Not that kind of “use!”

That’s… a big gap. I think I’d just be confused all the time if I had to switch between them.

C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.

Amazon has a non-existent customer support, so you may have limited options.

If they had customer support, I’d suggest contacting them and tell them to either refund, or else you’d give them the ID immediately followed by a GDPR request to purge your data. That might have gotten some movement, because those GDPR requests have the force of law, and are also a fair PITA for Amazon. However, there’s no way to give them a shot across the bow. I think your options are:

• process a charge-back, as someone else suggested, which might result in an Amazon ban
• take the loss (that’s entirely your call, regardless of anyone else’s opinion)
• give them the ID, get your refund
• you can still initiate a GDPR purge request. I’m going to guess it’s going to result in a block, but maybe not. You might be able to recreate your account

The happy news is that you are protected by GDPR. Many of us are not, and don’t even have the option to demand they purge the information.

This is really good to hear. As someone who hasn’t used Windows since 2004, it’s easy to lose perspective of how daunting a self-switch can feel.

I’m glad to hear your experience is going well. I know you’re experiencing many little annoyances and things which seem harder than they should be, but are not focusing on those. It’s always good to hear the perspective from a new user!

It’s not pointless, but needlessly silly: as part of the alarm system, in addition to the standard siren, the home audio system turns on and plays Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me” at full volume.

At 7pm on school nights, one of a number of versions of “Hushabye Mountain” is played, if music isn’t already playing.

Ooooh! Totally not useless, but I have a version of this.

I have a cheap, but powerful, amp for the home audio system, and discovered it burns out if left perpetually on (yeah, I’m on my third). So I got a wall switch that’s turned off after 10 minutes of no audio streaming to that snapclient.

All year? Please tell me “Halloween eyes” is just “scary eyes” and that you do this all year.

Interesting. Our sensors don’t see the cats. Unless I place once of the basement ones directly opposite the stairs; it can apparently see them if they’re a couple of feet away at sensor eye level.

But the one that sees people in the kitchen doesn’t see the cats on the counters when they get up there in the night.

I think if they saw the cats, I’d have to figure something else out, because our’s get everywhere.

OnlyOffice is a Russian company. Some people might care about the latter part.

The connection between OnlyOffice and Russia has caused some controversy. The company has moved headquarters and attempted to hide its Russian ties through shell companies. The company develops its product in Russia and presents itself in the Russian market as a Russian company. For this reason some Ukrainian businesses have moved away from OnlyOffice.

Wikipedia has more info (with references) for the curious.

Second this.

• message delivery can be iffy
• VoIP works well
• you connect with people like a normal app that isn’t going to scare your family off, not trying to get them to put in GUIDS
• it has all the creature comforts, attached/embedded photos, markup, attached files, attach pictures, share your location for 10 minutes (I’m on my way), history editing, deleting
• it has concurrent multi device support, so you can get messages on your phone, tablet, and desktop at the same time
• There’s a full desktop client (Electron, i think 🤮 but it works)
• the dev team is small and they seem to like to work more on features than user issues. development is slow
• multi-person groups work fine

It’s still the best E2E messaging system I’ve found; the only one my mom, wife, and sisters-in-law reliably use.

I just want them to focus on fixing the sketchy DHT that seems to cause every problem.

Penalty: the equivalent of $100, probably. And even that will be contested; the second judge will drop it to $50, and the third to $10, and then the Meta lawyer will pay that out of her pocket change.

My recommendation is to put all of the variables in an environment file, and use systemd’s EnvironmentFile (in [Service] to point to it.

One of my backup service files (I back up to disks and cloud) looks like this:

[Unit]
Description=Backup to MyUsbDrive
Requires=media-MyUsbDrive.mount
After=media-MyUsbDrive.mount

[Service]
EnvironmentFile=/etc/backup/environment
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/restic backup --tag=prefailure-2 --files-from ${FILES} --exclude-file ${EXCLUDES} --one-file-system

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.timer

FILES is a file containing files and directories to be backed up, and is defined in the environment file; so is EXCLUDES, but you could simply point restic at the directory you want to back up instead.

My environment file looks essentially like

RESTIC_REPOSITORY=/mnt/MyUsbDrive/backup
RESTIC_PASSWORD=blahblahblah
KEEP_DAILY=7
KEEP_MONTHLY=3
KEEP_YEARLY=2
EXCLUDES=/etc/backup/excludes
FILES=/etc/backup/files

If you’re having trouble, start by looking at how you’re passing in the password, and whether it’s quoted properly. It’s been a couple of years since I had this issue, but at one point I know I had spaces in a passphrase and had quoted the variable, and the quotes were getting passed in verbatim.

My VPS backups are more complex and get their passwords from a keystore, but for my desktop I keep it simple.

I hope this isn’t a step towards replacing the native app with an SPA.

Salem’s Lot.

It was forbidden, but on TV, so I’d flip channels to watch it in 30 second clips. It was far more terrifying that way, as I found out later in life; watched all the way through, it was a fairly mediocre film.

What I love best about that song are the vocal renditions on YouTube. It’s quite moving when it’s sung without the pop beat.

I like your take on it; the issue comes in that conflict where external labels don’t align with internal pronouns (or any other form of self-identity, such as identifying as a particular race despite genetic dominance). We want to respect people’s self-image, when we can, don’t we?

For me, it’s the good faith test. It can be difficult, or impossible, to determine bad faith, but sometimes it’s obvious. Trans people usually seem sincere about their identities, so I take them at face value. A meat eater insisting they be called ‘vegan’ is just mocking self-identification and kicking back at the whole pronouns thing, for whatever reason. That’s not good faith; that’s being contrarian.

That’s my line, until someone convinces me of a better one.

Ah, the rare Christian who’s read the Bible!

It’s crazy, and I highly recommend people in the US do it, especially if they’re not Christian. I have yet to come across a version of the New Testament that successfully creatively edits it enough that Jesus doesn’t come across as an utterly pacifist communist. It’s funny how so many self-proclaimed Christians will just ignore everything in the New to cherry-pick from the Old, which obviously was about a completely different god. An angry god. a righteous, vengeful, unforgiving god. The god who destroyed an entire city, children and infants, because some guys were buggering other guys, vs the Jesus who re-attached his enemies ear when one of his disciples tried to defend him. A Jesus who, by definition in the book itself, is both the son of, and yet the same being as, the old testament god. The new testament god who forgives the traitor, vs the old testament god who tortures his most faithful follower on a bet.

Everyone should read the Bible, if only to comprehend how utterly un-Christian most Christians are.

It’s not uncommon for sites and organizations to actively prompt for pronouns, which are labels. It’s generally accepted that minority groups can change their labels by group consensus - Redskins, to Indians, to American Indians, to Native Americans. Labels change, and this is accepted as a good thing, because identity is important to mental health.

Where do you draw the line? At what point do you think it’s justified to deny someone the right to decide their own labels?

Personally, I think it falls broadly under the paradox is tolerance, and there’s a point where someone is clearly just being contrarian. They resent self-labeling. But if someone consistently insists they’re vegan, at some point I have to ask: what gives me the right to insist they aren’t? If you go down the rabbit hole is insisting on dictionary definitions, you quickly get into a quagmire with things most of us agree on: many laws and dictionaries are wrong about their definitions of marriage, male, and female.

I think it’s an interesting topic, although I suppose almost everybody has already made up their minds one way out the other on the topic, and are frankly tired; most people automatically see anyone debating it as pushing some agenda.

But the paradox is tolerance is something I think progressives (liberals, the Left… that’s a whole different fight, on Lemmy) are still struggling with, and I’m interested in how we collectively resolve it. So when it comes up, I’m always interested in how people are thinking about this.

Dogmatic? Morally superior? Angry that people are changing the meanings of words that clearly already have a meaning?

Where does a person’s right to choose their labels (e.g., their pronouns, their identity) stop?

You’re just creating more monopolies, with no oversight and less control. At least with government, you can vote.