Nice!

Just remember to check the price. I’ve seen Cex selling things for above retail if they’re popular

Define donate or give away.

I’ve mentioned before that I help run a small music festival, and that it’s to help my local area. Raising money for that is a lot of work and takes a lot of energy. Pumping some money in would massively help the festival, which would help me. Would that count as donating, or would it be selfish because it helps me?

On a similar note, my area is quite poor. If I set up a factory with offices and other facilities that employed the low and unskilled workers at decent living wages, and included child care and employee training and education, would it still count as giving the money away if I made a profit, even if a small one?

I would be a bit selfish though, I’d build a house and some outbuildings on a large plot of land and soundproof everything completely. I function better at night, but still want to fix up my motorbike and do some woodworking, and I don’t want to wake the neighbours.

I’m not sure how long they take off the top of my head, but I think it’s quite quick. A lot of the apps only update once a month though, so it can feel like longer

To add to this, Street Complete and Every Door are great for getting started. They ask straightforward questions like what’s the house number of this building, or does this bus stop have seating. If you can’t answer a question you don’t have to, you can just go back and answer a different question instead :)

I volunteer at a small music festival. We’re trying to help keep the village alive at a time when more and more facilities are closing. I run the website and social media, and take photos over the weekend.

Taking the photos is probably the most fun, as you get to be part of the festival and watch everyone enjoy the event you set up, as well as watching some of the acts. It’s exhausting though, as you don’t stop for the better part of three days.

This year I had a lot to do with booking the acts and liaising with the acts and the venues. That was really interesting, but it nearly killed me. I’ve got a chronic illness that tires me out, but I thought this would be ok as it’s mostly emailing and messaging. I had no idea how many random things have to be organised and rearranged in the run up, or how much can go wrong on the day!

I’m sticking to photos next year!

Well, until you get that one that’s randomly hotter than the sun and turns your eyes and nose into gushing torrents, while you try not to cough it out in front of everyone else.

Always when you least expect it

I have got a mental picture of a Linux super nerd trying to browse through a text only browser on their oven’s display now though 😁

What? Nobody’s using their browser on an appliance (except for a handful of masochists with Samsung fridges). I said to most people their browser is on an appliance, as in they treat computers, phones, and laptops like appliances, in that they’re mysterious boxes that do a particular job.

Hardly anyone is trying to hack their appliances, and the majority of people just lump their computing devices into the same category - it does what it was designed for and nothing else

Don’t forget that most people don’t know that blocking ads is possible. To most people, their browser is on an appliance, like a washing machine or fridge. They know how to do the basics, but that’s about it.

I usually listen to punk and rock, but today I’m having a boiler replaced, and the gas engineer introduced me to Gold Radio, a UK based station. They’ve been playing classics from the 50s to the 80s, so I’ve heard loads of old songs that I haven’t heard for years.

Right now one of my favourites is playing though, Mister Blue Sky by ELO. Possibly one of the best songs of all time :D

Depending on the project, absolutely yes. I’ve got a load of maintenance projects that need doing on my house that I’ve been putting off because there’s a huge time investment, or they need to be done in nice weather. I wouldn’t be learning anything that would be particularly useful to me in the future, so getting them done instantly would be a massive help.

As an example, my garden is very overgrown and needs a few days of dry weather to complete. It’s mostly going to be cutting everything back with strimmers and hedge trimmers and then clearing the cuttings away. I already know how to do it, but even if I didn’t, it wouldn’t be difficult to learn so that I can keep on top of it going forward.

It depends on what you’re doing. I’ve got Mint on my laptop and main PC, and the experience is different on both. On the laptop I tend to play Minecraft and do some basic tasks like taking notes and browsing the web. There’s nothing in Mint that really affects that, so it doesn’t hold me back at all.

On the PC though, I’ve got all of my important software, and some of it has had to be installed manually because the Mint repos are outdated. It’s nothing that’s particularly difficult to fix, but I know my way around computers. For your average user, it would be too much.

No worries 🙂

I’m using Mint too, and have tried installing Notepadqq and Kate. Notepadqq just crashes immediately even with the fixes I found online.

Kate is really good, just be aware that the version in the Mint repo doesn’t save the session automatically. It can save it, but only manually, and only for saved files. It doesn’t recover files that haven’t been saved yet like Notepad++ does.

Is it just me or is Tom’s Hardware getting really shit lately? This is the third article I’ve seen where one person has been ripped off and their story is ‘The state of the industry! Scams everywhere! 😱’

One of the others was someone who bought memory that had been swapped for metal weights, and Tom’s Hardware tried to claim that it was a new industry scam because of the price increases, and not a one off

The latest DeDRM uses a key from the installed version of the Kindle program, which is for Windows. I think you can use a key from the Android or Amazon tablet versions too, but I’ve never been able to get it to accept those keys

Most of the cameras like this that I’ve seen have an app that lets you transfer the photos too. The issue is that you need to connect to the camera with Bluetooth, which then turns on the camera’s wifi for the full connection. The apps do this automatically.

I’ve been wondering if there’s a way to run the app from a computer, and connect to the camera through that, but I don’t know how you’d get it to wake the camera to allow the wifi connection.

There was a TV show in the UK called Crimestoppers, where they would show reenactments of crimes to try to find witnesses. I used to wonder why they didn’t just arrest the criminals while they were filming.

I just used Swift Backup with Shizuku to move an app from my old phone to the new one. It had an apk, but had some other files with it too. I don’t know enough about it to know whether the app can be used without those files, or if they’re linked to me at all, but the app works on the new phone :)