Defederate them, let them stew in their own isolated island of hate and bile… fuck the lot of them.

The Olympics used to be for amateurs only and athletes who were professional and earned their living from a sport weren’t allowed to compete. I remember reading about the UK’s Torvil & Dean figure skaters who after their win at the olympics in the 80’s went pro… and a couple of olympics later there was massive debate and changes to rules to allow them to compete again.

All the modern olympics of the last 30-40yrs are about is faux national pride and money… same for the bodies of all sports… they’re all corrupt and they’re all about stockpiling as much cash as they can for bribes and kickbacks… some of them like FIFA have hundreds of millions of cash reserves… But they don’t pay countries to host the world cup, the countries pay them, pay for the construction, pay for the infrastructure and FIFA reaps in the sponsorship and TV money.

I grew up in a city that has hundreds of miles of cycle paths, you could ride anywhere without ever having to ride on a main road, only the occasional first/last section to get to a house/shop. The nearest path to my old house was 150 yards down the road and when I was growing up before I started driving at 17 (mid 90’s), we used to ride everywhere. It was about 8 miles from corner of the city to the other.

As I got older and relied on a car… I found myself missing cycling. So in 2017, I got a 21spd hybrid city bike… Alas, I discovered that injuries and post op limitations restricted me to at best… 5-6 miles and I was exhausted.

So in 2022, I got myself an e-bike. A Haibike Trekking with the bosch mid drive system. I can now ride with ease once more.

Alas… I also moved from that city with hundreds of miles of cycle paths a few months after getting it… Now I live near to the sea and mountains… and there are 2 cycle routes near me. One I can do a 9m round trip, it would be longer but for some daft reason they never finished the path around the reservoir and it’s boggy and muddy for 5 months of the year or any time it rains in the other 7 months. The other route means riding about 1/2 mile through town to pick up the nearest path and then you’ve got about 7 more miles of pretty flat, open countryside next to a river… but also next to flood planes. So at this time of year, it can flood a section about 1/2 a mile long at the 2.5m mark (from my house). Oh and that first route, also floods long before you ever get to the reservoir restricting your ride to at best 4 miles in total there and back… it’s only 9 miles without the flooding.

I can do an 8 mile trip to an estuary and add another 1 mile I’m on the edge of a huge forest… 2 further miles through the forest and I’m at the beach… making it a 22 mile round trip… But the stony, gravel roads aren’t exceptionally suited to my city bike. I’ve bought reinforced tyres and puncture proof tubes… so maybe I’ll give it a shot next year.

For now, it’s unlikely I’ll be getting much riding done until March.

I pay £10 a month in the UK for 25GB data and unlimited texts and calls within the UK (not including premium rate numbers). I rarely ever use more than 1-2GB of data because I’m always on wifi at home, and never use public wifi when out and about… and because I work from home. When I got out, it’s often for exercise, a meal or to visit friends/family (using their wifi)…

I haven’t paid more than £10 a month for about 15yrs now… used to be a meagre 500MB data to begin with… it just kept increasing.

For people thinking about taking up this offer, make sure you have a large enough garden, and know that your insurance will increase your premiums if you have a tree within 5 meters of the property… because tree roots can damage the foundations and potentially void your insurance if you fail to inform them.

I lay in bed at night looking up at the stars and the only thing I’m thinking is ‘Where the fuck is my ceiling’

Manchester police had a higher body count than the attacker is not the kind of headline that makes them look good.

I used to have a wileyfox phone using cyanogen OS, which was a fork of android with a lot of security and privacy features. That forked again into lineage OS at some point in the latter half of the 2010’s.

I mostly stuck with motorola phones after that, as close to a vanilla OS as possible without going google… but I stupidly bought a Pixel 6 Pro about 2.5yrs ago… the price was hard to ignore, but regretted it ever since.

I only replace phones when the become obsolete and security is an issue, or the phone actually fails… this one is going strong and I keep meaning to look if it can easily be jailbroken to install and alt OS… But it’s been a very long time since I did anything like that and I find myself falling behind on modern tech stuff as I get into middle age.

I pay attention to everything, and refuse to install any apps. I block 90% of the data from apps I have installed, only allowing a couple to access certain things (banking for example). The first thing I do with any android phone is go through and disable all of the bloat from google, disable chrome and turn off most of the settings. Install a decent browser and plugins to block tracking, ads and so forth. I don’t install social media apps, in fact I’m not on any corporate owned social media, I use signal/telegram for messaging… I deleted old SM accounts starting in 2012 with facebook and ending with twitter in 2018. I use email services like a duck.com address or proton mail for online signups where required, along with alias spam accounts for certain things that can easily be deleted and stop spam.

From next year, I will only be buying phones that can be jailbroken and an alt OS installed.

I go even further with my home PC’s to protect my privacy… I can’t stop it all, but I can render what they do collect as worthless as possible.

One of the reasons you gen x kids got to run around un-tethered was because women weren’t even allowed economic independence until the mid 70’s… Women couldn’t get a credit card or loans without their husbands consent and signature.

Divorce rates didn’t spike because of ‘feminism’ it spiked because women weren’t forced to be in unhappy marriages with abusive partners because they literally couldn’t exist and survive outside of the financial dependency they were forced to endure.

I’m technically gen X myself (79)… right at the end of it. So I’ve never lived in a world where that was a thing. Why some men still think that women need to be tied to the kitchen sink only shows their own fears and ignorance… they’re afraid of becoming irrelevant in society after centuries/millennia of repressing women to possessions… that’s pretty fucking sick.

No… most misogynistic, insecure and incel type men want that… a real man is happy to see women (of all genders) gaining more power and places in the world.

I’ve not looked into anything yet… I’m reaching that age where I’ve just become closer to 50 than 40… and I find myself starting to become reluctant to dive in and learn a whole new OS after decades of trying to learn everything.

I started buying games on steam, way, way back in the 2000’s… long before any of the enshitification began… and you’re not allowed to own anything any more… I switched to GOG for buying games, as I do own them and can download and keep them for life… But after being converted away from… erm… acquiring games via alternative methods… I’m looking to acquire them again… even games that I bought and paid for simply for the hassle free experience of not needing to be online 24/7 and having DRM degrade the performance.

Have you tried using grayjay for youtube access without the tracking and data harvesting?

As for office software, libreoffice is something I’ve been using for ages now, I’m stuck on windows 10 for the moment… really need to dive into some form of linux… thinking proton as I do game a fair bit.

I’ve currently got a pixel 6 pro phone, and a HMD T21 tabelt… would really like to install lineage OS on both if possible… don’t know where to start. I used to have a wileyfox phone 10yrs ago, which used cyanogen OS… which I do believe forked into lineage OS. So I know how good the degoogle aspect was back then, plus the increased security measures built in.

I block as much as I can across all devices, and do my best to render what they can collect worthless… I use a VPN 24/7, block all scripts, trackers and cookies, sandbox sites in their own containers… quit facebook 13yrs ago… use mastodon, lemmy, signal & telegram only… have to suffer a whatsapp account for family only. Proton mail linked to an @duck.com email… so I never get emails sent to gmail, I use an old outlook email alias for spam signups and only check it if I need to confirm an email addy.

I’ve turned of everything I can with my phone, from location to anything to do with ai… I refuse to buy ‘smart’ devices that can be bricked or updated remotely from some company servers, or forced to connect to them to simply work… I own what I buy, so never buy digital goods (aside from some games from Steam/GOG) and only pay for Netflix streaming service… maybe I should roam the 7 seas for stuff too.

I’m thinking about building a pi-hole and setting up home assistant to eliminate the 2 internet connected devices in my home whjich is the thermostat for my heating and the solar/battery system which I use to monitor the data from the house.

In some countries you can, I believe Canada is one of them… at least I believe it’s legal to do so in Toronto.

Always makes me laugh when people say HDD is dead… as a home user, when I can buy solid state storage in the 20TB range for my home server for less than a HDD… I’ll consider believing them.

They simply don’t make any consumer SSD larger than 8TB and for the SATA SSD side, it’s well over £500 for one of them, meanwhile you can get 20TB HDD for about £300 here.

Last year the price of a Samsung 870 SSD was £300, I bought one, they’ve not been below £500 since.

I never thought I’d hear a positive school shooting story come out of the USA… is that ‘light’ enough to be banned from the Fascist States of America