Otherbarry

or that mainstream (S&P, Nasdaq) financial investments were no longer sound, what can one do to prepare for “the worst”?

Investors that factor in world markets would probably do okay as long as you’re talking just U.S. economic troubles. e.g. right now VT (total world stock ETF) is weighted 64.70% U.S. market due to market strength. So in theory if the U.S. tanked and other countries have better markets for investing then the weights would shift to the other side and maybe being closer to 30% U.S. vs rest of the world’s markets weighted towards 70%.

If you’re not seeing anything of concern in the SMART info then there’s little to worry about. You could install/run smartctl from the command line, or for something with a gui try gsmartcontrol / any other app that can interact with your hard drive diagnostics.

Hard drives can last a long time, as a general rule if your hard drive made it through its first 1-2 years without issue then there’s a good chance it’ll keep chugging along for years. I personally haven’t found that hard drives consistently die in 5-7 years, not too sure where you got that info from.

In any case backups are your friend, not just in case the hard drive dies but there’s always the possibility that your entire OS blows up somehow or you get a bad case of malware.

Stuff like that already exists, it just isn’t overly popular or mainstream. You don’t even need to build that on bittorrent.

Off the top of my head both https://getaether.net/ and https://retroshare.cc/ are p2p for social media/forums that sort of thing but I’m sure there are others.

Since you mentioned it cold brew coffee is less acidic vs hot coffee and I think(?) less than hot tea as well.

OTOH cold brewed tea probably edges out all of them in terms of low acidity.

Not too sure if you meant hot or cold tea, just adding some extra info :) For me cold brew coffee is way, way easier to drink and it’s become my daily go-to.

Shake Shack’s Shroom Burger is by far the best non-meat burger I’ve had. I’m not even a big fan of mushrooms but Shake Shack manages to turn that portobello mushroom into deliciousness.

404 Media seems to fit your description.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/404_Media

https://www.404media.co/

They are a legitimate crypto exchange.

Pretty sure they do ID verification depending on residency but you’d need to check their site for specifics.

Issue is that I need a Paypal account, for which I need a phone number and bank account from the same country. I have Canadian bank stuff, but no Canadian phone number.

I’m in Lebanon

That won’t go well for you long term, Paypal will eventually catch on and permaban you. You’ll also lose whatever funds were in the account during that time.

If you still go through with it I suspect you’ll need to figure out how to buy a non-virtual phone number, just seems like a waste of time since Paypal will eventually add it to their permaban/fraud database.

I was given a dunkin giftcard

Dunkin gift cards expire? That’s news to me, it’s been a while since I’ve encountered expiring gift cards. Not sure that’s even legal but maybe they expire in your particular state?

To answer your main question I buy gift cards with discounts/cash back all the time. It basically makes them cheaper than using cash. For example my credit card has 5% cash back for grocery stores so that gives me 5% cash back on gift cards purchased there.

Also a lot of credit card and stores do gift card sales where they’ll do 10%-20% discount, or throw in a free gift card with a purchase.

For me it was fine, maybe about 15 years ago. Small startup company I was at ran out of funding, we got something like 1-2 months severance. We all got along fine so it wasn’t like everyone hated the job or the owners, sometimes startup companies just don’t make it through those first few years.

Summer is probably the best time to be unemployed, spent a lot of time exploring my neighborhood during the weekday afternoons and was practicing making cold brew & other summer drinks LOL.

Was doing freelance work while being on unemployment / looking for a new steady job. Think it was about 4-5 months before I landed a new job (did get 1-2 job offers during that time but was maybe being a bit picky & turned them down).

… Also helps that I keep savings so short term unemployment won’t wreck me. I’ve seen posts about people being out of work for years, that would be a far worse scenario.

Agreed, though I’ve found that usually dousing a fly in water (via spray bottle) is enough to surprise them & get them to drop. Once they’ve fallen it takes them a bit to dry themselves & get airborne again, that’s usually enough time to swat it and finish the job.

That works well if you just have one or a few flies - if you’ve got a ton of them fly paper is going to work much better.

Yup agree with you there, Tabasco sauces are great. Not sure that I’d call their Sriracha an actual alternative vs the original Sriracha sauce but aside from that there’s nothing wrong with their version.

I do like that they didn’t add a ton of extra ingredients to their version, simple ingredient list = better IMO.

If any of my nearby supermarkets carried it I’d definitely give this one a go. Not sure that I want to commit to buying multiple bottles online.

Maybe not the Tabasco Sriracha if you’re looking for that Sriracha flavor. It’s not bad at all but it basically tastes like Sriracha flavored Tabasco sauce. That could be a good thing, there are a ton of Tabasco sauce devotees out there, just don’t expect it to taste like a proper Sriracha sauce.

A lot of these alternative Sriracha brands seem to have a ton of extra ingredients vs the original which puts me off from buying them.

Windows has its default Remote Desktop Connection that uses RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol), once enabled it will listen on port 3389. It is pretty solid and has a few features beyond VNC. Just be careful, you probably don’t want to open that port onto the internet since every port scanner is scanning that port & looking for unpatched Windows vulnerabilities or insecure user/password logins.

I use RDP myself for my Windows system but I need to SSH into my network before using it, so it’s really RDP over SSH. If you’re not going to go through all that at the very least change the port to something else so it doesn’t get port scanned to death.

… TBH if you’re not too sure about how to secure this stuff maybe Chrome Remote Desktop is the best option, at least it’s secured behind your own Google account (hopefully that itself is secure and you have 2FA enabled).

RDP is kind of limited

It’s useful if you only need to do stuff while you’re actively connected but you can’t, for example, remote in and start an app or process going and then disconnect and have that app continue.

Sure you can, I do this all the time on the work RDP server. Maybe you need to tweak your group policy so it doesn’t kick you out right away.

When you d/c your profile is essentially logged out.

Nope, depends on what group policy you configured. If you’ve never configured that before as a starter launch gpedit.msc (with admin privileges) and head to Administrative Templates / Windows Components / Remote Desktop Services / Remote Desktop Session Host / Session Time Limits. The other settings in there are also useful for other things you may want to configure.

Your activity also can’t be viewed by a user on the remote system, if you needed to collaborate or assist somehow.

Yes this is true, the only way to do that is to have admin privileges on the host and then take over that user session. But of course that’s not collaboration, that’s just you taking a user’s current session without them being able to see what you’re doing.

On Windows the official way to do that is via Quick Assist (on Windows 10, not sure if it got renamed on Windows 11), it’s sort of a shared RDP session where both the user and the remote user can share the same session. I’ve never needed to use it myself - with the work system users are pretty content with just having me “fix” whatever they needed without them watching, they usually don’t care how to fix the problem themselves LOL.

VNC is the kind of the baseline remote desktop that works on pretty much any operating system. You can start there & then decide if you need specific features that the others have.

You didn’t mention your own OS but it too probably already has support for its own remote desktop solution.

It’s the same here in New Jersey, or at least the city I’m in. Recently a fire inspector came by the condo building I was living in & failed ~ 60% of the units because they still had the old style replaceable battery smoke detectors. Apparently going forward we are/were supposed to be using sealed battery smoke detectors & replace them entirely every ~10 years when they stop working.

EDIT: Not sure if that’s OP’s problem unless their alarm company is so cheap that they keep giving OP really old detectors to replace with.

In the northeast U.S. Zillow and their related sites (they own a few real estate sales/rentals sites) is where the majority of rental listings show up. Though keep in mind those are also markets with tons of real estate brokers doing the listings & whatnot. Plenty of owner/landlords also use those sites but I’m not too sure if it’s the same in other parts of the U.S.

Those Zillow sites also have room / roommate search listings but a lot of people tend to join local Facebook groups for that or maybe use apps for that.

Seems mostly dead for apt rentals / roommate wanted type stuff. I used to use it years ago but nowadays it’s mostly scam posts and no one I know would use Craigslist for finding roommates / looking for rooms. The site itself has a reputation for having shady posters so people tend to avoid it.