Bruncvik

That a huge carpet of ants will sweep into my neighbourhood and eat everything, including me. I blame Macgyver.

I can see why Verne would be considered overlooked. While it's true that some of his works, in particular 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in 80 Days, and The Journey to the Centre of the Earth (and to a lesser extent From Earth to the Moon) are well known, others went unnoticed. His Robur the Conqueror series is fun, and so is Off on a Comet, to name a few of his lesser known sci-fi works. I particularly liked his competence porn works, such as Mysterious Island, and some of his romances. The Green Ray had an impact on me, and I'm still trying to find it.

Wells wasn't nearly as prolific as Verne, so it may appear that both are equally well covered in the anglophone world, but the truth is that just a small fraction of Verne's works received recognition.

I still have an unused, boxed WRT-54G. Granted, it's only 802.11b/g, but good enough for casual browsing, and I have experience setting up OpenWRT there. Thanks for helping me remember; I'll use that for the kids.

Biometrics, I already do, via my passport. Digital passports, maybe. I don't have a smartphone, so if the government wants me to have one for all kinds of digital shit, they'd better get me one.

I tried pi-hole, but it turned in a real pain, trying to set it up for normal use, plus two WFH offices. I may give it another try, when I feel more patient.

The idea of mocking websites came from talking to other parents from my kids' school. I was thinking about some form of a local "internet" for our neighbourhood for all the kids. Heavily curated, a mix of mock sites (like the full download of Wikipedia), news through RSS, moderated message boards, etc. I don't think it's an original idea given the current state of the Internet, so at this stage I'm just reading up on design best practices.

My kids are a little older - just learned to read without sounding off the words - so I need to introduce parental controls. But you may see your purchase as an investment: a year from now, the hardware may be worth twice as much.

I have a working emachines desktop with Win98. They'll pry it off my cold, dead hands...

I'm in the process of getting my kids their first PC this Christmas. They'll both get a mini-PC, with severely restricted Internet access. I'm actually thinking about just letting them connect to the home server where I'd mock the Web sites I pick for them. For this reason, Win11 with its online account requirement is automatically excluded from consideration. I wated to give them Mint anyway, but this was the argument that convinced my wife.

Looks like Alan Rickman. I wouldn't mind him running the US government.

I read it in Jason Statham's voice.

Now you gave me an inspiration. I'm eorking with a few other parents to create a local, walled "Internet" for the kids in our estate, and webrings would be a fun feature to resurrect.

I feel like I'm getting too old for the Internet. I still fondly remember the times where you could create a Geocities page and add it yourself to the Yahoo directory, and other netizens clicked through categories to get to your listing, instead of using a search engine.

But I digress. I'm finding myself browsing the www less over time, and I'm already limited to only a hadful of pages I visit regularly. For me personally, Vivaldi is the best choice for a desktop, and Brave is hands-down the best choice for my smartphone. But I appreciate that others may have different use cases.