I have a work phone and a personal phone. The work phone i answer calls from I known numbers all the time. My contact information gets passed around as part of my business. For a while I had scammers hitting my number 3-4 times per day. I answered and fucked with them every time. A little free stress relief through the day. Now I almost never get them anymore.

My personal phone I have always screened all the calls. It still gets hit with scammers 2-3 times per week.

I guess you are right. There is a list going around of numbers who waste their time.

Write a series of single query per e-mail.

Set then up on delayed delivery every hour through their workday.

It only takes once or twice until people read your entire e-mails.

I have been attempting to use Linux for 20 years now. It has found its niche used for me over the years. For example when my kids were toddlers they had a old machine that defaulted to PBSkids. Before that I used it to run a gaming server.

Currently I have a old laptop that I dual boot with win 10 and whatever Linux distro I feel like trying at the moment.

The win 10 on the laptop barely meets the minimum hardware requirements and takes 10 minutes to load.

I have tried a few different distros and always had a few issues with the setup. All sorts of different ones - screen orientation, WiFi connection, printer hell, keyboard layout etc. Takes me days to fix the bugs or give up.

Mint takes 2 minutes to load and so far is working seamlessly. It’s apt manager is the easiest I have used in a Linux distro. It found my network printer automatically. It runs smoother than windows 7 did on my laptop.

With Microsoft ending win 10 for the shitty win 11, I imagine many people are looking for alternatives. If Mint continues to work to make setup and usage easy, it will gain market share rapidly. It’s not all the way there yet, but it’s a hell of a lot better than before.

A long time ago I was the guinea pig/first user for a company developed system.

I often had my 1 year old at the time son with me when I worked on the weekend. He had a great time smashing buttons on the keyboard and randomly clicking the mouse on the test version. He found most of the bugs.

I have to use an iPad for work. I was also forced to use one of their phones as a while back. I have unhappily used the iOS system for about 7 years now.

A few additional things:

I have attempted to use multitasking on it. Every update changed it’s behavior and they are all unintuitive. I gave up and use my phone for the second task.

The settings menu can burn in hell. It’s an absolute hot mess that’s worse than anything else I have seen.

I use a Bluetooth keyboard at times. In order to use it I have to leave an annoying floating “accessibility” circle on the screen when it’s not connected. In order to turn it off, it’s buried somewhere in the hellish settings menu.

Apps crash about 2x more often on it than on any other system I have used. Especially after an update before the inevitable small fix comes out a few weeks later.

The updates go through an endless cycle of adding bugs then killing bugs then adding new bugs. One of my favorites bug was when I had the phone years ago. They somehow broke the search functions in contacts and took them 4 months to fix it. My company had loaded 3,000 corporate contacts Into the phone… Fun times.

Then there are all the hidden gestures that are completely illogical. I turn gestures off on my android phone for a reason.

Never had good luck with anything netgear.

I have used Motorola’s and have never had one crap out on me. I just replaced my old 3.0 modem with the MB8611 and so far it is working flawlessly.

If you do a lot of printing, the Epson Ecotank printer is really good. My wife goes through 2-3 boxes of paper per year. I refill the tanks 2 times per year. A full set of bottles is $45-50.

It’s nice that the are going directly opposite that HP.

Just ran through and used it yesterday. Then I did some searching and still found some comments in open subs.

Those comments don’t show up my user profile. They also don’t show up in the delete log.

Reddit up to it’s normal shenanigans.