I have a sony as well, and you can use it as dumb TV, by not agreeing to their privacy policy. If you want to connect it to wifi afterwards, it points you to the privacy policy again, so it seems like the TV follows that. But I’ve also purchased it 4 years ago, so not sure what the status is now.

So far, I’ve seen no ads. I mostly use it mostly via HDMI and sometimes for watching freely available TV via antenna.

Gout. Big toe on fire, throbbing with pain, joint swollen until there are no discernable features. Even a feather touching the area is enough to generate hot searing pain. The constant urge to ‘pop’ the big toe joint set against the impossibility to actually wriggle the toe without passing out.

Should drink lots of water to flush out the uric acid, but every trip to the bathroom has to be carefully considered because walking there takes 2-3 minutes of grabbing on to nearby things/people while stepping awkwardly on the outside edge of the foot, instead of 20 seconds of normal walking.

I’ve had severe tooth pain for a couple of weeks (a cyst - the pain killed the nerves in some of my teeth), and 3 days of gout until the meds worked well enough to walk less painfully were worse.

No Man’s Sky. Pretty sweet deal, I think.

I’d just start mining random stuff to put together to make better mining gear to mine better and more stuff.

Then just get on my dinghy and explore the 'verse while looking out for a better dinghy. Maybe plop down a few bases on nice planets, rinse and repeat.

I mean, you already have 12 phalanges on one hand (3 each, from 4 fingers) and you can use your thumb as an indicator.

I’ve no idea on the relockable bootloader support with self signed keys. Though I do remember reading at some point from some lad ranting about why it’s a bad idea to relock, and seemed to make sense, so I didn’t look further into the matter. The post was on the… ehm… other website.

Aye, they have unlockable bootloaders and sony also provides instructions and firmware needed to build your own AOSP if that’s your pleasure. I just went the lineageOS way.

That’s a damn shame. I really liked their phones, their only downside, I think, was the crap support - they only give 2 years of updates. But with lineage that is no longer an issue.

Have you looked at what sony has to offer? They latest xperia had a headphone jack, sd card and I believe lineageOS support.

i installed lineageOS on an xperia 5 ii, so older model, and seems to be going strong. got latest update 1 week ago.

My phone has IP68 with an usb-c and headphone jack, and the SIM/SD tray. Not a rugged phone though.

regarding your edit there, I guess most people stopped reading at ‘essential oils’ without knowing where this was going.

this is one (the only?) actual medical use for these things - their main thing is that they smell in a certain way that is consistent, so you use them to retrain your sense of smell. that’s it. no taking internally or applying to skin or whatever. just take the stopper off the wee bottle, sniff and repeat for as many bottles as you can be arsed.

when I had covid-19, I didn’t have so well defined scents on hand, but I did have several colognes I could sniff, and I knew fairly well how they were supposed to smell and could use those to gauge my senses. fun times, they were…

Fully agree with you there. I can never fully relax around family and it’d probably be a nightmare living with them.

because saying you’d need to build a power plant for every 72 homes would not make the technology very attractive

quoth Rage Against The Machine:

‘fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me’

Ah, you are a person of culture(s) as well, I see

Huh, I always thought pineapples and tomatoes were canned in non-aluminium tins that also have a coating on the inside to prevent corrosion. Them tins don’t really feel as soft as a beer or soda can.

Thank you. Your service is well appreciated!

The results section of the full pdf is an interesting read, though I’m not entirely sure what to make of it. It poses an interesting question and ends on an grim tone (if truly an experiment, it’s probably not the last).

I am confused whether I should put my tinfoil hat on or not.

now now, no need to be dismissive of other age groups in this matter. I’m sure there’s plenty of non-teenager people that think the same way too. on the internet, nobody knows you’re a 74 yr old extremist

I mean you’re not wrong. But here we are. If you’ve ever tried to convince anyone of… well anything that conflicts with their views, you’re probably well aware that there’s no changing peoples’ minds.

So I guess my honest question is… what now?

I’d say all these articles about social media saying it’s broken are just about maintaining the illusion of something better. As long as they can keep it up, people are going to think “it’s bad but it shouldn’t be!” and just keep coming back hoping it improves. And that can keep social media alive with everything it can do for everybody using it as an income stream.

It has never informed users and a pet peeve of mine is governments using fucking twitter to communicate. And businesses too lazy to create their own webpages (or pay somebody to do it for them) and pay for some hosting (deductible as a business expense, by the way) so they use fecebook instead.

Also, as somebody mentioned in a different comment, it is actually the town square, as it always was (I believe their comment evoked witch trials as an example).