If you have the means, please consider a donation to your charity or non-profit of choice during this holiday season. I highly recommend local food banks (money gives them more spending power than food donations), The Internet Archive (https://archive.org/), EFF (https://supporters.eff.org/donate/tbc--db), or Wikipedia (https://www.wikipedia.org/) if you need/want ideas.
Also, please remember your local Mastodon instances, it’s not free to keep the lights on. Thanks
@jerry!
@jerry I know it’s hard right now, but watching videos or viewing photos of Thor will eventually shift from tears to smiles. I highly recommend folks take lots of photos/videos of their pet’s mundane moments, as they are always the best memories.
RIP Thor. You had a great life.
And please take care of yourself, Jerry. Some might say they are just pets, but we all know better. They’re family.
I wrote a thing about making music more personal and focused again. Smartphones have taken a lot a way from our lives (social skills, attention spans, ability to actually meet other people etc) and they've also kinda reduced our ability to enjoy really awesome sounding music, and be focused on enjoying the music without distractions.
So I went back to enjoying pure music, again.
(hopefully posting this link doesn't bring down our web server for 10min).
@coffeegeek Nice piece and thanks for the share. One thing I found hopeful in recent years is the unexpected resurgence in vinyl. Crate digging allows one to read liner notes, view true album art in gate-fold format, and enjoy the company of others with similar tastes. Also, there’s the whole HiFi aspect of where you can go hog wild with your setup for maximum quality. As you stated in your piece, streaming has its place. But focusing on choosing an album, listening to it from start to finish with no commercials or skips, is the true essence of the art form. I always look forward to record store day as an opportunity to patronize local businesses, meet up with other audiophiles, and support artists by paying them for their art.
The first "fun" car I've owned in my lifetime. They've all been sensible and practical til now. But I am true to my Scottish roots, and I've been frugal. This car cost me less tha a new La Marzocco GS3 espresso machine. Now I just need to lose 25lbs to fit in the darned thing. 😎
@coffeegeek nice, congrats! The 35th anniversary edition matches your color palette and looks great. I attempted to purchase one of the newer models but the test drive proved anyone over 6 ft tall is unable to drive the car with the top up. My knee was also against the dashboard, making shifting impossible. For now I’ll just live vicariously through you.
There is a new website that popped up, https://brevilleUS.com, that looks slick and as if it is actually made by Breville as their outlet site.
IT IS A SCAM SITE. 1000% scam. Hat tip to a consumer for pointing me to that. I confirmed with Breville this AM it is a scam. Please spread the word. Worried about people falling for this and losing their hard earned cash.
The fake Breville site brevilleUS[.]com is being hosted on Cloudflare IP address 34.149.140[.]193 which is hosting a TON of other scam eCommerce sites for a bunch of different brands. There appears to be other Breville-themed eCommerce domains which are definitely fake and should be avoided:
brevilleoutlets[.]com - not active at time of analysis.
brevilles[.]us - hosting Breville products, fraudulent.
brevilleofficial[.]us - currently hosting beauty products, but could switch to Breville products at any time.
brevilleuss[.]com - currently hosting firearms products, but could switch to Breville products at any time.
Well-established orgs like Breville should have dedicated security teams monitoring for Breville-themed IP infringement/phishing/fraud sites. Regardless, I went ahead and submitted an abuse report to the hosting registrar for all these domains.
