the spam solution i can't use
I decided to regex everything to keep my email inbox clear of spam, but I have looked into other options.
There is one and only one way that is absolutely guaranteed way to stop all spam, and it's on-the-fly email aliasing.
What this basically means is that everybody, be it a person or business, gets a separate alias address to email you with. With on-the-fly aliasing, you can create an alias whenever you want and immediately start using it. Also, if any alias starts getting spammed, you can delete the alias, make up another one, and that spam problem is solved instantly.
But there are three huge problems with this, even though it absolutely does work to stop spam.
progressives vs. bifocals and trifocals
I'm due for another eye exam. Haven't done it yet, but soon will. For the last two eye exams I've had, it was recommended to me to get progressive lenses. I said no both times because I didn't feel I needed them. But now I'm at the point where I might.
A question then popped into my mind:
"Wait a second.. how come bifocals were never recommended to me?"
After having that thought, I did some research on this, and found out why they were recommended in the first place.
mid-to-late 2000s cadillac navigation systems
This actually isn't just about Cadillac but all luxury cars from the 2005-2012 era.
I'm an unabashed Garmin GPS nerd, and own way too many Garmin nuvi, Drive and DriveSmart screens. Example: I own 3 of 4 of the current line, Drive 53, DriveSmart 66 and DriveSmart 76, with the only one I don't have being the DriveSmart 86). And that's just the newer stuff. I have many older ones going all the way back to the mid-2000s.
And this brings me to navigation systems luxury cars and trucks of that era were using.
Updating the maps on a navigation system offered by Cadillac or any other luxury brand is basically impossible. And what really ticks me off are the reasons why. There are two.
i upgraded to windows 10... from windows 11
I had said back in July last year that I had made peace with Windows 11 in that I accepted its awfulness. As I've said before, while Linux is my daily driver, I keep a second computer with Win11 on it for the very short list of things I need Windows for.
Well, that's changed, because I got spooked.
Windows Update KB5074109 was released, and on "some PCs" it caused Windows 11 to have bugs all over the frickin' place, the worst of which being an UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME error. But then, but then... some users attempting to uninstall that 'update' would encounter error 0x800f0905, effectively blocking the rollback process. And how many is "some PCs"? No idea. Hundreds? Thousands? Many thousands? No clue.
Did my computer go nuts? Fortunately, no, but I think I know why.
wack wack
Search is a thing on the internet and always has been, because how would you find anything otherwise other than word-of-mouth?
I've bounced around with search a lot over the years. In the '90s it was Yahoo!, Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and others. Then came Google. Good for a while, but then started to suck. A lot. Then came AI, which I'll talk more about in a moment.
In the middle of all this craziness was DuckDuckGo, launched in 2008. They have duck.com now, so yeah, easy to remember. I had always known DDG was there but didn't use it much. However, these days, DDG is now my go-to both for search and, believe it or not, AI.