Posts by Alexander Mitchell4

It looks more like a plastics factory, right at the entrance to San Diego...

It doesn't quite look like a House,

Greetings, I have a purely technical grievance to raise.
I happen to be one of those individuals who appreciates that the forum’s visual aesthetic remains unchanged.
However, for those of us who are perhaps no longer in our youth—or even if we are, but our eyes have been somewhat scorched by too many screens—increasing the font size feels like a necessity.
As for what that does to the layout, I suppose I don't even need to explain...
The entire page just falls apart. Certain borders thicken unnecessarily when they shouldn't, and there's this one particularly egregious part where the little icon for the House at the bottom of the page takes up nearly a quarter of the screen.
Meanwhile, the actual text input box doesn't thicken at all; instead, it becomes incredibly thin.
It makes it impossible to adjust a window so that you can actually see five or six lines at once, rather than having to squint at letters that look like they were printed for use under a microscope.
I wouldn't say I am completely blind yet; I can still read a newspaper without my glasses, provided I leave them at home.
Is there anything that can be done for the quarter of the population struggling with poor eyesight?
Perhaps the various margins and unusable sections could be reduced, and perhaps those elements wouldn't thicken so drastically when the font is scaled up?
Ideally, when the font size increases, the forum would reorganize itself gracefully rather than simply breaking apart. Thank you.

We really ought to stage some kind of protest against how banks meddle in the relationship between employers and employees, or even between the government and retirees..
What business does a bank have in those affairs, anyway? And who gave them permission to act as if they own the citizenry? Who specifically decided to line the pockets of banking executives by making such an incredibly unfair decision—forcing us to pay the banks directly out of our own hard-earned paychecks?
Will a bank actually step up and cover the damages if some phone technician clones my device and sells my private data to a hacker buddy of theirs?
Not likely. I’m certainly not foolish enough to link a thief to my bank account through something as simple as having my phone stolen.
Once the phone is gone, there's no wiping the data; you might as well have handed the technician a blank check!!
Plus, I have to wonder: are banks selling personal information to groups planning to target individuals just to seize their assets???
The idea that privatizing state assets was just pure paranoia turned out to be true... right up until it actually happened!!
And once it finally did happen, it became painfully obvious that it was nothing more than a straight-up robbery..

I can't help but wonder: will these bankers actually be forced to settle their dishonest and illegal dealings using their own hard-earned assets? Or will they simply declare bankruptcy and leave the government to pick our pockets just to pay back what they stole from us?
To ensure an honest verdict, I suppose the government ought to maintain a comprehensive registry of bank owners along with a full accounting of their personal wealth. There is an enormous amount of criminal activity tied up in these court rulings.
Perhaps this is the only way we'll ever uncover who truly owns these banks while they operate under foreign franchises.
It’s telling when an American working in Austria tries to settle a loan and tells the local officials they have significant savings held at "their" bank back in the States, only to be swiftly dismissed because the local branch claims to have no connection to "that place." It suggests the domestic bank is merely paying for a franchise name, while the actual owner—someone with a questionable past—stays hidden to avoid disclosing their ownership.

It seems there isn't much of an option here without resorting to full encryption. If I go the encryption route, I’d have to use AES encryption.
But that isn't quite what I am looking for.
What I really need is just a simple password—perhaps a few digits or letters—so I can open a folder in a matter of seconds and grab the specific document I need.
And I need to ensure the "lock" doesn't fail if the TV shuts off, or if the computer loses power.
I want to make sure nobody can just write over or delete files within that folder, especially those items I absolutely cannot afford to lose.

The hard drive is a 2TB Seagate Expansion

Please excuse me if I am posting in the wrong section, but I am looking for some guidance regarding software or perhaps a specific method for locking individual files on an external hard drive. My goal is to be able to open and manage these files quite easily once the password has been entered, and ideally, this functionality would work seamlessly across Windows 7, Windows 10, iOS, and even Windows.
Does anyone know of a solution that doesn't involve paying a significant amount of money?

It’s one of those wonderful modern miracles, isn't it? I’m sitting down to log in for the evening, and I can only see about a third of the window. To make matters worse, the section offering Facebook or Google login options is visible, but the lower portion—where you actually enter your username and password—is completely cut off from view. On top of that, I keep getting hit with constant pop-ups asking me to enable Adobe Flash. Every time I grant permission, the window just turns white. It’s a total blank; nothing displays correctly. I can't see any Flash animations or videos on Facebook, and it seems to be happening on various forums as well.
I suppose I ought to brush up on my technical knowledge, though I don't recall things ever behaving quite this erratically before.

dustyorca14 said:Alexander Mitchell4, you actually have a point there.😂 It feels like a massive conspiracy by the tech industry just to turn us all into dependents.😁 Pretty soon, you won't even be able to buy a toaster without needing to hire a hacker just to get it installed.🤣 On the flip side, you have those products that work perfectly and simply, but they are under total manufacturer control and basically only have a single 'start' button.😁
edit: Have you perhaps tried a Macintosh or OS X? I hear everything comes pre-configured there, though that is likely why it carries such a premium price tag.

You can joke about it, but it really does boil down to that. I found myself in a similar predicament with a Celeron 500 about ten years ago. Back then, it was constant troubleshooting; I knew Windows 98 like the back of my hand—where every file sat and how everything needed to be tuned—but eventually, it just couldn't handle rendering modern web pages anymore. I struggled with it until I finally decided to scrap it for a new machine. However, on the new hardware, I couldn't even install 98, which at that point had been largely abandoned by virus developers and was relatively safe. The new hardware simply didn't support Windows 98; it would install, but every bootup would trigger an error that slowed the startup process, "subtly" nudging me toward upgrading to Windows XP.
Today, I have two computers; both are older models, but they function fine. They can't quite handle high-def video playback—sometimes SD is okay, occasionally DVD or 720p quality works on the same machine—but I can no longer find a way to download the old Flash player.
Capitalist greed truly knows no bounds.😠

edit;
It was the same with my old Ubuntu setup; I just had to type `sudo apt-get install dsl provider` into the terminal, enter my password, and everything functioned flawlessly for years. As far as I can recall, neither Ubuntu nor Firefox ever crashed or froze once.
Nowadays, Ubuntu feels too bloated for my old computer, and I haven't found Mint to be usable even after several months of trying.
And yes, about 17 or 18 years ago, when a computer was a staple in every third household, I used to make boot disks for people, wipe their drives, and reinstall Windows—first 95, then 98, then XP.
Lately, though, I haven't messed with that sort of thing much; it's mostly just some CAD work and general web surfing.

Changing my default search engine isn't really an issue for me. I can easily add eBay, Amazon, Wikipedia, and a couple of others whose names escape me at the moment. From there, I just head into the Firefox settings to find the option for additional search engines, which typically leads me straight to the Linux Mint pages.
Once there, I can find those plus Yahoo... personally, I find Yahoo to be a bit more helpful since finding information feels slightly more intuitive there than dealing with these other illiterate, corporate types.
As for images, they’re essentially useless here, even though you need them sometimes. Having a dedicated image search that provides direct links back to the original sources would be a brilliant feature.

The way I handle Google is by setting it as my primary search tool—I'll set it as my home page, so to speak—and then I get the full-screen experience. Its landing page features its own search bar with a specific Google search button, which allows me to find exactly what I'm looking for.

Sure, Google spies on you, but it is packed with information. It manages to track down just about anyone or anything, whereas, in most of my experiences, the other engines simply don't measure up.

Buying a brand-new computer just for web browsing? How old are you, anyway?

I've actually had similar thoughts myself. I have two computers that are nearly identical, and I've been testing all sorts of combinations lately. Recently, I've been running into issues with Linux; it managed to ruin three or four DVDs that just wouldn't work for some reason. Eventually, I managed to get an installation of Linux Mint 14 through somehow. That helped me format my secondary hard drive so I could reinstall Windows XP. I have the original disc, but it isn't working—it just hangs halfway through, claiming a file is missing. I also have a few burned copies, though one of them is a dud. I can't quite remember everything I need to install. The radio worked on XP for about a month before it froze up, so I reinstalled it. It worked fine again for a month or two, but now I can't even boot it up, not even in Safe Mode. I've truly never experienced anything like this before.
Sometimes Linux just freezes completely, and I haven't found a way to reset it other than hitting the physical reset button.
The Ctrl+Alt+Del command doesn't respond in Linux, and Mozilla crashes quite frequently. It does manage to restart itself and restore everything I had open within a second or two, so it isn't a massive disruption, I suppose.
It is frustrating that video won't play, and it refuses to install easily without some heavy programming involved.
I see the Adobe Flash Player icon in my menu, but Mozilla doesn't seem to recognize the program. It has a "Shockwave Flash" extension that crashes constantly; it seems to collapse within a tenth of a second the moment it detects any kind of video.
Synaptic hasn't been of any real help. A few packages will download, but reinstalling them doesn't improve the situation even slightly.
If I recall correctly, some Ubuntu distributions from four or five years ago were relatively stable, even though there were issues back then with video and ATI drivers. My current setup, Mint, doesn't indicate any driver problems, yet it still won't play video. The browser seems to have evolved... for the worse.
On XP, video played perfectly after installing Flash Player (Adobe).
AutoCAD 2007 runs normally on XP. If there were a hardware issue, the rendering in AutoCAD would likely freeze because it would peg the CPU at 100% for two or three minutes straight.
Mozilla keeps crashing on both Windows XP and Linux. On Linux, I can't even get rid of that useless search bar that's totally incompetent. Honestly, sometimes I feel like giving up on electronics entirely and just heading out to a mountain to start farming.😵

Could someone please recommend an OS for a beginner?
To be honest, I wouldn't even call myself a novice; I've been owning PCs since '95, back when we were dealing with Windows NT or whatever those versions before Windows 95 were called...
I remember installing Windows 98 using nothing but startup floppies, many years before most readers of this thread were even born. Nowadays, I find myself unable to install any operating system that can handle my most modest requirements without needing a degree in computer science.
Windows XP works for about a month and then dies on me—that’s happened three times now. As for Linux Mint, I simply cannot configure it to be remotely usable; video playback fails, and Flash Player or Shockwave seems permanently "broken," regardless of what I try to launch, unless it's just a still image...
As time goes on, I feel like I'm knowing less and less instead of more. Instead of progress, there's just frustration. No web browser seems to work properly; they're all completely broken. Everyone is searching for "plugins" that don't exist or are impossible to find. Even when I do manage to find and install them, they don't function. I can spend two months hunting for solutions only to come up empty-handed. It's ironic; I used to be the person repairing computers for others, and now I have to download everything from the internet because my own machine is practically useless!!!

On Linux, I'm stuck with some search tool that is the height of absurdity; I don't even know its name, and it can't find anything useful. I know there's a war between Mozilla and Google, but even Opera won't work. Everything is needlessly complicated and impossible to tune; nothing plays video, not even the browsers themselves.
Until recently, my kid could watch music videos without issue, but now I have to tell him he's ruined the computer...
Because after twenty years of surfing the web, I just can't get things configured anymore...
Maybe we should all just join the extremists, go out and nail everyone to stakes, and smash every electronic device with a hammer... nothing works anymore except for spyware...