one.)

Well, fair enough that you were exposed to them. I didn’t have a lot of friends, especially not those even remotely into any kind of tech, as a kid; I think I first heard of trackballs from a programming teacher in about 1996 and bought one to try out of curiosity. Ever since then I’ve used one whenever it was an option.

I’ve even mostly used the same model. If you look in my comment history, you can see I recently mentioned that most of what I use is Kensington Orbits. I’ve tried other models, but they don’t work for me.

The one PC gaming exception for me is Minecraft. In that game you have to right-click a lot (as I’m sure you know) and I guess I haven’t developed the muscles for that because it makes my wrist very tired very quickly. Still, I play a lot of FPS games and have no problem holding the right click for zoom and such; only quick, repetitive right-clicking causes problems for me.

edit: To address your original comment, I have one friend who uses a trackball at work but a regular mouse for anything else. Other than that, I rarely meet anyone who has even heard of them, let alone used them, let alone consistently done so.

On PC, I game exclusively with trackballs and have since the nineties. I’ve never not been given the side eye when someone found out that’s how I play.

When was this magical time during which they were popular?

It’s been a year or two, but I had no issues with Star Citizen in Linux. IIRC, I ran it through Lutris.

The person perhaps (eventually) most qualified to answer this might be Graeldon, who is on a quest to play every Steam game in alphabetical order.

My pleasure! Glad it helped. Also, I like your username.

I’m still not sure how much to fear AI, as I’m not knowledgeable on the subject (never even intentionally interacted with one yet) and have seen conflicting reports on how worryingly capable it is. Today I did see this video, which isn’t explicitly about AI but did offer an interesting perspective that could be compared to the paradigm: https://youtu.be/fVN_5xsMDdg

(Warning, the video was interesting, but I got invested about halfway through when I started comparing it to AI, then was disappointed in the ending)

I saw an interesting video about this. It’s outdated (from ten months ago, apparently) but added some context that I, at least, was missing - and that also largely aligns with what you said. Also, though it’s not super evident in this video, I think the presenter is fairly funny.

https://youtu.be/L6mmzBDfRS4

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California, I think.

I don’t know if it is, but you can always just use yt-dlp or something similar.

I strongly dislike Windows - the only Windows device on my network is my wife’s work computer. However, my favorite desktop interface is the one Windows had in XP and 10. I even use Cinnamon because it’s the most similar experience (and shares a lot of the same key shortcuts I learned as a kid).

Reminds me of Reef sandals, at least some of which have bottle openers on the sole.

Using them for that purpose seems … Ill advised.

Not only is this true and annoying, but other things about the ads are getting worse, too.

I recently had to factory reset my TV and, after the first time I opened the YouTube app, immediately had to find the “don’t play video preview” option. It worked, except for the huge banner ad at the top of the list of videos, which still saw fit to play with deafening sound when I didn’t immediately change the video selection. I can’t find a setting to disable this.

Also, I’ve noticed the “fewer ads for this long video” message popping up during videos longer than thirty minutes (and now it seems like longer than twenty minutes). Not only is that message condescending like they’re doing me a favor, but I’m pretty sure it’s not true, at least not by much; and the ads are definitely longer and mostly unskippable.

Like someone else says in this thread, it feels like extortion.