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!

It’s not as hard as it seams […]

I see what you did there.

My uncle retired from the US Air Force in the '90s and got full medical and dental benefits for life for himself and his civilian wife, simply because he made it to retirement.

I retired from the US Air Force in 2022 and I had to qualify for 100% disability through the VA before they gave me the same deal. And that was only for me; my wife had to serve and get her own 100% disability rating to also qualify for those benefits.

Crazy how much things can change in 30 years.

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The first Mad Max movie is literally just a cop (Max) fighting against a deadly biker gang in a small town. The second movie didn’t say anything about an apocalypse, it was just set in a desert wasteland.

It was the American (maybe international?) version of Mad Max 2 that added a prologue about an apocalyptic world event.

So yeah, in the original Australian version, this may just be some lawless hicks surviving in the Australian desert, while the rest of the world continues on like normal.

Lot of good explanations here, but here’s another to help understand the basic idea of DNS. I’m gonna use a lot of technical explanations, but I’ll break it down into an ELI5 format for you.

Computers communicate using computer jargon; codes and numbers and math, etc. that process data immediately. Computers do these calculations incredibly quickly, so they don’t need any fluff to get to the point.

Humans, on the other hand, can’t process raw data like computers. We need contextual clues to help us understand and relay information. So we build in translations for everything our computers do, to help us understand the raw data that our computers are processing.

Every website on the Internet is assigned an address, which computers use to locate them. Kind of like street addresses to find a person’s house. But this address is in computer code. In this case, we call it an IP address (Internet Protocol address). A string of numbers if you’re using the old standard IPv4, or a string of even longer letters and numbers if you’re using the new standard, IPv6.

Mini-tangent: Why do we have two standards for IP addresses? Because the original version 4 standard was too limited. The IP address range was from 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255, which allowed up to 4,294,967,296 unique addresses. But with the boom of the Internet age in the past 3 decades, we quickly used up all those addresses and couldn’t make any more without seriously disrupting the way computers process IP addresses.

So we added a hexadecimal version 6 IP address scheme that allows for up to 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 (2¹²⁸) unique IP addresses. Those addresses are written from 0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000.0000 to FFFF.FFFF.FFFF.FFFF.FFFF.FFFF.FFFF.FFFF. (Hexadecimal counts from 0-9, then A-F before starting over at 0, so base-16 counting (0-F) instead of our standard base-10 counting (0-9)). I highly doubt we’ll ever run out of addresses with this new standard.

So our computers use IP addresses to find a website, but how are humans going to remember that? If I wanted to go to Google, I could type 64.233.170.139 into the address bar and find Google, but who’s gonna remember that string of numbers? And that’s only one website. Imagine all the other sites you browse every day. You gonna remember all those IP addresses? It’s gets even more difficult when you mix in IPv6 addresses. You’d have to remember 2404:6800:4003:c00::71 to find Google’s website! And most browsers don’t let you use IPv6 to connect directly to a website, so good luck getting there with only that string of numbers and letters.

So DNS (Domain Name Service) is a program designed to translate IP addresses into domain names that make sense to the human brain. Instead of remembering the IP address for Google, I can just type google.com into the address bar and DNS knows to translate that domain into an IP address for the computer to find. Now I can remember a simple word or two to find a website! Much easier for our human brains to process, while still allowing for a specific and calculable IP address for computers to process and find an exact host.

Why don’t we just tell computers to use domain names instead of IP addresses? Well, because computers operate on number operations, not words. Every word we program into a computer needs to be translated into math for the computer to process anyway. If computers just use domain names, they’ll still need to translate it into a number that it can process. Creating a DNS program allows you to set those calculations to the side and process them separately from the computers’ other functions.

In large corporations, they usually build an entire DNS server just to process all the address translations that the business and its customers will be doing through the course of their daily operations. It puts that work on another machine entirely so you’re not slowing down your regular computers with additional processing power.

Also… domain names might change. Say you buy twitter.com, but decide to rename it to x.com. It’s still the same website, with the same physical server location. But now with a different, simpler domain for people to remember. The IP address doesn’t change; computers still know exactly where to go to find the website. But now people have a different domain name they can type to find it. It makes it easier to rebrand your site on a whim without creating a whole new address for computers to find.

You don’t need to ask your local town to give you a new street address simply because you tore down and rebuilt a house on your property; the address is still the same. You just have a new building for people to visit.

Good Fortune (2025), a film about an angel switching the lives of a rich guy and a poor guy to give them better perspective of their own lives. It was… unique. Definitely felt like it had a mixed message at times. And I felt like it had a kind of non-ending.

Susie Q (1996), about a girl who died on prom night in 1955, and 40 years later, a teenager moves into her old home and can see and hear her ghost. So he helps her resolve a problem with her still-living parents so she can move on.

My wife loved this film as a kid, so she introduced me to it. It was one of the early films starring Amy Jo Johnson, the actress who played the Pink Power Ranger on Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers (1993). It was very cheesy, definitely a low budget film.

Interesting fact: The film never got a home video release. No one knows who actually owns the rights to the film, so it can’t legally be released on DVD/Blu-ray or streaming services. Amy Jo Johnson streams the whole film on her website, if you create a free account. (It’s under the toy box link).

My wife and I met Amy Jo Johnson at a convention last weekend and she said it’s her hope that someone sends her a copyright strike so she can find out who actually owns the film and can work with them to get it legally released. No one who made the film knows; it was a weird deal where everyone was hired by an outside organization to make the film.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992). This is the original movie Joss Whedon wrote that inspired the TV show a few years later. Having watched some of the TV show previously, it was interesting to see the film it was based on. I only watched a few episodes of the show growing up, and my wife has never seen it, so we plan to binge it one day soon.

…And we’re still binging House, M.D. (2004) for the second time through. We’re about a third of the way through season 2 now. This is our comfort show, when we want to watch something but can’t decide what.

If I had to guess, I’d say first guy is WWII, second is Korean War, then Vietnam War, Gulf War, and Iraq War.

I was in that last generation. Definitely had guys like that in my unit.

I am surely not the first person to have thought of this.

The day the Steam Machine was announced, there were at least 3 Borg Cube memes at the top of my news feed. It’s a common association, but I gladly welcome more memes about it.

As a kid in the '80s/'90s, my hair looked exactly like Will’s from Stranger Things. When my peers pressured me to change my hairstyle in 7th grade, I tried a bowl cut. It was the same, just the bottom half was shaved. Looked super ugly.

In 8th grade, I tried a buzz cut, which seemed to be pretty popular with my peers. A little longer on top, tight on the sides, tapered in back. Back then, I think I asked barbers to cut it as a #4 on top, #2 on the sides. It was extremely low maintenance; I could just shower and towel dry and my hair was immediately dry and perfect for the day. My hair was so extremely thick and soft, people joked that I had fur instead of hair. I had a lot of comments that touching my head was like petting a puppy, or a bear pelt. My hair also grows straight out of my scalp, so if I took too long to get a haircut, I started getting a bit of a mini-'fro.

Then I joined the US military at 18 and got the buzz cut professionally trimmed every couple weeks. My hair grows extremely fast and we had military hair regulations that had to be maintained, so I constantly needed to touch it up. I changed my cut to a #2 on top, #1 on the sides, with a little extra length in the front. Of course, still tapered in the back. The military doesn’t allow block cuts, you have to taper the ends.

I spent 13 years with a buzz cut in the military. My wife spent most of those years begging me to grow my hair out, but I kept telling her I can’t; military regs prevent me from having long hair. Finally, she showed me a picture of Captain America from the Avengers movie. Claimed he was technically military, but he had longer hair styled in a way that was still within regs. So I agreed to grow out my hair like Captain America.

Unfortunately, I had started balding a bit in my late 20s. My hair was getting thinner and my hairline was receding. I didn’t have enough hair in the front to style it like Captain America’s, so I combed the front back and over to a side, giving a bit more lift in the front with what thinning hair I had left. I grew out all the hair on top of my head and parted it to one side. On the short side, I buzzed it right up to the part, then kept the sides buzzed short with a taper in the back. I would tell barbers to buzz with a #1 up to the part, then go “skin” on the sides and back, tapered on the back.

It worked fine for the last 7 years of my military service. Then I retired and spent nearly 3 years struggling to figure out a civilian haircut. I had spent so long adhering to military regulations that every time my hair got a little shaggy, I’d panic and get a military haircut again. But I also didn’t want people to immediately look at me as a military guy when they met me. Short hair made me look much older, and as I was just starting my 40s, looking older is not what I wanted anymore.

Finally, I just shaved my head. A complete reset on my hair. I figured, if I’m completely bald, I’m going to have to go through an awkward regrowth period, so I’ll be forced to deal with it instead of being able to fix it on a whim. I was fully retired after my military service, so I didn’t have to worry about looking presentable for anyone. I basically just holed myself up at home; no one saw my bald head except my wife. I should note that I have a wrinkly scalp that looks like a scrotum, so the bald look is really ugly on me.

After nearly 6 months of letting it grow wild, I finally got a trim. I parted my hair to one side and cleaned up around my neck and ears, but left the rest. My hair is still growing straight out of my scalp, so I need a little hair product to comb it down and hold it, but otherwise, it’s been holding a side part pretty well.

I also grew out a beard for about the past 4 months. When I retired a few years ago, my chin had a white spot to one side, and in the 3+ years since then, it’s spread to my whole chin. So my beard is salt-and-pepper with a solidly white chin now. I don’t really care for the beard, but my wife likes it and I get compliments on it from others, so I keep it trimmed neat and maybe an inch long. It definitely helps to hide the fact I was former military, since we couldn’t grow beards while serving. And it adds a unique character to my look.

And they still put the ingredient on haphazardly.

Half the time I need to manually rebuild my burgers because the ingredients are slapped together like they’re assembling a burger from across the room. You’d think this “burger” would be easy to get right.

I was stationed in Germany with the US military once, just 30 minutes from the French border. My American coworkers visited Paris and complained that everyone there were snobbish assholes. Every time they tried to ask someone for directions, they got ignored at best and insulted at worst.

My wife and I went to Paris a few times and we had the complete opposite experience. We both took several years of French in high school, so we had an extremely basic knowledge of the French language (thanks, American public schools! 🙄) and we tried to speak to people in French.

Every time we spoke up, they would notice us struggling and immediately switch to English for us. And then they were very helpful. Turns out, my coworkers were just speaking English to French people and expecting a response in English. Which insulted a lot of French people, so they ignored them.

TL;DR: Speak the local language as best you can and French people can be very nice and helpful. Just assume they’ll speak English and you’ll get some rude responses in kind.

I was an IT professional for 20 years, fixing and replacing phones, computers, tablets, etc. I can’t tell you how many devices I had to replace because people didn’t take basic care of them.

Sure, your phone might survive being submersed if you take care of it right away, but abuse over time will still shorten its lifespan, especially if you’re carelessly using it with wet hands. I’ve definitely replaced phones because people used them in damp environments and let water get into the ports without immediately cleaning it. Modern tech is not invincible.

It’s more a pet peeve of mine, as the guy who had to fix or replace these devices for so many years. Give your IT guys less work; take better care of your expensive phones!

Gottem.

And by “him,” I mean me. 😅

Do you go outside?

I do, but I always make sure my hands are completely dry before touching my phone. That’s an expensive piece of tech! I’m not gonna risk getting moisture in any of the ports.

Who touches their phone with wet fingers?!

Here’s the original:

Source: @cremanata on Tumblr

Hmm, this looks interesting. And you can’t beat the free price tag. I’ll check it out.

This is why I stopped watching TV. I can only watch a show at a set time period and had no idea if it’d be a good episode or a rerun? I might jump into the middle of a storyline with no context for the characters or the plot? I have to wait a whole week to find out what happens next? No thanks. My ADHD won’t allow for that kind of scheduling, plot confusion, and potential disappointment.

I collected movies and TV shows for a while, so I could watch whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. Until online streaming became a thing.

Even then, streaming services couldn’t guarantee access to my favorite movies and shows forever, with streaming licenses being a temporary thing that could expire. So I eventually dumped them all and went back to collecting my own movies and TV shows.

I eventually ripped my whole collection to my computer and set up a Plex server, so I could stream my own private movie, tv show, and music collection. I now have access to my media library anywhere in the world! Better than any public streaming service.