Learned from growing up in a communist dictatorship: don’t discuss politics and religion with strangers. And even with friends or acquaintances, don’t discuss it in writing. It doesn’t mean you can’t have strong opinions, but don’t make them public. Talking (not writing) one-to-one or in small groups eventually toppled almost all communist dictatotships, so there’s absolutely no need to broadcast your opinions, unless your goal is to be martyred.

To me, the Internet as we know it is dead. I’m trying to build a new, better “internet”. Don’t know how, yet, but I have a concept of a plan.

My kids are getting old enough to get their own computers. I got them two mini-PC’s, put Mint on them, and for now a few DOS games. They are at the age where they still sound out everything they read or write, but it won’t take long before they’d like to go online. For now, though, they are happy with some of the games I used to play. Right now it’s Duck Tales, Dynablaster and Grand Prix Circuit, but I hope to introduce them to Sierra and Lucasarts adventures later, and Microprose strategies even later.

But I digress. I don’t want to let them onto the Internet, even if I disable access to some sites (they’re bound to find a way around). Instead, I’d like to self-host my own Internet. It would be largely static, with entire downloaded Web sites, and I’m currently compiling a list of what I’d give them. I’m also thinking of curating a selection of news articles, which I’d grab and present to them via my own server. As time goes by, I’d slowly immerse them in more, but my goal is to grow them to be discerning young adults, who’d know better what to believe and what to share than my generation did.

Other parents in my kids’ school have the same concerns. I was talking to some about my idea, and they’d like to join. Some of them are far more knowledgeable than me in the technical aspects of this undertaking (I’m still using a LAMP stack for all my needs). At the end, we may end up with a local “internet”, with its own dedicated message board, perhaps some social pages, and relatively harmless content. If we had this idea, you can bet that thousands of other communities already had a similar idea. I fully expect the human internet to eventually fragment into tiny local internets, and the traditional internet becoming a giant circle-jerk of AI’s in circular conversation.

In addition to “normal” uses, my kids got into the habit of leaving me messages on the camera when I’m in the office and they are leaving for school. I grew to love these messages.

Using Eufy with local storage. Don’t know whether anything gets stored to the cloud, but I guess data still passes through Eufy servers when I view the videos.

I may not be representative of a larger sample, but I used medium format for landscapes, and always shallow depth of field. For sharper images, I used longer lenses on a 35mm camera. So, a diffraction issue wouldn’t be bothering me on a medium format camera, if I ever even found the money to get one.

Still doing Vivaldi on a daily basic. But I think I’m a very specific use case: an old user who hates to change his ways, and is obsessed with keeping the page tabs on the bottom of the screen.

When I was your age, we called them Micro$oft. Too bad there were no extensions in Netscape Navigator.

Brave. Not sure about the version number, but it’s been working fine.

Web browser. I only have two other social media accounts, on Reddit and LinkedIn, and I use a browser for these as well. Even if a dedicated app worked in my OS, my phone doesn’t have enough memory to install it.

I’m still running Jelly Bean. I know that I could get a more modern OS with Lineage OS, but for my very limited purposes the old Android is good enough.

In August it will be 15 years since I purchased the phone I’m typing this reply on, Samsung Galaxy S2. All I do is calling, basic browsing, and checking the weather, so I don’t really feel like I need a new phone. Battery is replacable, so until the screen is broken, this phone will serve its purpose.

I installed Office 97 from 49 floppies on a bunch of office computers. We didn’t have CD-rom drives, so we requested the floppies from Microsoft (this was a free of charge service). Took me a week. Got into graphic novels, as I was waiting for each floppy to load.

My company (130,000 employees) sticks to 24H2. IT wouldn’t approve the 25H2. Don’t know whether the refusal to upgrade hurts Microsoft in any way, but if it does, I think we’re big enough to be on their radar, and perhaps they talk to our IT about concerns and complaints we may have.

6 and 7. For now, I’ll be monitoring their activity, and we’ll see whether they’ll need any locks. Probably internet filtering on the router.

My kids are getting mini PC’s for Christmas, preinstalled with Mint. They use tablets now, but I want to introduce them to the joys of keyboards and mice (and The Secret of Monkey Island). I hope they’ll like it, so that in the future they’ll stick to PC’s and laptops, which offer far more robust control by the end user.

That was actually Windows. I think I first encountered it in Win 3.1, but I started really using it in 95. It’s not actually Windows that controlled it, but software. Application windows used yo have a top bar, and on the very left they had a small version of their shortcut icon. Clicking on it would roll out a short menu for minimizing, closing, etc, and double-clicking would exit out of the program. I think Chrome was the first popular software to remove it.

Using this method for closing programs is just a matter of preference and muscle memory. I guess it made sense when the last thing you did was File -> Save, so your cursor was already near the top left. Nowadays it’s not as obvious, but some of us are too rigid to easily change.

Brimg back double-clicking on the top left corner of a program to close it. Actually, bring back the top bar and the file menu while you’re at it. And for software that opens tabs, allow the user to position the tabs bar on the bottom or side of the screen.

I don’t watch others playing games, either, but someone who likes those streams told me he didn’t see a difference between watching good gamers play games and good football players play football.

You are absolutely correct about the ambiguity and problematic emojis. The trigger issue was the usage of hearts as “kudos” reactions. That’s where we use the thumbs-up emojis now.

The idea of a reference webpage is a good one, but with Slack allowing you to upload your own emojis (and us using some -- such as the Piccard facepalm and “modern solutions” meme), we’d have to be very careful to show only the default ones.

Those would be emojis not emoticons.

Thanks. I never knew the distinction between the two. These emojis are usually used as reactions in our company to indicate you read a post, are investigating, giving kudos, etc. We actually have an entire document in Confluence specifying which ones to use, for which reactions.

That’s where I learned to type, and the double-space is so ingrained in my muscle memory I can’t get rid of it. I also used to use lower case “L” for the number one, and upper case “O” for zero. I don’t do the former, but occasionally I catch myself doing the latter.