I wonder if it has something to do with “frogs” in bricks - frogs being the concave indentation in the surface of a brick. “Stitching” kind of works with masonry as well…

You’re clearly being watched!

Glad to hear it!

Yes it is a product of those things, if you’re thinking about it then please see someone and work out a path to better mental health.

We only get one life, it would be a tragedy to waste it!

Two people close to me have gone from “normal” to suicidal and back again in the last 6 years, for different reasons and at different times. Thankfully they are both stable and enjoying their lives now.

If you’ve not witnessed anything like that, count yourself lucky. I remember talking to people about suicide when I was younger and couldn’t understand how anyone could get to that place until I saw someone I know really well go through a complete mental breakdown.

It does have a similar vibe to when Liz Truzz killed the Queen

Didn’t he send another cardinal to lecture Vance?

Tell me more!

They don’t even have to leave NATO formally, just undermine confidence in article 5 enough that it’s no longer a deterrent.

I’ve never heard of PortMaster, I still haven’t got bored of all the tiny best set games yet!

I think I played half life (maybe 2?) when I was a kid and it scared the crap out of me!

Aliexpress. I bought from a UK website first time and it was double the price but still shipped from China, making it a bit pointless. This is the aliexpress link I used, I have no connection to the seller and only bought from them once, but it arrived in good condition and I’ve tested it works as expected. The unit I received was a “v5”, or “screen panel v4”, I paid £25:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007448762232.html

Edit: maybe it’s the tariffs? Haha

Yeah it’s great, my daughter has been enjoying all the old games as well so i bought her one too for her birthday. It’s much easier as a parent to give her the R36s and the retro games because they are all self contained offline things unlike a lot of modern games.

Some things I’d say to consider before buying:

• Factor in the cost of a good quality SD card (or two, one for the system and one for ROMs) to replace the one that comes with it. There are loads of warnings in forums etc about the cards that are supplied, but even so I was shocked when the card that came with mine broke after 2 days. Get a decent card like Samsung Evo Plus 128GB.
• It’s easier to start fresh when you get a new card than it would be to clone the one that comes with the device. Get the OS from here: https://github.com/AeolusUX/ArkOS-R3XS/releases
• For ROMs, search archive.org for “tiny best set go”

I’ve been playing Crash Bandicoot on an R36s recently, it’ such a nostalgic game. Amazing that you can play it on a ~£35 handheld! You can’t beat the gameplay in some of the old classics.

used

In my experience (as a Brit), people generally only refer to Americans as Yanks in a mildly pejorative way or if we’re taking the piss, otherwise it’s Americans.

Here we go lads

I haven’t used windows in about 15 years on my personal machines but see 7zip referenced everywhere…why is it so popular? Can windows 10/11 or whatever we’re on now not compress/extract most things itself or do people prefer it for some reason (nice interface etc)?

I’m always amazed when I’m following a tutorial written for windows and it says “download and install 7zip, then extract the file using 7zip”. I just right click the file and extract it…

Those hands! Haha

I started in 2012, and it wasn’t that difficult. I’d say I do about 30mins of maintenance every other month. It took me a while to work out the config originally, but I wrote a guide afterwards which was really popular for other people doing the same thing (it’s quite out of date now but the principles are the same).

Started out using a raspberry pi (which was also hosting a website at the time) but when I moved house to somewhere with a worse internet connection I migrated to a VPS, so there is a cost but it’s not enormous, maybe £20/month.

Don’t even bother if you can’t use a static IP, because all your email will be bounced if your PTR record for the IP (reverse DNS record) doesn’t match your domain name.

It got a bit more complicated when people started adding extra layers of spam protection like SPF, DKIM and DMARC, but those are mostly set and forget.

Overall, I’d say it’s worth it but only because I find it quite interesting/fun.

Google is unavoidable but I do my best to mitigate the worst parts of their privacy intrusions.

I have a pixel phone running grapheneOS with Google Services Framework installed but without Google Play or Gboard or any of that stuff. For me that’s a balance that works.

I host my own email server so no Gmail.

I also host my own Matrix server and avoid WhatsApp where possible (not Google but just as bad if not worse).

I use YouTube but via Newpipe or using Ublock origin on Firefox (not logged in obviously).

Chrome is genuinely worse than Firefox now that Google have made adblocking more difficult with manifest v3.

You just have to decide what the best tradeoff is between privacy and convenience.