Coconut Monkey Cornerclub

[Brian Boru]

62 + bonus.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4w7Teejres

 

[Brian Boru]

Nobody reads EULAs, ToS, privacy policies etc.
I think there should be a small few standards like those for open source software—GNU, MIT etc—and every site must pick one of them to honor. People might read and become vaguely familiar with a few defaults, and site owners wouldn't be able to sucker visitors so easily.

"We know nobody reads this, because we added in February that we’d send a bottle of good wine to the first person to contact us, and it was only in May that we got a response," a sentence in their privacy policy now reads.

Free wine hidden in website terms claimed after 3 months

The offer was included on the tax website as an "experiment" to see if anyone would read the terms.

www.bbc.com

Stargate on Earth

Nice idea, this should spread

Where is the Dublin Portal providing a live link with New York?

A 24/7 screen allows people in Dublin to see what's going on in New York throughout the day.

www.bbc.com

 

[Zloth]

Or another file manager, I imagine some of them have functionality for that sort of thing.

Can't. It's my work PC. They would string me up by my eyelids!

P.S. 56 gorram it.
P.P.S. WHICH ear!?
P.P.P.S. How did you keep count of your score?

 

[Zloth]

Oh, wait, I came here with a purpose! There's a chance of the Northern Lights getting past 40° N tonight. We've been told to watch for them a few times in my life, but I've yet to ever see them.

 

[Pifanjr]

Oh, wait, I came here with a purpose! There's a chance of the Northern Lights getting past 40° N tonight. We've been told to watch for them a few times in my life, but I've yet to ever see them.

I saw a post on Reddit that it had been sighted in my country, but I was already in bed and too tired to bother getting dressed and go outside to see if I could spot it as well.

 

[Zloth]

...and in came a cloud deck. It looks like we're a little too far south anyway.

If only I owned a helicopter!

 

[Brian Boru]

WHICH ear!?

Left is right

How did you keep count of your score?

Text editor open on 2nd monitor, typing 1234… as I got 'em right, moving to new line every 10 Qs and new 'para' every 25 Qs—I think it's 25 easy, 25 medium, 25 hard.

If only I owned a helicopter

I find a wingsuit nearly as good

The effects of the storm could however affect GPS systems, power grids, radio operations and satellite navigation

Northern Lights: US may get rare show this weekend due to solar storm

Rare solar storm could trigger phenomenon as far south as Alabama, experts say.

www.bbc.com

 

[Frindis]

62 + bonus.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4w7Teejres

55+bonus. Sorry I mistook the Irish national flower for the Sunflower, but I thought it would be something with a color similar to your beard

 

[Alm]

54

 

[Brian Boru]

Sorry I mistook the Irish national flower for the Sunflower

You were close, the Irish national weather is the sun shower.

Bonus: Irish national anthem

 

[ZedClampet]

I got every question correct. Not the ones in the video. I didn't watch that.

In other important news, Aldi is no longer selling British cheese, so I'm now ordering cheese from a place in Wisconsin. It's excellent, but 3X more expensive.

 

[Pifanjr]

I had one of the weirder computer problems I've encountered over the past two days. It all started when my wife couldn't connect to Diablo IV. She would just get a message that the network servers couldn't be reached and the game would close. So I figured the Diablo servers were just having some issues and it would fix itself. However, the friend she was playing didn't have any problems and I couldn't find any mention of an outage online. Even stranger, her friend did see her account come online for a few seconds before being disconnected, so she must have been making connection to a server. She eventually fixed the problem by going through a VPN.

Later in the evening, I noticed I couldn't load Google pages any more. After a bit of testing, it seemed I was able to connect to some websites, but not others, but I couldn't really find a pattern into which websites worked and which didn't. One of the strangest things was that I could go to Reddit, but it would only load 4 posts. Refreshing the website would give me 4 different posts though, so it wasn't a caching issue. We had already reset the router, so I figured it must be a problem with our ISP which would probably resolve itself in not too long.

The next day I worked at my office all day and my wife was able to use the VPN to connect without any issues, so I didn't think about it until the evening. When I tried to open the YouTube app on my phone, it took a while to load the overview of videos, but eventually it did. When I then opened a video, it just kept buffering for a while, but eventually did load the comments and the title of an ad, but the ad itself didn't load. So obviously it was making a connection, but for some reason it was really struggling. I was too tired to bother trying to fix it then though, so I just switched to my phone's data instead.

I was honestly a bit worried we had gotten some malware that was flooding our internet with traffic, because it seemed that most of the things that did still load contained mostly text, like this forum. Since I was working from home today and I didn't want to be stuck using my phone as a hotspot, I decided to get to the bottom of this. I checked the Network tab in the browser console window for a couple of websites, but that didn't really help. Then I decided to reset our router to factory settings, but when I logged into the configuration page I couldn't find a button for it anywhere. However, while I was going through every page looking for that button, I noticed that the primary DNS was pointing to a strange IP address. At which point I remembered I set up Pi Hole a while ago, but had eventually abandoned it. After changing the primary DNS to 8.8.8.8 everything worked again.

I did have a secondary DNS set to 1.1.1.1, which I suppose was how we had been able to connect to everything after the Pi Hole had been shut down, but it seems it's experiencing some issues and we had nothing else to fall back on.

 

[ZedClampet]

One time I was interviewed by a local TV news guy, and I remember thinking later that something I said was pretty stupid, but for the life of me I can't remember what it was.

But I just listened to an interview of a college baseball player on the radio, and he said the following:

"We're all good friends. I don't know them."

and

"The sky's my limit. I just have to stay humble."

He's a young guy and was obviously nervous. I just thought it was kind of funny.

****

Speaking of stupid, I had a semi-colon behind "radio" above, and I kept deleting it and putting in a comma, but it kept showing up as a semi-colon. Finally I realized there was actually just a speck of dirt on the screen in exactly the right place, and I had had a comma there the whole time.

 

[Zloth]

Speaking of stupid, I had a semi-colon behind "radio" above, and I kept deleting it and putting in a comma, but it kept showing up as a semi-colon. Finally I realized there was actually just a speck of dirt on the screen in exactly the right place, and I had had a comma there the whole time.

So that's one of those "problem exists between chair and screen" issues. Meaning the speck of dust on the screen, of course.

 

[neogunhero]

The missus is really wanting an iMac. I have to admit, the new ones look really nice and sleek. I am impressed by their in house ARM based chips, though gaming wise it’s not great but that was never their focus. She really wants one and wants to be able to game on it. I keep telling her how it’s not amazing for games, Mac compatibility aside, and tried to offer a good gaming laptop or even a full tower desktop but she isn’t budging. She really likes how it’s AiO which I can’t blame her for, it is nice to have such a small footprint on her desk as it’s already pretty tiny. It’s also $1500 which is not very cheap when there are really decent gaming laptops for under $1000.

I went through a rabbit hole for trying to find some other AiOs that are good for gaming. Surprise surprise, it’s not a thing, which is a shame. Maybe the market is not big for AiO gaming computers, I can imagine they have their fair share of flaws. Doing some digging, I can definitely see how they aren’t the best option. They’re a pain to upgrade, thermals aren’t great, and if the monitor is damaged it’s near impossible to fix that.

Digital Storm came out with their Aura AiO gaming PC in 2016, packed with a beastly GTX 1080, and based off the reviews it seems that it was pretty solid. However I can’t find much info on it since, so I chalk it up to either it sold poorly, or had tons of problems they decided it’s not worth the risk to do another one.

So that led me to the HP Envy 34. Released last year, it packs a RTX 3050 4GB, 16GB DDR5 RAM, 512GB SSD and i5 12400. Not the best specs, and at $1500 on sale, I think the iMac is a better option honestly. I’m confident the RTX 3050 can probably play games better than the iMac, but I can’t justify paying that price for those specs, you could probably build a tower with those same specs for less than $700. For the same price on the iMac, you’re paying for cutting edge tech, ARM based processing, and a 4.5K(?) screen, plus the whole Apple ecosystem is nice to be in since we have iPhones.

It kind of sucks since, as a gamer, it seems like a total ripoff. With that money she could get a really good rig or laptop to last her a while, but at the same time, I understand the appeal of an iMac and would honestly like to have one.

 

[Brian Boru]

Will she use it for more than gaming?

AiO … a pain to upgrade, thermals aren’t great, and if the monitor is damaged it’s near impossible to fix that

Yep, those ^

Is there much flexibility with them? Say can you add a second monitor or external drive or…? Can you configure some parts before purchase?

I wouldn't touch an AiO because of the thermals—heat has always been the big enemy of hardware, and that's a problem which has only gotten worse these days.

If she goes ahead with it, it's worth looking at the longest warranty you can get. Apple are notorious for designing parts so only their own equipment can attempt to fix them, which means a trip to the Genius Bar where you'll pay enough to buy a normal PC.

 

[neogunhero]

Will she use it for more than gaming?

She wants to get into photo and video editing, and she will be starting online classes this fall, it seems like a good fit for her needs. She isn’t a serious gamer, but I feel like it will be better than playing on the Xbox One like she normally does. If anything she can always cloud stream games especially since the XB1 has terrible WiFi issues with our ISP.

Is there much flexibility with them? Say can you add a second monitor or external drive or…? Can you configure some parts before purchase?

There is some customization options, but they’re only available through the Apple website and they get kind of ridiculous in price. For example, they come default with 8GB of RAM (which Apple claims is enough since they have fine tuned and optimized their own RAM chips, I think they even claimed that it’s as efficient as 16GB RAM in a Windows machine), but to go to 16GB it’s an extra $200. I’m already planning on spending an extra $200 to go to the 10-core GPU from the standard 8-core, so I’m not sure how much it’s worth it. From reviews I read, the standard 8GB RAM definitely is enough for most users. As far as post-purchase upgradeability, it’s non-existent. Just like with all of Apples products, it is incredibly difficult to get inside of the machine let alone add anything to it. Their machines are meant to be bought once then used until it no longer works, so a far cry from the custom PCs we’re used to.

I read something that adding a second and third monitor is a pain, I think that person was saying it’s not natively supported so you had to use a workaround. It has 4 Thunderbolt ports and an ethernet port, no USB type A or C ports. Most likely going to have to buy an expansion hub in the future.

At least the warranty isn’t very expensive for 3 years. That will be the best option if we decide to go with the iMac.

 

[Brian Boru]

What's your fav typo?

Mine is 'lie' instead of 'like'—do it all the time, weird huh?

 

[ZedClampet]

What's your fav typo?

Mine is 'lie' instead of 'like'—do it all the time, weird huh?

Whatever I can pretend was a typo instead of stupidity.

But I have noticed that about half the time that I try to type "your" that I don't get the "r" for some reason.

Remember what typos were like back in the age of typewriters? Always had a bottle of Liquid Paper next to me. I did get a typewriter near the end that could "erase" letters by typing over them in white. But the word processor on my Apple IIc and my Brother printer were life changing. I could make as many typos as I wanted. And even better, it had a spell check. I was in college and it was literally life changing.

Now I'm so careless I have typos all the time. Hitting <backspace> is not even something I have to think about. My fingers just do it.

When I was teaching Guido to type, I decided to show off and type something in front of him. I had my usual number of fails which I normally wouldn't even have noticed because correcting my bad typing has, as I said, become second nature, but every time I messed up anything, Guido just started laughing like it was the funniest thing he'd ever seen.

 

[Pifanjr]

What's your fav typo?

Mine is 'lie' instead of 'like'—do it all the time, weird huh?

I occasionally tell my wife I live her.

 

[Frindis]

Where/Were.

 

[ZedClampet]

I have good health news for a change. I've struggled to walk for a couple of years now. Doctors said it was my back injury messing up the nerves to my legs. Doing simple things like walking to the car was a challenge. I've had to order my groceries to be delivered and my wife has been saddled with all the yard work.

I was doing random medical research online and asked my doctor to check my potassium levels. She did, and they were quite low. She gave me a prescription supplement. I was really just hoping that I wouldn't feel so tired all the time, even though I have two different types of anemia that are the major factor here.

Two weeks later and I can walk again. All the extreme muscle fatigue is gone.

Warning: I'm not a doctor (although I should have been) and too much potassium can be very dangerous.

 

[Pifanjr]

I have good health news for a change. I've struggled to walk for a couple of years now. Doctors said it was my back injury messing up the nerves to my legs. Doing simple things like walking to the car was a challenge. I've had to order my groceries to be delivered and my wife has been saddled with all the yard work.

I was doing random medical research online and asked my doctor to check my potassium levels. She did, and they were quite low. She gave me a prescription supplement. I was really just hoping that I wouldn't feel so tired all the time, even though I have two different types of anemia that are the major factor here.

Two weeks later and I can walk again. All the extreme muscle fatigue is gone.

Warning: I'm not a doctor (although I should have been) and too much potassium can be very dangerous.

If you're still feeling tired a lot, it might be worth it to get your vitamin D levels checked as well, if they weren't already. My wife needed weekly injections for 6 weeks to get hers back to normal at the start of the year.

I should really be more consistent with taking vitamins myself as well. I just took some after reading your post.

 

[ZedClampet]

If you're still feeling tired a lot, it might be worth it to get your vitamin D levels checked as well, if they weren't already. My wife needed weekly injections for 6 weeks to get hers back to normal at the start of the year.

I should really be more consistent with taking vitamins myself as well. I just took some after reading your post.

Thanks. Yeah, I take Vitamin D every day since I haven't been going outside.

 

[Brian Boru]

The best of British press photography

A selection of the best images from members of the British Press Photographers' Association on show in London.

www.bbc.com

This one works for me