skype is shutting down
Skype is set to shut down this year, and this made me think of all the internet specific communications stuff I've used over the decades. Yes, it's decades at this point.
In some respects, I miss how internet communications used to be, but it's not like I'd go back to the old ways.
Oh yes, we're going here. I've been going all-in with learning how to do things with optical media lately, so I went ahead and acquired some CD-R discs.
You might be asking why I would even bother with this. I'll answer that.
In '23, I copied a lot of data off a big pile of old (some ancient) discs I had, both CD and DVD. After getting everything copied over and backed up, I vowed I would never return to optical media storage ever again.
Well, that's changed.
There's a shed where I live. It has electricity (ooh, fancy) and in there is a lone CFL bulb that's been in there for... 7 years or close to it? When turned on cold, it takes a good solid minute for the gas to charge so it achieves full brightness.
But once that gas is charged up...
This new guitar from Fender is not going over well, at least from what guitar players on YouTube are saying.
Yes, if you look up Fender Standard Stratocaster, this is a new model at the time I write this. You will see Fender on the headstock, and a price tag below that of a Fender Player Stratocaster. So what gives? Why so cheap?
In my mind, "SSD" doesn't translate to "old", but yeah, that storage tech has been around for a long time.
One of the oldest SSDs I have is a Crucial CT256M4SSD2 that I bought direct from Crucial themselves back in 2012. I don't remember how much I paid for it, but it probably wasn't cheap. This is what that 256GB SSD looks like these days:
Right up front, let it be known this is an out-of-the-box STOCK feature in any modern Linux distribution with KDE Plasma. No plugins or special programs are even necessary to do what you're about to see.
One of the most annoying things about Windows 11 is the taskbar. It's at the bottom of the screen, but that's not the problem. The problem is that you can't move it, nor can you resize it. All you can do is adjust the alignment of stuff to center or left and enable or disable auto-hide. That's it.
There was a way to get a cool floating taskbar in Win11 at one point...
Before I saw this cable, I thought of every type of USB connector type I've ever used. There's "the big rectangle" A type that everybody knows, the one most people call a "printer cable" B type because of it's notchy squared shape, mini USB (all my older Garmins use this), micro USB (smaller and flatter than mini USB), and C (which largely replaced micro USB).
Well, there's a cable that does more, and it's specifically for charging:
I had a "rugged" flash drive, but mine is dead to the world.
I've only seen a flash drive have real-deal hardware failure once before what I'm about to describe. Years ago I had a 512MB (yes, megabyte) SanDisk cruzer, and beat the crap out of that thing. One day, it started rejecting any attempt to write data to it. That's a telltale sign that flash drive has reached the end of its useful life, so yep, stick a fork in it, it's done. Chucked it.
The way this rugged drive failed however... this was not only way different in the way it failed, but rare.
I said recently that Windows 10 will be dead in October. Although my primary computer runs Linux, I do keep a separate Windows laptop for "runs only on Windows" specific stuff. It runs Windows 10. Or rather, it used to. Now it runs Windows 11. It's a bone stock install with the latest version. Thankfully, Win11 doesn't suck as much as it did a year ago.
