Flaky_Fish69

oh. sure. that’s why trump won’t be paying his bills…

90’s sitcom. I can hear kramer obsessing about his belly button lint.

next, you’ll tell people the door close button in elevators doesn’t actually work.

macgyver always carried a few slices… in case he needed an industrial sealant…

you have to understand, my dad’s a unix sysops guy. it was quite a lot of spare parts… (mostly machines older than my 486, which was also hand-me-down.)

Also, that imagery might be closer to reality…foam sword and all.

Hehe, that might actually have been more of the Uncle’s influence.

He’s the one that started me on the science fiction addiction- when I got into his (then-complete) collection on VHS. I found them and started. Binge watching them. Got to Trouble With tribbles when I was found out- and then it was my Uncle who was like “oh! That’s my favorite. Rewind it while I go make popcorn!”

well, if it’s your personal mac and you’ll be taking it with you, it’s difficult to see import taxes being a necessary thing.

It’s more the… if a group of people can’t get “good” hardware because of export controls … legally… some might take a shine to yours.

my first beowolf cluster, I built because I wanted to improve my pentium 486’s chances at doing well in some random FOSS benchmark (PiMark? it calculated pi… and you could ‘donate’ cpu runtime to help calculate more digits of pi.) It was cobbled out of my dad’s spare part’s rack.
Should have seen my dad’s face when he realied why i built the beowolf… “You mean… you did this. FOR PI??”(“Okay, that’s actually cool.”)

Also, you gotta be careful with macproducts some places.
Especially if they have export controls (Doubt turkey does, being nato,).

First video game I remember playing? Short Order on NES (with the pad.) That was followed shortly by monopoly- also NES.

First game I beat? was dad’s copy of Zelda (NES,) Which… I wasn’t supposed to be playing. I got caught when I saw my dad was struggling with the water temple.
“Dad…dad DAD. you go here. get that. Do this. And then do this that and this.”
“Oh. Cool. wait. how do you know this?”
“Oh i beat it last week.”
<awkward pause>
“you better pay attention. that’s the boss.”
“We’re not telling mom about this.”

I tip my hat off to you. that was awesome.

Kaspersky. Back when the russians started getting weird with things, and kaspersky… got dubious… I canceled my subscription and switched to a different AV. when it was about to expire, they sent a ‘we’ll automatically renew’. So I tried to log in- my credentials were invalid- I use a PW manager, so no. It wasn’t a bad password-
the password reset option wouldn’t work (literally wouldn’t send the validation link.)
Called their CS who told me that subscriptions were handled by a 3rd party in the US- Digital River.
Digital river said I should cancel it on their website.
got DR and Kaspersky’s CS on the same phone call. they finally complied and canceled the subscription.
A year later… “Your subsctiption will automatically renew!”

called them again. sent a letter. thought that was that until I saw they billed me anyhow.
tried to call them. they were giving me the run around.

Called the bank. to report fraud.
They were useless until I told them my next call would be FBI’s financial crimes people. Suddenly, that charge back became super easy.

I use free BSD. Just so I can flex on the Linux losers.

(Kidding…. BSD is weird. I use whatever flavor of linux happened to be interesting. Debian, fedora, Suse. Arch. Not Ubuntu. LMDE. CentOS. Maybe scientific if I’m planning some stuff with OpenFOAM.)