cobysev

I worked at an Arby’s back in high school (over 20 years ago). They told me free refills were a thing because most customers don’t refill more than once, if at all. Also, the soda water costs pennies and the bags of concentrated soda syrup were only like $10 (at the time). A single bag of syrup, mixed with soda water, could fill customer’s soda cups for maybe 2-3 days before it needed to be replaced. Fast food restaurants make insane profits on soda, so they don’t care if customers refilled multiple times during their visit.

I’ve spent nearly 2 decades connecting with friends, family, coworkers, and associates through Facebook. I hate Facebook, and actually use F.B. Purity to remove 90% of the content, ads, promotional junk, games, marketplace, etc. from it. But as the main way I’ve stayed in touch with people I’ve known over the course of my life, I just can’t dump it.

Besides that, I have Lemmy (of course); LinkedIn, which I’m not really using anymore since I retired young; Imgur, which I mostly just use for browsing memes; and Discord, which I only use to communicate with a few close friends whom I game with weekly.

I created accounts for Instagram and Whatsapp, but I’ve never used them. They were too self-promoting for my taste. When they first became a thing, they were all about taking selfies and sharing your face with your friends. I wanted discussion and interesting content, not to see selfies. They created the generation of “social media influencers” who think they’re entitled to things in life because X number of people follow them on social media.

I also avoid TikTok like the plague. I was in the US military (working as an IT guy) when TikTok became popular, and we discovered it embedded itself in your phone so deeply, you couldn’t fully remove it even when uninstalling. Plus, it gave itself full admin rights to your phone, then started trickling your data to Chinese servers. Which is why the president made such a big deal about TikTok being a national security threat. It’s not because we didn’t get along with a Chinese company; it’s because a foreign government was collecting personal data and building profiles on American citizens. I will never touch that program as long as I live.

I’m 40 years old, by the way. A lot of people say Facebook is only used by old people, and yes, I just turned 40 and am finally becoming an “old person.” But I’m still relatively young compared to people’s expectations of Facebook users. And I have a lot of Facebook friends who are much younger than I am.

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.

Personally. I don’t consider it a vacation until I’m cut off from everyone and everything. Let me relax in peace for a while, without distractions.

I was referring to PlexAmp. It’s decent, works well, but I just liked the interface for Symfonium better. It seemed more functional than PlexAmp when I switched over to it.

I actually haven’t used PlexAmp in a few years, so maybe it’s gotten better lately. I guess I’ll have to compare apps.

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.

Nope, a Subaru. I drive a Mazda and I don’t have this issue.

I’ve done that, but it still pings every Bluetooth connection it sees, whether it recognizes it or not.

Her car had some class-action lawsuit recently because its integrated satellite radio service was constantly pinging for a connection, whether you had the service or not. If the car wasn’t driven in a few days, the battery would be completely drained. And you couldn’t jump it yourself; it had to be towed to a shop so they could use some special machine to jump and charge it.

That issue has been settled, but now its Bluetooth is basically doing the same thing. Fortunately only while the car is on, but still.

My wife’s car is extremely aggressive. The second she turns it on, it steals my Bluetooth connection. I could be mowing my lawn, listening to music on my phone, then suddenly hear nothing, and it’s because my wife got in her car and was suddenly blasted with my tunes.

I tell my phone to forget her car’s Bluetooth connection, but then I’m constantly harassed by pop-ups on my phone every minute saying her car wants to pair with my phone. I can’t get it to stop pinging me. It sees a Bluetooth device in range and then spams it, trying to connect.

So yes, I like to keep my Bluetooth off until I want to use it.

Truth. I just retired from the US Air Force 2 years ago. Spent 20 years as an IT technician. Most of the time, I just worked in a safe, secluded server room. Even while deployed to Iraq, I pretty much worked and lived in bunkers. Wasn’t even allowed to leave the base. My job was pretty safe.

I deployed to a Marine camp once in 2005. My Marine boss said she hoped to god she never saw an Air Force person with a gun in their hands. She said that would mean the planes are down, the base is overrun, and the Marines are dead. She said we were literally the last line of defense. So if we were ever attacked, she told me to just hand my weapon and ammunition to the nearest Marine and go take cover until it’s all over.

I tried to sell my car on eBay back in 2008 - the first thing I ever attempted to sell on their site. I’ve bought a few random things from eBay over the years, including my car 3 years prior.

My account was immediately flagged for potential fraud and locked down. The only way they’d clear it was if I photocopied my driver’s license and mailed it to them; they wouldn’t accept a digital copy.

I just created a new account and have been using that ever since. I ended up selling my car outside of eBay; I’m never attempting to sell a vehicle through their site again.

That’s the route I took. I recently bought a 48" 4K monitor, hooked a mini PC up to it, and now I stream my movie and TV show collection through Plex. I still have Internet access on my “TV,” but I’m in control of what pops up (I block all ads on my home network). I just use a small wireless keyboard and mouse instead of a remote.

I haven’t actually owned a TV since about 2008. I have better media options through computers, and the technology just keeps getting better. Cable and public access television are a pain because you’re constantly bombarded with ads. With my own computer, I can circumvent ads and get a solid viewing experience.

NEVER click decline all. There are loopholes built in that still grant access to “legitimate interest” cookies, which are recognized differently from “consent cookies.” If you click reject all, it still allows collection of certain personal info through cookies labeled legitimate interest. Which is entirely up to advertisers to categorize.

As annoying as it is, always open up options and manually uncheck cookies.

I have a buddy who would rage quit when he dies in games, then rant about how there’s no advantage for skilled players and, “this game is all luck!”

He was exceptionally good at strategy games. Back in the days of Warcraft II, he would spend days writing down exact second-by-second instructions for building the perfect base to dominate the map. (“Dedicate 4 seconds to starting this building, the next 9 seconds are needed to harvest this resource, then 13 seconds to start recruiting 4 infantry,” etc.).

By the time I had made maybe 3 buildings and a few peons harvesting resources, he was already invading my base with a massive army. He probably could’ve gone pro, if esports leagues were a thing in our youth.

But he was a terrible loser. If his strategy didn’t go to plan, he would throw a fit about the game cheating and being all about luck instead of skill.

I retired last summer. This is basically how my week goes. Trying to fill the void with some hobbies or entertainment.

I was serving in the last couple years of my military career when the pandemic started. The military took it very seriously, because we still have a mission that needs to be accomplished. Anyone dropping out for a severe illness would compromise our capabilities.

So we went on full lockdown. No one was allowed to leave military bases unless you lived off-base, in which you were only authorized to go straight home and then back to work. It was highly recommended you order delivery services for groceries and stock up so you wouldn’t need to leave home. Going to the grocery store was the only exception to the lockdown, but it was considered an extreme risk and should be avoided if possible.

Our work shifts (in my unit, anyway) were split in half. Half the crew came in for the morning shift, then thoroughly disinfected the office, locked up, and went home. Then 30 minutes later, the second shift would come in and do the afternoon shift. The 30-minute break ensured no physical contact between shifts. The split-shift allowed a shift to take over full work days in case someone on the other shift got sick. Their whole shift would stay home for 2 weeks to ensure the contagious period passed before sending them back into the office to resume split shifts.

We would’ve moved to work-from-home (WFH), but unfortunately, I happened to be working in an Intelligence unit at the time and 90% of their job was on classified computer systems, which we couldn’t access from outside the office. I was an IT guy, fixing the Intel guys’ computers, so I did WFH for a few months, managing their unclassified computer accounts from a laptop. But eventually, I was needed in the office for their other systems.

We were also required to wear masks outside of our homes at all times. Anyone caught without a mask anywhere - even sitting in our car on the drive to or from work - could be punished for violating a direct order from our base commander. We used to make fun of conservatives who bitched about how uncomfortable the masks were and how they couldn’t breathe while wearing them. We had to wear them all day without breaks, from the moment we left home until the moment we got home. I empathize with emergency room workers; it was brutal, but it wasn’t impossible to do, and we got used to it eventually. After a while, I started to feel naked without my mask on.

In the last 2 years I served, we had a few people drop out with COVID-19 (their civilian families brought it home from their work/school), but the majority of us stayed COVID-free.

When I retired last summer, I moved in with my elderly hermit dad who lives out in the countryside. He avoided leaving his house for the whole pandemic, and even now rarely goes into town. He, my wife, and I are still COVID-free to this day.

My sister and her family caught it 3 times! But my sister married into an ultra-conservative religious family who thought the pandemic was a hoax and continued to hold religious parties and barbeques for the neighborhood all throughout the pandemic (They were anti-vaxxers too; something my sister fought with her husband about long before the pandemic occurred). There were a few scares when she came to care for our father and then got diagnosed with COVID-19 a day or two later. But somehow, my dad never tested positive for COVID antibodies. And despite my sister’s husband losing his sense of taste and smell (which is still not fully recovered to this day), her whole family has thankfully survived their run-in with COVID.

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Ugh, don’t call word art memes “old school.” I still see those as new-ish Gen-Z memes. When those started popping up everywhere in the past decade, I had my first boomer moment: “What the hell is this garbage format? It doesn’t make any sense!” My millennial ass is getting too old for this shit.

And here’s the original but it’s weird.

Oh… He’s one of those people. Looking through his other comics, he’s super pro-Trump, ultra-conservative. It’s a shame because his art style is nice, but it’s all political garbage posts.