cobysev

I used to use Gboard. I still do, but I used to as well.

It used to be my default. Every time I got a new android device, I would immediately install Gboard before doing anything else.

But lately, it's been garbage. It's been getting words wrong that I never had problems with previously. It randomly capitalizes normal words in the middle of sentences and I can't seem to train it not to do that. Like "Ever" is the standard capitalization now. I need to manually fix it every time I use that word.

It's been forgetting my name, which is annoying because I have a very unique first and last name and I had previously trained it to swipe my name.

It's also just sticking with variations of a suggested word instead of giving me words in the same swipe area to select. Like if I swipe "food" and it autocorrects with "good," my options to correct the autocorrect are things like "goodness," "goody," "God," etc.

I'm trying to de-Google my life right now, so finding a new digital keyboard seems like a good idea. I'm gonna try some of the suggestions in this thread. I am definitely NOT recommending Gboard.

American here, who has spent about a decade living in various countries around the world.

The biggest problem with my fellow Americans is that we're raised in an isolated country, which only borders two other countries (Canada and Mexico). And our country is so massive, probably 90% of Americans don't live anywhere near either country border.

Crossing borders is a big deal too; it's not like Europe where you can be driving and suddenly see a sign welcoming you to a new country. There are checkpoints, blockades, passports, regular inspections, etc. Especially since 9/11 happened, our borders have become even more locked down. Plus, going anywhere else requires expensive plane tickets to fly over the oceans.

This leads to most Americans having no social interactions with foreigners most of the time. We're fully ingrained in our own culture bubble and we don't get a lot of interaction with other cultures, outside of stereotypes through pop culture.

Combine this with the fact that we're taught from childhood that we're the "greatest nation on Earth," and you get an entire culture of entitled, narcissistic jerks who think the American way is the best way.

Our education has been failing for decades now, thanks to politicians on both sides of the aisle realizing that we're more easily manipulated if we're less educated. So there's this race to the bottom, where we're being fed lies and embellishments about how great America is and how we're this amazing country that the rest of the world looks up to and admires.

With this entitled world view, it makes Americans scared when foreigners come to our country because we only know of their culture through stereotypes and we fear their culture taking over our "amazing and most perfect country." Just as we've stepped into other countries and spread our own democracy, we're afraid other nations will attempt to do the same to us.

It doesn't help that we have an entire political party who maintains their voter base through fear mongering about foreigners taking our jobs, stealing our women, and destroying our "great culture" for their "backwards and corrupt" values. It's complete lunacy, but to the average American who has no regular contact with the outside world, it seems plausible.

So yeah, a lot of Americans get uncomfortable when foreigners speak their native language around us instead of English. They tend to find it rude at best, and offensive/dangerous at worst. And some of the worst Americans travel abroad and expect everyone to essentially worship the ground they walk on, so they get offended when other people don't know or speak English. It's a really messed up world view, but it's hard to change when we live such isolated lives.

I knew a guy when I served in the US military who got caught cheating in a semi-related way. He got assigned to a base in a new state and his wife refused to relocate their whole family for the few years he'd be assigned there, so he went by himself, leaving his wife and kids in his home state.

Turns out, he was sexting one of his younger subordinates at work. One of his daughters found out when she tried to use an old tablet and found out his account was still synced to it. She saw all his texts updating in real time.

He was ultra-conservative and didn't believe in divorce, so he was doing everything he could to save his marriage. His wife forced him to install security cameras in every room of his apartment and banned him from going anywhere after work. She knew his schedule and expected him home immediately after work ended. He was basically on house arrest until his job was done and he could move home.

The last I heard, he told his wife the landlord needed to paint the walls, so he removed all the cameras, dunked them in the bathtub, then played dumb when none of them would work when he set them back up again. He was seen inviting young women over to his apartment after that. So, you know... he didn't learn his lesson.

Way back in my senior year of high school (around 2002), we had a debate project where everyone partnered up, picked a controversial topic, picked a side of the topic, and then researched and advocated for their side to the rest of the class, including a Q&A at the end, where the class could challenge their position.

To our surprise, the two hottest girls in our class picked prostitution as their topic, and advocated for it to be legalized. The teacher was also surprised, and curious enough to let them present their topic to the class.

We all thought they were joking with their topic, to get a rise out of all the horny boys. After all, as 17/18 year olds, our experience with prostitution came from movies or TV documentaries, where it was generally shown as a disgusting and degrading act; the last resort for a woman down on her luck.

But the girls' presentation was incredibly well researched, with figures regarding the number of deaths, violent crime, drugs, and human trafficking involved in illegal prostitution, compared to Nevada's legalized prostitution since the 1970s, which had practically no numbers to report.

They even did a deep dive into a brothel in Nevada, where the women were paid very well and treated kindly and fair and not like they're just a piece of meat. Plus, they had regular checkups and practically free health care because of their profession. They even walked through the various services they provided, since some people (they serviced anyone, not just men) wanted other forms of intimacy instead of just sex. It was a safe and judgment-free environment, on both sides of the table, and the women employed there actually wanted to do the job, with the option to quit anytime. Unlike illegal prostitution, which removed the woman's autonomy over her own body and placed her in dangerous situations, exposed to violence and drugs to barely make a living.

In the end, the girls did a fantastic job on their presentation and convinced a whole class of seniors that prostitution could be an honest and respectable position, and should be legalized. I've never looked at it the same way since.

She serves as a distraction, so other Republicans can get away with things that seem tame compared to the drama she's stirring up. It's just misdirection; otherwise, Republicans would've ousted her themselves for hurting their party.

Remember when Mitch McConnell was in the news constantly for deliberately halting progress to serve his party's goals? We don't even hear about him anymore; not since Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert took center stage in the shitshow.

I wonder if this has anything to do with my Starlink connection dropping out in the middle of the night. Maybe a handful of the lost satellites would've been passing through my area in the night.

Several times in the night, between 2 and 4 AM, my connection blips for a few minutes. Which is normally not a big deal, but I'm a night owl and usually awake all night. Plus it interrupts any online services I have running overnight, so I've lost progress on projects I'm working on throughout the night.

Meh, Starlink is just a temporary fix anyway. I live out in the countryside, where I've been lucky to get 20-30 Mbps speeds for years. Starlink brings high speed Internet to my home (100-200 Mbps speeds), but it's been kind of unreliable. And their single public IP address for my entire network messes with my home servers that require their own independent IP addresses, so I can't run any of my online services from home. Not without buying a dedicated VPN server out on the Internet somewhere that I can route my traffic through.

Thanks to Biden's high speed Internet initiative, I'm finally getting a dedicated fiber line out to my house. Gonna take at least a year before the local ISP wires my region, but once that's in place, I'm throwing out Starlink.

Remember when games used to be a finished product on a cartridge/CD? You just bought it at the store for a base price of a video game and that was it. Any bugs found in the game became widely accepted, and maybe even exploited by competitive gamers. But there was no patching, no updates, no DLC. You paid for a game up front and that was it.

I miss those days.

My wife suffers from this. It's called clinical anxiety and depression, with a heavy dose of ADHD. She needs medication to keep it in check, and some days, even that's not enough. Trying to get her out of the house every few days is like pulling teeth.

On top of that, my wife is an introvert by nature, but you'd never know in a social setting, as she will talk everyone's ear off all night long. I found out that's her nervous tick; when she feels the social anxiety kicking in, she just lets the ADHD take charge and will run her mouth non-stop. When she gets home from any social event, even just a quiet evening hanging out with a close friend, she'll collapse from exhaustion and sleep for half a day afterward.

It's the other way around; you connect to seeders.

In the example of 2 (3), there are 3 total seeders and you're connected to 2 of them.

Although in your screenshot, you're at 100%, so you're not connected to any seeders at the moment and are, yourself, a seeder. You have peers (leechers) connecting to you. Same principle applies; in an example of 2 (7), there are 7 peers in total, and 2 of them are actively leeching off you.

This is actually my life right now. I retired from the US military at 38 years old and received a pension which I will collect monthly for the rest of my life. On top of that, they messed me up enough that I got the coveted 100% Permanent & Total disability rating from the VA. So I'm getting free medical and dental for life, plus a monthly paycheck from the VA that's bigger than my pension. My wife also got the same VA deal (she was actually medically separated from the military), so we have double the VA benefits coming in.

All this passive income means we don't have to work for the rest of our lives. I just turned 40, and after spending the last couple years getting settled back into civilian life, I'm starting to invest my free time into hobbies and projects.

My father just passed away a few months ago and I inherited his house (my childhood home) and its 6 acres of property. My dad didn't take care of the house or land (he was a bit of a hoarder), so I'm working on fixing up the house and cleaning up the property. That takes up a lot of my free time during the summer.

I wanted to get involved in my community, so I'm on the parks committee and communications committee for my local township, where I help to improve our local parks and trails, and ensure information about our local area and its events is disseminated to all our residents.

I've been playing a lot of video games lately. I have a steam library of over 3,400 games and I've been picking through my library, trying to discover hidden gems that I've missed. My library is so huge because I've been a Humble Bundle subscriber for a long time now, so I get nearly a dozen games a month. I also play online co-op games with some old childhood friends of mine every week.

My wife and I picked up Duolingo again recently and we're trying to learn a foreign language. I'm juggling both Japanese and Norwegian right now. I learned some basics of Japanese when I was stationed there 2 decades ago and I really love the language, so I'm hoping to master it. Plus, I have living descendants of my ancestors who still live in Norway and I'd like to communicate in their language one day instead of forcing them to use English to communicate with me. I also took 4 years of French in high school, and I was stationed in Germany for a couple years, so I have both of those languages cued up to learn if/when I get bored of my first two.

When I was 13, I discovered I was a prodigy at the piano. I taught myself how to play because I heard Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata and really wanted to be able to play it myself. My wife is actually sore about it because her bachelor's degree required that she take 4 years of piano lessons... and I'm still better than her at piano, without ever having a single lesson. Unfortunately, I haven't touched a piano in nearly 2 decades, so all my skill has gone to waste. So I bought an electric piano recently and plan to re-learn how to play. In my childhood, I had to read sheet music and sort of figure things out myself, but in today's world, there are all sorts of training and tutorial programs and videos online that I can use, so I imagine it'll be super easy to get back into it.

My wife and I watch a ton of movies and TV shows. If we're ever tired and just don't want to be productive for a day, we'll just sit on the couch and binge shows or movies all day. When we're extra lazy, we'll order DoorDash so we don't have to cook. We live in the countryside, about a 15 minute drive from the nearest town, so it's easier to order DoorDash than head into town for food some days. We always tip extra for the drivers, because we know our home is out of the way for them.

When I used to work, I always looked forward to the weekends. But now that I'm retired, I actually find myself hating the weekends and looking forward to weekdays. On the weekends, it's always so busy in town. So many people running errands, eating out with their families, partaking in local events, crowding parks and trails, etc. But during the weekdays, everyone's at work, so the town is quieter. Sometimes I like to go downtown and sit in a coffee shop or restaurant for a few hours and just idly browse my phone or read a book. Or go for a walk or bike in one of our parks and just enjoy the peaceful nature. Or browse some stores, knowing it's just me and the shop owner. I'm not bumping into other customers, I can chat with store owners, etc. I'm starting to understand why old people like to chat up employees so much. It's kind of nice when it's not busy.

As a 100% disabled vet, I get free passes to all national, state, and county parks, and there's a public park with a beach just a couple miles from my home, so I go there in the summer to swim and try to build my strength back up. It's especially nice on weekdays because there's no one there. I can swim laps and not worry about bumping into people. And since it's just down the road from my house, I can head over there anytime, all summer long.

I have a few other hobbies and projects on the back burner. A buddy of mine wants to build furniture and I've always been interested in woodworking, so we've talked about maybe starting up a workshop in my garage. Plus, I was a pro at electrical engineering stuff in my high school years, so I'd be interested in learning more about that field. My house is in rough enough shape, my wife and I have been talking about just tearing it down and rebuilding from scratch, so we're currently designing our dream home right now to see if that's a feasible project. We have enough land that we're interested in learning how to garden. Ideally, being able to live almost completely off our own produce. I'd also like to set up a giant solar panel array in our back field, so we don't have to pay much (if anything) for electricity anymore.

Plus a bunch of other little interests that I want to indulge in over time. In the meantime, I don't have much of a schedule. I go to sleep whenever I'm tired and I get up whenever I naturally wake. I'm a night owl, so that means I'm usually up most of the night and then sleep until almost noon most days.

I dunno what else... I guess I'm just living in the moment now, trying to focus on what makes me happy each day and not worry about trying to be productive or accomplished. I did all that when I was working, and now I can just focus on being comfortable. It's a wonderful feeling, knowing that I have no commitments outside of my control. My wife wants to go back to work one day, but I think I'm done. I much prefer the ability to plan my own days on a whim and not get tied down with long-term commitments. Every day is an adventure that I get to choose.

I had been using Relay for Reddit for years, and they didn't shut down like other third party apps, so I made a Lemmy account as a backup plan and then continued using both Lemmy and Reddit for a while.

Then the creator of Relay announced that they couldn't afford to continue service as it was and would be migrating toward a monthly subscription-based service to stay alive. That day, I moved to Lemmy and never went back. As much as I'd love to pay someone else just to stick it to Reddit's CEO, I felt that getting financially invested in a failing website just wasn't worth it in the long run. Besides, Sync for Lemmy had just been released and it was a familiar experience. I had used Sync for Reddit before I discovered Relay for Reddit.

Lemmy (and the fediverse as a whole) is much better than Reddit anyway. There are enough people here to have fresh content every day and I'm still discovering interesting niche subs (magazines? I'm still not sure what they call the categories here). There's also not too many people here, so when I find an interesting topic to comment on (like this one), it's not already 5,000+ comments deep. Nothing more demoralizing than commenting on a popular topic and getting absolutely no reaction from the community. No comments, no upvotes or downvotes. Makes me feel like I wasted my time trying to add my two cents to a conversation, and I tend to delete those comments later.

And if I run out of things to browse on Lemmy... oh well. It keeps me from being stuck on my phone all day. A smaller community means the feed isn't endless, so it keeps me from doom-scrolling all day and night. I much prefer it here, and I'm officially done with Reddit.

I don't know about 9D, but I once saw Avengers: Age of Ultron in 4D in a theater in Seoul, South Korea. It was a 3D film with moving seats, smells, and air that would blast in your face.

During a car chase, you could smell burning rubber, or close-ups of women would have a whiff of perfume or flowers. During a shootout, you'd get fine blasts of air on either side of your face, like bullets barely missing your head. If someone took a hit, the seats would jolt violently. It also poked you in the back if someone was hit from behind. Not to mention, flying in any aircraft felt like you were on a rollercoaster; the seats would raise and lower and tilt in all directions. It was pretty intense. Like being on one of those Universal Studios rides at their theme park, except for an entire film.

My wife and I lived in Germany for 2 years. We went to Munich for a weekend and had an excellent historical walking tour across the city, provided for free by our hostel.

During that tour, we learned that pretty much every stereotype Americans have for Germans (lederhosen, yodeling, beer and brats, etc.) are actually Bavarian culture, not German. And Germans are actually quite offended at the confusion we have between their culture and Bavarian culture.

We also learned that Bavaria used to be quite wealthy and powerful, and intended to split off into their own independent nation at one time. But then Hitler set up shop there and made it his headquarters for the Third Reich. The city was absolutely decimated during WWII, and when the war was over, they not only had to rebuild from scratch, but also had to contribute to rebuilding the rest of Germany, as well as paying for war damages for Europe and all Allied nations, etc. Their wealth was pretty much depleted and their hope of being an independent nation was gone.

A decade ago, I was riding a motorcycle and slid it sideways on some gravel in a turn. The weight of the bike crushed my ankle, shattering it to pieces, while my knee got split open.

I had a metal plate put in my ankle, my knee was stitched closed, and I was bedridden for a month while recovering. Then I was hobbling around on crutches for several more months after that.

Unfortunately, I was serving in the US military at the time and they wanted me to get back to work ASAP, so they pushed me to do physical therapy and start exercising as soon as I could. We have to maintain physical fitness standards to continue serving, so I was on a limited medical waiver and was expected to get back in shape quickly.

Part of our fitness standards included running 1.5 miles in a certain timeframe based on our age. I kept getting extensions to my medical waiver because I couldn't run, but they pushed me to hurry up and get back into running shape. Suffice to say, I was eventually able to pass my fitness test, but my ankle and knee would be throbbing in pain for the next day or two after.

A couple years later, I had the metal plate removed from my ankle, as it was restricting movement. I felt almost a jolt of pain every time I ran on that ankle. Removing the plate did make it less painful to run, but I was still barely passing my fitness tests. I just couldn't make myself run any faster, no matter how hard I tried.

On top of that, both ankles and knees started hurting. Turns out, I had been favoring the good leg so much, I was over-exerting it and causing stress. I got an MRI and they said I had worn away about 1/3rd of the cartilage in my good knee.

Eventually, my doctor gave me a cane to help with walking and before long, I found myself using it all the time. I was continually going back to my doctor to receive more advice and care, and I was in and out of physical therapy for years.

Finally, my doctor considered me for a medical board. This is a process to review one's medical ailments and decide whether they were fit to stay in the military, or if they needed to be medically discharged. My doctor asked me how close I was to retirement and I said I had 4 more years left. She then asked what job I did and I told her I worked in an IT role. She said I didn't need my legs to do that, since I sat at a desk all day long, so she recommended to the board that I continue serving on a permanent "no walk/run" medical waiver. This would mean that I'm exempt from any run or walk fitness tests and I could basically just coast to retirement as long as I could pass my other fitness requirements (pushups and situps).

I managed to make it to retirement, although the lack of cardio in my diet meant that I gained about 40 lbs in those 4 years. I used my cane pretty much every day. Fortunately, my ankle pain pretty much vanished, now that I'm no longer running all the time. It's easy to get a twinge of pain in my ankles if I'm not careful, but they don't ache regularly anymore.

Once I retired, I registered with the VA and they immediately claimed they could fix my knees with a simple operation - something the military claimed would be a fruitless endeavor. I had minor knee surgery on both of my knees last year and surprisingly, I have almost no pain now!

I no longer walk with a cane, but it's still easy to over-exert my knees and get sore/tired. I'm still within 6 months of my last surgery and they said it might take up to a year for me to fully recover, so I just need to be patient. But I'm excited at the prospect of being able to run again without pain. I'm hoping, by this summer, I'll be able to get outside and exercise more and hopefully remove these extra 40+ lbs that have been weighing me down. It's definitely not good for my knees to have extra weight on them.

Unfortunately, I'm about to turn 40 in a few months and every single one of my friends who hit 40 has claimed that that's the year their body starts aching for no reason and it starts getting harder to do simple physical tasks. So I may be on an uphill battle from here on out.

As a kid, I was extremely active. I was constantly running everywhere, climbing trees, bicycling, swimming, rock climbing, canoeing/kayaking, and just constantly bursting at the seams with energy. I had never spent a day in the gym, but I had a natural 8-pack abs just from being so physically active. The military actually made me less muscular because they told me to slow down and stop running everywhere/climbing on everything. It didn't help that I had a desk job, so I was told to sit still at my desk and work. If I wanted to exercise, they told me to go to the gym. But I hated the gym. It was so boring to just sit there and pick up/put down weights. Or run in circles on a track. I wanted an obstacle course, or something with a goal to reach, not just a boring, repetitive movement.

I was in great shape but still lost a lot of my strength/abilities while serving, because the military's idea of fitness didn't align with my own. Then my motorcycle accident severely crippled me for the rest of my service. And now, at nearly 40 years old, I'm hoping I can regain at least a little bit of that physical fitness back one day. I had built my whole life around the idea of being in excellent shape, and being crippled/broken has severely damaged my own personal image of myself. I feel like I don't even know who I am anymore; my fitness and physical activity pretty much defined my personality and without that, I've had to seriously redefine who I am, which unfortunately comes bundled with insecurities, depression, and anxiety. But I'm hopeful that I'll be able to be more active in the future.

My father walked anywhere from 2-10 miles a day just to stave off the symptoms of his Parkinson's disease and he was a huge inspiration for me. Heck, he was a local celebrity in my town; he was known as the guy who would be out walking every day, rain or shine. Unfortunately, he passed away this past Friday, finally succumbing to his Parkinson's. So it's my goal, starting this spring, to pick up his daily walks in his stead and get myself back in shape. I've been living with him for the past 2 years (in my childhood home), so it'll be easy to pick up his old route. Here's hoping I can continue to improve, even into my middle-age years.

I was deployed to Iraq in 2007, at Kirkuk Regional Air Base. I served in the US Air Force and my job was essentially an IT technician, so I was maintaining our base's computer servers.

Our base was half Air Force (Airmen) and half Army (Soldiers). About 90% of our ticket queue came from the Army side, because they didn't respect equipment or security practices as much as we did, so they were always breaking our things.

One day, I got a ticket from a small Army supply depot. Someone's computer wasn't powering on. So I hopped in our truck and drove over to the Army side of base. The supply depot was literally a shack, maybe about 20x15 ft. I went inside and was greeted by 3 soldiers.

While troubleshooting the broken computer, I tipped it and sand poured out the back. This was common, as we had a lot of sand in Iraq. It collected like super-aggressive dust everywhere and we had to clean our offices at least weekly to keep it at bay. Soldiers rarely cleaned their offices, so there was always a layer of sand on everything. I told them I was going to grab a can of compressed air from my truck, so I could blow out all the sand and then see if there was anything else broken within the computer.

The shack was next to a larger building that had a parking lot in front of it. I had parked in the lot and was rummaging around in the bed of the truck for a can of compressed air...

...The next thing I know, I'm lying on my back on the pavement, staring at the blue sky. I'm thinking how beautiful and peaceful the sky looks, but I feel like something's off. I'm trying to remember why I'm lying there, staring at the sky.

I tried to get up, but my whole body ached, like I had spent an entire day in the gym, beating up every muscle group. It was a struggle, but I eventually managed to sit up. My hearing suddenly came back to me and I heard a commotion going on in the direction of the shack. I struggled to stand up, using the tailgate of my truck, and I walked around the corner of the larger building to see what's going on.

There was a small crater in the ground, next to the shack. One wall and its section of roof was almost completely blown off. A mortar had landed, just outside the shack. A bunch of people were scrambling around the wreckage.

I did a spot-check of myself and despite being full-body sore, I didn't have any holes anywhere. No blood, I could move all my limbs and digits. Somehow, I seemed okay. I must have been hit by the shock wave from the impact while around the corner from the shack. Which was lucky, as this particular mortar seemed to have scattered little molten balls of metal everywhere when it exploded.

Emergency crews arrived and they started excavating the ruins of the shack. Two of the soldiers had died instantly; the third was rushed to the hospital with limbs barely attached. He died a few hours later on the operating table. If I had been responsible and brought all my tools inside; if I didn't have to go back to my truck to grab supplies for the job, I would've been in that shack with those guys. That was the closest I ever came to dying.

Since I didn't appear to be injured, I just went back to work. No sense in me being in the way of everyone else. But little did I know that I had suffered a mild concussion. I was kind of dazed for about a week, just staring blankly at my computer screen. I eventually snapped out of it and continued on with my life. Never went to the hospital about it because it never occured to me while I was dazed, and when I snapped out of it, I felt like I was all better anyway and there was no reason to be examined. I was young and dumb.

At the time of the incident, you could only earn a Purple Heart medal by being injured while in direct combat with OpFor (opposing forces; a.k.a the enemy). So I didn't qualify, as they had just launched a random mortar at our base and I was unlucky enough to be in its vicinity when it blew up. I was a victim of circumstance, not in an actual battle.

A few years later, they expanded the award to cover any injury sustained indirectly from OpFor's actions. Also, they included mental injuries. Used to be, only physical damage counted, but PTSD was starting to become more commonly recognized, so mental injuries became a qualifier for the Purple Heart. So I qualified for it, but when I applied, I realized I had no evidence of my injuries from OpFor specifically, because I never went to the hospital afterward. I went to get checked out, but the hospital said I had no residual trace of mental damage that they could see. Brain scans looked fine. So I never earned the Purple Heart, even though I technically qualified for it.

I had a similar issue, except from the customer side. I had worked IT for 20 years in the US Air Force, and when I retired 2 years ago, I moved back in with my elderly dad in my old childhood home. I found out he was paying for 40Mb service (the best offered to our secluded countryside home), but we were lucky if we could get 15-20Mb at the best of times.

I spent several weeks troubleshooting over the phone with his ISP and they insisted it was a problem on our end. I rebooted our modem so many times, even configured it from scratch several times. I ensured the WiFi router I set up to extend the range across the house wasn't slowing anything down along the way. I swore there was nothing out of place on our end and they needed to check the connection to our house. They didn't believe me; thought I was just claiming to be an IT expert to skip steps and get someone out to our secluded neck of the woods (fair, but still...)

Eventually, I convinced them to send a technician out here, an hour away from their offices. The tech connected to the line outside the house and immediately packed up his tools and went back to his truck. He said he doesn't even need to check my equipment; there's definitely something wrong with the external line.

Turns out they have a service box at the end of my street. They don't have a dedicated 40Mb line for my home, so they paired two 20Mb lines. One of the lines was completely disconnected; removed during maintenance and they forgot to reconnect it. The other was a shared line with my small neighborhood, which explains the drop in connection during high usage hours. The service tech connected the second line and we got twice the speed we used to.

I ended up dropping that company for Starlink shortly after, since they had no higher speeds in my area. Which was a significant improvement (200Mbps), but not quite the speeds I had hoped for. Now, thanks to Biden's high speed Internet initiative, I'm getting Gb speeds to my neighborhood this summer. Can't wait for that; as much of an improvement as Starlink has been over my old connection, it's still slow compared to what I'm used to from my military service.

Recently retired US veteran here. When I joined the service in 2002, almost everyone I served with were die-hard Republicans. When I retired last summer, most of the people I served with were liberal Democrats.

Just in the past 2 decades since 9/11, we've watched as Republican politicians publicly flaunt support for us, while privately cutting all our pay and benefits and sending us off to die in countries we have no business being in.

The Republican party continues to claim that they support veterans and service members, but we know the actual truth. Democrats have done more for us than Republicans, and most of us are already voting Blue.

They should've stuck with Steam instead of going exclusive through Epic Games. Epic's predatory practice of PC exclusives makes it hard to survive something like this. If they existed on a broader spectrum of services, this would be no big deal.

I spent 20 years traveling the world with the US Air Force, and I met many different people from many different cultures. And I would be lying if I said that I didn't have conflicting world views with some of the folks I've met over the years.

There were times, early in my career, when I felt other cultures were just wrong and needed to change everything about themselves and the way they operate in order to get themselves out of the poverty and violence and hatred that they lived in. It turns out, my way of thinking was wrong.

The thing that helped me the most was actually taking an "Introduction to Culture" course through the Community College of the Air Force. It introduced me to the mindset behind other cultures and why some people I ran into just seemed to be unapologetically biased and/or racist/bigoted toward "outsiders."

Learning how other cultures think and associate with others of their own culture helped me to get a mental foothold on differing opinions. I was able to discuss logic and reason from a common ground, not just a Western mentality viewpoint. I learned how to "speak their language," so to speak. And even though I couldn't change everyone's world views, I was at least able to relate and discuss topics on equal footing.

And at the end of the day, you have to realize that everyone is their own unique individual. Sure, a particular culture and/or religion may go against everything you hold dear in your life, but individuals' opinions may not be as resolute as the overarching culture may appear. Some people are open to new ideas and creative ways of thinking. You need to be aware of your personal biases (we ALL have them) and work to help others overcome their own biases at the same time, while not being accusatory or judgemental.

You can't just tell people to educate themselves, but you can educate yourself, then share your knowledge and experience with others and try to come to an understanding. There are entire cultures out there who can't see themselves as individuals with unique hopes and dreams. They only function as individual "worker ants," supporting the ideals of their overarching culture and families. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. But it makes it hard to convince them of the importance of individual people, especially members of a group that's contradictory to the teachings of their own culture. They have an especially hard time separating individuals from the group's belief structure.

Teaching tolerance to groups who thrive on intolerance is very difficult, but it starts by relating to and positively influencing individuals. It won't happen overnight, but good impressions can leave a lasting effect. And you need to be able to swallow your pride and don't let your biases get the better of you. Be caring and respectful and let their own biases crumble under their own scrutiny. There's no simple or direct way to do this, but if you spend enough time around others, you might find small ways to relate to them, then work on expanding your common ground.

Humans compartmentalize because we don't have the cognitive ability to understand everything in the universe. It simplifies our world so we can better understand it. But racism and bigotry is a nasty side effect; we assign biased opinions on entire cultures so we don't have to re-learn about every single member of a culture. But it's important to fight against that urge to stereotype and teach others how to avoid it too. People deserve a chance to prove themselves, and you need to be able to give them that chance, even if it takes them a few tries. Some people just need a guiding hand and some extra opportunities to figure out how to be better. Most people need it, to some degree. All you can do is try not to give in to your own biases and help gently lead others to identifying their own biases.

For me personally, video games are interactive stories. I love movies and TV shows, and being able to have some level of control over the action is an amazing experience for me!

I'm also not competitive and don't care so much about scores, rankings, or online multiplayer vs. games. Just give me an intriguing plot and let me be the protagonist in it. I'll play that game for hours on end.

I don't like games that are essentially movies with a few interactive scenes between clips, though. It has to be really interesting if I'm going to sit through a game like that. I'm here to play, not to watch. The only series that's been interesting enough for me to deal with hundreds of cutscenes dispersed every few minutes throughout is the Metal Gear Solid series.

I realize I don't speak for the whole gaming community, but this is my personal view.

The machine just radiates heat, which makes the arms of your glasses more malleable.

The last time I took my glasses in to get adjusted, they did it for me, but recommended I just use a hair dryer at home to heat them up before bending.

I was born and raised throughout the whole Memphis Design era, reluctantly tolerated the Y2K era, gained a little hope for humanity during the Frutiger Aero era, then subsequently lost all hope once the Flat Design era hit.

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.

My father did this. He signed up for his body to be donated to science. He always told me, the minute he passes, there's a card in his wallet with a phone number. Just call them and they'll come out to pick up his body. That's it; no funeral or anything. He didn't believe in wasting money on a funeral or burial plot/coffin after he was dead. When they're done with their research, they'll return his cremated remains to us.

Sadly, I had to call that number a few months ago.

I actually prefer Lemmy because it's less active. I browse Lemmy's version of r/All and I have more than enough content to keep me entertained for hours. Plus, when I find a popular thread, I can actually contribute to it and my comments aren't buried under 10K other comments within a few hours. I feel like I can actually communicate with the community here, instead of shouting into the void like on Reddit.

I'm actually just about to celebrate Christmas in the next hour or so. My dad's health went downhill over the holidays and he needed to be moved to assisted living, so we had to delay Christmas for a bit.

I asked my family to get me gift cards because I don't like receiving a bunch of trinkets/cheap toys. And the non-cheap "toys" I want are too expensive for my family to afford. So I'd rather they contribute cash toward something I really want.

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.

That's what the founders of Reddit believed when they started. We all jumped ship from Digg because Digg became too corporate and greedy, and Reddit was our safe haven.

Now here we are, over a decade later, and we're jumping ship again because Reddit has become too corporate and greedy.

Lemmy has the advantage of being decentralized, with no single person or corporation running it, and you're proposing a Reddit clone, run by an individual? Honestly, I love the ideas you have for Matrix, I love what you've accomplished with it, and I love your optimism for the site. But I've been burned too many times in the past by hopeful honest innovators who let money and power slowly corrupt them over time. Unless you can add your site to the federation, I'm gonna have to pass, even as enticing as your site looks now. I'm too jaded to trust a single entity/corporation to host social media content.

When you switch to any sort of tire that doesn't have pressurized air in it, the dampening can only occur by deforming the tire in contact with the ground, and it's not going to be anywhere near as good.

I mean, these new tires do deform with the ground. That's the "revolutionary tech" they brag about; the rings are designed to compress a bit and deform to compensate for impact, but always bounce back to their original shape no matter how much force is exerted on them. So you get a simulated air pressure.

Technically only Congress can authorize a war. However, the president can and often will undertake “peacekeeping efforts” or “counterinsurgency operations” or “targeted strikes” without congressional approval.

I served in the US military during the Iraq War. Everyone refers to it as a war, but within the military, it was officially called the Iraq Campaign, as it was a military campaign sanctioned by the president. We couldn't officially call it a war because Congress didn't approve a war in the Middle East.

Technically, the last war Congress approved was WWII. The Korean War, the Vietnam War, even our first foray into Iraq with the Gulf War... none of these are official wars. Just the president deciding to step in and get involved in foreign conflicts.

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.

A few months ago they required that you have a watch history to display the homepage.

I'm actually glad for this change. I hated the random junk they always suggest on my homepage. I spent ages clicking on the menu on each video and selecting "don't recommend this channel." It took a few years, but I actually got a clean, empty homepage. Then they changed their website and all the videos came back. I had to start over, cleaning out my feed again.

Now with this new change, my homepage is always clear. Thanks, YouTube!

For the record, I only watch my subscriptions. If I learn about a new channel, it's through another site/person recommending it. I don't let YouTube recommend me stuff to watch. And I definitely don't watch YouTube Shorts or whatever they call their vertical video nonsense.

My main gripe with Google Lens is that it replaced Google Image Search on their browser. Used to be able to drag/drop an image into Google and it'd do an instant search for all similar/identical images. Now it opens Google Lens and it just gives me a bunch of "related links" instead of a proper image search.

To get the old functionality back, I need to use a "Google image search" add-on in my Firefox browser. It opens the old Google image search page.

I mostly use it to find higher resolution versions of old, grainy images, but Google Lens took that functionality away from me.

There are already a lot of good answers/opinions/experiences/etc. here and I don't want to rehash all of that, but I will mention this:

If you've heard the expression, "blood is thicker than water," you should know that the original unedited expression was actually, "the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb." Basically meaning that the friendships (covenants) you make in life are stronger bonds than the family you just happened to be born into.

You can't choose your biological family, but you can choose your friends and (non-bio) family. Don't let people drag you down just because they're related to you. Cut the dead weight out of your life, regardless of relation, and live your best life. If your dad doesn't care about you, then why should you exhaust any energy caring about him? He hasn't earned your attention, nor the attention of his grandkids.

My wife came from a poor trailer trash family and felt obligated, as the only person who made something of herself, to attempt to support her grandparents (who raised her), mother, and 3 siblings. But it only led to greed, gluttony, and dishonesty. Eventually, she had to cut ties with most of them because they started to feel entitled in sharing her "wealth."

We had to draw the line when one of her pregnant sisters was about to have her baby taken away by the state. (I believe it was her 4th one the state had taken from her at this point; she had been deemed an unfit parent, but kept pumping out kids regardless.) My wife's family tried to guilt us into adopting the kid, just to keep him in the family. She finally put her foot down. Taking in illegitimate children from her family was just trapping her with the burden of her siblings (who were already trying to pawn off their kids to their grandmother). My wife cut ties and now only speaks to her siblings (and mother) if they call. But she makes zero effort to stay in touch otherwise, and she won't give them anything except functional Christmas gifts - the one time of year she indirectly contacts them.

My wife had deep-seated anxiety for years, worrying about supporting her deadbeat family. Now she's low-contact and made a rule not to support them financially. She's living stress-free now and is in a much better place for it. Their lives are their own and she refuses to feel responsible for the horrible choices they've made.

I spent 20 years in the US military. I had to quickly learn "military time" in order to function, as we were taught 12-hr time growing up in school. I was surprised when I traveled the world and discovered that everyone else uses "military time" (read: international time) as well. I guess Americans just really wanna do their own thing.

I exclusively use military time nowadays. If someone doesn't understand the time I stated, I'll correct it to 12-hr time on the spot, as converting is super easy. Just count back 2 hours and drop the 10's digit by one; e.g. 1600 = 4 PM. 2200 = 10 PM. Etc.

Yeah you should let your stuff cool before washing it.. but how many of us do that?

I used to love putting hot pans in the sink with cool water. Loved the sizzle and steam it created, and it was faster than waiting for it to cool down.

Then I would complain about all my pans being cheap and warped. I couldn't cook evenly because there was one bulge that got direct contact with the oven and the rest of the pan rocked back and forth and either burned or undercooked all my food.

Until one day, my wife pointed out that putting a hot pan in cool/cold water causes them to warp. She got mad at me because some of the ruined pans were actually expensive quality brands. I've learned my lesson; no more hot pans in the sink for me. Let them cool a bit before you wash them.

I was a sysadmin in the US Air Force for 20 years. One of my assignments was working at the headquarters for AFCENT (Air Forces Central Command), which oversees every deployed base in the middle east. Specifically, I worked on a tier 3 help desk, solving problems that the help desks at deployed bases couldn't figure out.

Normally, we got our issues in tickets forwarded to us from the individual base's Communications Squadron (IT squadron at a base). But one day, we got a call from the commander of a base's Comm Sq. Apparently, every user account on the base has disappeared and he needed our help restoring accounts!

The first thing we did was dig through server logs to determine what caused it. No sense fixing it if an automated process was the cause and would just undo our work, right?

We found one Technical Sergeant logged in who had run a command to delete every single user account in the directory tree. We sought him out and he claimed he was trying to remove one individual, but accidentally selected the tree instead of the individual. It just so happened to be the base's tree, not an individual office or squadron.

As his rank implies, he's supposed to be the technical expert in his field. But this guy was an idiot who shouldn't have been touching user accounts in the first place. Managing user accounts in an Airman job; a simple job given to our lowest-ranking members as they're learning how to be sysadmins. And he couldn't even do that.

It was a very large base. It took 3 days to recover all accounts from backup. The Technical Sergeant had his admin privileges revoked and spent the rest of his deployment sitting in a corner, doing administrative paperwork.

I posted a homemade video to YouTube once. It was of a coworker chugging a bottle of soy sauce, then puking it back up. YouTube's automod blocked it for nudity. It was literally just a few guys in the office, joking around while this guy chugged soy sauce. We were wearing military uniforms, so the automod probably misinterpreted the tan T-shirt as bare skin or something.

They gave me only one chance to contest the block, and when I submitted my response, it was almost immediately denied. I guarantee that was an automated response and not a real person who reviewed my case.

Nearly a decade later, I noticed it let me contest it again, so I submitted another request and got an actual human response this time, saying I was right, there was no nudity in the video. My video was restored. But I had several years with no access to the video because YouTube blocked it.

I also posted another homemade video with my own audio compilation of pop/rock music over it. It was up for a few years, until YouTube started scanning videos for copyrighted music. Now the video is muted and it's been so long, I don't think I have the original copy anymore. I can't pull it from YouTube because it's just mute. They won't give me access to the audio of the video.

So that's a home video I made that I just don't have the full unedited version of anymore, thanks to YouTube. Definitely don't use them as a backup service for your videos.

A fellow Kurzgesagt enthusiast, I see.

Well that was quick... He's already passed away. They gave him a week to live and he didn't even last the night.