I usually use TSC wood pellets as cat litter since they’re cheap and just break down into sawdust with use. There’s other brands I can shift to, but I’ll pay a bit of a premium for it

The “under god” portion was added in the 50s or 60s, same with adding “in god we trust” to all currency

When I was in school the pledge was always preceded by the statement “we live in a nation of freedom, participation in the pledge of voluntary. Those who wish to participate please stand, other may remain seated and quiet”

I remember when it first dawned on me how creepy the pledge is I began to sit and one teacher was like “what are you doing? You have to stand up!” so I explained that it seems creepy, and quoted the statement they always precede the pledge by and the teacher replied “oh I never thought about that” and left me alone from then on on the subject

I feel like a browser API that just gives info to the site when request of either “is under age, is of age to create an account, is adult” might be an easy way to establish something like this too

This way the site can voluntarily check if they’re illegally collecting data on minors, if they’re showing adult content to adults, and automatically display age appropriate content of applicable

Maybe an NSFW flag as well that sites can check to automatically show/hide NSFW content, for example on work machines or shared computers, but that’s probably getting a little too finegrained

The real question is how is the age flag determined? Is it determined by the browser? The OS? Browser seems the safest bet, since Google can base it off of the Google Account, Microsoft can base it off the Microsoft account and Mozilla can shove it in the settings and potentially base it on the Mozilla account

My current work acquired a company with a very poorly provisioned IT department. Their networks all happen to be in the low 192.168.0.0/16 so users VPNing in often end up with wonky IP conflicts. I’ve heard warnings about similar when selecting subnet ranges, so I just stick with low 192.168.0.0/16 ranges for home networks from which I might potentially VPN into a network I don’t control, and I use 172.16.0.0/12 or 10.0.0.0/8 at work as needed and as aligns with our wider topology.

I will also add that I encountered some fun challenges at a small bank I worked at where they clearly under-planned their network and carried a bunch of wonky configs as vestigial networking adaptations as they grew. They did do a cool thing where they made each branch its own /24 subnet so you could tell at a glance exactly what branch someone was connecting from, plus branches could theoretically limp along with an ISP outage, but they didn’t the extra steps of setting up edge servers so the end result was a full branch outage during an ISP outage

Personally I do a Tailscale tunnel to my home network, if nothing else but so that services don’t log a hotel IP

sets subnet to 10.0.0.0/16 so I don’t have to type a yee yee ass class B/C address everytime I wanna do something with an address

Personally I find 172.16.0.0/12 addresses are easier for me to quickly type accurately than any other private range. 192.168.0.0/16 is just too many similar-but-different digits, and 10.0.0.0/8 is too many similar/the same digits before I get to the digits I actually care about, so both are more error prone for me

172.31.254.0/24 range is for manual assignments and 172.31.255.0/24 range is given out by DHCP. I do not need that many IPs, it’s just for convenience.

I do similar for my home network, mostly for a combination of future proofing and ease of use.

Realistically it would probably make more sense to segment it with more networks, but I’m only going to go so far with complexity for my home production

My point was that the average American is simply too disconnected from politics to see this. The average voter is terrifyingly uninformed

The average American has zero clue how anything in the government works, nor the interest in policy to actually understand what the policies their politician of choice are pushing do. The average American is so disconnected from politics it’s zero surprise that shitty politicians are elected everywhere regularly.

This isn’t an indictment of the people themselves but the society they live in that somehow incientivizes general laziness when it comes to civics

But for gamers moving game installs that they don’t feel like rebuilding the mod load out for between an HDD and an SSD that might be moving an extra 100GB month or so, probably less frequently depending on how much they’re moving games around, plus it’s no more wear than if they simply uninstalled and reinstalled the game as needed. Ultimately I don’t think that’ll make much difference.

I’ll look at the wear stats on my main desktop with its 8 year old SSD when I get a chance and share

SSDs have limited write endurance, so moving a lot of large files on and off of them will wear the nand flash out shortening its lifetime and potentially killing it

This is the conventional wisdom, but honestly I’ve not seen any detectable wear on any of my several year old SSDs even with daily use. I’ve seen more SSDs fail just due to age/power on hours professionally and never wear-related

It sounds like the DNC is looking at some former state governors. I forget the names but recent governor of Michigan, Kentucky, and Minnesota were mentioned. But I’d put money on them rolling out former California governor Gavin Newsom. He’s super moderate, not very likable but not too unlikable, and the only one of the names I’ve seen mentioned that I actually recognize as someone who pays some attention to the news.

Plus there’s an interview where they’re asking him if he’s going to be picked and he’s struggling not to beam like he’s just been told he has a shot right now at his biggest lifetime goal.

Elections are all about optics, and the optics are he might not even make it to the general election, let alone the following 4 years if elected. The populace is starting to wonder how much Biden is just a real life Weekend at Bernies now where they really weren’t before.

This is why if you are nice and polite to conservatives they start spouting more and more bigoted bullshit

I always interpret this as projecting their opinions. If you give the person nothing to suggest a specific political leaning and have a positive enough interaction it’s too easy for them to assume you hold the same values as you.

I’ve honestly caught myself in the same, so I just try to stay apolitical in interactions at work until others reveal their opinions to me

In regards to the DNS advice should I use that for both my PC and android ? And when would I use a vpn?

You should setup your preferred DNS server everything really. On your phone, on your computer and on your router if you can. DNS is the absolute easiest way to track and block/hijack browsing habits, so hardcoding your devices to use a standard one like NextDNS, Quad9 or Cloud flare will put you very far ahead

Regarding VPNs, commercial VPNs are really overhyped, and thats because they’re a cash cow for operators. See Tom Scott’s video on the subject if you prefer this britishplained to you. All a VPN is is a tunnel from your device to the VPN server wherever that is, so you’ll look like your traffic is originating from that VPN server, plus all of your traffic is going to that VPN server so you have to trust that that server isn’t compromised nor slurping up all of the data to sell/provide security agencies. Clear text browsing traffic will also be secured between your device and the VPN server, but that’s super uncommon nowadays. Realistically a commercial VPN is best for if you’re doing illegal activities such as piracy because it will add layers of abstraction should a private company or public agency wish to investigate your activities and try to identify you. I do use Tailscale with an exit node on my home network when connecting to public wifi just in case the network is misconfigured, but it’s really just another layer of Swiss cheese security.

Interesting observation lemmy user SatansMaggotyCumFart

I tried Graphene OS but my banking failed so back to stock Android

Any features in the mobile app that don’t exist on the website? I’ve had good luck checking my bank balance and all sorts of other things through Firefox on Android - pre-edit: I missed that it was app only. That sucks.

For browsing on Android I use Mull and on my android Proton VPN is always on. I visit twitter and twitter ocasionly but always through mull browser.

The VPN really doesn’t do much at all for privacy. It just moves the point of trust from the service provider for the current network to the VPN provider, plus now you have extra hurdles as you’ll show up as a VPN IP rather than a “normal” residential or cellular IP. Realistically set your DNS to be something like Quad9 or Cloudflare and you’ll already be several steps ahead on browsing privacy

For spending habniys I try to use Google pay as little as possible and use my master card.

Realistically any card is going to be selling your spending habits. Cash and crypto are about the only ways to have private purchases, and plenty of places won’t accept either

Personally I had a long hard think about my privacy practices and how they only isolated me and made me unhappy, and realized that if I’m already blocking all ads so I never get to see the results of the incredibly dystopian advertising hellscape, does it really matter that much if Google knows I spent $200 on random model train shit last month when they already know I watch a few hours of train-related content on Youtube? So I take smaller steps to not fully given in, but I don’t take steps that create extra hassle in participating in modern society and living my life to its fullest.

How are you spending so much? I spend half that on gas per week (rural area so I easily put 200-400 miles a week on the car) and your weekly grocery budget is about my monthly budget for a family of 4

As someone with 2 preschool aged kids I absolutely agree