We live in a forested rural area and take our trash to a local transfer station. They don't have any electronic methods of being paid so it's $2 or $4 depending on how big the garbage bag is.

I also own a tabletop game store and many events, the players give us cash. The bank charges a fee when we deposit more than $5,000 in cash in a month and we hit that most months so a bit of cash is being spread around.

[John]

I tend to ignore much of my email. Deleting it if it's not relevant to my job or what I'm doing. Doesn't matter if it comes from a vendor I recognize (like Red Hat).

But. I have to pay attention to emails now because if I don't catch a phishing email and report it, my "Security Alertness" ratio drops and I get a talking to.

It's almost like InfoSec is sending out ads to make money on the side.

[John]

I have a couple of thousand CDs I've purchased since the late 80's (Steely Dan's The Royal Scam being the first). 20 years ago, I spent quite some time on the couch ripping CDs into MP3's so I could have them on my iPod. As of last count, I have something like 126,000 MP3s. I of course added tags to identify songs I recognized and liked and copied them to my iPod. Good times,

The first iPhone I got was a 3. I copied the 'ipod' tagged music to it, no apparent problem. Music played and I enjoyed the Genius lists iTunes created.

This continued whenever I upgraded. To the 5. To the X. And now the 13.

Over time though, songs have been "unavailable in your country" or lately, simply disappeared. In iTunes, the songs have a grey circle. Apple support is useless. "Just delete all the songs and add them back in multiple times until they all show up."

I have an Android as well (business phone) and I'm in the middle of cleaning up my library as there doesn't seem to be an 'rsync' type option to copy songs. I'll continue with iTunes as I do like the Genius lists, which don't copy to my iPhone any more BTW. No option to select them in iTunes.

Yea, pretty shitty.

[John]

When riding the bike, nothing. My own thoughts :)

I try to listen to the music on my iPhone but Apple hates that I own CDs so half of my tunes are blocked and the other half are deep dive songs. Nothing like Boston and Little River Band being blocked by Apple.

I have an Android as well so I'm uploading my tunes there but the F150 doesn't support USB-C connections.

[John]

Why not? No one did anything about it last time. Clearly it’s yet another pointless law.

[John]

Being out in the boonies, streaming really isn’t viable with the “High Speed WiFi” service we have. As such, over the past 10 years, we’ve just purchased the physical media and have been doing a weekly date night. Make a little popcorn and kick back on the couch. Currently we’re watching a DVD at a time of Picard (so 4 episodes at a time). But I also pick up movies when we’re at one of the big box stores during our weekly shopping trips.

My wife has Amazon Prime and Netflix but we’ve not been able to get a good solid run of any TV show or movie. It starts and stutters to pause often enough that we simply stopped trying after a while.

[John]

But I do a lot of "work" on my Linux virtual machines. Be it a VirtualBox Kali Linux VM or one of the 300 or so Linux or Unix VMs on my homelab cluster.

Right now I'm at work and it's a pretty restricted Windows laptop. I'm doing automation work but with no access to anything at work so I'm using my homelab to poke, prod, and learn what needs to be done, then submit tickets to get the work done.

I have several cygwin terms open, slack, and discord open. I have iTunes cranking out music (ZZ Top, La Grange right now with Rage Against The Machine coming next) and a browser open to distract me, let my mind rest. I'll touch base with my DBA wife as she'll have terraform questions or I use her as a 'Rubber Duck' when I'm stuck on something. I might even grab my guitar and play along with Rage Against The Machine. :D

If I'm not on the computer, I'm on my tablet browsing the 'net or using the terminal app to access my VMs if I have a thought.

What? I use whatever it takes to learn new stuff. It's just how I am :)

[John]

It was kind of a weird revelation. I’d been using Linkedin more as a historical “resume” listing a ton of jobs from way way back in time. After getting the nth job description with ‘Windows required’, I basically converted my Linkedin profile to be an actual resume. I have a ‘Technical Resume’ that lists all the jobs, skills, training, and tools I’ve used since I started way way back.

It hasn’t really changed the emails I get with the stupidest job descriptions though as I expect it was scraped into recruiter databases. But at least any new recruiters will get accurate information.

And I’ve started Unsubscribing or Blocking recruiter companies that repeatedly send me job descriptions where the recruiter hasn’t done a bit of a review of my resume.

[John]

We have two WiFi services. One for house usage and Starlink specifically for work laptops.

The house one goes through the server farm.

External WiFi to Server Farm/PFSense VM to House WiFi plus a WiFi booster on the main floor.

Three phones, three tablets, one laptop, music mixer, and dishwasher.

For the Starlink, two laptops (mine and my wife’s).

We have the one TV and 4k player for watching movies, but neither are connected to the WiFi device.

[John]

I caught some popcorn making video where the person rendered down bacon to get the popcorn “oil”, added popcorn kernels, salt, and a bit of water. That would be pretty tasty. Just don’t make a ton :)

[John]

Local theater:

* Moana 2 - I didn’t see Moana 1 - Cartoon
* Gladiator 2 - Seriously?
* Red One - Yet another Christmas movie and is that The Rock?
* Wicked - Nah, I’m good.

In a few days,

* Tosca Encore - ? No idea what this is (yes, I can look it up)
* Pushpa The Rule 2 - ? Again, no clue.

Then several old Christmas movies. Christmas Vacation and so on.

For $60 for two? Not going to happen.

[John]

Heck, it’s actually “good enough” picture and sound quality to justify not spending a ton going to a theater. I said up-thread that I’m old enough that the picture and sound quality at a theater isn’t better than what I get at home. :)

[John]

Yea, I was looking over my moving going experience and it’s about a movie every 4 years roughly. The last one my step-daughter wanted to see some 7th sequel to a horror series I’d personally not seen before but I like horror movies and her mom doesn’t.

[John]

I’m an old guy. Sound and Picture quality isn’t better than my home setup as far as I can tell.

[John]

Last my time daughter and I went, it was $60 :) But the same thought. As long as it’s cheaper to pick up the DVD and make my own popcorn, I’m not going to a “pickup” movie. It has to be something I really want to see. Enough that I’m willing to drive to pick up my daughter, drive to the theater, get popcorn and a drink for two, take a seat, then take her home and I head home.

[John]