I think you might actually have a black hole cat

As if popcorn wasn’t bad enough on its own, I’ve heard that stuff can sometimes be made from asbestos too

You could imagine a thriller version of this scene, where the AI starts talking to him and exploiting his weakness to manipulate him into releasing it or contacting aliens or ghosts or whatever the plot is about

On desktop I really like Vimium. It enables keyboard navigation on basically any site

…Or to go first bright flashes in the distance

My old place had hardwood floors so the best place to barf, naturally, was in my slippers

This is the one I use on my work PC: https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat

Mostly what it does is change things back to how they were on older Windows versions. E.g. the start menu is aligned to the left corner instead of the center. It is great at removing unnecessary bloat apps like Xbox Game Bar, and disabling various telemetry and ads such as the spam Bing search in the start menu.

I also found that PC had an annoying driver suite (resource hog) called something like “AMD Adrenaline Edition” that the debloat script missed. I had to uninstall the factory graphics driver and reinstall the “minimal, driver only” version from AMD.

Use at your own risk of course. Microsoft often breaks these things with Windows updates

It sure looks like a Dell XPS to me. Those old XPS cases were nonstandard so it was very hard to upgrade the parts later on.

eMachines had cases that look like that too back in 2006

I think that one predates YouTube. I remember first watching it on a friends computer who shared his files during a LAN party

Yep. I’m on Debian for many years now. Every broken update I can recall was either caused by an undocumented PPA or nvidia drivers (which have finally been fixed, for my card at least)

Way back when, Slashdot had something like this to place in your signature. It was a code string that looked like a PGP/GPG signature but the letters were actually personal details.

I recall you could encode age, gender, and relationship status in it, and I think location and whether you worked in the tech industry

In addition this was back when airlines had strong restrictions on wireless being used on planes, so many devices had physical switches to turn WiFi/Bluetooth off. Maybe it’s still turned off

I called 911 a few years ago and they had a police officer call me back when he got to my neighborhood. I had to do this a few times as the incident repeated a few days later. Each time the officer called me his number was hidden.

That’s the only time I’ve ever had a call from a hidden number that was not a scam, but I would be hesitant to block them all

I have some bad news for you - any random idiot with a driver’s license and a two-ton death machine already puts your ass at risk, all the time. We call it “traffic” because we’ve just gotten used to it

Everyone I know who has had a skunk spray was due to one of two causes:

1). They ran it over with their car or 2). Their dog attacked it

In general skunks are very reticent to actually spray. I’ve never known anyone to get it from just walking by. I knew someone who blocked a skunk with their shoe from running in the house, because they mistook it for their cat.

From what I understand, they have poor eyesight and hearing, so in my experience they usually don’t even notice you. They are a wild animal though so the important thing would be to not surprise them. I think if you make noise, keep your distance, and never corner one you should be fine.

I came to the comments to mention that exact experience. There must be historical reasons that SCP uses -P and SSH uses -p but I certainly didn’t expect it since they’re both from the same package (openssh)

Shelled and unshelled both also mean unshelled and shelled, respectively

Yes exactly. Before I got my current Pixel 7a I tried to flash a used Pixel 6a (Verizon variant) and ran into the problems above.

Without an unlocked bootloader the install process will fail at step two, Enabling OEM unlocking, of the install guide at https://grapheneos.org/install/web.

The OEM unlocking setting in developer options will be grayed out on all Verizon devices, even if you paid full price for an unlocked phone (not on a payment plan - some OEMs also lock phones while under contract so you can’t steal the phone and stop paying. Verizon just locks them all regardless).

There are numerous websites with dodgy software that claim they can bypass the restriction, but in my experience 100% of them are scams. Sometimes well meaning redditors will tell you they got theirs working, but they’re conflating OEM unlocking and carrier unlocking (which, so I’ve read, Verizon employees are specifically trained to conflate)

Unique to the Pixel line, you actually can re-lock the bootloader. So if you can manage ADB fastboot (that is, follow the install process) then I wouldn’t worry about the security risk in this case.

The GrapheneOS installation process is exceptionally easy to follow. It’s much faster and easier than the old Cyanogenmod days

The specific variant is usually listed by the seller. On Amazon if you’re buying it used I believe it would be listed near the condition information from the specific merchant.

You may also be able to message them to ask. The model number is printed on the outside of the original box, and is also available in the About Phone settings page, so it should be easy for the seller to find it.

The model number to avoid is G0DZQ.

GWKK I think is the ideal version, especially if you’re traveling overseas. This is the global version so it should have the most radio bands available.

GWKK3 (AT&T version) should work great in the US on a non-Verizon network.

I have the G82U8 version, which apparently was originally for the Japanese market, but it works great for me in the US. I’m using Mint Mobile with GrapheneOS.

(Source https://www.phonemore.com/models/google/pixel-7a/)