cobysev

F.B. Purity is a desktop browser extension, it only works on the website from a PC. It won’t run on Android devices, unfortunately. They’ve been talking about making an app for it for years, but they still haven’t made one.

Has everyone forgotten about F.B. Purity (Fluff Busting Purity)? It’s a browser extension that lets you customize the entire interface of Facebook. It’s been around for 17 years and still works just fine.

I use it to remove not only ads, but FB games, marketplace, reels/videos, suggestions/featured content, FB Messenger, etc. I pretty much locked down my Facebook interface to only show me posts from my friends in the order that they were posted, with the latest at the top of my feed. Just like Facebook used to be before it started shoving useless content in your face.

The only reason I still have a Facebook account is because 90% of my friends, family, and contacts I’ve made over a lifetime of global travels, are all on Facebook. If I need to get in touch with someone, Facebook is where I’ll find them. But I don’t post anything to Facebook anymore; I rarely log on to it.

There isn’t another social media program where I can find everyone I know without subscribing to even more junk. I won’t use Instagram, Snapchat, Whatsapp, TikTok, or any of the other corporate social media programs, and most people I know/knew in person don’t use or understand the Fediverse.

Bluesky and Discord are as corporate as I’ll tolerate, and I’m already on the lookout for replacements for both. I used to have a Mastodon account a decade ago, before the Fediverse was a common thing, but I have no idea what site I built an account on. I might have to just suck it up and rebuild my account somewhere else. And there are plenty of Discord clones out there, but none quite as functional as Discord yet…

I remember software in the 90s having limits on how many computers you could use an application on (however rarely enforced)

I remember software in the '90s having “limited licenses,” but operating on the honor system. Because you could just install it on as many computers as you wanted and there wasn’t really a way for companies to stop you.

It wasn’t until the early 2000s when I started seeing licenses verified through the Internet and actually limiting their usage.

This is an absolutely brilliant move by Valve. Get more buyers purely for the quirky behavior of the controller, then sell even more when people accidentally break them from throwing them on the ground. They’re just printing money at this point.

Fellow millennial here. I’m in the same boat. Zero subscriptions except for Curiosity Stream, which is like Netflix for educational documentaries, and it’s dirt cheap.

I bought the lifetime subscription to Nebula. It’s been worth it; I have a few channels I follow and I appreciate the extra content and freedom of video producers to say/do whatever they want without platform censorship. YouTube has so many restrictions, no one can post content without bowing to Google censorship.

Parody laws should allow people to actually review or poke fun at other media, but Google will demonetize or block any content that they arbitrarily decide is copyright infringement. Most film review channels I follow have to be extremely creative in how they show clips of movies. Most of them mute music scenes, and some will insert their own public domain (or homemade) music over scenes to avoid a ban. It’s ridiculous how far the MPAA and RIAA have gone in locking down media from public consumption.

I always build my computers with a minimum of 64 GB RAM, so at first I didn’t see what the fuss was all about. But the article claims the Windows OS technically only needs 4 GB?!

And I see the push for more RAM is most likely to accommodate AI/Copilot, which needs a lot of resources to function. “Gaming” is just the excuse Microsoft is using to get people to upgrade.

This reminds me of a video I saw recently about how old computers didn’t have the space to waste code, so every line of code was micromanaged to perfection. But today’s computers have so much room on their hard drives, programmers don’t care how efficient the code is, as long as it runs. Which leads to your computer seemingly performing as slow (or slower!) than computers used to back at the turn of the century.

Our computers are more powerful than ever, multitudes more than the beginning of the Internet Age. And yet, we have so much wasted code because we have room for it, so our modern computers crawl. Imagine how fast our computers could perform if modern coders programmed like they did in the '90s and earlier.

Note for those passing through and not reading articles:

This is not a summary of the article, but OP’s suggestion for a solution. The article talks about creating a yeast product that’s lacking in bees’ diet due to climate change and a lack of diversity in flowers.

OP suggests combatting the effects climate change has on biodiversity by planting your own diverse flowers. Which may work, or climate change may just kill those too.

Critics claim the phrase is dismissive of nonreligious service members.

Very true. I was an atheist serving in Iraq during one of the most dangerous times to be there, minus the initial surge into the country. Our base was mortared at least once a week. Over 150 civilians died in a bus bombing the week I showed up. We were working and living in hardened bunkers most of the time. I almost got blown up once, only surviving because I stepped outside to grab a tool. The three members who were inside the small building I was working in weren’t so lucky.

I never appealed to a higher power while there. If anything, the devastation and violence I witnessed further convinced me there couldn’t be a higher power in control of all this.

I have a Google phone, which has YouTube embedded on it. I can’t remove it. I had to disable it, then tell my phone to redirect all YouTube links to my browser. Now I can block ads again!

Man… Call of Duty: United Offense was the game my squadron played all the time while we were deployed to Iraq in 2007. Someone had a cracked copy they brought with them and we installed it on all our computers in the squadron (we were an IT squadron).

Once a day, around lunchtime, we’d shut down the whole squadron for about 30 minutes. We’d hang signs on our doors that said we were closed for “simulated warfare training.” Then we’d jump into a massive free-for-all match and shoot everything that moved until there was one person left standing. Someone had dozens of custom maps people had made online, so we always had some new and unique map to play with.

I don’t miss Iraq, but I do miss those days. CoD was my favorite FPS series back in the day. Now it’s complete garbage.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (the 2009 original, not the 2022 reboot) was the first time I felt like the franchise wasn’t trying anymore. I mostly played the campaign mode and that was the first campaign that was basically just a carbon copy of the previous game. Same exact plot, same exact ending, just a new villain who took over for the villain in the previous Modern Warfare game.

Black Ops was kind of weird, but not that bad. However, I completely lost interest when trying to play Black Ops 2 and haven’t bought a new game since. I hear they’re up to Black Ops 6 now?

I knew a guy when I served in the US military who got caught cheating in a semi-related way. He got assigned to a base in a new state and his wife refused to relocate their whole family for the few years he’d be assigned there, so he went by himself, leaving his wife and kids in his home state.

Turns out, he was sexting one of his younger subordinates at work. One of his daughters found out when she tried to use an old tablet and found out his account was still synced to it. She saw all his texts updating in real time.

He was ultra-conservative and didn’t believe in divorce, so he was doing everything he could to save his marriage. His wife forced him to install security cameras in every room of his apartment and banned him from going anywhere after work. She knew his schedule and expected him home immediately after work ended. He was basically on house arrest until his job was done and he could move home.

The last I heard, he told his wife the landlord needed to paint the walls, so he removed all the cameras, dunked them in the bathtub, then played dumb when none of them would work when he set them back up again. He was seen inviting young women over to his apartment after that. So, you know… he didn’t learn his lesson.