Relatable…
Ramen Junkie 
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
Ramen Junkie
Monday 2025-01-20 – Link List
Blogging Intensifies Link List for Monday 2025-01-20
17-Jan-2025 – Surprise! We have a 28th amendment?
Brief Summary: “As Joe Biden was getting his coat and leaving the White House, he has announced that he has ratified”
17-Jan-2025 – Older Music Is Losing Ground as Nearly 80 Percent of U.S. Streams Come From Newer Releases
Brief Summary: “Streaming data shows that older songs might be fading from U.S. playlists.
The Luminate 2024 year-en”
17-Jan-2025 – Linden Lab Set To Increase Group Limits Soon In Second Life
Brief Summary: “It’s been officially confirmed by Philip Linden on Monday 13th January 2025 via the Second Life Feed”
17-Jan-2025 – Trump’s Next Attacks on Abortion Rights Will Be More Insidious Than a Ban
Brief Summary: ”
During his campaign, incoming president Donald Trump did everything possible to muddy his record”
16-Jan-2025 – Legendary Filmmaker David Lynch Dies at 78
Brief Summary: “David Lynch/Facebook
Visionary filmmaker David Lynch — known for surreal hits like Blue Velvet and t”
15-Jan-2025 – Walgreens CEO Discovers That Locking Things Up Keeps People From Buying Them
Brief Summary: “In January of 2023, Walgreens finance chief James Kehoe said to investors in a year-end earnings cal”
15-Jan-2025 – No Ham License? Listen Anyway in Your Browser
Brief Summary: “Full disclosure: ham radio isn’t for everyone, and there are many different facets to it. What appea”
15-Jan-2025 – Nice PDF, But Can It Run DOOM? Yup!
Brief Summary: “DOOM is a classic game to implement on a variety of platforms, but doompdf by [ading2210] is one we “
14-Jan-2025 – ‘Do a Little Homework’: Senator Mocks Pete Hegseth for Flunking General Knowledge Test
Brief Summary: ”
Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) mocked Defense Secretary-designate Pete Hegseth for flunking a g”
14-Jan-2025 – ‘What the F*ck Is Wrong With You?!’ Jon Stewart Rips Republican Critics of California Fire Response
Brief Summary: ”
Jon Stewart is no fan of Republicans criticizing California over their response to expansive f”
13-Jan-2025 – Amazon removes ‘equity for Black people’ and ‘LGBTQ+ rights’ from company policies
Brief Summary: “Amazon has quietly removed several policies from its public websites aimed at protecting workers, in”
13-Jan-2025 – Meta Is Blocking Links to Decentralized Instagram Competitor Pixelfed
Brief Summary: “Meta is deleting links to Pixelfed, a decentralized Instagram competitor. On Facebook, the company i”
13-Jan-2025 – Project 2025’s Plan to Dismantle Public Education—And Screw Over Disabled Kids
Brief Summary: ”
Project 2025’s stance on the Department of Education is clear: “Federal education policy should “
09-Jan-2025 – The Unusually Strong Force Driving Apocalyptic Los Angeles Wildfires
Brief Summary: ”
This piece was originally published in Vox and appears here as part of our Climate Desk collaborati”
09-Jan-2025 – Your CD Player Could Be Turning Your Music Lossy All This Time
Brief Summary: “Are you sure you’re hearing lossless CD playback?
Portable CD players revolutionized music on the go”
08-Jan-2025 – Idaho Republicans file resolution to repeal marriage equality
Brief Summary: “Idaho Republican legislators have introduced a resolution on Tuesday urging the U.S. Supreme Court t”
08-Jan-2025 – Meta is using your selfies to create AI ads of you targeting…. You
Brief Summary: “Welcome to Black Mirror live, ladies and gentlemen. The main character is you – yes, you! If you’ve “
08-Jan-2025 – FCC Launches ‘Cyber Trust Mark’ for IoT Devices to Certify Security Compliance
Brief Summary: “The U.S. government on Tuesday announced the launch of the U.S. Cyber Trust Mark, a new cybersecurit”
07-Jan-2025 – Dear Duolingo: Why don’t some words change over time?
Brief Summary: “Welcome to another week of Dear Duolingo, an advice column just for learners. Catch up on past insta”
07-Jan-2025 – Lutalo has shared new single ‘I Figured’ ahead of their North American tour
Brief Summary: “Lutalo has released new single ‘I Figured’, following their debut album ‘The Academy’.
The Minnesota”
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
Social Media is Dead, Long Live Social Media
And other Hyperbolic click baity headlines.
Two articles today.
And
Basically, Mastodon, the Federated Open Source client for microblogging is shifting itself to be a not for profit company. John Mastodon os no longer in control. Or, he won’t be. These things apparently take a few months to do. Tangentially related, its picture centric counterpart Pixelfed, has experienced unprecedented growth. I saw one post where a Pixelfed instance was no longer allowing Instagram importing and Facebook is apparently blocking links to Pixelfed.
Both of these moves are very good for the internet as a whole, but they also feel very much sparked by Facebook’s recently policy changes. Basically, as part of its push to bown down to the incoming administration, Zuck has shown his true colors and rolled out a new policy that fact checking is no longer a thing on Facebook. Instead it will rely on “user notes.” At the same time, and more maliciously, they also changed their policies around hate speech, with specific exceptions around calling out LGBTQ people as being mentally disabled. Basically, you can’t get banned anymore for hate speech against the LGBTQ crowd.
This pretty much aligns with the plans of the incoming administration to start stripping away people’s rights as rapidly as possible, starting with transgender folks, probably pushing through on gay marriage and gay rights, and eventually layering on top a good helping of removing women’s autonomy from US society.
With the destruction facts and reality on Twitter, and now Facebook, basically, propaganda and lies are set to take over. We already saw it on Twitter.
This change isn’t the only anti-LBGTQ thing happening on Facebook. They renamed (one report said removed, one renamed) some of the Pride themes on Messenger to be more generic (Example, I want to say the lesbian pride was now “rustic sunrise” or something). I also saw some people suggest they had had various pride based badging removed from their username and profiles.
I do feel like its a bit more though, than just the new policies. But I am sure that is a lot of it. I don’t use Instagram really anymore, the algorithm has destroyed my interest in that platform, but I follow the Instagram subreddit. In the past few months, there have been a massive influx of accounts and people being randomly banned from the platform by the new AI based moderation system. It doesn’t really tell why either. Just the vague, “violation of site policy.”
So, it does seem there are still ways to get banned, but just not for LGBTQ hate speech.
Not to be overtaken by Twitter and Facebook, WordPress, has also been making a huge stink for its users lately. Its much less in the came of hate speech, but more in the area of, “Their CEO is just being a weird, petty whiney bully.” There is some sort of feud going on between WordPress and something called WPEngine, which is apparently a popular WP host, but I had never heard of it before this recent events. Like I said, it all seems very petty. Like the log in form for WordPress had a checkbox that said, “I am not affiliated with WPEngine for a bit. When people complained it was changed to “Pineapple on Pizza is good.” There have been other similar incidents.
I have been mostly ignoring it from apathy, but lately, it feels like WP just wants to bring in and potentially monetize the shit out of everything, and its got me seriously considering changing my blog platform, despite that I am hosting the software on my own VPS. I have been looking at doing some sort of static site system for a while, its starting to really feel like its time to be serious.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
Windows 10 End of Life
I got a notice today on my secondary Desktop about Windows 10 going out of support later this year. Microsoft really wants people to upgrade to Windows 11.
Like, a lot.
I mean, I get it, and I have no problem with updating. I use Windows 11 at work, I use it on my main desktop. Aside from the annoyance that the Task Bar can’t be docked on the side or top, I don’t really notice.
But I can’t, not on this PC, due to…. Reasons…? Windows 11 is essentially just, Windows 10 under the hood, it seems really weird that I can’t update this machine. Its most likely due to age. But this kind of leads me to another point.
This PC works just fine.
Its just my previous desktop, off to the side. It does everything I need it to do, just fine. It could even do more than I need it to do, just fine. I mostly use it to run Docker Containers and to host files. I occasionally use it to run a second Fortnite instance to play Bot Matches. It has gobs of memory for doing whatever task I throw at it, I have considered getting a better GPU for it to do AI stuff with it (it already has a very nice GPU, just not, AI nice).
Probably, at some point, I will just blow it out and load Ubuntu on it. I will lose my Fortnite ability probably, but I am kind of done with that anyway. I have already been slowly winding down my use needs that are Windows dependant there. I need to figure out the process of transferring my Docker containers over first. I may test things out using my Laptop first, which already runs Linux.
Which is another set of contention here. I went ahead and just replaced Windows 10 on my 10 year old Laptop. It still, ran just fine. I primarily use it for writing and coding, but I do play some games on it too. Thankfully, Steam has made great strides in getting Linux support in the gaming world.
But its not just my laptop. All 3 of my kids and my wife have laptops. My son has a desktop as well. Only one of these laptops is Windows 11 compatible. I have no idea on my son’s desktop. But all of these PCs work plenty fine.
I know I keep pushing this, “It works fine” point, but part of that is because the Windows 11 “requirements” really feel like a weird appeasement to PC makers to try to “encourage people to upgrade hardware.” I feel like these people are greatly overestimating just how often people buy new hardware. I had a neighbor at my old place with a Windows XP machine he would ask me to work on sometimes. The reality is, an XP machine would work just fine for what he needed.
PC power basically just, plateaued in usefulness a decade or so ago. It kind of feels like why there is such a big push for AI crap as well. “Get the new PC with an NPU! Get AI locally somit can make stuff up without the cloud!”
I could put Linux on some of these machines, but I already get grief over having to occasionally fix things on my family’s laptops as it is, I don’t really need that extra layer of grief AND a learning curve. I know its all much easier now, but like the upgrade cycle, its a “regular people” thing. Its a “Why doesn’t this scanner software work” thing, or a “why can’t Install my SIMS game” thing.
Though I will say this, for my case. Linux Mint runs 1000x better than Windows 10 did. I do get occasional weird lock ups though, which is annoying. Seems to be some sort of memory issue with Firefox because it happens if I get too ambitious with tabs, which I very often do. Its fine fine, then suddenly, the shole system is unresponsive.
But it also helps that I know how to use Linux already. I have been using it on some level now for like 25 years. I failed to install it the first time while at college in the early 2000s. But I have used it since. And prefer it.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
A Project a Year in the Making
Ok, calling it a project is a bit of a stretch. Its something I have been doing for the past year, that really worked out well. Its not even something I can show off, quite the contrary.
I have been cleaning up my old Facebook posts.
Its something I have tried to do a few times, except Facebook does not really provide a good interface for browsing old posts. Its there, but its clunky and prone to “refresh and start over.”
A lot of my early posts were thing like, Friendfeed and Social Media shares or even just straight Tweets posted to Facebook. They don’t serve any purpose. Not that anyone is scrolling way back to see all that garbage.
I wanted to delete it though, for a variety of reasons, then even moreso with all this AI crap feeding from everyone’s data.
So last year, I had a bit of a revelation. Facebook, has a daily “Memories” page, that shows all your old posts from that day, to encourage you to reshare your old posts as memories. Each post on this page, has the standard Facebook menu on it, which includes a delete option.
So I simply, made a point, of once a day, deleting everything.
Not everything, but a lot.
One thing I learned was that my current trend of “not really using Facebook”, has been my “always trend.”
This just goes back to a large desire to just, being everything back to my own control and my own blog. Its always kind of been that way, but lately I have been actively pursuing it. Even though I post to Bluesky and Mastodon, everything feeds back here in hidden categories, so in the future, I don’t have to sort it out and archive it. I already have the archive.
Another Facebook related one is Instagram. I have always kind of disliked Instagram because unless you use the platform a lot, it doesn’t show your stuff to anyone. If no one is going to see my stuff, I may as well just post it to my own blog. I have been doing that some here already with my “Snaps” posts. Just, posts with single photos. I am going to set up something similar over on Lameazoid with Toys stuff, and maybe game screen shots. I have a ton of toy photos to schedule put for daily posts. I also have a ton of random game screen shots. It would not even be the first time I made a website around random screen shots, I had a Geocities site for that back in the days of dial up.
Anyway, I am kind of happy I managed to keep up with my Daily Facebook deletions all year. It really shows now because my “Memories” pages are suddenly very barren.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.