That a huge carpet of ants will sweep into my neighbourhood and eat everything, including me. I blame Macgyver.

I can see why Verne would be considered overlooked. While it’s true that some of his works, in particular 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in 80 Days, and The Journey to the Centre of the Earth (and to a lesser extent From Earth to the Moon) are well known, others went unnoticed. His Robur the Conqueror series is fun, and so is Off on a Comet, to name a few of his lesser known sci-fi works. I particularly liked his competence porn works, such as Mysterious Island, and some of his romances. The Green Ray had an impact on me, and I’m still trying to find it.

Wells wasn’t nearly as prolific as Verne, so it may appear that both are equally well covered in the anglophone world, but the truth is that just a small fraction of Verne’s works received recognition.

I still have an unused, boxed WRT-54G. Granted, it’s only 802.11b/g, but good enough for casual browsing, and I have experience setting up OpenWRT there. Thanks for helping me remember; I’ll use that for the kids.

Biometrics, I already do, via my passport. Digital passports, maybe. I don’t have a smartphone, so if the government wants me to have one for all kinds of digital shit, they’d better get me one.

I tried pi-hole, but it turned in a real pain, trying to set it up for normal use, plus two WFH offices. I may give it another try, when I feel more patient.

The idea of mocking websites came from talking to other parents from my kids’ school. I was thinking about some form of a local “internet” for our neighbourhood for all the kids. Heavily curated, a mix of mock sites (like the full download of Wikipedia), news through RSS, moderated message boards, etc. I don’t think it’s an original idea given the current state of the Internet, so at this stage I’m just reading up on design best practices.

My kids are a little older - just learned to read without sounding off the words - so I need to introduce parental controls. But you may see your purchase as an investment: a year from now, the hardware may be worth twice as much.

I have a working emachines desktop with Win98. They’ll pry it off my cold, dead hands…

I’m in the process of getting my kids their first PC this Christmas. They’ll both get a mini-PC, with severely restricted Internet access. I’m actually thinking about just letting them connect to the home server where I’d mock the Web sites I pick for them. For this reason, Win11 with its online account requirement is automatically excluded from consideration. I wated to give them Mint anyway, but this was the argument that convinced my wife.

The Drop Site Massacre deserves to be part of the main line of books, not just a supplement to the story.

I read it in Jason Statham’s voice.

Now you gave me an inspiration. I’m eorking with a few other parents to create a local, walled “Internet” for the kids in our estate, and webrings would be a fun feature to resurrect.

I feel like I’m getting too old for the Internet. I still fondly remember the times where you could create a Geocities page and add it yourself to the Yahoo directory, and other netizens clicked through categories to get to your listing, instead of using a search engine.

But I digress. I’m finding myself browsing the www less over time, and I’m already limited to only a hadful of pages I visit regularly. For me personally, Vivaldi is the best choice for a desktop, and Brave is hands-down the best choice for my smartphone. But I appreciate that others may have different use cases.

1. Sherlock Holmes books. New are still written and published, and many are quite good.
2. Warhammer 40k books. A mixed bag, but you’ll find your favourite authors soon.
3. Riftwar Cycle. A few dozen books over three decades. Last book was in 2013, so it’s probably no longer active, but you’ll never know…

Two shows that weren’t mentioned yet:

• Warehouse 13 - An endearing sci-fi show about a warehouse full of weird artifacts. Despite some intense episodes, it offered mainly a light, feel-good entertainment, and featured a really well-crafted send-off.
• Fringe - Starts out weird, then it goes totally off the rails, but in a good way. Also wrapped up nicely.

Because my stereo is so old that it only accepts tape or CD as an input. No bluetooth or even USB stick. However, it works, and it’s adequate for my humble needs, so I haven’t considered replacing it yet.

My stereo still uses CD’s, so that’s what I use. I have a DVD burner in my PC, and a spindle of blank CD-R’s and anothet of blank DVD-R’s. I use the former to burn music CD’s for my stereo, and the latter for extra backup whenever I’m about to upgrade my hardware (once every 10 eyars or so). This is on addition to a NAS and an external drive. I just figured that the disks would have the best chance to be read once I get a new desktop.

(I also saw the mention of floppies in the discussion. I have an old Win98 machine - for gaming only these days - with an internal floppy and zip drives. Those media easily outlast CD’s: I can still read almost all oc them, even though some are over 30 years old.)

I wonder how many kids still know what headphone cords are.

Hiking. Alone. No technology along, just my walking stick and backpack. Bonus points when it’s foggy and I feel like the only person on the trail.

I have an account where I only post after I translated my writing through three different languages and back to English. The original input and the output convey the same message, but have very distinct styles. Randomizing the three languages in my translation sequence introduces enough variety that I doubt current LLM’s can identify me. (Full disclosure: I don’t post any sensitive information under any account; I do it just for fun.)

Keanu Reeves. Just the two of us, each on one end of the bench, enjoying a sandwich, and not talking but still content with each other’s company.