Oh really? Man, I thought I was doing good. I never see ads since I use uBlock Origin.

I’m curious to know people’s thoughts on Startpage. I’ve been using it exclusively for a good couple months now and like it.

Not a clue, I only use the built in TV tuner program in Linux Mint. I forget what its called, but it does a decent job.

I have a Hauppage TV tuner card that I use to get OTA TV and record certain shows. I’m pretty sure there are USB solutions, but if I remember, at the time I got this it was one of the only cards that my system supported or whatever caveat I was operating around.

Duuuude, mobidex has such a cool sound to it. Real star trek vibes. I wish.

Sorry for your loss

Another thing that I’m not seeing people mention is helium balloons wandering to places like power substations and/or power lines, causing outages or even fires/explosions depending.

I liked what someone else said about writing thoughts or stories and having them read anonymously.

Thank you for this treasure, and I’m sorry that you had to endure such a thing. May no man need to deal with what adj16 has.

You know we all have to know now. You can’t say some wackadoo shit like that and not expect questions. Let’s have it. Come on now.

Thanks Michael Scott!

We had a guy throw spoiled meat all over the breakers one time. He was mad at us that the power went out and his food in his freezer all defrosted and went bad. He has a substation right behind his house, so he went to town. Real cool dude.

I know most of these stories are going to be IT or food service, so I’ll chime in with mine to change it up.

TLDR: We caused some explosions on a transformer because someone didn’t read test results.

I work for a power utility. One night, we were energizing a new transformer. It fed a single strip mall complex with a major grocery chain on it, so that’s why it was at night, as we couldn’t affect the service while they were open.

Anyways, we go to energize, close the primary switches and one of the lightning arrestors blows up. And I mean blows up, like an M80 just went off. Lit up the sky bright as day for a couple moments at 1 in the morning. The protection opened the switches and everybody is panicking, making sure nobody was hurt.

Well after everybody settled down, the arrestor was replaced, they decide to throw it in again. Switches come closed, and explosion #2 happens. A second arrestor blows spectacularly. I tried to convince the one supervisor on site to go for a third time, because why not, but he didn’t want to do it again. Whatever.

A few days go by and we find out what the issue was. This transformer was supposed to be a 115kV to 13.2kV. Come to find out there was an internal tap selection that was set for 67kV for the primary, and not 115kV. So what was happening was the voltage was only being stepped down half as much as needed so there was like 28kV or so on the secondary instead of 13.2kV and that was over the lightning arrestors ratings, hence why they were blowing up. So the transformer had to have its oil drained, guys had to go inside it and physically rewire it to the correct ratio.

We had a third party company do the acceptance testing on this transformer, and our engineering department just saw all the green checkmarks but didn’t pay attention to the values for the test results. Nobody expected to run into this because we don’t have any of this type of transformer in our system, but that’s certainly no excuse.

Moral of the story: read your acceptance test results carefully.

The Room by Tommy Wiseau. I know it’s like a cult classic for being bad, but the first time I watched it, I made sure to view it as unironically as possible. It’s an atrocious movie for what a movie should be.

If you want to watch something cringy and terrible to mock and laugh at, this movie is so much better. But if you watch this movie wanting it to be a proper movie that took itself seriously (which was its original intention) it is fucking terrible.

I also really don’t like ads, but I think what’s lately been bothering me more is every short form video that exists has subtitles added to the middle of the video. I can’t even look at the videos because I hate getting distracted by the unnecessary text in my face. Like just let me watch your video, I don’t need you to spoon feed me the words too.

Oh my god, this statement hits too hard, especially relating to my wife and things like this. She’s very resistant to change.

My wife turns off the WiFi on her phone to avoid the pihole. She does this so she can watch the ads in her games to get an extra life or whatever. You’ll never win on that front and I won’t either.

I literally just had this happen a couple days ago. I dual boot with Linux Mint and I generally don’t go into windows except for specific use cases. So sometimes it can be a while between boots for windows on my system.

I had to use a windows only program, but it was a quick 5 minute thing. Finished my task, shut it down and I get the update prompt. Fine windows, update and shutdown. Of course it reboots, but it defaults into Mint and I’m confused for a minute why my PC is still on when I come back.

As a long time dabbler and recent full on Mint user, I would recommended either Ubuntu or Mint for a first timer for sure. I would say that I enjoy Mint more just because I like the look and feel of the Cinnamon DE more over the Gnome DE or whatever it is that Ubuntu ships default with. Mint is very easy to use, doesn’t have lots of major updates all the time so it doesn’t break and it’s relatively light weight.

Hypercooled dairy sugar blend

A phone app?! Why didn’t I think to look for that. I’ll give that a look as well. Man I’m glad this community is full of troubleshooters.

Good to know. My PC is a dual boot with Windows 11, so no problems there. Thank you for the advice, I’ll be sure to update after I give it a shot.