I personally do not trust ISP provided routers to be secure and up to date, nor free of purposefully built in back doors for either tech support or surveillance purposes (or both). You can expect patches and updates on those somewhere on the timescale between late and never.

Therefore I always put those straight into bridge mode and serve my network with my own router, which I can trust and control. Bad actors (or David from the ISP help desk) may be able to have their way with my ISP router, but all that will let them do is talk to my own router, which will then summarily invite them to fuck off.

Likewise, I would not be keen on using an ISP provided router’s inbuilt VPN capability, which is probably limited to plain old PTPP – it has been on all of the examples I’ve touched so far – and thus should not be treated as secure.

You can configure an OpenWRT based router to act as an L2TP/IPSec gateway to provide VPN access on your network without the need for any additional hardware. It’s kind of a faff at the moment and requires manually installing packages and editing config files, but it can be done.

Niko, cousin! Let’s go bowling!

Yeah, I just winged it based on a hazy recollection of a block puzzle I’m pretty sure I saw once. I’m sure the puzzle in question was not mathematically rigorous both so it could look nicer (with the same or similar solution to what I doodled, there) and also so it could be like, you know, actually manufactured.

The rub with this design is that the length of the sides of the little squares is not an even integer division of the length of the sides of the big square, though.

Doing it the naive way, i.e. keeping all the edges parallel, you can only fit 16. However it’s trivial to fit 17 in there without it looking like a warehouse accident, like so:

Or, a slightly easier to follow rendering:

This may correlate with #17 on your linked list, but I was not rigorous with the math. (I.e. I just traced this off of the screenshot.)

I’m positive I’ve seen this as a 3D printed puzzle somewhere at some point…

Pretty much all of those are characters from franchises that quickly jumped to consoles, or had the intention of multiplatform releases from the very start. I’m not sure any of them are very fitting.

So on that note, the least nonsensical mascot for PC gaming in particular I can think of is that dwarf, whoever he is, from the box art of World of Warcraft. Or possibly the orc from the alternate version. WoW is earth-shatteringly popular and has basically defined the entire private lives of a depressing number of people, not to mention it’s the sole and singular thing even non-gamers think of when you mention MMORPGs. And it has only appeared on home computers. Never consoles. Other Warcraft properties have, but not WoW.

Define “long.” I disagree with the Doomguy proposal explicitly, because Doom appeared on the Sega 32x in November of 1994 which was barely a year after the initial PC release. One of the defining aspects of gaming in the mid '90s was the monumentally cynical gold rush of trying to cram Doom onto any damn fool console as fast as possible, in a vain attempt to capture part of the lightning and make those sales. And until the Playstation and arguably the N64, every attempt failed spectacularly in various ways.

The definitive Doom experience remaining locked to the PC for those few years was absolutely not for a lack of trying. Every greedy video game exec on the planet wanted Doom on their system. id themselves assisted with several of these ports in various ways and they had absolutely no intention of leaving Doom only on PC, either, if they could help it.

Also not true for HP’s “Instant Ink” subscription service, which I can tell you from experience will brick the perfectly full cartridges already in your printer as soon as you cancel, even if you have not yet reached the next billing date.

I’d doubt this is anything approaching universal, but where I am there definitely were three digit signs in the early aughts, which now appear to have all been replaced with two digit ones. I don’t know if this was for cost purposes or the proposed “high score” reason.

There was one right in front of the police station in the town I lived in back in the day, which was a full dot matrix display and didn’t even have discrete digit slots. It could display other messages if it wasn’t in speed readout mode. I passed it at about a buck twenty one night and discovered that it topped out at 99. It’s the first one I recall seeing that didn’t have a third digit, but then they became the norm pretty shortly thereafter.

The ones that are popping up like mushrooms around here now fit within the footprint of a normal speed limit sign and they have a dual color LED matrix that flashes a frowny face at you if you’re 0.01 MPH over the specified speed…

Or possibly ten thousand spoons.

I’ve been summoned, just like Beetlejuice.

Oh, that’s diabolical.

For similar reasons, I always kept Alabaster Potions around to sub out for the Meteor Shower (or Fireball, but Meteor Shower is more amusing). Pick white, you explode. Red, I’ll just give myself 4,294,967,296 health.

You know, I have a deck that could theoretically legitimately cast this by turn 4. Less if you were willing to abuse Lotuses or Moxes.

Usually I just dump all of that colorless mana into a Meteor Shower, though.

Neon, of course!

All of a true ninja’s tools have multiple purposes.

…Yes?

It’s the dessert of champions.

This works with Maraschino cherries, also. Helps you reach the bottom of the jar and keeps your fingers from turning red. Double bonus.

Said jar, by the way.

A friend of mine worked for the US Census Bureau for a while. Among their myriad binders and forms, etc. was a page full of tear-off perforated wallet size cards which contained no text or information on them whatsoever other than “do not distribute this card” printed on the back. And no, I have absolutely no idea what the purpose of these things was supposed to be. Nor apparently does anyone else.

So of course he dutifully tore them all off and quite deliberately handed them out to people. He gave me one. I might still have it someplace.

Wish.com used to lock your account if you unsubscribed from their daily spam emails.

If only that boat could be made smaller somehow and fit inside the car.

These types of identical house suburban hellholes are the exception, not the norm. Mostly it’s the newer developments being built out in the middle of nowhere that look like this, and presumably so the builders can skimp out on construction costs by making (or attempting to make…) everything the same for each one. Plus the HOA, “but muh resale value!” factor.

I live in an American suburb. All the houses in my neighborhood, and all the others in town, are different. We don’t have an insane HOA and I can paint my house whatever color I want. We have quite a few services, shops, and various eateries (to be fair, three of them are fast food joints) well within walking distance. With sidewalks. And in some places, even a bike lane.

This area was built up in the 1940’s through the late 1950’s in the post-war boom.