Keeping my computers, phone and the firmware of any devices up to date. Doesn’t matter what it is, I like the latest and greatest.
Consider my SIP VoIP gateway, I maybe make one call a month through it and get a couple of scam calls a week, it’s stable as hell. Yet the second I get a notification saying there is a new firmware version I’m downloading it!
BBC News. They do a fairly good job of being impartial since both main party voters here in the UK hate it and accuse it of being biased to the opposition!
2744548! I still log in once every few years to see all my contacts who are offline!
So many!
MS Comic Chat and their weird VR Chat, the former was always very lively and a great introduction to the world of IRC, the latter was just experimental and trippy.
Usenet and finding lively discussion, flamewars and so much porn and spam under one roof.
Instant Messengers like ICQ and AIM being the lifeblood of the social world.
I think the thing I miss the most is that there was so much to discover and discovering it was very much a word of mouth thing, you had to find links from friends, follow webrings and pointers from sites that made it onto Altavista and Yahoo (or astalavista for the less legit stuff), now everything is consolidated onto a handful of platforms, it feels less open than ever.
I loved this one. Before broadband internet was common a number of us would download our Linux ISOs from questionable websites in our university computer lab and then take our files home on floppy or zip disk. I remember once my friend got trapped in a number of popups which claimed to have pictures of “Britney Spears Nude!!!” and I loudly asked him “what does ‘Britney Spears Nude’ mean?” in the full lab and then watching him panic close down everything.
Golden days!
I cut my teeth on Usenet so web forums always seemed so backwards and limiting compared to that. My earliest experience of being an actual user of them was probably the eurogamer forums and a few proboards “free” forums hosted by a few websites in the early-mid 00’s and still it just felt so clunky!
I have two Huawei AX3 Pro Wifi6 routers (Chinese versions, since they have a much larger range due to extra amplifiers on one of the bands) which are connected together via a devolo homeplug system. I consider it pretty cheap and janky, but practically it works really well. Range is excellent and roaming between both routers is seamless. My only complaint is that you only get 3 free ethernet ports as one is needed for WAN/uplink, also you need to use Google translate to configure it as there is no English language option!