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diddly : Facebook and Instagram stored your passwords in plain text, ...
diddly : TV Series post![b]Halo[/b] - Season One: John "Master C...
diddly : Not mine, but precious.[img]https://imagedelivery.net/C9yUr1...
diddly : Tried a couple new AI services tonight.  Supposedly [ur...

600 Million Passwords

Facebook and Instagram stored your passwords in plain text, and now theyve been leaked. Always use a password vault and different passwords for every service.

Update your WinRAR

It has been a long running joke that so many people have been using WinRAR for free past the 40 day trial period.  Now the joke is on you, if you haven't updated your copy already.  Hackers in Russia and China are using a serious exploit in WinRAR to run malicious scripts on victim's computers.

Zellers Coming Back!

In this day of high inflation and mass layoffs, it will be refreshing to have another discount department store other than just Walmart.  HBC, who owns the Zellers brand, has announced they're opening new stores, including one in Cambridge!  After Target lost $5.4 Billion trying to replace Zellers in Canada, I really hope the original is able to come back strong.  I actually liked their little in-store restaurant, and it was always the first store I'd visit for new every-day-wear clothes.  The price was right.

Toots

Let's face it.  Twitter is done.  Elon Musk has killed it by laying off half the employees, banning remote work, adding a monthly subscription cost, and even considering putting content behind a paywall.

Twitter users are looking for a new home, and many of them are flocking to Mastodon.  This is a distributed social media that's been around for several years, and lets you host your own serverDarkshade even has an instance!

It's like twitter, but tweets are called toots (following the elephant theme) and accounts are named @user@server.  You can follow me @diddly@darkshade.social

Old Message Forum

Time marches on, and the ability to run our old message forum has been lost with recent system updates.  If there were posts you want to revisit, there does exist a snapshot on the wayback machine at archive.org.

The current message forum is still fine though since it's much more recent software.

Stable Diffusion

You might have heard recently of an AI called Stable Diffusion that can generate images from text prompts.  I just installed it on my M1 Mac Mini tonight using a tool called DiffusionBee and put it to work.

Among the images I had it create were "The Predator steps through The Stargate", "Two Galleons battling at sea during sunset", and "a woman walking her dog, in the style of Monet".

It takes a while to run, since I have only 8GB of RAM instead of the recommended 16GB.  It does still work though, as you can see.

Netflix Considering Ads

Due to a dramatic drop in their stock price, Netflix is considering adding Ads to lower level subscriptions.  If you're concerned about 200,000 subscribers suddenly leaving, adding advertisements doesn't sound to me like a way to entice others to stay.

Two Year Ban on Foreign Buyers

In an effort to calm soaring house prices, Canada has banned foreign buyers for two years.  Now, apparently foreign purchases account for only 3.4% of property buyers, so will this change make much difference?

Dodge to Drop Muscle Cars

The Dodge Challenger and Charger will both be discontinued in 2024 in favour of hybrids and electric cars.  I guess it wasn't going to be long after Ford bastardized the Mustang into a hybrid SUV crossover that the competition would follow suit.  It's sad to see cars with character reaching the end of their line.

Burger Priest coming to Waterloo

One of the things I miss about living and working in Toronto is the food.  There are so many great restaurants in / around downtown.  One of those places is The Burger Priest, and it's coming to Waterloo!

Crash Recovery

I'm slowly getting the services back up.  Luckily nothing was lost.  Turned out to be some bad ram after upgrading the server memory, caused a whole mess of issues.  I've learned my lesson and tested the ram in the server now before setting it back up.

Forum Re-opened

I've re-opened the forum to new users, and implemented additional measures to discourage spammers.  For example, external links are disabled for new users.

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