Most recent, but not the absolute worst, was ripping my pants at work. I bent down to pick something up and heard the rip. It was over my crotch region too. Thankfully I had boxers on but was still pretty embarrassed.

Thankfully my boss was cool about it and I just drove over to Costco down the street and got a new pair and changed in the back of my car. He make a joke when I got back which was fine.

Not to mention it was a smart home with all kinds of AI minus the “artificial” part of AI.

Been that way for a while on my iPhone and I’ve never had Premium or whatever the fuck YouTube calls their paid subscription now.

It doesn’t work on music videos or videos that are for the music, like music with an album art in the background unless YouTube hasn’t categorized it correctly.

It was mainly around Ubisoft’s The Crew as the latest conversation. This was about a month ago.

Ubisoft took the game offline and also removed from customers’ digital libraries with a message suggesting they try the newer installments in the series instead of the game they paid for.

I think your cert plans are good, but I think you should also get a Microsoft cert relating to security as well just to diversify and also be appealing to orgs that are using Defender and give you another perspective. Microsoft has exam vouchers every so often so you have the opportunity to schedule an exam for free if you participate too.

I am currently unofficially the security guy at my job in my role because no one else was taking it on and I have similar goals as you and this is the route I’ve been taken thus far.

If you have the freedom in your current role, see if there are any security related tasks you can take on to gain some experience if that sounds appealing too.

Yeah the ones at the Post Office, right?

I’ve been into 3D printing for a few years now and it’s been a really fun hobby that has grown over the years.

I started with a cheap FDM printer which basically is the most common kind that extrudes plastic onto a build plate to create a 3D object. I then began learning how to create my own objects in various CAD programs like Fusion 360 and even Windows 10/11’s 3D Builder. I started making small alterations to existing objects I found online. The first was because the object I wanted was too large for my small print bed so I learned how to modify the model on my own in the CAD software. I then began doing more complex things like creating objects from scratch to be used. I’m mostly into practical printing but there are a lot of people who choose this for miniatures like for DnD and Warhammer or for creating cosplay armor/accessories.

Most recently, I moved into resin printing (SLA) which is different than FDM in using liquid resin and lasers to create the 3D objects. This is more expensive and more hands on in terms of needing post processing and also more safety involved because resin is toxic to breathe in and also hazardous to the touch, but has been very satisfying and a joy. The level of detail is much higher quality on SLA than FDM, generally feeling like something you’d actually find in a store than something that has noticeable lines straight from a FDM printer bed. Not that you can’t achieve similar qualities with FDM, but it just will require more work like sanding and polishing.

Similarly, my girlfriend likes to crochet and we both have grown to find commonalities in our hobbies. I recently created and 3D printed a crochet hook for her with a cute little buddy on top which she has been awing over the past week.

We have gone to some local street fair events and often find people who are selling their crocheted and 3D printed stuff, usually like stuff animals and desk toys, respectively.

But if you feel burnt out, you may need something else in your life. Maybe to find a more fulfilling purpose like helping others? Speaking from experience, some of my burnt out feelings have been “fixed” when I spend time helping others and being a source of strength for someone else. I find myself most satisfied when I have been able to improve someone else’s life in some way. Just to throw that possibility out there too.

Don’t put up with abuse. I let a woman take advantage of me and abuse me, mentally, emotionally, and physically, for almost 4 years. I was determined not to hit the 4 year anniversary, but I feel stupid letting it go on at all. She still tries to reach out and every now and then but I’m over it. I let her have a ton of control over my life back when we spent time together.

It was hard dealing with it and it was hard getting over her.

I remember feeling dumb as a kid when the teacher had us try. I legitimately couldn’t replicate any of those areas shown in the textbook.

Could be market share. More PSN accounts than Nintendo and Xbox in competition.

Just to play devil’s advocate here.

But I’m with you, either selling data or both of these.

You’re unfortunately correct. IT departments will just implement a new GPO to modify registry or otherwise hope to block this or pause this update until they absolutely have no choice and then hope for the best or hope to block it later down the line.

Same here. I tell people that it’s my reminder of my mortality and how fragile life actually is. Treat each day as your last and live as if you won’t be here tomorrow, because it is promised to no one.

I had GamePass for a few years and just canceled last month. I barely used it anymore except for Minecraft and Halo Infinite and don’t play those anymore. I might even own Minecraft and have forgotten.

But then I signed back up for Nintendo Online because my girlfriend and her son just got Switches and we play Animal Crossing together. But it’s not as much as GamePass so not that big of a deal.

But I’m sick of subscriptions for shit I don’t even use. Everything nowadays has to be a subscription for no reason. Nintendo doesn’t even provide anything of valuable for theirs since I can’t even talk over it. I’m just paying for what used to be free on their past consoles.

I kept wondering what would keep me from updating to newer versions of Windows.

Yeahhhh…this is it. This and the inevitable forced Microsoft accounts that will come with this.

The Microsoft of the past was evil, but at least you could pay for an upgrade to the enterprise version that didn’t include this bullshit, but even the enterprise versions suffer from this stuff too!

They’re kind of working on one device that is basically smaller than an Apple TV and will connect to your TV and is thought to be strictly for streaming games and nothing more. Essentially would be this since you have no storage or resources for locally stored game playing.

This small device was seen on a shelf in a live stream a few years ago and there were some other rumors surrounding it.

I’m using an app on my iPhone called NFC Tools right now to do this so I can get you the numbers.

I just scanned one of my Amiibo tags (Legend of Zelda - Link, 8-bit) and it says that it is 540 bytes in size. This was one I copied over to an existing tag. It says it is 135 pages (4 bytes each).

Meanwhile scanning my debit card doesn’t seem to give me a size…

Here are screenshots so you can see what I see:

And I also captured the signal when trying to do Apple Pay from my Apple Watch and this was the result

I’m guessing these are encrypted which is why I don’t get the same data and makes sense now that I think about it. You could do some heavy damage to someone through this method if left open.

Perhaps it might work? You may have to be rooted on Android for your phone to be the tag to then make purchases. But being rooted and banking apps often don’t play nicely together, so you won’t be able to access your banking app on the phone if that’s something you’ll want to do alongside this.

If you want to go the route of just being able to backup and then copy it to a blank tag, I bought some off Amazon. They have cards the size of a credit card and also little circles too. But these seem to be permanent, like you write once to it and that’s it. There’s also a storage limit on them, so in the case of the Amiibo, I couldn’t scan them to the credit card sized ones because they weren’t large enough to store Amiibo data. You can also buy devices that will be the tag and cycle through like the Flipper Zero does but just for this purpose. Most of these seem to be for people like me doing it for Amiibo so no idea if it would work on this.

Which this now makes me remember something slightly unrelated I saw on Instagram…some people have taken the chip off of their cards and then put them in things like one guy cut the chip off and then submerged it into resin and made a ring which he could then scan at the Google Pay registers. Biggest issue I see with this is (besides the amount of time and work) that the card has an expiration date, so will inevitably useless after some time lol. But a neat idea, nonetheless.

You can do that as well for some NFC tags on your smartphone. On my iPhone, I can read and write in an app called Ally for Amiibo backups. There are similar apps for the same sort of thing for other NFCs. You can scan them in your phone and then write them to another device.

I have read online that jailbroken and rooted devices have the capability to be the tag as well, so you can use your backup on your smartphone instead of having to write it to a blank tag.

If you didn’t buy up studios and then close them in a year, I think that would be even better for the business side of things. You know, the fact the business didn’t get arbitrarily shut down by the big corporation and all that.

But that’s just me.

One recent example I can give you is XnView. It’s a program that is free for personal use as an alternative to some specific Photoshop suite as well as some other paid photo viewers like ACDSee. But if you’re going to use this for any sort of commercial use, you need to pay for licenses for all computers you use this on. Such was the case for us since we needed it where I work.

Admittedly it’s integrity based for most of these programs. They are hoping that you are going to be honest about your usage and pay when you use it for commercial use. There doesn’t appear to be telemetry that reports back your usage as this is usually just some guy releasing his personal project. In the case of XnView, I feel it was a guy who was fed up with more recent updates to ACDSee and made his own that mirrors the older versions and just works.

We bought the licenses but I never really felt they were necessary to activate. But we had the proof if we were ever audited that we paid for commercial usage.

I pirate some stuff in my personal life, but these little guys who do this are seriously awesome and I try my hardest to follow their rules since it’s so convenient and helpful in my search and their approach is not ever privacy intrusive.

Another example would be WinRAR, if I remember correctly. They expect businesses to pay to use it but the general public of users just using it at home get the free, infinite “trial”.