I still occasionally pick up CD’s, as I do for blurays… I’ll check out charity shops if I pass them, go to car boots… it’s why I keep an old BDrom in my server, so I can rip the files from them, convert and have them available to stream around the house.

I roast mine

Colonialism… it’s a smoke screen, they know that the rest of the world is realising and pushing for a one state solution that would give Palestinians equity and eliminate the Israeli imperialism. So this is all a cover to protect Israeli genocide again.

About 12yrs ago, I picked up a Tassimo machine that made coffee from pods… over the next few years, I added a milk steamer, so that I could heat and froth my own milk as the pod milks were vile.

I was used to buying lattes at shitty coffee places like Costa and Starbucks in the UK… then some one made me an amazing latte at an independent coffee shop… and I realised how good coffee should taste.

I tried switching to my own ground coffee and buying some re-useable pods for the machine… they were garbage.

So a few years ago, I invested in a decent bean to cup machine with steamer by Delohngi, and started buying a variety of beans to try in them.

I’ve settled on Lavazza crema or intenso beans (8/10 & 9/10) as they’re quite strong and reasonably priced… Occasionally when I visit one of the food fairs in my area (about 5 or 6 a year) I’ll pick up a bag of extra special flavours for xmas and so forth. I’ve even tried a few of the supermarket varieties and found them disappointing.

With the price of coffee rising due to climate change and poor crops, I’m having to rethink my purchases… 4x 1kg bags of beans used to cost £60, and are now more like £100… So I’ve switched to a different lavazza now as they’vce changed packaging and these are labelled 11/13 and 10/13 for strength.

Whilst I was saving a lot of money each year by ditching pods… it was more about the waste than the expense for me… the cost of the machine meant I didn’t actually save any money for about 2yrs really due to the upfront cost, but the savings each year on beans vs pods is about £125-150… and the machine was £320.

But with prices of coffee beans rising, the cost of the pods is rising even more… so those avg savings could be more like £175-200 a year now.

All I know is that the coffee beans work out cheaper, give a far better drink and the grounds help keep the cats of the garden and the soil fresh and fertile.

I used to have a wileyfox phone using cyanogen OS, which was a fork of android with a lot of security and privacy features. That forked again into lineage OS at some point in the latter half of the 2010’s.

I mostly stuck with motorola phones after that, as close to a vanilla OS as possible without going google… but I stupidly bought a Pixel 6 Pro about 2.5yrs ago… the price was hard to ignore, but regretted it ever since.

I only replace phones when the become obsolete and security is an issue, or the phone actually fails… this one is going strong and I keep meaning to look if it can easily be jailbroken to install and alt OS… But it’s been a very long time since I did anything like that and I find myself falling behind on modern tech stuff as I get into middle age.

I pay attention to everything, and refuse to install any apps. I block 90% of the data from apps I have installed, only allowing a couple to access certain things (banking for example). The first thing I do with any android phone is go through and disable all of the bloat from google, disable chrome and turn off most of the settings. Install a decent browser and plugins to block tracking, ads and so forth. I don’t install social media apps, in fact I’m not on any corporate owned social media, I use signal/telegram for messaging… I deleted old SM accounts starting in 2012 with facebook and ending with twitter in 2018. I use email services like a duck.com address or proton mail for online signups where required, along with alias spam accounts for certain things that can easily be deleted and stop spam.

From next year, I will only be buying phones that can be jailbroken and an alt OS installed.

I go even further with my home PC’s to protect my privacy… I can’t stop it all, but I can render what they do collect as worthless as possible.

It’s a pyramid scheme, always has been… every decade for the last 30yrs there’s been a few of them… The dot.com boom and bust of the 90’s was the start, in the 2000’s everything went ‘digital’ which was the same old shit with an LCD added to it and a doubling of the price, digital services for games/music/movies where they could take away what you bought… then they got even more serious in the 2010’s where the real enshitification of the internet started… the ‘cloud’ where you were no longer allowed to own your own data, subscription fees for everything… ‘smart’ appliances that just tracked you and stole your privacy for the enrichment of a few billionaires… Crypotocurrency, the biggest scam and pyramid scheme to date… and now in the 2020’s, crypto as a means to launder money and bribe politicians, massive corruption, fraud and consolidation of power by evil people and their corporate paymasters… and of course… the newest and worst pyramid scheme of them all… AI…

The only way to win is not to play… don’t use it, disable it, remove it… every time you use it you are encouraging them to invade you life, take away your rights and exert control over what you can do and think… I know some of you will think that’s an over reaction, you will learn one day that I and others were right to warn you as I have been doing for years now… But by then it will be too late, the climate is burning and these billionaires are trying to make it happen quicker, they value their wealth more than your very existence and they will hide away in their bunkers and private islands as the rest of humanity burns.

One of the reasons you gen x kids got to run around un-tethered was because women weren’t even allowed economic independence until the mid 70’s… Women couldn’t get a credit card or loans without their husbands consent and signature.

Divorce rates didn’t spike because of ‘feminism’ it spiked because women weren’t forced to be in unhappy marriages with abusive partners because they literally couldn’t exist and survive outside of the financial dependency they were forced to endure.

I’m technically gen X myself (79)… right at the end of it. So I’ve never lived in a world where that was a thing. Why some men still think that women need to be tied to the kitchen sink only shows their own fears and ignorance… they’re afraid of becoming irrelevant in society after centuries/millennia of repressing women to possessions… that’s pretty fucking sick.

No… most misogynistic, insecure and incel type men want that… a real man is happy to see women (of all genders) gaining more power and places in the world.

I just licked my UK passport and it tasted like Xenophobia and Zionism.

I’ve not looked into anything yet… I’m reaching that age where I’ve just become closer to 50 than 40… and I find myself starting to become reluctant to dive in and learn a whole new OS after decades of trying to learn everything.

I started buying games on steam, way, way back in the 2000’s… long before any of the enshitification began… and you’re not allowed to own anything any more… I switched to GOG for buying games, as I do own them and can download and keep them for life… But after being converted away from… erm… acquiring games via alternative methods… I’m looking to acquire them again… even games that I bought and paid for simply for the hassle free experience of not needing to be online 24/7 and having DRM degrade the performance.

Have you tried using grayjay for youtube access without the tracking and data harvesting?

As for office software, libreoffice is something I’ve been using for ages now, I’m stuck on windows 10 for the moment… really need to dive into some form of linux… thinking proton as I do game a fair bit.

I’ve currently got a pixel 6 pro phone, and a HMD T21 tabelt… would really like to install lineage OS on both if possible… don’t know where to start. I used to have a wileyfox phone 10yrs ago, which used cyanogen OS… which I do believe forked into lineage OS. So I know how good the degoogle aspect was back then, plus the increased security measures built in.

I block as much as I can across all devices, and do my best to render what they can collect worthless… I use a VPN 24/7, block all scripts, trackers and cookies, sandbox sites in their own containers… quit facebook 13yrs ago… use mastodon, lemmy, signal & telegram only… have to suffer a whatsapp account for family only. Proton mail linked to an @duck.com email… so I never get emails sent to gmail, I use an old outlook email alias for spam signups and only check it if I need to confirm an email addy.

I’ve turned of everything I can with my phone, from location to anything to do with ai… I refuse to buy ‘smart’ devices that can be bricked or updated remotely from some company servers, or forced to connect to them to simply work… I own what I buy, so never buy digital goods (aside from some games from Steam/GOG) and only pay for Netflix streaming service… maybe I should roam the 7 seas for stuff too.

I’m thinking about building a pi-hole and setting up home assistant to eliminate the 2 internet connected devices in my home whjich is the thermostat for my heating and the solar/battery system which I use to monitor the data from the house.

In some countries you can, I believe Canada is one of them… at least I believe it’s legal to do so in Toronto.

Takes me back to 2008 and Rockstar claiming that GTA 4… was designed for hardware that didn’t exist yet after that shit show of a shitty port to PC… It would be a further 6yrs before I could play that game at a reliable 19080p, 60fps… then GTA5 came out a year later.

I never thought I’d hear of a positive school shooting story coming out of the USA

Always makes me laugh when people say HDD is dead… as a home user, when I can buy solid state storage in the 20TB range for my home server for less than a HDD… I’ll consider believing them.

They simply don’t make any consumer SSD larger than 8TB and for the SATA SSD side, it’s well over £500 for one of them, meanwhile you can get 20TB HDD for about £300 here.

Last year the price of a Samsung 870 SSD was £300, I bought one, they’ve not been below £500 since.

I never thought I’d hear a positive school shooting story come out of the USA… is that ‘light’ enough to be banned from the Fascist States of America

I used Anonine (Sweden based) for 10yrs and never had a single problem visiting any site… I use a VPN 24/7 because I value my privacy and don’t want every fucker tracking my everymove and that includes my ISP.

Recently switched to Proton because streaming from legal sites like iplayer and netflix had become impossible unless it was turned off. Proton actually works with them.

Look… if you’re the sort of person who still uses chrome and thinks a vpn chrome extension is the bees knees… well… that’s on you.

P.S. Microsoft have the perfect tool for you too… it’s called ‘recall’