ridgered4

FWIW I run Mint which is ubuntu-ish, and Steam and proton don't really give me any trouble.

I don't have a mac, do these voices rely on a cloud component to function or do they run locally? (without internet access is the real test I guess)

Walt at least starts out with noble sounding goals motivated by pride. The show lets the mask fall so slowly on what he really is the viewer will probably have a hard time letting go of the initial appearance, especially if you identified with it personally. But even half way through the show you'd have to be deluding yourself if you still thought he was a good person, and by the end he's explicit about what a monster he always actually was.

I can't say the idea of a verifiable government id being demanded by every social media or other sign up sounds that thrilling to me. It'll just be facebook demanding a scan of your driver's license in a different form. The SMS verification step where you phone number is demanded "only for security" (and then used for advertising 10 minutes later) is bad enough, but at least it is still possible (if onerous) to get some some separation there.

I'd honestly just prefer TOTP or hardware tokens be mandated as an option for 2FA if you offer it.

> I interpreted the phone number requirement as a signal that “had I setup 2FA, it would not have asked for the phone number but maybe just the second factor?”. Then I went on an odyssey to setup a Google account without linking it to a phone and with 2FA enabled (also not linked to a phone!). Seems OK so far, but the procedure is highly complicated and partially luck-dependent. I am probably going to publish it, because there are tons of articles about how to setup Google account without phone number, but none of them worked for me at the time :)

I'd be interested, even if it was just a rough guide. My experience has been that some services apparently let you sign up without a phone number, but then try to extort it out of you either at first login (or worse) after you've used the service for awhile.

I've noticed some of my own old accounts (not google anyway) seem to be grandfathered in and do not have a hard requirement here.

GVT-g is the one that got me. Although with all their storage caching antics over the years I knew what I was getting into.

And I imagine they add new domains with updates all the time.

At home I was trying to avoid random reboots from updates in a full proof way in a Windows VM that ran long processing tasks. I determined the only reasonable course of action was to remove all internet access. Stamping out the massive list of changing domains (and hard coded ip addresses?) would just be to much work that I know I would never keep up with.

A white list might work.

I mused that you could have a constantly updating Windows machine and monitor all of its connections, adding them to a block list on an external firewall but in addition to being complex to setup I bet it wouldn't even catch everything.

It makes some amount of sense to me. If I lived a nomadic existence and a larger more powerful tribe drove me out of some territory I'd be angry but eventually just try to find new territory since I'm mobile anyway.

If I was a farmer though and my crop was being stolen I'd probably fight to the death. I wouldn't be able to easily replace it and if I was driven off the territory my group would probably starve before we could locate a new site a establish a new farm.

LGR on youtube had a video on a home automation system from the 80s. IIRC it had a modem listen interface, although I don't recall the details.

I gave up on facebook (but I wasn't trying that hard) but it seemed to be using the extortion practices a lot of services use now. At first it appears to let you create an account but upon logging in for the first time it demands a phone number for 'verification'. Microsoft was even worse when they migrated my mojang account, it let me use it for a little while before demanding the number.

Back when I had a facebook account I recall it suddenly up and demanding I scan my drivers license one day or I couldn't log in again...on the same and only machine I actually had used facebook on.

> The worst thing is that the calculator pretends to be running after like 2s but is unresponsive.

I can't stand this and it happens in a lot of places. It seems like pure metric chasing. We made it load faster boss. Well, no you can't use it but it yet but you should have been more specific!

If I open word doc over the slow VPN Word forces itself to the foreground only to show me a file loading dialog.

That said the film was improved immensely by cutting the scene of the T-1000 using touchy feely scan of John's house and the pointless and sadistic killing of his dog.

This may have been changed from the original cut but I recall it being intentionally unclear that the T-1000 killed the first cop. They made it look like he just passed out from a gut punch, which of course makes little sense.

An interesting level of this scene is that it implies neither terminator is able to identify a fabricated voice even though they have a full understanding of each other's design. The T-1000 cannot tell it is talking to a T-800 until it realized it has been tricked and the T-800 cannot tell it is talking to a T-1000 until it tricks the other machine.

Of course, it happens over a pay phone so perhaps with the full vocal range in person it would have been different.

I remember reading an article where a guy in the UK set one of these up with a bot like Lenny to make money off the scam calls. It was kind of shocking to me you could just setup any number like that, not just 900 numbers.

Last time I tried to sign up for Twitter it demanded I verify my account with text messages. Actually, virtually all services do this now when creating an account. The worst (Microsoft for example) let you sign up and use the account for a bit (possibly purchasing some items tied to the account) and then extort the phone number out of you later to maintain access.

It is sort of amusing that these companies hitched their wagon to the now scam laden telephone network to track users and ended up getting scammed themselves.

Man ball mice sucked, it seemed like I was always cleaning the rollers. I generally am an early adopter of nothing but I rushed out to buy that first Microsoft Optical mouse. I was still using it on a secondary machine until a couple years ago when it finally died.

I'm in the US and I use checks for some bills because they charge me a fee to pay with other methods (off the top of my head, my property taxes and electric bill have these drawbacks). I tend to use the bank bill pay system for these instead of writing an actual check though.

I find the audio mix on a lot of movies is such that turning it up makes almost no difference. It barely improved the dialog loudness, just increases the obnoxiously loud music and sound effects.

Older media seems to have a more even mix. It is probably a 5.1 through my stereo speakers thing but I'm not sure how to fix it or if even can be fixed.

I once bought a pair of needle nose pliers at the dollar store (actually a dollar) back in the 90s. The first time I used them both the grips immediately bent under a small amount of force, which is actually so funny that I think I got my money's worth in the end.

Not through a VPN service though, at least in my experience.

So I initially gave up on this show part way through the first season, but not because I hated it exactly it just fell off my radar and didn't grab me. The sex in it did seem...out of place and kind of shoehorned in. And the Joe MacMillon character's out of control Jobish behavior irritated me. But the season 1 finale was solid, I liked many of the characters and the subject matter so I went back to it and I'm so glad I did.

It is now one of my favorite shows of all time. The characters were slightly retooled after season 1 and their bizarre family structure is very compelling. The backdrop of the era was why I really showed up for the show but the characters and performances were why I loved it.

I watched a pretty horrifying scifi recently (I think it was on netflix) about a guy who chose to be frozen and was thawed in the early experimental stages of the reviving process and ends up as a lab rat basically.

It doesn't help that the x570 chipset uses like twice the idle power of the x470 it replaced.

I've barely used any ride sharing apps but I definitely did not cough up my SSN. Can you just start over with a new account and no SSN, maybe a new CC?

> They used their own sound effects so if someone was stacking kills or whatever it would play announcer or musical clips.

Whew, to me this was a strike against community servers. There was a period there where I couldn't join a single CS:Source game without a boatload of Simpsons sounds downloading preventing me from playing. I remember replacing the downloaded sounds with 0 byte files so I wouldn't need to hear them, but servers kept changing the paths so I'd have a bunch of redundant ones to clean up.

Thankfully in true Valve fashion they gave me an out, well after things had gone completely off the rails, with a command line (and later UI) option to block only sound downloads.

Can this be used to accelerate video decode in a linux machine/virtual machine? It sounds like it is not for graphics on linux but it unclear to me where decode falls.

I swear my car was (gently) fighting my steering here due to the lane keep feature before I turned it off. I frequently drive around potholes and dead animals and don't need the car trying to fix that for me.

Oh, sure. I expect that. I was perhaps misinterpreting it to mean if nothing connects for a year the number is released even if it is paid up for 2 years which sounds wrong to me.

Do they really disable paid-up numbers if nothing connects to them for a year?