The Spam Thread!

[cpd2009]

Have you heard of Winaero Tweaker? I decided to install it on Rusty when I was trying to find a way to enable the old Windows Photo Viewer program. The tweaker had a one click tool to enable the old viewer and it can do a lot of other tweaks as well, similar to the old TweakUI.

Eventually I'll get IrfanView installed. If only the developer would switch to Qt toolkit, he could bring it to Mac and Linux without hassling with Wine.

[cpd2009]

Have you heard of Lifebuoy brand soap? I've known of it when I was trying to find good commercials off Bengali TV channels a few years ago. Lifebuoy appears to be a very popular brand of soap in Asian countries. In America, not so much. It was once popular in the 1950s, but it gradually declined before being phased out by the mid 2000s (according to Wikipedia).

It looks like Lifebuoy is being reintroduced into American markets in response to the pandemic. Earlier this evening, I spotted two different Lifebuoy liquid soaps at Dollar General, "Care" and "Total 10". I might try both kinds soon. Hand soap has been very hard to find in the last few months. Very little stock of well known name brands like Dial or Softsoap. When new soap does arrive, it ends up being imported brands that Americans have never heard of or off-brand knockoffs of Dial or other name brands. In addition to Lifebuoy, I've seen "Dalan" soap imported from Turkey. I tried Dalan out since it was the only kind of hand soap available a few months ago. It was very good actually. The two kinds I tried had good scents, cleaned well, and didn't have any negative effects on my skin.

As for hand sanitizer, you need to be careful. The FDA has been recalling various brands of sanitizer since it's been discovered some kinds contain wood alcohol, aka methanol, which can be very dangerous.

[huckleberrypie]

Have you heard of Lifebuoy brand soap? I've known of it when I was trying to find good commercials off Bengali TV channels a few years ago. Lifebuoy appears to be a very popular brand of soap in Asian countries. In America, not so much. It was once popular in the 1950s, but it gradually declined before being phased out by the mid 2000s (according to Wikipedia).

It looks like Lifebuoy is being reintroduced into American markets in response to the pandemic. Earlier this evening, I spotted two different Lifebuoy liquid soaps at Dollar General, "Care" and "Total 10". I might try both kinds soon. Hand soap has been very hard to find in the last few months. Very little stock of well known name brands like Dial or Softsoap. When new soap does arrive, it ends up being imported brands that Americans have never heard of or off-brand knockoffs of Dial or other name brands. In addition to Lifebuoy, I've seen "Dalan" soap imported from Turkey. I tried Dalan out since it was the only kind of hand soap available a few months ago. It was very good actually. The two kinds I tried had good scents, cleaned well, and didn't have any negative effects on my skin.

As for hand sanitizer, you need to be careful. The FDA has been recalling various brands of sanitizer since it's been discovered some kinds contain wood alcohol, aka methanol, which can be very dangerous.

We've had that for a time, circa 1999-early 2000s, and yeah it was positioned as a competitor to the likes of Safeguard:



And it looks like they're also re-introducing the soap here as well after a two-decade hiatus. Of course they'd cash in on the COVID train so it's natural that they'd market it as a personal disinfectant product to rid the skin of the 'rona:

So apparently Unilever's having a global marketing campaign to reintroduce the soap and stuff.

As for hand sanitiser, yeah those handed over as giveaways or no-name/bootleg-tier stuff should definitely be avoided. Methanol can and will blind you if ingested, if you're lucky enough not to get killed by it.

[huckleberrypie]

So yeah my friends and I did this:


It still has some issues like cameras and battery life, but is otherwise usable. Well at least it should breathe new life to an Epic outgrown by a child or something.

[cpd2009]

That's rather neat. Though it still looks like a kids tablet, running the newest possible Android OS ensures that the device has a future rather than being destined for an eWaste pile somewhere. If only device manufacturers would make more updates available to older phones, or cut back on yearly releases. There's no need to release a new phone or computer every single year.

LineageOS... is that the successor to CyanogenMod?

As for tech projects on my end, I decided to just get an SSD for my mom's old HP 20-b013w AIO. She recently retired from her job, and will only do basic tasks like web and Word documents. The back cover is rather easy to pull off but the clips can be a challenge. The new SSD is a WD Blue 500GB from Walmart. The drive is so small and light that I don't even need the original metal cage the mechanical drive was in, plus the old drive is the desktop standard 3.5''. The drive is just connected to the SATA pins and no extra support is needed. If I had double stick tape I would have added some but I don't at the moment.


Here are the insides. There was a large amount of dust inside so I had to take the PC outside and use canned air. It's much better now and the fan is free of the dusty fuzz it had earlier. Once I get all the updates installed and software set up, I will be able to see if there is any good performance gain over the old HDD.

I also had to pull some strings to set up an offline account. I had to disconnect from the internet during initial setup, and got the offline account created. I then had to go into the Settings and disable a lot of notification options, so my mom wouldn't get that "Let's finish setting up your PC" crap at every startup. As for software, I will just set up the new Edge browser, and install VLC for media playback. I still have that McAfee subscription for Rusty and I believe I got the 3-PC option. I will get the AIO set up as PC number 2.

[huckleberrypie]

Isn't that the AIO your mum was using since 2012? The main bottleneck on that thing besides the hard drive is its anaemic APU from what I remember.

As for the Epic, it isn't exactly the latest Android release as it's Nougat, but at least it's far cry from the now antiquated KitKat ROM it came with. We may try porting Pie to it assuming that it can run on shit-tier chips like the MT6580, but I doubt it would be easy.

[cpd2009]

Isn't that the AIO your mum was using since 2012? The main bottleneck on that thing besides the hard drive is its anaemic APU from what I remember.

As for the Epic, it isn't exactly the latest Android release as it's Nougat, but at least it's far cry from the now antiquated KitKat ROM it came with. We may try porting Pie to it assuming that it can run on shit-tier chips like the MT6580, but I doubt it would be easy.

The APU is a bottleneck for sure, but since my mom will only really need very basic computer tasks now that she is retired, there is really no point in trying to build a faster rig. I still have to gauge performance, but installing Office 2019 didn't take too long, and the setup process was rather quick. It would have been faster if Office didn't insist on adding an email address to my mom's MS account and fiddling around with 2FA. Even if the computer ends up not being blazing fast, it's still fine for the occasional solitaire game or email check. She doesn't even watch YouTube on the computer, and uses Facebook on her iPhone.

[huckleberrypie]

Isn't that the AIO your mum was using since 2012? The main bottleneck on that thing besides the hard drive is its anaemic APU from what I remember.

As for the Epic, it isn't exactly the latest Android release as it's Nougat, but at least it's far cry from the now antiquated KitKat ROM it came with. We may try porting Pie to it assuming that it can run on shit-tier chips like the MT6580, but I doubt it would be easy.

The APU is a bottleneck for sure, but since my mom will only really need very basic computer tasks now that she is retired, there is really no point in trying to build a faster rig. I still have to gauge performance, but installing Office 2019 didn't take too long, and the setup process was rather quick. It would have been faster if Office didn't insist on adding an email address to my mom's MS account and fiddling around with 2FA. Even if the computer ends up not being blazing fast, it's still fine for the occasional solitaire game or email check. She doesn't even watch YouTube on the computer, and uses Facebook on her iPhone.

Fair enough, though it had me wonder what would happen if you install ChromeOS given her use case negating the need for something faster...

[cpd2009]

Isn't that the AIO your mum was using since 2012? The main bottleneck on that thing besides the hard drive is its anaemic APU from what I remember.

As for the Epic, it isn't exactly the latest Android release as it's Nougat, but at least it's far cry from the now antiquated KitKat ROM it came with. We may try porting Pie to it assuming that it can run on shit-tier chips like the MT6580, but I doubt it would be easy.

The APU is a bottleneck for sure, but since my mom will only really need very basic computer tasks now that she is retired, there is really no point in trying to build a faster rig. I still have to gauge performance, but installing Office 2019 didn't take too long, and the setup process was rather quick. It would have been faster if Office didn't insist on adding an email address to my mom's MS account and fiddling around with 2FA. Even if the computer ends up not being blazing fast, it's still fine for the occasional solitaire game or email check. She doesn't even watch YouTube on the computer, and uses Facebook on her iPhone.

Fair enough, though it had me wonder what would happen if you install ChromeOS given her use case negating the need for something faster...

ChromeOS could work, but it's a cloud based OS. My mom prefers to save stuff to flash drives and she hardly uses Google services. I'm not a fan of ChromeOS either. Linux on the other hand is still a possibility. I would need something that would be rock-solid stable since she is not tech literate and would get confused if an update breaks stuff. The HP AIO is probably old enough to have proper driver support for the AMD APU graphics and other hardware, and if using something like Xubuntu or another lightweight distro, the AIO could run much better than Windows 10.

I got around to trying that Lifebuoy liquid soap, specifically "Total 10". It's quite nice. It comes out very smooth almost like a lotion, and it lathers up well with just one pump of soap. The smell is interesting too, sort of a fresh smelling type with a hint of typical soap chemicals.

[cpd2009]

Wow... my mom's home internet is blazing fast. Her house got hooked up with fiber internet a couple years ago. One of those half-hour long commercial blocks at 1280x920 60fps only took about seven minutes to upload, compared to the three or four hours with my apartment DSL. I will do a SpeedTest and gather results.

I also came across another one of those awful YT comment bots, with a twist. Instead of getting something along the lines of "Wanna be friends?", I instead get "I'm Lonely" with a love emoji and sad emoji, and a profile icon of an Asian girl that looks like it was taken from an adult film. I turned off image loading in Vivaldi, and checked this profile out. The page is just a massive link farm to a whole bunch of other spammy YT channels streaming porn.

I reported the comment to YouTube and we'll see what happens. You can't report a whole channel anymore. Figures.