Had planned on making a solid dent in Hollow Knight, but so far it’s been just wall-to-wall Lego: Incredibles. Having kids is fun. :P

Using any password manager at all is the most important part. Once you are, you get two main benefits - password uniqueness and password strength.

Uniqueness is important because when one site gets hacked, they’re immediately going to try your email/pw combo on every other site in the world, and if you re-use passwords, you’ve just instantly lost multiple accounts at once. Unique passwords means you don’t have that problem.

Strength is obvious, but using a manager means you can go really hard on strength and still not ever have to remember it.

You then only have to remember one strong pw for your manager account and then that’s it forever.

Bitwarden is my favorite manager, and it’s got a great self-hosted setup with Vaultwarden, but also their regular free plan is good enough for most people and the paid account is pretty cheap if you need multiple organizations. Has passkey and TOTP and everything else you’d expect these days too. Decent mobile apps and browser extensions.

But yeah honestly as long as you are using a password manager at all, that’s the most important part. They’re also usually pretty easy to migrate between if you want to try other ones out.

If it makes you feel any better, the stress of reading through this immediately resolved my constipation.

But in all seriousness, having been through a similar situation recently, hang in there. When you do eventually land something, you’ll be amazed at how quickly that lingering cloud of worry clears up (only to be replaced by the normal getting-exploited cloud, natch).

Oh another good one is substitute teaching - depending on your state it can be pretty easy to get into, provide really flexible scheduling and decent pay, and is really easy just to say you’ve been doing that for the last however long. It’s not exactly in your field but it’s also one that is easy to say you’ve always had a passion for and just wanted to try it out and “give back” or whatever.

I’ve also found that interviewers in the tech field are pretty accepting of the narrative of, “Yeah after the company downsized, I decided to spend some time with the family and we did some traveling and visiting family, and I worked on some personal coding projects or w/e”, basically implying that you were so well compensated at your last spot and you’re so responsible with your personal finances that it was nbd for you to just coast on savings for a year or two.

It’s not yet! I’ll ingest the flacs onto the media server later, but rn it’s unfortunately where I’m listening.

Ok interesting, had heard the other way. I know there’s some of that for xbox game pass stuff, based on play-time and whatnot.

But yeah agreed, claiming/downloading/playing can probably only be good for them in one way or another, so just don’t do it.

Yeah that’s what I mean. “Claiming” your free copy counts as a sale, in one form or another.

Gonna pick this up soon. Listening to the older stuff on sp*tify and it’s chunky as hell, I love it. It’s giving old Sleep vibes. Very cool stuff so far, looking forward to the new disc.

Just putting this out there, but usually devs get paid based on number of downloads in these freebie deals, so downloading it for free still helps them.

So ya know, don’t download it.

Ya know, that’s a good point. Especially on an item like this, it would be very easy to drop this thing as a quick seasonal cash-out and then disappear into the night with the bag after liar-Santa tells millions of kids about [insert any of the gross stuff AIs talk about these days].

Yeah just saw in the store the other day a phone (like old school landline rotary phone) that would let kids talk to an AI Santa. It came with 60 mins of talk time and the option to buy more, apparently.

I can only imagine the weird sicko shit you could get that Santa-bot to say with a little effort. I’m sure they put heavy-duty chicken-out guardrails on it, but so far it seems like those are not very effective, as this article demonstrates.

Definitely! Did that for the homelab. Other goals here include something more streamlined for the living room setting, and reliability cuz the kids are going to be crawling all over this thing.

External gpu enclosure goes huge on price, but yeah good for expandability. Looking at a unit now with an amd 4800u for <250, which is probably about what most enclosures I’ve seen run for, let alone the actual card. Some day though…

Yeah that’s one of the generic brands I’m looking at. They’ve got skus all over the price range. Glad to hear a good experience with them!

Picked up Hollow Knight for real after putting it off all this time, and now hearing about Silksong nonstop lately. Really fantastic game. Difficulty is for real, but it feels pretty fair. Just got the dream-nail and am hunting for essences, so I think I’ve still got a lot to go.

Biggest mistake was picking it up on switch, just because it turns out to be where my kid wants to play all their games too, so finding time to play has been tricky.

Mealie does this, and is pretty good at it. It’s got an API too, so should be possible to hook up together somehow, but I’ve never gone that far with it.

It’s really cool, but yeah definitely overkill. Didn’t try the calendar stuff much. I do like being able to make meal plans based on actual inventory levels, but obviously it’s a lot of maintenance to get to that point (probably easier to manage if you set up the barcode scanning and everything). I probably would have gone harder into it if the recipe builder was a little easier to use or if it integrated with something like Mealie.

It’s a thing from like trade shows and county fairs. The hucksters there will have their little portable PAs and the goofy mic setup is a staple from those. His aggressive sales approach in the original ads is directly lifted from that environment.

I got a stack of Wii points that I never even spent

A little bit of this, but just keep in mind that if the kids are not on a (extremely restrictive) “kids” account, the they also have access to things like, ya know, all the Deadpool movies (found that one out the rad way).

Haven’t played beat saber in a long time, but my go-to track for rhythm games was always Wildcat by Ratatat. Has a really nice groove that builds over time and then drops in a big way. Always seems to get picked up nicely in games that let you use your own tracks, too.