Joined the Mayqueeze.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • The problem with the VPN solution is that the BBC has gotten smart about that. It’s a game of whack a mole. Every time a service has installed a new server with new IPs, iPlayer finds out about it and blocks it. So you don’t even get to the part where you could fraudulently claim to be paying for the license.

    Where in France are you? In Calais you might still get terrestrial signal (although I don’t know if the signal standards differ) or it could be available on cable.

    A third option is not perfectly legal but more so than torrenting. There are online services that record the terrestrial signal and allow you to download the recordings after the fact. Google BBC online HDR or DVR and see if one of these services might be for you.


  • I am not an expert and I think this falls at the first hurdle because a login is required to view more than the latest post or two.

    Here is how I use it: you take an old device that you never installed Insta on, run it under a burner account at the OS level, run a kill switch VPN on it (preferably always on the same server), and then create an account on Insta that you’re ready to ditch the moment they want your ID. That device doesn’t do anything else than Insta.


  • I get that. But a rating system by the unwashed masses is going to give you shit data to base your decision on. Because they cannot tell if it was a setting on their device, the hotel network, their ISP, or an act of god that fucked up their internet speed. People are dumb, attribute fault preferably externally. They’ll all blame it on the hotel. You could be reading five reviews from last week about bad internet when there was an unfortunate power outage at the big brand ISP and they were running on the backup satellite internet the hotel had ready for just that case. That doesn’t tell you shit about what it’s like on any other day when everything is working fine. And the reviews end up hurting their business.

    Ratings work if you get thousands of them to get enough variety, which I think you probably won’t here. Or if you find a trusted source, a reviewer who knows what they’re doing. Internet speed is in the reviewer category for me.






  • You are assuming that the name as it is in Italian today has always been the same and it isn’t. Both Milano and Mailand are linguistic descendants of the name whichever people who first set up shop there spoke and decided to call the place. And that wasn’t anywhere close to modern Italian. They are both valid.

    English ditches the o and has Florence on the books as well. Geographical names follow no logical rule. Most are just historical accidents, some historical crimes. This is more in the former category if you ask me.

    Cologne, Munich, Brussels, Naples, The Hague … It’s everywhere.







  • The Anerican political theater has twice as many viable parties as North Korea. Contrast that with virtually any other democracy where there are at least a handful of parties fighting to be in charge. That doesn’t mean though that you don’t have enough different opinions to fill a party-political spectrum like that in the US. The dominance of the two parties just forces most people under one of the big tent roofs. So you have more conservative Democrats (and there used to be more liberal Republicans) in the party that are bigger in relative numbers compared to what you’ll find in the social democrats in Germany (or among the conservatives in France). The Democrats are nominally the more left leaning party. But if you compared the party programs they would align more with the conservative parties of Scandinavia. Everything is further to the right in the US thanks largely to gun laws and lack of social security. And that explains why you have non-lefty people in the nominally lefty party. And while bigotry and hatred are certainly not a new thing, there is a culture that permeates down from the political leadership. And if name calling and pouring oil into the fire of social issues are the new MO, and admissions and convictions respectively of sexual assault don’t keep candidates out of office, many people feel they are now also allowed to say the quiet part out loud.


  • For shits and giggles I watched Phantom Menace today. Because I figured I’ll never have as good (?) a reason to watch that … wonderful … movie again. And I had time. As with all things I know I don’t like, the rewatch was more enjoyable because I could brace for the trade dispute Jar Jar pod racing medichloriean bullshit and not get pissed off. But that’s really besides the point. Anakin is six in that movie and too old to be trained as a Jedi. And Padme is closer to 18. I think in terms of the actors’ real ages it’s more than a decade’s difference. And I totally forgot Ani is a Jesus baby too because Shmi doesn’t remember the conception. JFC, what a family, the Skywalkers.

    And mesa totally fine with Padme and Ani eventually becoming a couple. Mesa no okay with the children slaying for love though. Big doo-doo dat one.





  • You have a choice in life. You can accept certain things you cannot change. This one, you won’t change. Even if you spearheaded a popular movement I doubt you’ll get it changed. Everybody hates DLST and we still can’t get rid of it.

    So I suggest you adapt your language. You don’t talk about the night of the fifth but the night from the fifth to the sixth. Three additional syllables in this case and the confusion evaporates quickly. You’re focusing on the perceived problem and not on the solution. If you do resolutions for the new year, maybe add that point to your list.


  • You are applying the thinking of wholly owned platforms and how to judge their success. They have to grab a sizable and hopefully growing number of users who keep coming back to be successful. Because they need the data from their users and/or their eyeballs on ads for commercial success. None of that applies to the fediverse really. It can grow as slowly as it wants to or not grow at all. As long as there is a small percentage of people who spend time and money to keep the instances going. This laced corsage of economical necessities is much tighter for a centrally hosted platform which will have a thirsty boardroom to answer to. Popularity isn’t so much the factor why reddit is/was more of a success, it is/was the quality of information others got from it and it definitely used to be the ease of getting to it. People who got pissed off at reddit will slowly add to our numbers here (or another iteration of a service like Lemmy) as the idea of becoming your own algorithm becomes more normal for the non-techy minded users as well. We’re playing a long game that we don’t even want to win.