I’ve been a fan of the Might and Magic universe since the beginning. I have boxed copies of every game from King’s Bounty to HoMM V, promo materials, and even a very minor design credit on one of the HoMM IV expansions. Unfortunately, life, family and kids took precedence to gaming, so I missed this initiative. Thanks for the heads up! I’ll definitely explore fheroes2.

Shout out to the book Red Tide by M. P. Woodward. It’s a military thriller where one of the main plot points is a Chinese spy seducing the son of the CEO of a semiconductor manufacturer, in order to export AI chips to China. The book was published last year. The author worked in naval intelligence, so I guess there may have been rumors about this scenario before…

Anyone actually uses Reddit search? That thing has been so horribly broken since the very beginning that some of the best subreddits (AskHistorians, for example) openly recommend using a standard search engine with the “site:reddit.com” parameter.

And for some reason, copying the tapes via a double-deck never worked. I had to use software like Mr. Copy to copy over the tapes I borrowed from a classmate.

I’m old enough to use pen and paper for my calendar, to-do lists, diary, etc. But if my kids want to use a PC for such things when they grow up, I’ll either get them an air-gapped machine, or at the very least have them use my personal server for document sharing.

That’s why local networks are beginning to pop up. We’re working on a scaled-down version of Internet for the kids in our estate. So far, it’s to control what they have access to, and to provide them with a safe social network. But I can see this growing to localised “Internet” instances for everybody.

First thing I thought of was Roko’s Basilisk as well. If nothing else, it’s the modern version of Pascal’s Wager.

Yesterday, I visited new Reddit. No VPN, Chrome in incognito mode, so no extensions, clickedon a link directly from Google search. Got a message that my access was blocked for security reasons. Copied the link to Firefox (with uBO and a few privacy-centric extensions), changed it to old reddit (where I was already logged in), and it worked just fine. I found out that when Reddit kills old reddit, I won’t even have the choice to switch to the new one (not that I ever would) because I’d be blocked anyway.

I can’t think of any food or drink (save for alcohol, but I cut down to one drink per week) that I’d buy because of the brand. The majority of what I’m buying is from store private labels. Living in Europe, however, I do pay close attention to country of origin, and try to buy as close to home as possible.

Two of my favourite game franchises are Civilization and The Elder Scrolls. I played them since the first game, and I still play them. The original Civ and Daggerfall are always with me on a USB stick, in case I feel like playing them, even when the computer doesn’t have them installed.

The last games from the franchises I played were Civ IV and Oblivion. The next games required a download, and to this day I refuse to pay for a digital copy only. I have a huge backlog of older games on discs, so I don’t mind that my recent game purchases are largely limited to collector editions on Kickstarter.

Are webcams that ubiquitous nowadays? My monitors never had one, and I could never be arsed to buy an external one, but perhaps I’m the weird outlier here.

Insta360 does the same. I downloaded the app, registered the camera, and deleted the app. On my kid’s tablet; my phone is too old for the app. If GoPro only requires such a rudimentary registration, it’s a matter of 5 extra minutes. Now, if they require the app for transferring videos, that’s a whole different problem…

I still have an unused, boxed WRT-54G. Granted, it’s only 802.11b/g, but good enough for casual browsing, and I have experience setting up OpenWRT there. Thanks for helping me remember; I’ll use that for the kids.

I tried pi-hole, but it turned in a real pain, trying to set it up for normal use, plus two WFH offices. I may give it another try, when I feel more patient.

The idea of mocking websites came from talking to other parents from my kids’ school. I was thinking about some form of a local “internet” for our neighbourhood for all the kids. Heavily curated, a mix of mock sites (like the full download of Wikipedia), news through RSS, moderated message boards, etc. I don’t think it’s an original idea given the current state of the Internet, so at this stage I’m just reading up on design best practices.

My kids are a little older - just learned to read without sounding off the words - so I need to introduce parental controls. But you may see your purchase as an investment: a year from now, the hardware may be worth twice as much.

I have a working emachines desktop with Win98. They’ll pry it off my cold, dead hands…

I’m in the process of getting my kids their first PC this Christmas. They’ll both get a mini-PC, with severely restricted Internet access. I’m actually thinking about just letting them connect to the home server where I’d mock the Web sites I pick for them. For this reason, Win11 with its online account requirement is automatically excluded from consideration. I wated to give them Mint anyway, but this was the argument that convinced my wife.

I have an account where I only post after I translated my writing through three different languages and back to English. The original input and the output convey the same message, but have very distinct styles. Randomizing the three languages in my translation sequence introduces enough variety that I doubt current LLM’s can identify me. (Full disclosure: I don’t post any sensitive information under any account; I do it just for fun.)

My current computer will be Linux, as soon as I stop procrastinating and clean up my documents and back them up on my NAS. Already did that with my travel laptop.

Learned from growing up in a communist dictatorship: don’t discuss politics and religion with strangers. And even with friends or acquaintances, don’t discuss it in writing. It doesn’t mean you can’t have strong opinions, but don’t make them public. Talking (not writing) one-to-one or in small groups eventually toppled almost all communist dictatotships, so there’s absolutely no need to broadcast your opinions, unless your goal is to be martyred.