Always been a bloke in the pub or car boot or whatever that can supply hooky dvds or games or hacked satellite, FAST always talks tough about busting them.

Early eights it was disk and tape trading, mostly tape trading in the UK. Was a way more social activity.

Late 80s and early 90s, it was all disk, and you really needed a connected friend who could get the menu disks (custom pirated compilation disks). These were often super hoarded, only traded for a lot of games, like certain private trackers today.

Very early web stuff was all usenet and ftp servers, often hosted at a university. If you knew where to look, anything was accessible.

Early 2000s was a golden period of easy access. It would be slow, and the quality would often be low if it was a video or mp3. It’s gotten harder to find the obscure stuff as time has gone on. I

t’s like the scene only remembers out and out classics or the latest thing outside of some niche places.

I use powershell for work as I need the m365 modules for work and its very flexible with decent module availability to plug in all sorts.

However it absolutely sucks for large data handling, anything over 10k rows is just horrendous, I typically work with a few million rows. You can make it work with using .Net to process it within your script but its something to be aware of. Being able to extend with .Net can be extremely useful.

I switched from Pop OS tiling that I had retro bolted onto stock ubuntu to Sway, massive step up and more importantly I get to keep my Ubuntu/Wayland base.

As with most add on WMs I had a bit of a learning curve sorting out the extra bits and pieces that just come stock as part of Ubuntus Gnome implementation such as a launcher (I use dmenu), a menu bar (swaybar for me), and even a lock screen (swayidle). Even doing things like wallpaper needed more effort.

Gravy or curry sauce

Normal hifi gear, particularly second hand can sound way way better than generic computer crap. However normal hi-fi speakers are designed to work best a certain distance from the wall **and ** a certain distance from you. These distances vary between speakers but it is important to check this before spending any cash as some speakers need to be many feet from you, which isn’t always remotely practical for most pc setups.

I went with Dali Minutes for this reason, so they can be right on the wall and really close to me. I paired mine with a Rega Brio amp and RME ADI 2 USB DAC, then added a monitor audio sub later.

Most proper studio monitors are designed for near field listening they also make a good choice although they can be a little clean for some people’s taste.

I use powershell by default on windows and I prefer it for scripting any day of the week vs. shell scripts. It’s not the fastest but you can always plug in .net to your scripts to dramatically improve performance. Sure, I could write the script in rust or whatever to make it even faster, but that’s way more work than I need for the lifespan of the script.