So over the past few years I've seen a pattern, one that has become extremely annoying...

90% of tech has become throwaway nonsense!

Phone screen cracked? back up your files, toss it, buy a new one.

Car trouble?, Pay someone $150+ an hour to "fix" it on their time.

Computer Not turning on?... you going to check the power cable? nope call geeksquad to make sure you didn't unplug from the outlet again.

the list goes on, and while the first one has been a gold mine of free parts as I've learned to recycle other people's junk one thing keeps coming to mind.
WHY?! why do people pay overpriced "specialists" to do simple jobs, why be lazy and not fix it yourself... not like it's actually difficult... in fact it's gotten easier.

Granted if your TV screen is cracked that's one thing, or you need a new windshield... or you need a valve job on your car or alignment done which require special tools but for the easy stuff, why throw it away? why shell out buku bucks for some college student in a back room to fix it in 30 min and charge you for a few hours?
It just doesn't make sense. 

it's not like I'm expecting my grandfather to build a PC from scratch but even he does simple maintenance on his computer with defrag and keeping his anti-virus up to date...
I'm not sure if it's society, laziness, or something else but working in tech support the most irritating thing I hear daily is the following.

"Alright sir is the power off?, good! now i just need you to take the yellow cable labeled printer on the port labeled 1 of that box on top, take it out, and plug it back in."

"I can't do that, I'm not technical, I shouldn't be expected to do this"

Insert facepalm with phone on mute while I figure out how to convince them to do a simple trivial task.

BTW, that yellow cable? is keyed, it can only go in ONE WAY!!!!!

these are people in government jobs that literally make the world work 

anyway, rant over...

what do you prefer to do? do you try to fix things yourself or do you take it to an overpriced repair shop so they can fix problems that in hindsight are probably pretty easy?

Hi,
I am new to the forums, however not to the internet

Well.. I hope to stay here for longer so.. I just wanted to say Hi

wasn't quite sure where to put this so I stuck it in general.

so the quotes cycling through the banner could use some refreshing so I thought hey, why not get some suggestions for some!

so post here any quotes you think would be cool or awesome to have come up on occasion.

I'm opening this thread today because lately I have been playing Simcity 4 a lot in this region, and I wanted to start sharing it with you all, as well as give myself more reason to participate in this here forum!  

Today for you I just have this picture of a Cruise Ship Port I unlocked in the city of Zhurstl, apparently it had many more jobs in commercial than I thought. I may post the area again later when it is fully developed.

Im new here

Hey all. I'm new here. Forum looks really neat!  I found the link on ForumPromotion and thought I'd check it out. : For those who don't know me, I'm Smokey, 28 from the USA, i'm a gamer, webmaster and streamer on Mixer. When I'm not spending time with my girlfriend, i'm usually gaming or posting around forums. Hope to see you all around the forums and have some interesting discussions. 

Final season starts tonight! Exciting stuff!

They get started tonight !

Tampa is the best team and favorite going into them this year..

Washington is the defending champs..

Any thought / predictions what will happen in these playoff this year ?

I've been using my MacBook Pro as my sole compute device for the past few years. It's an old model with a 1280x800 screen. Serves me very well indeed, but I do development on this thing. The screen is a mood killer, 110%. 

Well, I had an old Lenovo G710 (2.5 ghz dual core haswell (4th gen) i5, 16 gigs of RAM, 240 gig SSD), and the thing is gigantic. 17 inches, 1600x900 display, and otherwise a terrible design. Horrible battery life, heavier than the most heavy gaming laptop, and gigantic in just about all regards. 

Windows doesn't exactly boot on this thing, so I started finding some linux distributions. I settled with Deepin, very much by surprise. It's a Chinese linux distribution that isn't particularly popular here in America. From my past couple weeks of rumaging around reddit, it seems like very few people actually use it in the English-speaking community. This was almost a turnoff to me, but I decided to use it for a variety of reasons. I started off very skeptical, but let's just say the experience managed to change my mind.

• The d*** thing is stable as all hell. Even more stable than a fresh install of Mac OS on my Mac. I'm very pleasantly surprised by this. I have had absolutely ZERO issues whatsoever. 
  
• It's extremely fast compared to Windows and Mac OS. Relatively good performance, even for a Linux distro.
  
• The desktop environment is a custom, in house desktop environment from the Deepin team. It is, by far, the most beautiful desktop environment I have ever used. Extremely functional, very well polished and very stable. It somewhat mimics Windows and Mac OS, and is somewhat of a fusion of the best elements of both. 
  
• They included applications for things that often need to be done, such as installing fonts, finding graphics drivers, etc. Most distributions require you to go to a terminal for this. Deepin has it built in the box. These are small details, and are applications you don't think you'll need until you find that you actually do need them. They've actually come in handy for me. Saves me from being in the terminal too much.
  
• Despite being a small distribution, its packages and repositories are great. It's based on Debian, so just about anything that's compatible with Debian will work in Deepin. For better or for worse, Debian (and debian based distros) are well known to have some of the largest repositories available in the Linux community. It seems that Deepin gets most of its packages upstream and has an equally large selection. Considerably better than Ubuntu in that regard, interestingly.
  
• Surprisingly, you can install Unity (game engine), Pycharm, Chrome, and a ton of other applications straight from these repositories and the app store. I was shocked. In Ubuntu, this is only possible by going to the terminal and copy/pasting commands to add unofficial PPAs. These are only compatible with certain releases of Ubuntu, and can break your system if they are poorly maintained. I've never seen a linux distribution offer all of this out of the box in the repositories. 
  
• It somewhat feels like Windows, and is every bit as easy to use. Overall, highly polished. 
  

Shoulda done this way sooner. It's astonishing how much they all try to spy on you.

In short, the pi-hole is a DNS server that acts like your 1GB hosts file on its own by blocking whatever domains you feed it. You can use it as an adblocker, a malware domain blocker or something that just blocks all sorts of gov't/telemetry servers from botnetting you.

I already use ublock origin, so I don't really get any requests to advertising servers, meaning my blocked request log is pretty small so far. But in 12hrs, Microshit has tried to send away my data a total of 400 times:






I strongly advise you set something up like this ASAP.
https://pi-hole.net/
It's a one-line install script on most major linux platforms. Use it on a Pi, one of my friends is currently setting it up on his Ubuntu Laptop. Doesn't matter, just get it up and running.