i can’t. unless i’m really, really tired. i prefer blankets… as in plural… with some bulk and weight to them.

$65 for 4tb? they’re almost certainly fake crap. just got done giving someone the bad news on some similarly-priced sd and ssd they bought off ebay.

https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm will verify real capacity in seconds.

captive portal detection, certificate status verification, and iirc server settings updates. yes. none of them are ‘absolutely required’ but they do exist to improve the reliability and secure operation of the program–and none are secret nasty spying telemetry. just turn those particular settings off as desired.

that’s the c2r maintenance process. main job is to set up and update the local files for office.

that bit you can turn off in edge settings… but the webview engine stays because of widgets and probably some other bullshit.

and to install ‘mandatory’ giant bloated updates faster…

and to reboot faster after crashes (which may or may not have been caused by the above updates)…

when i set up a new pc i warn the users moving from really old ones that their coffee-fetching and bagel toasting time is about to shrink to zero.

it’s been a long time but i vaguely remember an office tray icon or desktop toolbar or something that could run all the time.

nowadays, windows caching and prefetch should be more than enough… and that’s not even considering the fast ssd we have now, either.

libreoffice. which has also had a similar feature for years.

i had a monitor like that once. big bright af blue power light baked into the power button, bottom center of the bezel. blue led was the ‘new’ thing back then. the barton-era matching pc (which i didn’t have) had a larger matching button on its front. if you know your '00s pavilions, you know the ones.

it was horrible. that monitor lived its entire life with a black piece of paper taped over the whole switch and light. i was not saddened when it finally gave up and failed to turn on. i was more annoyed that it took 15 years for it to fail.

my mom had that hair for a bit when i was little. used to have real long hair, then she (i think gramma did the deed) cut it off to this… stayed like that til she went full dorothy hamill in '76 like so many others back then.

i think it comes with the territory; the kinds of users that lemmy attracts–and doesn’t.

democrats are simply the ‘lesser evil’, and have been since the 1960s, at least… and we’ve needed a viable third party left of the mainstream for longer.

republican administrations drag us down and undo gains made. democrats repair some of the damage–but never quite enough, never push progress enough. they lose. it gets undone again and the cycle repeats.

but now it’s all getting destroyed. there may not be a continuation of the cycle. it’s hell from here on until ‘trumpism’ and maga are what is completely destroyed.

i find ddg sufficient for nearly everything. occasionally i will go to startpage or ecosia or mojeek for a different ‘perspective’, but that is not very often at all. i also use wolframalpha almost daily for some sort of calculation or conversion.

i haven’t used google or bing except by accident when using someone else’s browser or device (that is, when i forget to go to duck.com first).

yes, it is. but between it and graphhopper (or osm), it’s “enough” for me.

i don’t need a feature-filled “app” (my phone is ‘dumb’), and the only time i end up on something else like bing or google maps is if a site i need to use embeds and relies upon them.

ddg maps is just a no-frills apple maps.

no. we didn’t ‘bully’ them into dropping the 15 minute thing.

they’re still gonna do it–they just won’t tell you up front at the start of the call. and it will be because of reduced staffing at call centers instead of automatically adding a long wait time to every call.

you can have (well, used to) eggs anytime… fried, boiled, scrambled, omelets, poached–whatever. but gram’s special deviled eggs were for ‘special occasions’ only. she always made enough, so yea. gonna eat far more eggs that way than i ever would in a normal breakfast or meal.

i had just looked this one up recently:
the little nub on a peanut is an embryo.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/peanuts-embryo-nub_n_56d4a305e4b03260bf77b808

it does get marginally better once you do run out.