MrsDoyle

pleasant texture

I’d go with “rubbery”.

I mean back in the olden days I would pay for a newspaper, for example, because the ads were USEFUL. Every week there’d be a motors section where all the dealers would advertise their deals on a full page each, and punters would try and sell their clapped-out cars in the classifieds. Then once a week it was the day for job vacacies, another day was property. Gradually the businesses started getting websites and stopped advertising in papers - which in turn got thinner and less useful. They had their own websites but most never worked out how to make money from them. People could get their news on TV, newspapers were only useful for starting fires with.

Magazines have followed a similar pattern I guess. It’s a bit of a death spiral. Sad, but there you go. The online ads are just garbage, they’re not useful at all. I don’t want them, I don’t want anything they’re trying to sell.

My first adventure in Linux back in 2003. No idea how I achieved this, but from memory I just reinstalled and all was well.

The drink on the right is caffeinated, maybe that’s why they added sweetener? The label on the left doesn’t mention caffeine.

Ski goggles. https://sfstandard.com/2022/12/25/the-worlds-only-private-ski-resort-where-mark-zuckerberg-and-bill-gates-hit-the-slopes/

Some of my non-techie friends were complaining about how rubbish Google search is now and I suggested Duck Duck Go. They couldn’t get past the name. I know it’s based on some childhood game in the US but it makes no sense to anyone here in the UK.

Agreed, sadly. I mean look at Moses. Seriously, read the chapters about him going up the mountain, coming back with the big list of rules, then ordering the killing thousands of the people who’d followed him into the desert, because they didn’t obey the rules while he was away getting the big list of rules. Psycho.

Then he said to them, “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.’ ” The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people died.

Someone told them they’d get brain cancer.

Seriously though, a lot of us olds have our phones Bluetoothed to our hearing aids. So at least with us you only get to hear one side of the conversation. “I’M ON THE BUS!”

I accidentally triggered Gemini while taking a close-up photo of something in my hand. It threw up a nearly full-screen “how can I help?” message. I muttered “fuck off”, and the message now read, “I’m sorry you feel that way…” Oh my god no. NO. Gemini now disabled.

My first computer was like the 1981 one, even had two floppy drives like that - it meant you could have your program disk in one and save your work in the orher. The monitor had orange type rather than the usual green. Fancy. I got it second hand in 1984.

In the olden days we would use a fax machine for that.

Phew.

This is correct. I’m old, and when I was a girl every home had soup spoons - along with teaspoons, dessert spoons and tablespoons. They appear to have died out, who knows why*. Some of my friends have heritage sets, I don’t. I eat my soup with a dessert spoon, like an ignorant youth.

** On reflection, maybe it’s a measuring thing? Baking recipes use teaspoons and tablespoons, but never soup spoons.

A BMI calculator will just use height and weight - if you have a lot of muscle bulk you’ll get a higher BMI result even if you’re lean. Conversely, some people are “thin on the outside, fat on the inside”, ie they carry a lot of visceral fat around their organs. So while BMI can be useful, it’s not perfect.

Yes, Kindle does now support epub. Annoyingly, it no longer supports mobi. I mean, I can still read all the mobi files on my ancient Kindle Keyboard and on the Kindle phone app, but any new book files have to be in epub format. I have a massive amount of mobi files, now have to convert them with Caliber if I want to add them to my Kindle.

I mostly use the ReadEra app on my phone, it does pretty much everything. My favourite feature is that you can control screen brightness by touch while reading, without ferreting around in settings.

This is it. Yes, spinning HDDs may be cheaper, but replacing mine with an SSD made my PC faster and quieter, especially on boot.

At least they still exist somewhere, albeit hidden. In the early days of television, the BBC routinely taped over episodes, even of really popular shows, because the tapes were expensive.

Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes

Every now and then a box of old VHS recordings turns up in someone’s shed or attic, and can be added back in to the archive. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-67218634

Licence plate: “Boy & dog”.

"The officer chose to write him a warning and ask him to take the animal back home and leave the city.”

So much to enjoy in this story.

Never mind computers (my first one, in I think 1985, had two floppy drives and an amber screen, very fancy), it’s phones that blow my mind. I grew up with a heavy black bakelite dial phone that lived on a special bench in the hall, and now I do video calls with my family on the other side of the world from wherever I happen to be. Toll calls used to be a huge deal, you had to call the operator, we didn’t even have direct dialling. I watch TV on my phone, not even Star Trek had that!

Amazon gets these dumb answers because it emails buyers with the questions. So Joe Blow gets an email saying, “will this fit my XYZ?” and he answers, “I don’t know, but it works ok on my ABC”. It makes the Q&A section mostly useless.