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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • I’ve usually just walked into a local pharmacy and asked if they have the booster. My local pharmacy just has a standard paper form for all vaccination (flu, shingles, covid, etc) walk ins, there is no website or arbitration clause or even specific covid form. You might want to try a different pharmacy if that has been your experience.

    I just hope they don’t cost an exorbitant price now that the national health emergency has ended here. It was really nice being able to get them for free because I am poor.




  • They had a lot of weird stuff in Enterprise. I would love if they did a show in that era that was actually about that era instead of time travel shenanigans. It would be fun to learn about how the alliances and rivalries built up, the successes and blunders and cultural clashes. From what I recall, season 4 was when they finally started looking at that stuff and by then it was too late.


  • Well, on the plus side, one of the admins of firefish.social (not the one at the center of this art drama) has been very public about his belief that there need to be lobby servers that do federate with Threads to help provide a path for Threads users to escape the Facebook ecosystem and transition over to the fediverse. He thinks some Threads users will find other servers more appealing in the end. He picked up a second domain, notmeta.social, to eventually set up as a separate fedipact option, but that hasn’t even been upgraded from Calckey to Firefish yet so I don’t know how seriously they take it.

    You won’t have access to mastodon.art from firefish.social, but you can access the threads-welcoming side of the fediverse.

    Honestly, I was hoping to find a fedipact firefish server that doesn’t have meta in the name (why would I want to advertise for them in my server name?), but the information on which servers are in the fedipact is so poorly organized that I gave up on that entirely for now.




  • For reading news, I recommend getting a tablet and a case with a stand to prop it up at a comfortable reading angle. It’s easier to read with aging eyes than a smartphone. It will still have the accidental long press problem, but icons need to be dragged a longer distance to be rearranged so there is a better chance it will snap back into the right spot after an accidental long press. Someone needs to make an elderly-proof launcher that has a way to lock things in place on the home screen and disable that long press there. Maybe someone already has? I haven’t played with alternative launchers in years.

    I use Blokada 5 on my android phone which is a free, phone-wide ad blocker that runs as a local VPN based DNS service that blocks spam address DNS requests. They do have a newer version, 6, that’s cloud based instead of a local VPN and requires a subscription and I haven’t tried that out. Maybe that one is easier to reconfigure remotely if something important inadvertently gets blocked. The only reason I never tried it is I have a very limited income right now as a full-time caregiver. I have used Blokada 4 and then 5 for several years now.

    My pi-hole on my home network is also pretty set it and forget it and protects all of my mother-in-law’s devices while she is connected to the Wi-Fi, which is most of the time since she only ever wants to leave the house for doctor’s appointments or occasionally to eat out. I bought a cheap orange pi zero to set the pi-hole up on and it lives next to the router. My MIL is a 70+ year old gamer so she is a little bit more tech savvy than your average elderly person, but she constantly falls for ads and terrible tabloid clickbait that shows up in her news app.

    I kind of want to try setting up an RSS app for her with more curated news sources and see if that will give her a satisfactory news feed without all the junk. I used to use Google News, but it has become nothing but spammy tabloid links with no relevance to me. I mostly got my news through Reddit in recent years, but Lemmy reintroduced me to RSS and I’ve been working on collecting good news sources like back in the good old days before the social media firehose of info.

    Unfortunately (for the purpose of offering advice), I have no experience with remote tech support. My dad is a retired computer engineer so he’s got a handle on things at his place. I live with the tech-challenged person in my family.




  • I live in a rural area and gave up Amazon shortly before the pandemic. I switched to ordering items directly from the manufacturers’ websites. Giving up Amazon doesn’t mean giving up the rest of the internet, though admittedly some manufacturers link you right back to Amazon instead of running their own separate storefront, so I have to look for another.









  • I don’t currently use the computer much, but I have Windows 10 and Linux set up for dual boot on my old desktop and primarily use Linux there. My kid uses Windows for playing games and sometimes I do, too, but I don’t game much these days.

    My laptop has Windows 11, but they keep filling it with all kinds of advertising and I absolutely hate advertising. I am very tempted to replace it entirely with Linux.

    I’ve toyed around with different distros several years back and at this point I’ve settled on Ubuntu simply because any time I search for answers to problems that crop up, the results are primarily geared for Ubuntu users and being middle aged, I lack the patience to dig deeper to learn how to fix something on a less popular distro. Having something with longer term support is nice for me, too, because I’ve been stuck with horribly slow DSL internet living out in a rural area, so downloading updates all the time is not trivial for me either. For a little bit I thought I wanted to be bleeding edge and then I realized it was pretty impractical and unnecessary for my situation.