IRC: simplest way of communicating online, and a bouncer can be availed for free
Forums: great store of knowledge and friendly, helpful people. If you ask a question in discord, nobody will ever see the answer again.
Me.
CDs/DVDs/BluRays
I don’t want to support Spotify, which is owned by tencent. I don’t want to spend a fortune on streaming services. I don’t want to sell my data to google by using YouTube, and I want to be able to listen to music/ watch movies when offline.
Is that a recent development?
For me personally? I have been steadily changing the way I source media over the past 2-3 years. Also I lately read more of other ppl going back to physical media for the same-ish reasons.
Pencils. The ones where you need a pencil sharpener to sharpen them every so often. Mechanical pencils just aren’t the same.
Have you tried an auto rotating mechanical pencil?
Other mechanical pencils suck because you get a flat side on the lead. An auto rotating one fixes this problem and makes it like new everytime you pick up and put down the tip to write.
…for fine drafting, rotation is the last thing you want: that chisel-tip is precious, lead holders are love, lead holders are life…
Aren’t mechanical pencils incompatible with scantrons?
Fortran, probably
Buttons, knobs, plastic bezels.
At least according to the industry those are all in the past. The future is screens that go to the very edge of the device and absolutely nothing tactile.
And it is bullshit. It is less reliable, less convenient, less cool – To say nothing of the safety disaster that nailing a tablet computer to the dashboard of every car has been.
Your mom
Safty razors! Why would anyone spend 20$ on the new fangled 30 million blade razor that mighy last one shave? When you can spend pennies even if you change blades every shave.
electric razors are just straight up superior though
Electric and safety razors don’t necessarily serve the same purpose. An electric razor can never cut as close to to the skin as a safety razor. I use both
fair, I don’t care about having a close shave so electric does the job for me
Developers. Yes, AI can sling a lot of code, but it can’t make business decisions and it can’t please a difficult customer.
Measles
Leeches are still used in some surgeries.
Analogue clocks, particularly clock towers in towns, but also just basic clocks on the wall in your home. With smart devices everywhere, it seems like they’re not needed and probably old-fashioned. The circular 12-hour clock face probably feels like the floppy disk icon or the rotary telephone, in terms of how ‘of another era’ it is, but it’s still a fantastic and resilient form factor for the purpose of visualising the passage of time. Digital is great, but analogue will be with us for the foreseeable future (and I’m including in that the representation of analogue in a digital form, e.g. on smartwatches that provide a classic clock face graphic).
Magnetic tape. It’s one of the better long-term offline backup solutions. It is compact, inexpensive, has no moving parts (bearings, motors, reader heads), no scratchable surfaces, and can last for decades in a moderately climate-controlled room.
Just keep it away from magnets… or iron vaults. According to an anecdote (that I can’t find right now), a large bank vault was repurposed as an offsite backup storage, except it kept wiping the magnetic tapes because the thick iron walls reacted to changes in the geomagnetic field.
I’d love to get into tape backups for my stuff. But the price for the drives is absolutely unjustifiable for hobbyists unfortunately.
We used to do tape backups up until about 6 years ago, but our higher headquarters decided they wanted to go all in on Rubrik instead. I will say that it is a lot easier to maintain and conduct restores from, and we have all of our various sites’ Rubriks backing up to each other for redundancy. But you’re definitely right that tape is far cheaper per GiB of storage than anything else.
Correlary: always test your backups and don’t just assume that they will work when you need them.
RSS feeds
I loved netvibes to get daily comics and blog posts. Unfortunately people stopped writing blogs and netvibes is also gone
Blogs are having a timid resurgence I would say. Also not everyone stopped writing blogs, I have been following some since 2008 or so… When Google Reader was a thing lol
I think they are a lot more obscure because we prioritise social networks over blogs, so do search indexers. But they are still there!
Comics are now mostly on Instagram, but you can make Instagram RSS feeds with things like rss-bridge
I setup tinyrss a month or so ago, I just can’t get into it. Any tips?
Into your instance or into RSS in general?
Generally what are you using it for? I’ve had trouble finding uses outside of youtube and a handful of news sites.
I follow some blogs, news sites, and GitHub project releases so I’m up to date to what I’m interested in.
github is a good one, I didn’t think of that. Thank you
I started self hosting my own RSS feed a few years ago, and I couldn’t live without it. It’s the best way to get timely info.
And then you can be the first one to post it on lemmy.
Came here to say this
Phones from 2000-2010. Linux/PostmarketOS allows you to run these as mini webservers with webcam’s built-in (depending on chip support)
Also PostmarketOS are looking for a new name, so if you’ve got a suggestion put it here: https://nextcloud.postmarketos.org/apps/forms/s/cAYZZrCqLnrfMPEMAAonCWwx
