Yep, it’s just evil to their own staff. It seems every time I have to call some call centre these days, when I finally get to a human the conversation starts something like “I’ve just spent 40 fucking minutes trying to get to talk to a person and I’m really pissed off. I know that’s not your fault and I apologise in advance if I struggle to contain my frustrations while we talk. Now…”

I’m open to suggestions for what else I can do. I’m already not buying anything made in the US.

I get what you’re saying but, as someone observing from outside, stuff like this is all I can do to resist.

This is me too. I’m still on Facebook for some family contacts and a couple of useful groups. Years ago I could spend hours a day there. Now I spend maybe 15-30 minutes each morning scrolling for friend/family updates and group content - and hitting “Hide all from …” on every single bit of unsolicited content. I was reporting and blocking them, but I’ve decided it probably doesn’t achieve anything and it was too many taps/clicks.

Instagram is similar - I used to spend hours there too but now I only go to check if there’s progress on one car build I’m following and scroll for maybe 5-10 minutes and I’m out for the day.

Which is really really sad. When I was younger I used to think we just need these old people to age out of the system and my generation can do things better. We seem to be doing significantly worse.

This isn’t a generational thing. For a start, he’s technically Gen X, not a boomer. And secondly, I’m older than him and I’m just as happy about that as everyone else.

Almost a chuckle

I must be old - it’s WordPerfect to me.

Once an end-to-end, encrypted, connection is established between a pair of peers then anything can be sent through it. The establishment proces is generally facilitated by a server of some description so neither peer needs to allow inbound connections. (I’m a long, long way from being an expert on this and happy to be corrected - but this seems like network fundamentals?)

I recently learned this, and changed mine to English only. I still see non-English communities in All. I suspect it’s up to community owners to set the language of their community and a lot don’t?

No, I didn’t.

But there’s no future profit for Sonos in them providing the ability for us to play music we already own from our own library.

There was an unofficial option for rollback - I’m on Android so I went to apkmirror and downloaded the last good version and turned off auto update. This worked for a while, but then they forced me to update - it literally said I had to update to continue using. I’ve seen someone say this wasn’t actually a forced update, but rather keeping all the parts of your network in sync. I have one Sonos device and my phone is the only things that connects to it??

My issue was specifically the windows sync client - not server or web related. I turned on debug in the client and watched the logs and saw it making stupid (IMHO) decisions about speed throttling.

I’m in a similar situation - I’m a (retired) Unix admin and have Linux servers at home but I’m still on windows for my desktop because of OneDrive. If you use it as intended, it works really well. I can login to my laptop, my phone or either of my wife’s PC’s and all my stuff is just there.

Yes, I’ve tried nextcloud and it’s close, but the windows sync client is (was?) broken - the upload speed throttling logic is broken and it was going to take ages to sync my data. I went to the nextcloud community and it seemed to be a known issue that know one cares about because the sync just happens in the background and it’s done when it’s done.

As I typed this I realised that if I move to Linux desktop I don’t care about the windows sync client :-) So now I’ve just got the issue that I won’t get my wife off windows and if we’re paying for 5TB of cloud storage, I might as well use it. Yes, I know there are ways to use OneDrive on Linux, but it doesn’t look as seamless and I’d be always concerned that Microsoft will do something to break it.

It blows my mind that they need to do this with physical phones. I would have thought they could virtualise/emulate everything needed.

That made me laugh for real. Mainly because it bought back memories - I’m pretty sure I first heard it from my dad - about 50 years ago.

What’s going to stop you from taking over?

Sane, rational people don’t want to take over anything. We just want to vote for reasonable governments, let said government get on with governing and get on with our lives. We don’t want to be bombarded with all this political bullshit everywhere we turn - MAGA stickers and Fuck Biden stickers, you can’t open any comment thread on any public social media post without some idiot blaming Biden for the most ridiculous things.

Since the growth of the internet and social media these right wing nazi fucktards have figured out they can weaponise their followers to take over anything at any level and with your attitude to this site that’s exactly what I predict will happen there.

I’m in the process of replacing all my mp3 (including a lot of V0 and 320) with FLAC. I know that most of the time I can’t tell the difference, but I did some testing and in some scenarios with some music I could tell. And, at the size of music files, disk is cheap.

My son has just signed up to a new retailer where he pays wholesale rates (he understands the risks) and for half an hour yesterday afternoon they were paying him 13¢/kWh to take it!