I found 0.3 of a Bitcoin I owned a few years back - I had never paid for Bitcoin, it came from free things like "the bitcoin faucet" and I only had it out of interest to play about with this programming paradigm (blockchain) that had come along.

I made good use of it when I discovered it. Got a few $100 of value out of it for nothing.

Years ago, I mined a block with the spare time on the VPS I used for my websites, mail, etc. That was 50 BTC, dropped into my hands. A year or two later, I got the idea to use it to try to mine more. By that time, CPU mining was no longer feasible. GPU mining was still somewhat profitable, but FPGAs were doing better and the first mining ASICs were about to hit the market. 50 BTC was worth about $650 at the time. I used it to buy a couple of Butterfly Labs ASIC miners (they were supposed to be the USB-powered "coffee warmers," but they ended up shipping small cubes with two chips each (IIRC) to deliver the promised hashrate) and a Radeon RX 6800 to have something to run while I waited for the ASICs to arrive.

If I'd just held onto those 50 BTC, they'd now be worth $3-3.5 million. Even if I'd cashed them in at $1 million or $2 million, it would've been more than enough to quit my job, buy some land, and build a homestead with plenty left over to buy whatever I couldn't grow, raise, or make.

Try exchanging bitcoin (or any other crypto) with no computers or electricity.

Have you not heard of paper wallets? Print one out, transfer some bitcoin onto it, hand it over to somebody. You probably want to write the amount on it somewhere. You can pass it around among people indefinitely.

For a slightly more sophisticated method, there's this note generator that provides standard denominations and a method for the private key to be obscured non-destructively.

Both do ultimately rely on the proper functioning of the network to redeem the stored value. This is analogous to the way you used to be able to redeem paper currency for fixed amounts of precious metals. Until it's redeemed, though, it can be handed off from one user to the next.

I don't think I've ever seen an IDE floppy dive, myself. Every one I used had the floppy drive interface.

LS-120 drives mostly used IDE (and that probably includes the ones installed in an external case with a USB adapter). They had their own 120-MB format they supported, but were also backward-compatible with ordinary floppy disks.

My grandfather had a CoCo. Whenever I visited (which was fairly often as my grandparents were less than an hour away at the time), I worked through the tutorials in Getting Started with Color BASIC . Eventually, I got a TI-99/4A at home, and then an Apple IIe. All of those put me on the path to where I am today, 40+ years later.

So you're saying not to hire people from San Francisco?

Not speaking for the OP, but yes. :)

various Microsoft tools - such as the setup programs for SQL Server Management Studio - like to lock out the Explorer window

I've not observed that behavior in a long time...and as it happens, Winget is upgrading SSMS as I type this. Everything else continues to work as normal while it does its thing.

On what are you basing that statement?

The first meme of the two here explains it.

The ideal is a seedbox somewhere, where one can have all that stuff done offshore, then fetch your goodies via SFTP.

I was doing that for a bit, but then I mashed Transmission and a VPN client together in one container and started using that. Files land directly on my home server, while the VPN endpoint is in a country that takes a more relaxed view of "sailing the high seas." Keeping this URL in your BitTorrent client allows you to quickly verify that the VPN is doing its job.

And this is on Slashdot why?

Ditto. News for nerds? Stuff that matters? I'm not seeing it.

Ungoogled Chromium and SearXNG are your friends. They do what they say they do, without putting your privacy up for sale.

So, building out gas stations all over the country and regularly shipping fuel to each one of them was doable, but connecting chargers to the existing electrical grid is too difficult?

When the grid is barely adequate for the existing load? Yes, building out infrastructure for a fleet of battery-powered devices is pointless, unless you want to also build out a shit-ton of generating capacity to back it up.

You thought wrong. I have seen Vizio TVs at Costco, although not in a while.

My first LCD TV was a 30" Vizio, purchased at Costco the better part of 20 years ago. At the time, it was a relatively inexpensive HD TV from a company nobody had heard of, but it worked like a champ for me...until some asshole broke into my condo and stole it. :-P

...or SmartTube, which also supports SponsorBlock.

What I'd really like to see is an alternative YouTube client that supports Invidious, so you can move your subscriptions off of YouTube's servers. Invidious works pretty well in a browser window, but an app that runs on Android TV, talks to an Invidious instance (I run my own; it's pretty easy to do), and includes SponsorBlock support would be great. I might even be willing to cut a few bucks loose for such an app. :)

Is this real? Do you have a link to verify this?

They've been doing this for several years already, starting at Gen 8 with their "SmartCarrier" trays. This caught me out when I bought a server and some drives separately and set about bringing up the assembled server. See here for more information. I was eventually able to bring it up after putting the drives in a different knockoff SmartCarrier-compatible tray that I found someplace.

I just got my ET-3760 running again after it had clogged so badly it wouldn't print anything. (This cleaning kit works pretty well for fixing that problem, BTW.) I have had to replace the overflow tank (or "ink maintenance box," as the replacement was labeled), but I've not yet run across the page-counter issue you mentioned.

Between that and an HP LaserJet 1320 that's probably approaching 20 years old now (so it predates HP's enshittification by quite some time), my printing needs should be all set for the foreseeable future.