John Prine sang the Spanish Pipedream chorus in the 70s: Blow up your TV, throw away your paper Go to the country, build you a home Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches Try and find Jesus on your own

SEO filled the web with slop way before AI

And AI made it 1000x faster, more convincing, and expanded its scope, even allowed spam to get automated back and forth.

I have an HP LaserJet 6P that I purchased new in 1996 and it has a page count of 53740. For color, I have FedX Kinkos and Staples nearby.

Is there enough 4K content available to justify replacing an older Samsung 1080P LCD? I still find free TVs on Craigslist. When I see 4K TVs running in demo mode at Costco I'm impressed, but at home watching World Cup over the air or on Fios at 1080P looks good enough. I don't pay extra for Netflix 4k and most Fios content is not 4K.

What insurance company do you use? I thought that in-network means the provider has agreed to accept the insurers usual and customary rate and that you are not liable for the difference.

This was Providence in Oregon. I thought that's what it meant, too. But in this case there's a contracted "allowed amount" that is all the insurance will pay the doctor. If the doctor chooses to charge more, you get to pay that.

Which really freaks me out. If you're insured at a contract rate of $5000 and they bill $30,000...?

Does this analysis only include incorporated cities or does it also count unincorporated census-designated places?

I sell on CL and FB Marketplace. Some items that I listed for months on CL sold in days on FB, but I prefer CL. FB search results are inferior often because FB posters created misleading ads and don't delete ads for events that have already occurred. Never tried Nextdoor because they required I give them my cell phone number. My landline number was not enough.

> FB search results are inferior

That’s quite the understatement. FB marketplace search results are pretty close to useless. Search for something, it will show you maybe a couple of that something and then ads that look like listings, and things that are supposedly related (they aren’t), hours away from your search area. No way to filter or anything. I go out of my way to not use FB marketplace, that’s how bad it is to me.

I have purchased 6 multi Tb external drives at estate sales. My son brought home a few from a summer working as a mover. In his experience it was divorcing spouses throwing out each others stuff.

All of these drives had Pii and personal photos. Some of the estate sale drives included pii of children and grandchildren.

I've found a few cheap hard drives at thrift stores. I used to buy them just in case someone had left a crypto wallet on them.

They're usually formatted but not wiped, so even recuva was typically able to claw back all of the missing data and restore the whole drive.

Family photos, nudes, sex videos (homemade and professional), downloaded movies, pirated games, I've found them all.

If you're dumping a drive and you don't DBAN it first, other people getting to see your shit is 100% on you.

You left out the most interesting part - did you find any BTC?

No, I would have included that otherwise, lol.

Could you share them?

Not selling drives without securely wiping the data, for starters.

"What about unhappy exes?" Well if they really care about the kid and know the exact spouse is techy enough, they'll put their ego aside for the kid and ask their ex to do it.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Windows+also+in+%22S+mode%22 "Switching Out of S Mode If you find that S mode is too restrictive, you can switch out of it for free. However, according to Microsoft Support, doing this is a one-way street—once you leave S mode, you cannot go back without completely reinstalling Windows.To switch out of S mode:Open the Start Menu and click Settings.Navigate to System > Activation.Look for the Switch out of S mode section.Click Go to the Store.On the page that opens in the Microsoft Store, click Get"

I responded because your solution was to use Linux Mint which I have installed a few times on older hardware. My experience getting older relatives to use Mint has not gone well. The most common is their reliance on Microsoft Office. Windows S mode and having to use the Microsoft Store might save me time supporting them.

"My experience getting older relatives to use Mint has not gone well. The most common is their reliance on Microsoft Office"

I was asked by an older friend to put Linx on their computer because they were too frusterated with MS Windows. She also used MS Word and Powerpoint a lot. I said that I had installed a different version of Offce because it was all I had at the time, so the menus would be slightly different. It was three years before she discovering that LibreOffice was not Microsoft Office. By that time it didn't matter.

>In the interest of full fairness while writing this review, I purchased a plastic cup of my dad’s currently favored “Buttery Homestyle” Idahoan brand instant mashed potatoes for $1.99. The preparation was extraordinarily efficient; the aroma was decent; the taste was a reasonable facsimile; but the texture was all wrong - a smothering paste that coated my mouth and constrained my tongue like a straightjacket. 3/10 would not buy again.

I substitute warm heavy cream for half the water and add extra butter which gets me to a 6/10. Mix in some cabbage or kale and you have a quick Colcannon.

yeah some of the instant ones aren't half bad, especially if you're not just using them as mashed potatoes with gravy, but in a pinch i can throw together a reasonably hearty and savory shepherd's pie with instant, including the peaks. Heavy cream definitely helps, and get lots of air in, if possible.

obviously real potatoes taste better, but they haven't been dehydrated and reconstituted, destroying the cell structures. probably.