Boozilla

If you plug a USB drive into Microsoft Windows, in many cases it will try to do things "for you" with the drive. Not a great idea. There could be malware lurking on that USB drive.

There are a couple of things you can do to help mitigate the issue. These tips assume Windows 11.

Turn off Autoplay

• Open Settings. Press Windows + I to open the Settings app.
• Go to Bluetooth & devices. In the left sidebar, click on "Bluetooth & devices."
• Select Autoplay. Scroll down and click on "Autoplay."
• Turn Off Autoplay. You'll see a toggle switch labeled "Use Autoplay for all media and devices." Turn this off.

This will turn it off completely. You can, if you want, make individual settings for different types of devices.

Deny Execute Access (Pro or Enterprise versions of Windows 11)

• Open Group Policy Editor. Press Windows + R, type gpedit.msc, and press Enter.
• Navigate to the Removable Storage Access Policies. Go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Removable Storage Access.
• Modify Policies. You can enable the policy "Removable Disks: Deny execute access" to prevent execution from removable drives.
• Apply and Reboot.

Note, there are some cases where you may want to execute scripts or programs from a removable drive. If that's the case, you may not want to do this, or make a note of it so you can re-enable if needed.

This is not an anti-Kindle rant. I have purchased (rented?) several Kindle titles myself.

However, YSK that you are only licensing access to the book from Amazon, you don't own it like a physical book.

There have been cases where Amazon deletes a title from all devices. (Ironically, one version of "1984" was one such title).

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html

There have also been cases where a customer violated Amazon's terms of service and lost access to all of their Kindle e-books. Amazon has all the power in this relationship. They can and do change the rules on us lowly peasants from time to time.

Here are the terms of use:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201014950

Note, there are indeed ways to download your books and import them into something like Calibre (and remove the DRM from the books). If you do some web searches (and/or search YouTube) you can probably figure it out.

I feel like an idiot for not knowing about these.

Every 2-3 months I have to snake out our shower drain with a 25' snake. Giant PITA.

After some web searches, I stumbled across these hair trap devices. They come in both external and internal configurations. Many different types to choose from.

I purchased an internal one, installed it, and am going to give it a try. In theory I can just pop it out and clean it instead of snaking the pipes. Folks tell me they work well. If this one doesn't work I'll try another type. They are fairly inexpensive.

We mostly watch news and sports in my house. So unfortunately, live TV. Occasionally we watch other things. I mute the commercials and browse my phone when they're on.

But I would love a TV that is smart enough to auto hide & mute every kind of ad. Even little logos on the athletes' uniforms. Hide the ads on the pitcher's mound. Hide the billboards and signs in the stadium. Show some cool little generic animation, music video, or slide show during commercial breaks. Hide the damned popup window ads and scrolling ads that some channels do. Remove product placements from movies and shows. Basically make all ads completely vanish.

Not asking for tech support here, just wondering if in theory it would be possible to create a plug-in or even a complete browser that blocks ads in a way that's impossible to detect. One model that comes to mind is a quarantined / containerized non-blocking virtual browser which queries the web server directly, then the UX filters the content from that container and presents it to the user ad-free. As far as the web server can tell, the containerized browser is just vanilla Chromium.