As someone who has “won” the games (that aren’t actually games) and claimed the prizes a bunch of times, I’d advise you just ignore them. The fish/farm/etc games, and the popups that claim free items, anything else. Close them, and just buy whatever you were going to buy. Unless you have a lot, I mean a LOT of people that are willing to sign up for temu as a first time user, using you as the referral, the only way to complete those so-called games is to spend around $800+ to earn your way to conspiring the game and claiming the free prizes. Prizes that if you pay attention, you could simply bought outright for somewhere in the range of $5-20.

And the stuff with the spinning wheels and whatnot, claiming this or that percentage discount, you’ll get a cheap item for free(something that you could have bought for $3-4 max), but only by adding it to an order with a predetermined number of other items, which have had their prices dynamically increased, and will actually cost you more than if you had simply purchased all of the same items but by searching them up and just adding them to your cart normally. If you add some items to your wishlist, you’ll start to see those items being offered to you in these supposed deals and discounts. You will also notice that if that item was $5 when you added it to your wishlist, the “deal” page might be showing it to you with a crossed out $50 price, and a new amazing discount price of let’s say $9(I call this the J. C. Penny method). I tend to keep a large wishlist, with items that sit there for months while I decide if I’ll get around to buying them or not, so this kind of fuckery with the prices sticks out to me a lot.

This all exactly the same for when they had the cash back deal. Place an order, and they credit your account with, well credit, that you can spend on more stuff. The more you spend in the order, the higher the percentage of cash back. But as before, the prices of the items you buy to earn that cash back are getting fucked around with dynamically, and increased as you shop. Not only that, but they change the way that you received the cash back. It used to be that after the order shipped, you go to a certain page and cash out your earned credit, and it is then available for use. Then they started placing limits on how much you could cash out per day. And then the last time I had used it, you instead only got a few cents per day, and you had to keep opening the app every single day and manually claiming those few cents. And if you forgot one day, you just lose that credit entirely.

Ask of this is to say, I absolutely promise anyone reading this, the games, deals, discounts, or whatever else they are promising you on temu, are absolutely, in no uncertain terms, not worth your time (even if you believe your time to hold no value), and will cost you more money than if you had simply purchased the items normally through just searching for what you want and adding it to your cart. Back when temu was still pissing away ass-loads of money to get people onto their platform, you could legitimately get free and/or heavily discounted items, as well as decent amount of cash back/credit. But that’s is no longer the case. They got the massive number of users they wanted, now they are looking to actually make money from them.

The only reason I but anything on temu at all, where I would have bought it on AliExpress previously, is that temu will usually get the items to me between 1 and 2 weeks, while AE still often takes several weeks before the seller even THINKS about shipping the order, and then often an additional 3-4 weeks minimum for it to actually arrive. I had some stuff that I needed a bunch of, and they only had a few in stock on temu. So I ordered them all, then ordered more on AE right after. The temu ones came in 6 days. The AE ones took 2 and a half months. And before anyone asks, the identical item on Amazon was more than triple the price. Most of this stuff tends to be.

Yes. Yes it is. I had a single Windows install that was my main system. I eventually decided to semi-switch to Linux, and passed that SSD through to a VM, along with the GPU and half of my USB ports in order to continue running that Windows install for gaming and Adobe stuff. You just have to keep messing around with the config of the VM, and look up info about getting your UUID from Windows to add to your VM config, so your Windows license/activation will keep working as is. There are guides and info for all of this if you Google around. Don’t remember exactly where I found those guides, as I ran that setup for about year and then switched that Windows install back to bare metal, and it has been about another year since then. I do remember that I got the same boot issues as you when switching back and forth between bare metal and VM, and I had to run the Windows boot repair tools to get everything working. Trying looking into that.

About 14TB. Which reminds me, gonna need a new drive to drop in the NAS soon.

I’ve been using it for the last year or so, no issues, as long as I confirm there are no breaking changes before updating my docker container. My only real problem is that I sorely, SORELY, miss the editing features I had in Google photos. There’s been more than a couple of times now that I needed to quickly edit a photo as I would have done with Google photos, and when I couldn’t, got aggravated enough to consider switching back. Still chugging along on immich, though. Still holding out hope that one day they’ll add at least some basic editing features.

But I do have gas, so there’s that.

Wait, do we actually get something for our old lifetime Pocketcasts licenses? Because I remember when they switched the app to being free, with any extra features being locked behind a subscription, existing licenses holders got… not anything, as far as I remember. I’ve been using the app daily for years now, and have no reason to give it up, but I don’t feel like having bought the license back in the day is getting me anything extra over what a new free-tier user is getting now. Am I missing something?

Pretty much no games, at this point. I’ve been buying up every game(worth owning, to me) on Steam sales, humble bundle, and other means. The last year or two, I’ve just been buying the new games I want at full price on steam, or waiting for sales if I don’t want it that much. The only game I still refuse to buy is The Sims 4, for that one time every other year that I want to boot into a heavily modded Sims game to play Sims Orgy Simulator 6969™. But even the other dumb hentai waifu nonsense games, I just buy on Steam (half of which are my gf’s, but she refuses to buy them on her own damn account), even though they are easily obtained at the usual locations.

MusicBee, Stardock Fences, obligatory Adobe mention, all VR everything (unless something has changed recently, I haven’t looked in while).

Along with the other suggestions here, Garuda also already does this out-of-the-box.

I bought mine on Amazon. It’s an Addlink. You should find it by searching (ad2TBS91M2P). It’s currently $10 cheaper than when I bought mine. No idea if it’s a good deal anymore, I haven’t shopped for SSDs in a while, so I don’t know current prices to compare.

Bought the deck, upgraded to a 2tb SSD, upgraded the cooling, swapped the shell, added additional grips on the sticks, pads, triggers, rear buttons, did some overclocking and undervolting, spent many hours tweaking various setting and plugins, etc. I’ve played a couple of hours of Mario golf on yuzu, and haven’t otherwise touched it for a single other game. I’ve had it for 8 months. And the $2k gaming laptop that I ended up with a couple of months ago really kind of put the nail in the coffin. I had big plans for the Deck when I bought it(and the many accessories, upgrades, and mods), and those plans just kinda… didn’t become a thing.

I’ve been thinking about pulling the SSD and putting the 512gb back in, and just selling. The only thing stopping me is that I have some ideas on possible major life changes for this time next year(think tiny and/or mobile living arrangements), where the form factor of the Deck would/should be beneficial. That was the original intended purpose of me buying it to begin with. But even there, the laptop is plenty small, and vastly more powerful. Just not sure I see a reason to have both, and if forced to choose one or the other, I mean…

Mine went for $40. No box or booklet, just the cartridge. Sold FF2 last week for $60.

Just sold my copy of this game, literally earlier today. Was the last remaining SNES cartridge I owned.

What’s weird, is that I don’t have any filters at all, and I have nsfw content allowed in the settings. Yet, I’ve never seen any porn through the sync app. Like, not even once. But I keep seeing people talk about how much porn there is all over the place. I’m very confused.

Well, at least only one of my top 5 most-played games was a hentai game, this year.

I switched from Google photos to immich just recently. I’m still looking for a good solution to replace Google’s editing features. I used, and miss, those features a LOT.

I am using immich as a replacement for Google photos, which syncs my phones and tablets. I just wish it had any kind of photo editing.

I then also have Photoprism, which I use for my actual photography stuff. When I pull raws and videos from my DSLR, I dump them into a share on my NAS, mapped to a drive in Windows. They then get automatically imported into and managed by Photoprism.

Still trying to work out the best way to edit/work with the raws in Lightroom, while keeping them in Photoprism, and also up-to-date.

I also use Duplicati to do nightly encrypted backups to Google drive.

Sure, if you have family photos. Or a family that you want to have access to anything of yours. I do not. And I very specifically want to do everything in my power to prevent my so-called family from gaining access to anything of mine, digital or physical.

I want the opposite. I want all of my data to be completely inaccessible to anyone, and potentially even self-destruct somehow.

Squaresoft, tri-Ace, Natsume