Got expedition 33 running on the steam deck (with some amount of tweaking to make it run smooth - valve should not be marking that game as verified) and it has absorbed every moment of free time I have. Fully understand the hype now. Apart from that, Outer Wilds had been sitting in my library since the summer sale untouched and I’ve finally gotten into it, and Dispatch was really fun and beautifully animated.

I bought an artificial one second-hand which felt like the most sustainable option - not cutting a tree down every year and not paying for virgin plastic either. Charity shops here are usually filled with pretty nice ones since a lot of people seem to replace their plastic trees far more frequently than they should.

You can use uBlacklist with a list of AI websites to filter out a ton of crap in search results. It’s good for blocking out AI slop websites but probably won’t be too effective for individual YouTube videos.

I don’t think this place is big enough yet for my conspiracy theory to make any sense, but if I was the CEO of a company like Reddit and I wanted to prevent users moving to Lemmy I would make a bunch of accounts on here and spark as much drama and infighting as possible. And there’s been so much of it lately, whether it be callout posts on different instances or people concern trolling under posts, that it does feel so inorganic. When you come on here hoping for a better place and you see users writing mini manifestos calling out another user’s character flaws, it is extremely offputting.

Ours was “{town} Free Wi-Fi” when we lived in the town centre for a while, just to confuse tourists. It was more of a getting stabbed area than a fun SSID name area though.

Bloons TD fits this for me, I play it when I’m too ill to think properly but still need something to pass the time

He’s been chasing the far-right for the past year under the belief that he can win those voters back by adopting their political positions but it’s not working. I think he thinks this makes him look tough on immigration, but ID cards are a really unpopular policy in the UK and it will not go down well at all with the public.

For some reason ID cards have been an obsession of successive Labour prime ministers, and this policy was pushed by a thinktank led by Tony Blair, who tried and failed to bring in mandatory ID when he was prime minister in the noughties. So I think it’s a bit of both where he genuinely does want to bring these in, but he seems to think it’ll help him win favour with right wing voters.

These are to be mandatory for every adult in the UK and require installation on a smartphone, all just to appease the far-right. It feels like the UK gets more authoritarian every day.

Deliveroo in the UK does this, although I don’t think anyone actually calls them ‘riders’ except for the company themselves. It is a weird term to use.

When I was 5, then I seemingly got better as a teenager and didn’t need an inhaler for about ten years. I got covid in my early twenties and got re-diagnosed after it ruined my lungs. And I do mean re-diagnosed, they wouldn’t prescribe me new inhalers from my original diagnosis after ten years of not taking them and I had to get a peak flow prescribed and do the tests over the phone since we couldn’t do it in person thanks to the pandemic.

Moved from Android on a Samsung S24 to /e/OS on a fairphone 6 and will probably move to Lineage if and when there’s a build for this phone. It’s been fairly frictionless but I was already pretty degoogled by now so the only big change was losing contactless and I just keep my card in my phone case now instead for the same effect. Even though One UI on the Galaxy has its problems, I think it’s a better UI than the stock Android UI which /e/ uses. Apart from that, I’m pretty happy with it so far, even if it isn’t the gold standard that Graphene is. I can’t see myself ever moving to iOS though, I would probably prefer a basic flip phone.

I think a lot of non-techie people only know signal from the Trump admin using it illegally earlier in the year. In a lot of people’s minds because of that they think Signal = insecure because they don’t get the nuances of why using it in that specific context – on personal phones, using a third party app, with a random journalist in the mix – was bad, but that for most people it’s still one of the best options. WhatsApp on the other hand has a lot of marketing around it and if you didn’t know that Meta is Facebook I think some people wouldn’t even realise who the owners are.

I did it so much in a retail job that the supervisor told me to stop saying sorry all the time and of course I immediately replied “sorry.” Being autistic and socially anxious will do that unfortunately. It’s taken time and I’ve gotten a bit better at not apologising for things that aren’t my fault, but it’s still an annoying habit.

Here’s the guide they have. I had a couple pairs to do it for (myself + my partner’s switch) and I think the first one took about half an hour but it gets easier once you’ve done the first one. The comments that people have left as well are good if you’re stuck, there’s some techniques in there that work better than some of the stuff in the official guide.

For photos, immich is great if you’re willing to self-host. It’s pretty much a drop-in replacement for Google photos, and lets you tweak the machine learning and stuff like that if you want automated identification of your photos. A raspberry pi is enough to get going, maybe something fancier if you want the machine learning. Google Drive can be replaced with Nextcloud as well if you go down the self-hosting rabbit hole.

Ente is probably your best bet if you don’t want to host anything yourself. I used proton drive for photos before but thought it wasn’t particularly suitable as if you’re looking for a particular photo it takes ages for it to load from their servers.

Also an autistic vegan here! I’d wager that the % of autistic people in the vegan community is higher than in the general population. I didn’t do it for any health reasons, but going vegan was a nice way to find out I’m lactose intolerant and food isn’t supposed to hurt.

The Dark Hedges. Not our number one tourist destination, but probably the most overrated one. It’s some trees that appeared in Game of Thrones and the over-tourism + the increase in stormy weather thanks to climate change is killing them.

We’ve more popular places like the Giant’s Causeway and the Derry walls, but those places are worth visiting at least.

I graduated university a couple years ago and I felt in the same boat coming up to final exams. Like others have said, you almost certainly know more than you think. You’re at the start of the final year as well so you have a lot of time to get ready.

Most IT/programming jobs will train you on the job and I haven’t heard of anyone coming into a role who’s expected to know everything, so I wouldn’t worry about that too much. Getting the job will be the harder part, and the best thing I did was to consider my past experience and apply to jobs tightly related to that. I’ll not dox myself so these will be fake details but that meant if I’d done a work experience position doing tech support for an accountancy firm, I’d have focused my applications on those companies. If you have a final year project to complete for a dissertation, see if you can tailor that to what you think are your best chances of a job. E.g. you did work experience doing IT support for a law firm, and your final year project has to be related to improving human rights, so you could develop a CRUD application to connect defendants to good pro bono lawyers. If there are law firms near you hiring for IT, that sort of thing that will help you stand out in an interview with them. I think I did only two interviews before getting a job offer with that tactic and I know others with the same degree who graduated the same day as me that still haven’t found anything.

And outside of uni/college, is there anything in IT and computer science that interests you? I found that university killed my joy for it and I’ve only rediscovered it since graduating. Building a JavaScript web app for my final year project, led me to wanting to program some discord bots, from there onto using a raspberry pi to host them, and then into doing some self hosting and networking with the likes of Docker and WireGuard. Some of that has come in handy in work, especially when using linux servers, but it’s stuff I do cause I just enjoy it and it so happens to give me some experience. There are tons of open-source projects you can work on to get experience with different parts of IT, and you’re on a good website for it since most of us on here are Linux nerds.

That’s a fair point. I suppose like any movement there’s a wide spectrum of people and one end of the spectrum would be those who are as strict as that. I don’t think it’s very productive to be that strict though, certainly where I live and with the health conditions I have it would be impossible to live life so strictly compared to someone in top health living in a major city.

There is a surprising amount of debate over that in vegan circles. Beyond Meat taste test their burgers against cow burgers to compare the flavour and some vegans will say you can’t consider those burgers vegan while others would say it’s a very small amount of animal consumption to allow for a vegan burger that might help convert more people and so the benefit outweights the harm massively. I’m vegan and I don’t really know what side to lean towards, but there’s debate over everything from honey to almonds, and debate on whether it’s acceptable to order vegan food from non-vegan restaurants, just as examples.