Do Crystal next! ;)

Treat the laptop as a desktop and put it in a public space (ie: the livingroom). Meaning gets an external monitor, keyboard or some other reason that it becomes a stationary PC.

Then an adblocker or pihole will be fine. Then have a discussion with your kids, that there are some very ugly places (use death/gore/animals being hurt, etc) that are not suitable people their age (or even your age)… and this computer tried to monitor and block it.

This won’t stop curious kids from being curious, but they will understand why the guardrails exist… and having it in a public space will avoid leaving them alone in their personal space with the untethered internet at their finger tips.

.…classic Microsoft :facepalm:

I drink and I smoke, but I also think it’s not a good idea to get children used to those things.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a “one size fits all solution”. When I was a kid, I had the candy cigarettes, champagne bottles, cap-guns to play " cops and robbers", and bb-guns to “shoot things” (trash usually)

As an adult, I don’t smoke, I’ll have a beer once a month or less, and I haven’t robbed any banks nor go hunting. Mainly because, as an adult, I’m not interested in those things.

However, as a child, these were tools to pretend and often pretending involves replicating your environment. I definitely grew-up in a rural area, but on (80-90s) television when everyone is smoking and drinking, your relatives smoke and drink - it’s normalized.

I would argue that the social shift towards no smoking and less drinking for adults, has a greater affect on children than a ban on stick shaped candy in a box.

(Now marketing vaping to young people with addictive “fun” chemical flavoring: that is evil and should be banned)

edit: fixed a couple of words

If you start fresh you should be fine. Just don’t browse the internet on it, or run sketchy ass software on it. And turn it off when you’re done. Behind NAT the only way for your device to get infected is for something else on the network infect it.

There is a lot of wisdom here, but be cautious…

“Back in the day” (when xp was still relevant), I installed a VM with xp on the cooperate LAN. …as it took eons to install all the patches and updates, this turned into a multi-day task. I didn’t browse the internet or do anything (because the patches were still installing/rebooting/ect).

When I came back to the office, the next day, the networking on the VM was disabled and I got a message from the local IT guy saying that my VM was part of a botnet and was spreading worms, so they had to quarantine it (by disabling the networking).

I literally did nothing with it, other than install updates. I assume someone in the office had a worm and it infected my VM during the night.

…so if you’re playing with xp (or any unsupported version of windows) - be careful.

…but how would it consume all our water? /s

“While you’re waiting here are some interesting full screen ads, by 500 of our closest affiliates.”

edit: “Oh, we’re going to have to throttle your update, so you can experience our streaming ads in Full 32k UHD”

Holy Snap -

That is exactly what I’ve been looking… and it would explain why I couldn’t find a plugin.

Thank you for sharing this!

… because I can’t find the tab I opened 2 days ago, so it’s faster open it again… which just creates a negative feedback loop of having too many tabs and not able to find anything.

Case and point: I’m in IT and we use github. Some code requires reviews (which needs “more time” to complete), then often I’m looking at other 3rd party repos’ for documentation/examples/etc. Some might be useful, some are related to my current problem. Oh, I get a ping - I need to finish that PR review: “which tab is it? They ALL say github!” … and I’m too impatient to hover over them. So, it’s faster to just type the URL in and go.

I loved browser plugin, Vimperator. It was fantastic, I could (at anytime) type “:b <pattern>” and it would search through my open tabs. But I’ve tried a bunch of the “successor”, but universally they seem to get “stuck” when it comes to inputting text - either into text fields (like on a normal email form) or as input into the browser extension.

Recently, I found an extension that would group tabs based on your rules (so, I could separate the company github tabs from the OSS). It’s far from perfect… but it’s endurable.

… but what I really wish for is a Firefox plugin that’ll allow me to type parts of the tabs domain or title and it’ll filter the results.

You mean, “Roll out!” /s