About 20 years ago, I lived in a shared house in the city. I worked nights, so if I left a download running when I went to bed, it would affect the others in the house. I saw a post online where someone was giving away a cable modem, and not knowing much about how they worked, I had an idea that I wanted to try.

The cable internet came into the house through a coax cable, rather than the phone line, and was split with a dumb splitter between the router and the TV. I used a spare splitter to run a cable to my room and plugged my modem in.

I tried it first on my day off so that I could check with my housemates if it caused any problems. It connected and everything worked with no issues, except that it only connected at about dial up speeds. We were going out for the night so I left it connected with some downloads running to see if it would stay connected. When we got home, the downloads that should have taken a few days were done. A speed test showed that I was getting around 35Mbps, when the fastest speed we could pay for was 4Mbps.

We later found out that apparently the street was sharing a connection (to the cabinet I think, it’s been a while), and because my modem wasn’t registered, it was just getting whatever was left over. At night, when everyone was in bed and their devices were off, it was going a lot faster. It didn’t last long, only a few months, but we took advantage of it while we could :)

Look for the QxR group. Lots of their releases include special features, and often as a separate folder.

‘Gaming laptop, only used occasionally. Been sitting around for a while because my kid’s got a new hobby. £1,200 no offers. I know what I’ve got’

The pictured laptop has a Centrino sticker on it and looks like it’s been used to dig a garden

That’s brilliant, I hope it all works out 😊

It’s a great idea, but don’t forget about how these people are going to get support in the future. If something breaks, most helpers (computer shops, kids friends etc) are going to be Windows users.

Mint can do automatic updates, but both my laptop and PC have had serious issues with version upgrades. My laptop, which is Mint only, asked me to remove a load of software before upgrading, then booted with loads of errors and had to be reinstalled. My PC was mostly fine, but had no sound. It turned out that Mint switched from Pulse Audio to Pipewire, or vice versa, and the old audio manager left config files behind.

They were both annoying issues more than anything else, but would be difficult for the people in your scenario to get fixed.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to put you off, just checking that you’ve thought of the downsides :)

Automatic Ripping Machine can pull the main movie off a disc automatically, but I’m not sure about imaging the full disc. Once it’s set up, you just put a disc in and wait.

https://github.com/automatic-ripping-machine/

Because this is a thought experiment. There’s no waste when nobody’s actually buying anything.

Sorry, my bad. I found my old 486 PC in my parent’s attic recently, and started planning to get it running again

This is one that was shared recently:

!https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/42247576

I can’t remember much about it now, but I remember really wanting BeOS. I managed to get it installed once, but couldn’t get the internet working, so ended up uninstalling it.

Because it’s a scam, and they’re trying to find as many victims as possible 👍

If it makes you feel any better, I did something just as infuriating a few years ago.

I had set up my home media server, and had finally moved it to my garage with just a power cable and ethernet cable plugged in. Everything was working perfectly, but I needed to check something with the network settings. Being quite new to Linux, I used a remote desktop tool to log in and do everything through a gui.

I accidentally clicked the wrong item in the menu and disconnected the network. I only had a spare ps/2 keyboard and mouse, and as the server was an old computer, it would crash if I plugged a ps/2 device in while it was running*.

The remote desktop stayed open but frozen, mocking me for my obvious mistake and lack of planning, with the remote mouse icon stuck in place on the disconnect menu.

*I can’t remember if that was a ps/2 thing, or something specific to my server, but I didn’t want to risk it

That’s good to know, thanks :)

I’ve got a few services running on my aging media server, so I want to start doing it properly, and getting a proper home sever going. I’ve used ssh for some of the basics in the past, but I need to start using that more too :)

I’ve only just set it up, mainly for the facial recognition. I had no idea that it could do that type of search too. It’s going to be really helpful with my faulty brain and not remembering words 🙂

The team are helpful too, and helped me with a question when I set it up 🙂

If it’s anything like my server, it’s in the same room, but only connected to the power and network. You can open and close the drive, but it doesn’t have a keyboard, mouse, or monitor 👍

Yes, that’s what it does by default. The problem happens when you open a new tab to search for something, for example, and the update screen and restart distract you and you forget what you were going to search for. It’s like the feeling you get when you walk into a room and can’t remember why.

Mint, it just works.

You can set up automatic updates too, so they won’t end up with out of date software and possible security holes. The only downside is Firefox. If an update runs while your grandparents are using Firefox, it will stop working and show them a page that says it needs to be restarted.

It’s not a major issue in itself, but if you have any sort of memory issues, like I do and lots of older people do, it can derail your train of thought and cause you problems.

I bought myself a copy of Neat Image a few weeks ago for noise reduction, and it works really well on Windows. I haven’t had a chance to test the Linux version yet. I think it’s proprietary, but like you say, there’s not much else out there.

There’s a free demo if you want to try it

https://ni.neatvideo.com/

I’m still mostly using Windows on my main PC. I’ve got a few jobs to finish before I switch, but the main one is scanning old photos from the 80s and 90s. I’ve tried lots of different scanning software on Linux, but I can’t find anything that works as well as the Epson software that was bundled with the scanner.

It’s got a few one click fixes for bad exposures that work really well too, so things like that orangey reddish cast that some photos have is fixed almost automatically. It can all be done easily in other software, but the time saved by doing it in the scanner software is massive.