Old guy in the USA. My first car was a sport motorcycle so six speed with clutch and shifter. I have a sedan with an auto trans, but also a 4WD truck with manual. When I learned to drive in my teens automatic transmissions were not as nice as they are now, just three speeds and not very smooth. Now they’re typically six speed and much nicer. I really dislike a manual trans in heavy traffic, quite a chore.

I do 76F in the summer for AC and 68F in the winter for heating. Try to use minimal heating and air and still maintain a comfortable range. Can get expensive if working the system too hard. If it wasn’t a matter of cost I’d leave it on 72F all the time.

Evaporative coolers are great if you live where you can use one, much cheaper to run and they can work pretty good as long as humidity isn’t too high. I had one in a house I lived in before along with a regular AC system. It was a good to have and saved a lot on the electric bill. If it was dry enough out the AC unit was not needed.

Haven’t used a heat pump before and don’t know much about them. If they work as well and cost less to operate that would be a good option, but I wouldn’t use one if it’s a downgrade in performance. Rather pay for the comfort.

Stardew Valley: I really enjoy the game and play it on PC. It saves the game only at end of turn which is a game day. If I’m not able to finish my turn I have to put the computer to sleep instead of shut it down. Also if I make a mistake which is easy to do I have to start from the last save which can lose a good amount of progress and sometimes random pickups. Though it’s my only peeve with the game so it’s still doing better than most.

I agree with your philosophy on federation and defederation and support it. It’s one of the main reasons lemm.ee is my home instance. I support your actions as you feel appropriate.

That said, it’s often the most intolerant people that get overly vocal about issues. In other words they get easily offended and try to make a bigger argument footprint than warranted. I mean if a person doesn’t want to see something what’s so hard about blocking a community in their personal profile or just ignoring a post and moving on to the next.

Do we really want to set a precedent where we need to block a whole instance because someone might potentially get offended? I prefer not to have an admin or mod make harsh decisions like that. On the other hand there is content that is just not acceptable under the most liberal judgement and that kind of stuff needs to get pruned, that’s why we need reasonable mods.

I never thought Reddit was addictive. I actually spend more time on Lemmy in a day than I did on Reddit. My browsing habits changed though. Reddit is so big I only looked at a few niche subreddits. Lemmy being much smaller I view a much wider range of topics. It’s a different and better experience for me.

Haha, most of my opinions are unpopular. Some posted in this in thread I agree with.

I think sci-fi has it right with that, I mean you’d only get up out of your chair or whatever receptacle to perform bodily functions. Most people think everyone would turn into fat blobs, but I think that’s not the case. There’s this one sci-fi where I think they got it right, most people became emaciated due to a failure to eat and get any exercise.

Oh and I’ll take the blue pill, VR all the way, reality blows. Though some might say reality is already virtual. It’s an interesting hypothesis, sure would explain a lot.

uBlock Origin forever and always.

Haha, most important program on my computer. My browser is a uBO support system.

The admin here takes a conservative stance on defederation. He doesn’t do it unless there are lemm.ee rules violations or network abuse. I haven’t looked at any explodingheads content, but if it does not violate any lemm.ee rules and presents no network abuse it will probably not get defederated.

I agree with lemm.ee’s philosophy on defederation and that’s one of the reasons this is my home instance. In general you can’t call for defederation just because you don’t agree with content. If it’s blatantly offensive then I suppose that would be valid grounds, but I would hope that reason is used sparingly. I mean discussion that’s offensive to you may not be offensive to me.

No issue here on sticking with the standard Lemmy front end. I’m fine with that. Even if you hosted different front ends, I’d probably keep using the standard one. Also hope the best for you on the personal side.

I rarely use any kind of chat, but I used IRC sometimes back in the day. I was recently working on a thing where I needed to use Discord for some programming advice. I got the info I needed, but yeah that Discord is a convoluted mess. Newer hardly ever means better.

Great software, used it a lot. Also Handbrake.

I like them when they are actually amusing. Problem is that’s maybe one in ten so it’s not worth browsing them. If someone posts one and it’s actually good, no problem.

For the longest time I used my hand lathering with the bar first, then realized using a washcloth works much better.

Some bot content is okay, but I agree it should be moderated. Thanks for your effort on this, no disagreement.

Also, thanks for your contributions to making Lemmy great!

How does it impact Chromium?

Chromium is the open source part of Chrome. I’ve actually run Chromium before, but it’s kind of hard to find a binary release. Chromium lacks some Google additions like an mpeg player and PDF reader. It’s also free of some annoying add-on stuff like that app tracker that runs a background process full time. Who knows what that process does really. Of course I have it disabled on my system, but you have to go out of your way to kill it.

Otherwise Google has the Chromium project under their thumb so they’re not going to do anything Google does not approve of or refuse to do anything Google wants them to.

Speaking of Google influence, it bothers me that Google is a big contributor to Mozilla. I think it’s mainly to stay out of hot water with the FTC. They know all too well what happened to Microsoft and Internet Explorer in 2001. They need to keep the competition alive. Still it makes me cringe knowing they could exercise their will on them as a big contributor. I mean everyone has a price, and in Silicon Valley it’s not very high.

and am stunned when I see the web without an adblocker.

True, True, it’s damn near unusable. You take it for granted what a job your blocker is doing for you.

I know my uBO has saved me from some hostile shit. So yeah it’s a part of my browser security. I have it configured to a stricter blocking mode so it’s not just blocking ads for me, it gets other stuff that can be a problem.

Anyway I’m aware of the Manifest V3 business and being on Chrome I’m just waiting for the hammer to fall before going to Firefox. If they start adding DRM as well, I’m out of there quick.

Yeah, yeah, I know, just go to Firefox now, but I don’t really want to deal with a new browser and all my custom stuff until I have to. I’m old and that shit is super hard to motivate on for me. Not to say I’m inept, I mean I’ve spent my whole career in tech, but old dogs and all.

I spend more time on Lemmy. More interesting content, more commenting on my part.

It’s kind of a tough call. In my case I keep a library of Blu-Ray and DVD disks. I’ve ripped them to network storage so I don’t actually need them, but I did spend an amount of money collecting them. So at this point I just keep them for posterity.

In general I have a rule about not keeping stuff I don’t use, but there’s always exceptions. There’s been a few things I’ve wished I had not parted with, but if you never get rid of anything you’re just hoarding. I’m more of an anti-hoarder and it’s cost me before. On the other hand there’s too much “material stuff” in life. Best to keep it minimal.