Old guy in the USA. My first car was a sport motorcycle so six speed with clutch and shifter. I have a sedan with an auto trans, but also a 4WD truck with manual. When I learned to drive in my teens automatic transmissions were not as nice as they are now, just three speeds and not very smooth. Now they’re typically six speed and much nicer. I really dislike a manual trans in heavy traffic, quite a chore.

I do 76F in the summer for AC and 68F in the winter for heating. Try to use minimal heating and air and still maintain a comfortable range. Can get expensive if working the system too hard. If it wasn’t a matter of cost I’d leave it on 72F all the time.

Evaporative coolers are great if you live where you can use one, much cheaper to run and they can work pretty good as long as humidity isn’t too high. I had one in a house I lived in before along with a regular AC system. It was a good to have and saved a lot on the electric bill. If it was dry enough out the AC unit was not needed.

Haven’t used a heat pump before and don’t know much about them. If they work as well and cost less to operate that would be a good option, but I wouldn’t use one if it’s a downgrade in performance. Rather pay for the comfort.

Stardew Valley: I really enjoy the game and play it on PC. It saves the game only at end of turn which is a game day. If I’m not able to finish my turn I have to put the computer to sleep instead of shut it down. Also if I make a mistake which is easy to do I have to start from the last save which can lose a good amount of progress and sometimes random pickups. Though it’s my only peeve with the game so it’s still doing better than most.

I never thought Reddit was addictive. I actually spend more time on Lemmy in a day than I did on Reddit. My browsing habits changed though. Reddit is so big I only looked at a few niche subreddits. Lemmy being much smaller I view a much wider range of topics. It’s a different and better experience for me.

Haha, most of my opinions are unpopular. Some posted in this in thread I agree with.

I think sci-fi has it right with that, I mean you’d only get up out of your chair or whatever receptacle to perform bodily functions. Most people think everyone would turn into fat blobs, but I think that’s not the case. There’s this one sci-fi where I think they got it right, most people became emaciated due to a failure to eat and get any exercise.

Oh and I’ll take the blue pill, VR all the way, reality blows. Though some might say reality is already virtual. It’s an interesting hypothesis, sure would explain a lot.

uBlock Origin forever and always.

Haha, most important program on my computer. My browser is a uBO support system.

Strange new Worlds. I think it’s the best Star Trek series since the original. I don’t think the casting is particularly great, but Anson Mount makes up for it. Like William Shatner was born to be Captain Kirk, Anson Mount was born to be Captain Pike.

I watched the whole series recently, it’s on YouTube.

Some years ago I had the whole collection on VHS, tells you how long ago that was. Haven’t seen it anywhere since, I’ll rewatch it if I do.

I’m not a big book reader, but a friend got me “The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla and Other Works”. It’s sitting on my nightstand when I can motivate to crack a boot. The book I finished before it was “Brief Answers to the Big Questions” by Stephen Hawking.

I like reading works from Scientists. I can’t understand their research papers because of the math, but I enjoy the works they do for the layman.

I like them when they are actually amusing. Problem is that’s maybe one in ten so it’s not worth browsing them. If someone posts one and it’s actually good, no problem.

The little blue bird on every shop window, website, and business card becomes a stylized letter that, hopefully, doesn’t look so threatening on the next iteration?

Haha, I know the most appropriate iteration, a red background with the X in a white circle.

Um yeah, I’m not seeing that. You can see monthly active users on https://the-federation.info/platform/21 and it’s been fluctuating up and down, no big jump. So I call bullshit on that article based on the metric there. Though no doubt as Twitter (X) implodes Mastodon will see the fallout with higher activity.

For the longest time I used my hand lathering with the bar first, then realized using a washcloth works much better.

I spend more time on Lemmy. More interesting content, more commenting on my part.

Heroes (2006-2010)? That was one of the most boring and monotonous serial shows I’ve ever attempted to get all the way through. I watched every single episode of that suck fest hoping something would happen, nothing ever did. Just the same old thing over and over. I was like an obsessed gambler thinking the next one was going to be the big score. To this day Heroes holds a special place in my heart as the most disappointing waste of time serial show I’ve ever watched all the way through.

BTW, I liked SG1 and Atlantis, both were good shows and I watched most if not all the episodes. Never watched 200 so no comment on that one. Some remarkable ones I’ve seen lately; The Mandalorian, Star Trek Strange New Worlds, Black Mirror, Silo. Some awful ones; From (for lack of a cohesive plot) and Last of Us (for being gratuitously violent).

Only instances with a “.ml” at the end of the name may or may not be affected. Lemmy is a collection of instances so the loss of a few will not cripple the whole thing. Content over the whole is not greatly affected.

If your home log-in instance is one that’s affected, you’ll have to find a new one. You’ll know right away because the instance will be unreachable. Not a big deal, last time I looked there was over 1200 instances to chose from.

Another consideration is any communities living on an affected instance may have issues. All communities are common to Lemmy, but each originates from a particular instance. We’ve not yet seen a major instance go down so I don’t know how Lemmy deals with communities getting orphaned like that.

lemmy.ml is still up as of right now. Possibly they contracted a subscription to the domain name to keep it up. They had to do something to retain it otherwise the site would be unreachable. If lemmy.ml does have to change names it will be a hassle since I’ve got a good number of community subscriptions there.

This wouldn’t happen to an instance with a regularly subscribed domain name. Problem is the .ml domains were free and the associated country decided to claim them back. The risk of using a free top level domain is something that should have been considered. I don’t think it’s worth the risk versus the cost savings considering how difficult it is to migrate a Lemmy instance.

Thanks for that, was concerned about keeping my subscription to that community. Keep us posted and let us know where you end up so I can change over my community subscription.

Anyway I think the lesson learned here is don’t use free TLDs. Lemmy is not at all designed to deal with domain name changes.