i do that too. if it’s from a number i’m gonna answer (but don’t recognize), i do. and then watch the call timer on the phone and don’t say anything until after three seconds. legit callers are always still there, the computers–never are.

if a call rings through that the phone company has tagged in caller id as probably bogus. i just answer and hang-up right away. they don’t call back.

since STIR/SHAKEN rolled out, the scam and robocalls here have really dropped off. only a few per week now… even to the phone numbers that are published (intentionally) online.

of the ones that get through, nearly all of them are coming through new voip points-of-presence popping-up in small towns all over our very rural part of the country.

i don’t do anything on my phone. it’s a flip phone with data and wifi disabled on the device, and sms disabled at the carrier. it’s quite literally just a ‘telephone’.

if i go somewhere where i might expect a long wait alone (like to a doctor’s appointment), i’ll take a paperback with me.

and they’ve used magicband wristband trackers and rfid ticket cards for over a decade.

well, they are putting more water in mass market cold cuts these days…

it took over an hour and three tries to download updates to firefox and thunderbird on a system configured to use mozilla’s ppa (thunderbird is not included in mozilla’s new deb and rpm repos)

about the third loop around, when science had evolved to the point males of a species were no longer needed to procreate–the women left and settled somewhere amongst the stars, far far away.

perhaps the many, many people who are trying to update and secure their existing systems or install new software or packages on them? the many others wanting to upgrade or install a new ubuntu? perhaps anyone who maintains or uses a ppa archive or other launchpad resource? there are millions of people outside of your sphere that are affected by this ongoing incident.

don’t be dissin’ what was a good beer, either

it’s a part of macrium reflect version 8. it’s what mounts backup images within windows to browse and recover files from. you should still be able to boot off a reflect rescue usb to do those tasks.

macrium doesn’t do perpetual licenses anymore, and they EOL’d all reflect versions sold that way. it’s all subscriptions now (according to a neighbor that uses it… he was strong-armed into upgrading to a sub from his version 8.x)–even for that previous version which they still sell (relabeled ‘ltsc’) as a subscription.

kwik trip (upper-midwest us) has both roasted and fried chicken. neither is cheap, but they got it.

i’m not even recommending 8gb laptops to most users anymore… especially not ones with soldered ram that are stuck with only that.

it won’t. ubuntu’s announcement pertains to the extra demands of gnome, their flagship release, and it’s default configuration.

mint doesn’t ship a gnome spin, and cinnamon, mate and xfce are lighter-weight… and mint is not dependent upon snaps, nor is it even configured oob with snap support enabled.

latest Gnome desktop, modern web browsers, and typical multitasking workflows

so use a lighter-weight de (xfce, lxqt, budgie), and don’t go crazy with brower tabs or open applications, and you’ll be ok… like you’re probably already doing now if you’ve got a ‘marginal’ pc.

that’s probably per ‘household’ not ‘per line’ or ‘per person’.

i’ve still got an ‘emachines’ here. granted, nothing inside is original anymore, except the optical with the curved silver bezel. has an am3 board in it now (originally a barton core on nvidia chipset). i keep it around because it has ide ports… and yes, i do use those. had to dig it out twice in the last month.

that’s a different thing. chromium edge has always had the ‘load at startup’ option (enabled by default, of course)… to make ‘loading’ it when you do run it, ‘faster’.

this new innovation will launch the actual browser window, too.

I only had 360kbit/s for a while

they still sell dsl that slow here… and of course the telephone company charges those people even more than they do in town for 20-60mbit dsl or 100-1000mbit fiber.

there’s a few projects for running windows in a container… winboat and winapps are a couple that come to mind. dunno if they’re ready for ‘prime time’ yet. interesting concept, though.

that’s where we take a lot of our junk, too… but we also buy from there when we can, instead of amazon.