Keep in mind that newegg sold out in 2016 to a Chinese company. They used to be great but have been going downhill ever since. I only purchase in person at my local MicroCenter and just pull out my phone and have them pricematch. They will pricematch anything sold and shipped by Amazon for example. Dunno if you have a local store, but that's the way to go.

It really was. It was a time when most didn’t have computers at home. Once a week you’d get to go down to the computer lab and play educational games from MECC. Oregon Trail being the most popular of the bunch.

I mean, maybe google should stop shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to messaging. See: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-of-instability-the-history-of-google-messaging-apps/

Many restaurants charge a “split plate fee”. If you order something and want to share it with your partner they’ll bring you an extra plate but charge a fee. Have a link: https://frugalreality.com/split-plate-charge/

Lemmy 0.18.2 (which sdf is on) came out 29 days ago. I wouldn’t consider sdf Lemmy to be dying because they don’t jump on every point release the second it comes out. Production system shouldn’t rush out releases unless it’s patching zero days. To talk about needing to migrate off or the platform dying because they are on a release not even a month old is a bit hysterical.

I skipped the Agile2023 conference last month because they chose Florida for some reason.

I read a great WaPo article on this recently. Basically on the left, no one can define healthy masculinity and it's really opened up a spot for the right wing to swoop in and define it for us.

As someone that spends a lot of time on a vintage machine using sites like 68k.news and frogfind.com , I think it would be really sweet if there was a non JavaScript front end that could render correctly in something like Netscape 4. I know I’m a weirdo, but there’s a lot of weirdos like me on SDF :-)

I get the sentiment, but Flickr hasn’t been owned by Yahoo for a while. They were purchased by the folks that run SmugMug.

For sure, turn off wifi on the tv and also block it's MAC address at the router. Plug in your trusted streaming box of choice via HDMI and only use that (Nvidia Shield, AppleTV, Roku, AndroidTV, Homebuilt Plex box, etc).

Gopher pre-dates the world wide web. In fact, gopher was used to distribute early web browsers like Netscape and Mosiac. Both the White House and MTV's first presence on the internet was through their own gopher sites. Gopher was a somewhat stealth project at the University of MN, and never really got the care or support it deserved. It was really just supported by a band of crazy programmers working to keep it on the down-low at the U of MN. There's a great article here on MinnPost about it.

Gopher is a text based way (but graphical clients exist too) of sharing information in a structured page layout. The source files, like HTML, are plain text that anyone can write. The gopher client/browser will render them into something usable. It is still used today because it is very fast, lightweight, and free of clutter.

Gemini is more of a spiritual successor to gopher that incorporates some basical colors and graphics but it still much more lightweight that a traditional web browser. It's a nice balance between gopher and modern browsers.

If consuming text and doing retro stuff is your thing, it's a fun time. Creating gopher spaces and gemini sites requires much less knowledge and training then HTML.

I have a similar story. Back in the 90's I'd go to the library and one of the terminals available auto dialed and logged into gopher (being that this was MN and gopher was home grown). One of the menu options eventually ended me up at another college that had muds in its telnet link sections. But you couldn't really sit and monopolize a terminal at the library. I did see though the phone number written on the modem. So I dialed it from home with my 2400 baud modem. It would just land me at a > prompt. No regular commands worked. But I had remembered that the gopher server was consultant.micro.umn.edu . So I typed that in at the prompt and voila I was connected. The curses client for gopher loaded up the mother gopher site. I found my way to that college with the mud list and played quite a bit. Later I discovered by accident I could just ^C out of the curses client and be dropped to a limited privilege command shell. but it had telnet. So I could just go straight to the muds.

Later I learned from the U of MN gopher site that I could get an alumni account for a few bucks a month. Well, they offered alumni accounts anyway. I hadn't actually attended. I printed out the paper form and mailed it in, just checking the box that said I was an alumni. apparently they didn't check if I actually was, because from then on I had an alumni account. Which didn't really give me anything new except an email address. And I could "officially" dial in like I had been. but I felt like I should at least be paying something.