Otherbarry

the web page essentially accuses me of being a criminal and asks for my bank records. No way in hell.

Yeah don’t bother doing that. All that will accomplish is them gathering even more information on you, they rarely/never actually unlock your account & let you use it again. You’ve been permanently blacklisted on their service, just move on. And honestly you don’t need Paypal anyway.

Similar stupid thing happened to me too I think about 10-15 years ago, I was using virtual credit card numbers that my credit card company was generating for me & Paypal thought that was suspicious enough to close my account & permanently blacklist me LOL.

Fun fact: I did learn over the years that I can temporarily create new Paypal account(s) as long as I don’t use the same mailing/billing addresses or credit cards/bank accounts. But then it’s just a waiting game, they usually figure it out eventually and close the Paypal account yet again.

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.

I’ve been fully onsite basically the whole time, including during the pandemic, for me it’s been fine. Gets me out of my tiny studio apartment and keeps my work life at work. Also free A/C / heating at work.

The commute is also part of that decision making - for me the commute is a long walk outside to/from work every day. All that walking around outside sort of levels me out mentally & gets rid of any stress I had, not to mention the exercise.

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.

Screenshot the QR codes & save offline to a USB disk. Alternatively some people do print them but that only works for people that have printers or access to one. Same with the 2FA backup codes.

Or less ideal you can save them somewhere secure on your desktop/laptop/whatever, just keep in mind if you get hacked or get malware/whatever then it’s game over.

Agreed, where I was growing up in the U.S. we had a bunch of regional parts manufacturers and Boeing contracts were always prized My dad was a union guy working at one of those factories for a while before it got bought out by a larger multinational corp. AFAIK they ended up shifting a lot of that manufacturing out of the U.S. into Mexico while downsizing the U.S. operations. That’s kind of how it goes in that industry :/

Wow that’s a useful list of things they accept for recycling. It’s a total PITA to recycle anything electronics related in my city especially stuff like computers & hard drives let alone cables. That may end up getting me inside a Staples more often than once every year or two so maybe their plan is going to work.

Oof, yeah I’ve seen buildings like that. In NYC in the Lower East Side inside some of the older buildings you walk up one flight of stairs then walk the hallway across the length of the building to the other flight of stairs. That sort of setup feels so much worse vs just toughing it out up a column of stairs.

It was fine. In NYC roommates and I have been in different apartments that were both 5 and 6 floor walkups. This was when we were in our 20’s - early 40’s. Thing is that after a few weeks you don’t really notice the stairs anymore. Bonus is your legs will be pretty strong!

Sure we also had to lug groceries/laundry up the same flight of stairs, a bit annoying but nothing unusual. Didn’t have a car either so all that stuff would get carried x amount of blocks from the apartment or even a subway trip.

In my late 40’s / going into 50’s I’m not so sure I’d still do those type of walkups anymore.

PS - Yeah pay for movers when doing moves in/out of walkup buildings, you really don’t want to do that yourself. It’s fine when you only need to go up the stairs once/twice a day but repeatedly for a move is much harder.

Perhaps you’re overthinking this? In the house you can go barefoot, keep socks on, and/or wear slippers/loafers.

When you go outside you put on shoes.

So yes most people would have a shoe rack or just keep their shoes placed near the door. If you have multiple doors sure you can consider keeping extra pairs of shoes there or some sort of in between like outdoor slippers/something for when you just need to go check the mail or whatever.

Not yet, hadn’t had a need to consider it since the desktop version does what I need & is cheap enough when on sale.

That gets me curious - is the web/online version ever on sale? Like does the Deluxe+State online version ever go on a $19.99 sale? I get the feeling those types of promotions are usually done via the online retailers (Amazon/Newegg/etc.) but could be wrong.

Nice review!

Way back I used to use TurboTax & eventually switched away from it when they started limiting how many tax returns you can complete with it (at the time I was also helping family do their taxes). It also doesn’t help that Intuit in general is a terrible company.

At the moment have settled on H&R Block Deluxe + State, usually get it for $20 whenever there’s a sales promotion at Newegg/Amazon or wherever. Not fully on Linux yet so haven’t had to think about that aspect but I assumed you could still run it via Wine or a VM running Windows. (though at that point it’s also reasonable to switch to something web based)

If you get .flac, .wav or similar lossless music, you should could encode that with opus.

Fixed.

Unless you have a strong stance against people storing lossless files of their music? But I don’t think that’s quite what you meant :)

True, but add-in cards are going to be around for a long time after that for the people truly desperate for USB-A ports on a new desktop.

For a while at work I had to use a add-in card in a Win 10 desktop just to have a parallel port for the ancient label printer we were using.

Something like that is more likely to work if it’s the same exact hardware, an XP image applied onto a totally different system is likely going to BSOD when all the current drivers it has installed suddenly stop working. And XP being XP, you’re not going to find new drivers for new hardware.

A lot of these XP machines running other hardware also have their own specific drivers and long unsupported proprietary middleware installed that won’t transfer onto new systems easily.

But I do agree with you on the disk image, if only the hard drive on that XP system dies then that’s an easy fix. Worst case OP would have to hunt around for an IDE drive if that desktop is particularly ancient.

At work we have one old PC on Windows XP for the ancient PBX phone system we are currently using. It runs fine, it is only there to run specific programs so it’s not like we install/run anything else on it. And it’s not exposed to the internet.

The hardware will die eventually but until then my boss is too cheap to spend the money to replace the entire phone system.

You should consider migrating away from lemmy.world for piracy discussions/topics

https://lemmy.world/post/13320356

Nope, not directly related to the recent action, the post itself states

We have recently received a takedown request for content not directly related to these communities, but it prompted us to review other piracy related content and communities.

https://lemmy.world/post/13320356

Speaking of bicycles, as a teenager I was riding my bike through the neighborhood & then started looking at all the pretty clouds up in the sky that day. Then as I lowered my line of sight back to the road I saw the parked car I was riding directly into and slammed right into it. Not sure if anyone witnessed the event but it must have looked cartoonish, or at least something straight out of Jackass.

Luckily got out of that with just a few scrapes and bruises, and a lesson to always watch the road.