I’ve been paying for Proton VPN for a couple years now and I’ve never been blocked by YouTube.
I’m also using uBlock Origin and Firefox as a browser. YouTube takes like 5-10 seconds to load videos, thanks to their built-in delay timer when ads can’t play, but otherwise it works fine.
Honestly, I’d gladly wait 30 seconds staring at a black screen than watch a 10-second ad. So their delay timer is pointless.
For some reason, this just sparked an ancient memory of the Geek Code, which was a sort of signature block you could append to your emails and online bios to show off how much of a geek you were in the geekiest fashion possible.
Goddamn I’m old.
“They Live!” A guy finds some strange sunglasses that lets him see the subliminal messages hidden in all our print and media and advertisements. He can also see aliens walking amongst the population, disguised as regular humans!
Turns out, Earth had been invaded by aliens long ago and they’ve been keeping us under their control with subliminal messages for decades.
I think it was paid… But it’s been years so I couldn’t tell you.
It’s currently $3.99 in the Play Store for me, with a crossed-out list price of $6.49. Not a bad deal.
I thought it was referring to “standup meetings,” which is what we called weekly meetings with the commander in the military.
Everyone stands for the commander when he enters a room, then each person presenting needs to be standing while briefing the commander.
It’s military protocol for a high-ranking officer, although the cool officers would tell everyone to buck protocol, remain seated, and just give them the bullet points so we can get back to work.
I was in the US Air Force for 20 years, working as an IT guy, and our computers were so locked down, you couldn’t use password managers at work. Nor were you allowed to bring them in.
Almost every office I worked in was secured; no removable electronic devices allowed. No cell phones, no flash drives or removable drives. Heck, CDs were a controlled item. You had to check with a security manager for approval before bringing in a music CD, and and data CDs required a log of their use and physical control by a trusted agent.
Plus, the computers themselves had a custom-configured OS and you couldn’t install any software on them that wasn’t on a pre-approved list. Half the time, normal users needed to talk to an admin like me to install something, and I might not even have the rights at my level to do it.
I didn’t get to mess around with password managers until I retired a couple years ago, and they’ve been a game changer! In the military, we needed unique complex passwords for everything, can’t reuse passwords, can’t write down passwords, and you had to change them every 60 days.
Having a password manager makes my personal accounts so much more secure. I can have super complex passwords for everything and not need to remember them. I currently have Proton Pass (been de-Googling my life and switching all my stuff over to Proton lately) and it’s been wonderful.
I don’t know why the military doesn’t get some sort of password manager approved for use. This is far more secure than what they’ve been doing in the past. I had 3 standard password templates, then made minor changes to them for every unique account. If they got too complex, I’d forget them (and again, we weren’t allowed to write them down). Now I can just auto-generate a 25+ character complex password and I don’t even need to remember it. I love it!
Be careful… Don’t just click “Reject All.” There’s a category called “Legitimate Interest” that will still be enabled.
It was meant to be a way for websites to collect relevant data for adjusting content to your interests, but it’s been so loosely defined in legal requirements that literally any advertiser could pull your personal data through that category and use it however they want. This legal loophole is how websites continue to collect data and build profiles on you without violating the law. And clicking “Reject All” won’t disable anything in that category.
As much as it sucks, you still need to review all categories and manually change your advertising settings, then click “save preferences” (or however it’s specifically worded) instead of just clicking “Reject All.”
[…] I don’t think YouTube is even profitable for them.
Correct. Even Google, one of the richest companies in the world, is struggling to afford the massive infrastructure required to run YouTube. That’s why they’ve been cracking down on ad-blocking software lately.
Also, this is likely why they’ve been pushing their new updated Chromium-based infrastructure for web browsers, which will prevent ad-blockers from working on websites. If you’re not using Firefox or Safari to browse the Internet by now, you should switch. They’re the only independent browsers not using the Chromium framework.
My wife has access to my password database. If I go before her, she’s in charge of going through all my accounts and shutting stuff down.
My father actually just passed away a few months ago. I had convinced him to use unique passwords for everything, but he couldn’t keep track of them all, so he just wrote them all down on a piece of paper that he kept on his computer desk. When he passed, my sister took a photo of his password sheet and we both have been going through his stuff, closing accounts, transferring money, notifying his social media accounts of his passing, etc.
For the record, my dad had a Trust set up, with my sister as the executor of the Trust, so we’ve already talked about money stuff (even with my dad while he was still alive) and we’re both in agreement. And we’re both decent people, so there’s no complications with dividing his estate or anything. My sister is in charge of all his finances, and she’s been very straightforward with me about what he had and how it’s being divided up.
EDIT: If my wife goes before me, I would probably give my sister access to my password database. She and I are pretty close, and I’d trust her with that access.
Oh damn, I’m starting on the Boomer habit of complaining about Zoomer culture when it’s actually Alpha culture.
It feels like yesterday, Boomers were complaining about how annoying millennial kids were, when we were actually adults in our 20s/30s at the time. I’m just realizing that was over a decade ago, and now I’m doing the same thing to Zoomers. Someone please stop time before I get any older; I want to get off.
Had to guess on the boomerang. I’ve seen boomerangs but didn’t know that’s what they’re called nor have I ever posted one.
I’ve never heard of a “boomerang” that wasn’t referring to the Australian tool/toy. I totally guessed on that one too. I don’t post videos to any social media platform, so I was totally out of the loop on that one.
Skibidi toilet? As a 39-yr old millennial, I’m aware that was a thing like a year ago, but I assumed it was a Zoomer meme or something. I can’t get past that captcha.
EDIT: Upon looking at it again, I see it just wants me to type in “what is skibidi toilet” into Google, not answer what it is. Ugh, I’m turning into my Silent Generation/Boomer parents.
That analogy doesn’t make sense. Volkswagen is a brand; PC is not. Every personal computer is, and always has been, a PC. That’s why we differentiate between desktop PCs and laptop/tablet PCs in the industry. Macs are a type of PC. I know this; I worked IT in the federal govt for 20 years and there’s is no name brand just called “PC.”
What you’re confusing for “PC” is specific name brands of PCs, with specific hardware. When they added PC to software designation back in the day, they were letting you know it was specifically for a personal computer; not a VHS, not a record, not a game cartridge, not a cassette tape, etc. That was the designation, and then there would be more details about what specific hardware/software was required to use it. (e.g. Windows 95 with 512 MB RAM, at least a Pentium III processor, etc.)
When Apple started marketing their PCs, they built their own unique system that wasn’t compatible with other PCs, so they started pushing the Mac vs. PC campaign to separate their equipment from the rest, which eventually culminated in those Mac vs. PC ads many years later. Products started receiving a Mac label instead of PC, to show that they wouldn’t be compatible with the rest of the PCs on the market.
It helped that the rest of the PC industry started standardizing their equipment, to be compatible across all systems. Macs stood out from the rest, by refusing to be compatible with other PCs and forcing their users to stick exclusively with Apple products. It was a very anti-competitive practice, preventing users from sharing across systems, and one of many reasons the federal govt never went with Apple computers; we need to be able to share data with a variety of systems across the globe.
But Macs still fall under the umbrella of a personal computer. They are PCs. Even if they prefer no one calls them that.
On a side note, the EU just forced Apple to standardize their cables to USB-C, so they’re getting rid of their Lightning cables and finally joining the rest of the world in cable standardization. But they’ll fight tooth and nail to prevent any other changes. They’re still fighting against Right to Repair laws, as they want to force you to return to them directly for any maintenance.
As an IT guy in the early 2000s, it was really annoying to see all the “Mac vs. PC” arguments. PC stands for Personal Computer - a Mac is literally a PC! When I was a kid in the '80s-'90s, my schools all used Apple IIe computers (and later versions of Apple products as I got older), but they always called them PCs.
But those Apple ads convincing people to ditch the frumpy old guy PC for the young, hot Mac guy did their job, and pop culture decided that a Mac wasn’t a PC.
I’ve been maintaining a self-hosted music library for so long (30+ years now), there used to not be any tools for editing metadata. I used to have to go into file properties and manually edit the data for each individual MP3 file. Nowadays, I use Mp3tag to manually edit entire albums at a time. I have ADHD though (the hyperfixation kind), so I’ve literally dedicated thousands of hours to manually fixing metadata.
I guess I never bothered to look for more advanced tools to auto-update metadata. I had to go in and manually fix stuff that updated automatically from the Internet in the past, so I guess I stopped trusting online databases. But they’ve really advanced since the last time I went searching for tools, and their databases are a lot more complete in this day and age. I’m gonna play around with some of these programs and see how well they work.
I host my music library through Plex, then use Symfonium on my phone if I want to stream my Plex music remotely, just because I like their interface a little better than Plex’s.
I was worrying about this change because my Plex server provides free streaming for several of my friends and family and I didn’t want them to have to start paying for it. The whole point was to get them away from Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, etc.
But this sounds like, since I’m already a Plex Pass subscriber, my remote viewers will still be able to access my stuff for free. Do I have that right? Because if so, this change is just business as usual for me.