Props for the Hiromi recommendation, though I’d personally choose Seeker from the Alive album.

You should always have enough supplies for a short term emergency. That’s not doomsday prepping, it’s just common sense.

I’m not a prepper IMO, but I have rooftop solar with battery backup, a few smaller portable batteries and UPSes on my critical stuff, and some oil filled radiators since my heat pump isn’t connected to the solar setup.

At any given time we generally have a month or more worth of food in the house in frozen and dry/canned goods. Also, several gallons of bottled water.

I also keep some stuff under the back bed of my car’s hatch, first aid kit and emergency blanket, and battery jumper kit as well as a battery powered tire inflator.

I live in a semi-rural area, and in an emergency, getting out and/or getting food and necessities may not be possible. And if there’s a wildfire I may need to evacuate fast, so important to have what’s needed. This sort of thing is like… If you have the means, why wouldn’t you?

You can use ntfsfix on the drive to do a check and remove dirty bit. This isn’t a full check though, and could mask or hide actual issues with the drive if it’s failing.

There’s also chkntfs which is more robust but I’m not sure if that’s open source and I’m not familiar with it.

Using ntfsfix is a good quick fix in my experience, but at the end of the day, NTFS is a Microsoft exclusive format and shared disks should be mounted in a format that both OSes can use, like exFAT, or Btrfs with the WinBtrfs driver (the latter I’m not familiar with, I’ve always used exFAT for shared disks, but I don’t use Windows anymore).

I’ve ditched all of them except the Disney/Hulu bundle, and that’s only because Amex gives me back $7 a month of the cost.

Amazon Prime used to be okay as a Prime customer, but now you can’t watch a 24 minute show without seeing like five ads. I tried to watch an episode of Invincible and there were two ads before the show even started, two in the middle of the show, and one at the end. It’s freaking insane.

I barely even watch video these days, I get way more mileage out of a good music service like Qobuz or Tidal.

And it’s not a dementia thing, it’s an adhd+generalized anxiety thing. Piece of mind is pretty valuable to me and mine.

That’s a fair take. I dunno, the potential security vulnerabilities outweigh any possible gains for me with most IOT devices, and I feel smart appliances are just more complicated to fix and more easily break down. Plus, the last thing I need is my washer to brick or my fridge to stop working from a botched firmware update.

With a wifi fridge for example I can know if it stops working and the temp starts rising before I have a fridge full of spoiled food.

You don’t need a wifi fridge for this. My wife and I manage this via Home Assistant and cheap Switchbot sensors. Fully self contained on my network, nothing to phone home anywhere.

The rest of the things you listed are kind of silly. If you left the oven on, that sucks, but you’re already gone. Also, who sets the oven on before leaving the house? That’s just an odd… like, really odd thing to do. Like, senility/dementia level odd, at which point what difference is a notification? And the dryer thing… well, that’s nothing a 15 minute wrinkle cycle doesn’t already solve on a dumb dryer.

It depends. I’m not saying I never pirate books. I’m not going to just support a publisher milking a book that should belong to the commons.

Also, some publishers have taken to raising ebook prices to as high or higher than hardback costs. For those I might buy one book by an author and pirate another. I won’t justify it other than to say I only ever bought paperbacks anyway and still remember those being like $3.99 to $6.99, so I’m not paying $18+ for an ebook novel because of publisher greed.

But if it’s an author I like, I buy their books, and support them in other ways (like with Sanderson’s Kickstarter for example).

Nah, no need to be a shitheel. I’m cool with paying for books, authors gotta eat. I wouldn’t refund a book I’ve read.

Takes a small effort to set up (install Calibre, install NoDRM plugin, apply Kindle serial to plugin), but once it’s done, the rest is literally drag and drop, it removes DRM from your books automagically.

Like hell I don’t. Calibre plus NoDRM says otherwise.

My senior class in high school, the French and History teachers got together to plan a senior trip to Canada post-graduation, with stops in Montreal and Quebec. They let us have beers (on our own dime) if we wanted since the drinking age up there was 18, and one of my history teachers even offered a few of us Cuban cigars the last night of the trip since there was no embargo in Canada but we couldn’t cross back into the US with them. Was a pretty good time.

We were warned the Quebecois could be kinda douchey to non-native speakers, but I found the whole trip was pretty chill, and as long as you were at least trying to speak French to them, they were more than accommodating for directions and help. Was a really memorable trip, 20+ years later still a very fond memory. Good teachers are great.

I spend a bunch of time in log reviews in my current role. “Googling the error message” image is literally hanging on my office wall.

Have a ton of games already, but I picked up Nuclear Blaze and Streets of Rogue on the cheap.

A week prior to the steam sale, got a good deal on River City Girls 2 and Mechwarrior 5 Mercenaries on Fanatical, $15 for both together.

PC-Engine CD version, R-Type Complete.

IMO it’s better than the original arcade version. That soundtrack is amazing.

Cool shit, I had no idea there were all these ports of the original R-Type.

IMO R-Type Complete for PC-Engine CD is the absolute best version of this game available. Better than the arcade version even.