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.

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.

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.)

My current computer will be Linux, as soon as I stop procrastinating and clean up my documents and back them up on my NAS. Already did that with my travel laptop.

Learned from growing up in a communist dictatorship: don’t discuss politics and religion with strangers. And even with friends or acquaintances, don’t discuss it in writing. It doesn’t mean you can’t have strong opinions, but don’t make them public. Talking (not writing) one-to-one or in small groups eventually toppled almost all communist dictatotships, so there’s absolutely no need to broadcast your opinions, unless your goal is to be martyred.

In addition to “normal” uses, my kids got into the habit of leaving me messages on the camera when I’m in the office and they are leaving for school. I grew to love these messages.

Using Eufy with local storage. Don’t know whether anything gets stored to the cloud, but I guess data still passes through Eufy servers when I view the videos.

I may not be representative of a larger sample, but I used medium format for landscapes, and always shallow depth of field. For sharper images, I used longer lenses on a 35mm camera. So, a diffraction issue wouldn’t be bothering me on a medium format camera, if I ever even found the money to get one.

Still doing Vivaldi on a daily basic. But I think I’m a very specific use case: an old user who hates to change his ways, and is obsessed with keeping the page tabs on the bottom of the screen.

When I was your age, we called them Micro$oft. Too bad there were no extensions in Netscape Navigator.

I installed Office 97 from 49 floppies on a bunch of office computers. We didn’t have CD-rom drives, so we requested the floppies from Microsoft (this was a free of charge service). Took me a week. Got into graphic novels, as I was waiting for each floppy to load.

My company (130,000 employees) sticks to 24H2. IT wouldn’t approve the 25H2. Don’t know whether the refusal to upgrade hurts Microsoft in any way, but if it does, I think we’re big enough to be on their radar, and perhaps they talk to our IT about concerns and complaints we may have.

6 and 7. For now, I’ll be monitoring their activity, and we’ll see whether they’ll need any locks. Probably internet filtering on the router.

My kids are getting mini PC’s for Christmas, preinstalled with Mint. They use tablets now, but I want to introduce them to the joys of keyboards and mice (and The Secret of Monkey Island). I hope they’ll like it, so that in the future they’ll stick to PC’s and laptops, which offer far more robust control by the end user.

I don’t watch others playing games, either, but someone who likes those streams told me he didn’t see a difference between watching good gamers play games and good football players play football.

This is just my speculation, so take it as you will. The EU has been pushing for digital ID cards for quite a while, and this is just another attempt. The last serious attempt was the Covid vaccination passport, but so many people still opted for paper certs, and the rest deleted the app when vaccination was no longer mandatory, that it failed again. So, now the authorities are becoming smart and trying to go through the vector that has a proven record of driving technological change: porn.

I have a 486, but with MS-DOS 6.2 and Norton Commander as a UI. Haven’t booted it up for about a decade, though, but don’t see a reason why it shouldn’t work. My Win98SE computer (Pentium 100), on the other hand, is still my gaming rig. Don’t need anything better for HoMM2, Master of Orion 2, and TES: Daggerfall.

Trump’s executive order forced Microsoft to disable access for ICC’s Chief Prosecutor. So, in a sense, Trump is indeed a threat to digital sovereignty.