Notices by Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@retro.social)

@ShaulaEvans Got the cheapest one in the thrift shop, it's not good

Last few tins of Cadbury's drinking chocolate I've gotten have smelled of paint and apparently there's been a recall, Fedi please tell me about your favourite drinking chocolate (not cocoa, that's different, I mean stuff you stir into milk (I put it in with instant coffee to make a Cheap Mocha)) EDIT: obviously not nestle, they literally kill babies

sometimes I forget how bloody rich you lot are

INDIE GAME DEVELOPERS OF FEDI, pls give me your hot chocolate recommendations

Fedi sure is good for some things?

🦝 Are there any toasters that aren't shit
🐰 You want a toaster oven
🐻 Fry it in a frying pan, trust me
🦅 New ones are all deficient, try getting one from the 40's
🦆 Toast is bad for you
🐺 I use a microwave

🦝 Gimme a VPN recommendation
🐰 Mullvad
🐻 Mullvad
🦅 Mullvad
🦆 Mullvad or proton no wait actually just mullvad
🐺 Mullvad
🦝 Alright mullvad yikes

🦝 Aldi have started wrapping their peppermint teabags in plastic, who's my next pep T purchase
🐰 Celestial Seasonings
🐻 Celestial Seasonings
🦅 Celestial Seasonings
🦆 Celestial Seasonings
🐺 Celestial Seasonings
🦝 So celestial seasonings then yeah

🦝 My hot chocolate has started to taste like paint, can you -
🐰 You wanna use cocoa instead
🐻 Crumble up an actual chocolate bar and fry it in a frying pan, trust me
🦅 Have you tried using the syrupy stuff you put on ice cream
🦆 You can import this stuff from germany
🐺 Oh there's a great brand, it costs ten cents a GRAM

"Thanks, but didja get the high-def version?"

You put your glasses on and tell your phone to quit being polite about Jen's phone's battery and give you the zoom-in-able high-res "I'm actually going to look at this photo and not just scroll past it" version of the photo, and you go "Awwww!" aloud and congratulate Jen on her cute new piercing.

You turn on the telly while you make breakfast and the celebrities are moaning about how nobody goes on the advert app anymore now that folk just talk to their friends instead. You turn it off again. You went viral once; your phone battery was flat in half an hour, but on the bright side, your phone battery was flat in half an hour. You make all your posts friends-only now.

Anyway "Nice tits Jen"

It's weird, last year everyone was really excited about this app and talking about it all the time but now you can't even remember what it's called. You vaguely remember that everyone uses a different version of the app and they all have different names, and at one point you knew why that was, something about "clients" your computer friend said, but these days you don't think about it, you just think about your friends.

Kinda like how the podcast people don't say "Get us on soundsli" or "Peep us on greebo" or whatever, they say "Subscribe however you get your podcasts," it's that sort of deal, everyone gets them from somewhere different and it all works out fine. However you get your friend updates. Podcasts for your mates. But not audio. More like nodding cheerfully at each other. Nodcasts. Except Jen's more birdcasts. And sometimes bodcasts.

One day you couldn't sleep and you were looking at your phone at 3am when a notification popped up saying your friend-status-thing app was synchronizing. You got curious and tapped on the thing and watched it.

It told you that some of your friends had nominated you as one of their trusted text backups, and your phone was now checking all their posts and downloading any it'd missed, so if their phone got stolen by a crow or buried under a tree then they could come round your house with their new phone and get their old posts back. You remember seeing the option when you first installed the app, and you didn't bother with it, but in that moment you felt weirdly grown-up and reliable, and you told yourself to try and remember to sort out backups tomorrow.

You watched it looking at each post in turn and getting the comments and reactions and stuff, and you imagined some scruffy little librarian raccoon nodding and scribbling notes and putting them in lots of different drawers, making sure that nobody lost anything. This somehow made you feel safe.

You were glad it decided to do all this when you were asleep, because your phone got kinda warm.

One of your friends uses an app called Yesterday or something, except spelled wrong, Yes!Today! or some crap like that, it does the daily Go Get Everything thing too, except that's it, it never updates in real time, it only ever shows you what your friends did yesterday. Every night he puts on his glasses and makes a drink and gets in his comfy chair and makes a ritual of it, like people used to do with the newspaper. He has one of those e-ink phones that doesn't even scroll, just flips from page to page like a book.

You might try it one day, or you might not, it sounds equal parts cosy and infuriating. But it takes all sorts, doesn't it? That's kind of the point, right?

It's 2026 and you wonder what your friends are up to. You tell the app on your phone to go and get everyone's most recent news. Jim's phone takes a sec to load because his wifi is crap in the garden, and Alex's phone takes a sec to load because their wifi is crap in the workshop, but nobody times out.

You don't worry when your friends time out. You're not one of those Worrying People who panic when they open the app and their friend's phone fails to respond to the ping, you figure they're just, y'know, in the garden or going through a tunnel or something.

Jim is of course posting hole. You comment "Nice hole Jim," and that comment goes straight from your phone to Jim's. Your phone saves a copy as well because it deliberately doesn't know the difference between a four-paragraph furnace repair guide and "Nice hole Jim" and it makes a local backup of anything you type, in case Jim drops his phone down the hole and doesn't notice until he's planted a tree on top of it. Everyone still teases him about that, and he jokes along with them because it was pretty funny. The tree has its own account now.

You scroll through today's posts, mostly goodmornings and fantastical lies about all the stuff your friends are gonna get done today. All these posts were downloaded from people's phones when you opened the app a minute ago. You reach the end of today's posts (the first one of course was Jenna and her early-bird nonsense) and that's it, nothing more to see, you're up to date on what your friends are up to. You're not ready to go back to Actually Doing Something With Your Life so you move your thumb over the Yesterday button, but before you can tap, a mitherbox pops up to tell you that Alex is posting shaft.

Your thumbs do a happy dance and "Nice shaft Alex" is sent directly from your phone to theirs, without needing the permission of any weird billionaires sitting in between, a connection as direct as a phone call, not that you're thinking about that, you're thinking about Alex's shaft. Apparently they've been polishing their shaft all morning and they're almost ready to give it some lube and stick it in. That car's gonna be Gorgeous when they finally finish it.

Anyway that's it now, you're all caught up. You didn't see any ads (why would you? All this is stored on your friends' phones' SD cards and sent over their wifi, they're the ones paying the 0.0001p to respond to your phone's "What's new" request) and everything was shown in chronological order (there are alternative apps that mess with your timeline ordering but nobody uses those because they're shit) and you've read the whole day and you're done. You put your phone away and start getting dressed.

As your coffee brews you check your friends app again and Jen the birdwatcher wants to show everyone her tits

🐰 *snfsnfsnRRRRRfffsnfsnf* ew, what's this?
🦝 That's a video file, Kodi, that's what you eat. That's the only thing you eat. Will you not just eat it?
🐰 *snfsnfsnf* hmm, no, I don't know what it is
🦝 it's a VIDEO FILE just PLAY IT just EAT your FOOD give me STRENGTH

"Opinionated" software they call it, as a euphemism for "Loud abrasive arsehole" software, think about the guy at the party who describes himself as "Opinionated"

Thank you Krita devs for making it so that we never have to think about the GNU IMP ever again, now do Kodi

Pls let 2025 be the year of taping over the arsehole software with nice friendly software that works normally

🐰 Taping over, Dan?
🦝 Taping over. Like put the good new program on the same tape as the crap old one. Tape over it.
🐧 Like... like drywall repair, or
🦝 Rewind the tape to the start of the tape and tape over it, like record over the same bit of tape, you know, "Who taped over Red Dwarf," just tape over it
🦆 OK hun that's enough excitement for one day, let's get you home
🦝 Gonna need lots of tape for the good new programs

🦝 Like how the BBC taped over the old Doctor Who episodes
🐹 That's nice Dan
🦝 I'm gonna bring it back this year, I'm bringing back "Taping over"
🐹 Are you now, that's exciting
🦝 Like when the computer says you've got too many emails, it should offer to start taping over the old emails
🦝 When someone gets cancelled we're gonna say we're taping over them with a new celebrity
🐹 I brought you your slippers
🦝 Thank you
🦝 zzz

Whoever's working on Kodi But It Plays Your Random Video Files Without Being A Picky Little Bitch About It, can we also have Calibre But Leaves Your Ebooks Where They Are Instead Of Being A Total Dick About It

Alright guys and gals and nonbinary pals, it's time to play "What's that stuck in Dan's defrost vent"

And I'm reminded of the last time I bought a car in a hurry and the absolute toss I scrolled through on Craigslist

Sale: 2008 [whatever it was], $2000 OBO. Bluetooth, satnav, inspection good for 10 months, heated seats. Recent new tie rods, struts, radiator, exhaust. New tyres in January. Oil change last week. Wrecked it into a tree.

and there was a picture of the back end of this gorgeous pristine looking thing and then another picture of the front end looking like one of those inbred luxury dogs that can't breathe

I could do an '08 Honda Pilot for four grand. I could make that work. Let's give him a ring.