AllWashedOut

I recently bought a second-hand phone that is unexpectedly locked to Verizon. Is there any way I can speak to a human to find the status of the IEMI lock (days remaining etc)?

So far the tech support phone numbers I have called have automatically hung up with a message that they only accept calls from Verizon phone numbers. But I am not (currently) a Verizon customer.

I'm always always on the lookout for more books like Hyperion. Within the Dan Simmons ecosystem, people usually point to Illium/Olympos. But I just recently came across his novella "Muse of Fire" and found it had even more similarity to Hyperion though.

Both stories deal with

* Humanity spread to the stars by ftl technology which they don't own or understand.

* Christianity replaced by ancient dead religions.

* A class of shadow rulers who turn out to be far from unified.

* An obsession with poets and bards.

* Grim body horror

I would recommend it to any Hyperion fan. You can find it as stand-alone release, or the last story in the collection "New Space Opera".

If yo

Every synopsis I've read of the Divine Cities books (including Wikipedia) describes Saypur as an island nation. But this quote from the middle of City of Stars states that Saypur is connected to the Continent by mountains. Am I missing something or are the synopsis all wrong?

"Two days later >!Sigrud!< sails along the Jukoshtan coast, watching as the cliffs climb and climb north of him, climbing until they become the Mashevs, the tallest mountains in the known world, much taller than the Tarsils. This tiny isthmus of land, hardly five hundred miles wide, is all that connects the Continent to Saypur, yet with the Mashevs in the way it might as well be an ocean in between the two."

(And stra

In the 90s, Sega made a niche console called the LaserActive . It was a Frankenstein system that could play laser disk movies and games for Sega Genesis and Sega CD. It also had a very small number of dedicated games, including a port of Myst.

What is wild is how they chose to port Myst. Instead of recompiling Myst code for the new system, they basically screen-recorded a 100% completionist playthrough video and then wrote a wrapper that would loop a given scene until you clicked somewhere. Then the wrapper would fast forward to the correct section of the video to show the outcome of your click.

To make things even more wild, each frame of video actually contained two different scenes (

I tried to teleport from Light Speed to Warp but it has been placed on hold for the past 12 hours. In the meantime my service has been cut off and I get notifications that my eSIM is "not provisioned". Can anything be done to restore service quickly? I don't really care whether I am on Warp or Dark Star or Light Speed, as long as my phone service is restored soon.

"Your port request for the number xxxxxxxxxx has been submitted successfully. However, every port has a due date for activation. We've escalated this and are now waiting for the due date from our porting partner so that we can activate the line promptly."

I want to lay out my understanding of the origin and purpose of Area X based on what Control, Ghost Brid, and Lowry have told us. Sticking to textually-supported statements, can you point out areas where I am off-base? The sub-bullets are quotes and evidence, so you can skip them if you agree with the higher level statement.

• Control and Ghost Bird believe that an alien civilization sent out automated seeds to prepare planets for colonization. One lands on Earth, long after its parent civilization died.
  • This is based on their experience seeing the sky in Area X full of unrecognizable stars and
  • Ghost Birds vision in Acceptance: "She saw or felt, deep within, the cataclysm like a r

My house was built back in 1999 so it has phone jacks in most rooms. I've never hand a landline so they were just dead copper. But repurposing them into a whole-house 2.5 gigabit ethernet network was surprisingly easy and cost only a few dollars.

Where the phone lines converge in my garage, I used RJ-45 male toolless terminators to connect them to a cheap 2.5G network switch.
Then I went around the house and replaced the phone jacks with RJ-45 female keystones.

"...but why?" - I use this to distribute my mini-pc homelab all over the house so there aren't enough machines

Based on this week's announcement about "lost Canadians", I qualify for a "discretionary" grant of citizenship. Which form should be using? Do I file a request for a citizenship certificate (CIT-0001)? Or do I go through a full citizenship application process?

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/news/2025/03/canada-to-request-a-further-extension-to-maintain-first-generation-limit-to-canadian-citizenship-by-descent.html

I have had a persistent issue in the past months where wemo lights would mysteriously turn off in the middle of dinner even though there is no related schedule rule. Today I went into the Wemo app to double check this, and I noticed a mysterious Wemo switch named "Jojo" in my account. I can turn it on and off but it doesn't correspond to anything in my house. I can't even remove it from my account because the app demands that I "Connect to the same Wi-fi" to do that.

I assume someone gained access to my cloud account (even though it has a long randomly generated password that I use nowhere else). All I can do is hope that resetting my password locks this other person out. And I guess I'm pe

The M715q is an interesting mini PC because it is an almost-acceptable gaming machine that you can buy for $75 used. Look for one with the AMD 2400ge or 2200ge CPU. These come with a built-in AMD Vega GPU. This is a weak GPU by modern standards (a little slower than a GeForce 1030) but will run circles around the Intel GPUs found in almost all mini PCs. With the tweaks below you will be able to play some modern 3d games, which is kind of a feat for a $75 mini PC.

This doesn't get you a good gaming PC, but it is honestly kind of a great TV-top Steam box (paired with any Bluetooth controller). I use it for casual couch play, and occasionally put it in my backpack for work trips or vacations

I will occasionally enter an absent -minded state, particularly when walking a few blocks on the sidewalk. It feels like being on autopilot, with just enough brain activity to keep my feet moving without tripping.

When I inevitably snap out of it, I get a mild feeling of vertigo. In fact, it feels a bit like the "Hitchcock shot" from the movie Vertigo, where the emphasis of foreground and background swaps jarringly.

Is this a normal human quirk? Os there a name for it?