Macaulay Culkin just wanted to stay home alone.
The actor, 45, revealed why he decided to step away from acting in 1994 after starring in the holiday classic “Home Alone” in 1990 and its 1992 sequel, “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.”
“What I wanted is to be with people my own age. You have to remember: a lot of the stuff I did when I was a kid … I’m not doing ensembles. It’s me,” Culkin shared while appearing on Mythical Kitchen. //
In 1994, the child star led the family comedy “Richie Rich,” about a boy who has everything in the world except friends.
Afterwards, Culkin had the urge for a more normal lifestyle.
“I wanted to go out and I wanted to date girls, and I wanted to hang out with people my own age. I wanted to, you know, go to a party,” he detailed. “I wanted to do those kind of things. I can’t tell you how many bar mitzvahs I missed.”
Leontovych lived in Pokrovsk during the first years of the 20th century, and it was there he began to make a name for himself as a composer while teaching music and running a local choir.
And it was around that time that he repurposed a local folk tune to write Carol of the Bells — then called Shchedryk — and after World War I it became the anthem of Ukrainian nationalists hoping to gain independence from Russia, which had controlled the country’s people for centuries. //
“Shchedryk, which was a hit and always played as an encore, enchanted Europe and America, and helped Ukrainians to declare their nation and state to the world,” said author Anatoliy Paladiychuk.
But Leontovych paid dearly for his defiance of the Russian yoke.
After the Bolsheviks retook swaths of Ukraine during the Russian Civil War, he was tracked down by Soviet agents and murdered in a 1921 assassination that was covered up until the 1990s.
Practical steps to make an aging operating system usable into 2026
Part 1 You can switch to running mostly FOSS without switching to Linux. First, though, give your OS a bit of TLC. We'll come back to what to do next in part two. //
Before you begin, you should grab a copy of Snappy Driver Installer Origin and put it on a clean, empty USB key. Then run it, directly on the new key, and tell it to download all its driver packs. SDIO is the only driver-installer tool we trust and recommend. Don't pay for any alternative: indeed, we suggest you avoid anything else. SDIO is big – it takes quite a few gigabytes with all the driver packs or more – and takes a long time to download all the drivers, but it does the job. We've found it helpful from Windows XP all the way up to Windows 10.
Next, get a clean version of Windows. If you have the license key, you're all set. If you don't have your license key, then you can extract it from the running copy of Windows with Nirsoft ProduKey.
However, if you are willing to change versions, we suggest switching to Windows 10 LTSC. As we explained back in August, the Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021 edition will get updates until 2027, and if you don't mind using US English, it'll last until 2032. As an added bonus, it's remarkably uncluttered – it doesn't even have the Windows Store, and so no "Modern" applications. Aside from Notepad, there's very little there at all, which is just how we like it. //
11 hrs
Liam Proven(Written by Reg staff) Silver badge
Reply Icon
Re: Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021 edition?
This doesn't work on machines running Windows 10 Home though, does it?
Yes it does.
Read ALL OF https://massgrave.dev/ carefully. It is not a large site. //
11 hrs
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward
The trick I find is to simply keep them offline (from installation, onwards).
This doesn't mean you can't use them to connect to the internet, but the OS as a whole must never be online. What I mean by this is i.e SOCKS5h proxy which only Firefox knows about. //
hrs
Jou (Mxyzptlk)Silver badge
Thanks for the article!
Snappy Driver and Ventoy were unknown to me, never needed them, but good to know and have those tools at hand.
As for my usual 10th-bazillion times repeated hint: Server 2022 and 2025, keys which activate are cheap, or use your favourite graveyard tool. Does not need a hacked-installer to not-annoy you. And has some nice features. like dedup, or setting a quota in a directory, or limit the file type / sizes, disconnected RDP sessions don't stop like on workstation Windows, they just work on, SMB Bandwidth control (nice for LAN parties, 'cause your game play is more important than those copy jobs). Well, and that's it, the rest of the server features/capabilities/roles are too esoteric for a workstaton install, or are already the same on normal Windows, except mins the crap you get on normal Windows.
If you want to install something from the store (manually, without account, like the Windows-Camera) or need bluetooth audio (read, never tested self on S2022) you are better off with Server 2025.
And you get updates long enough
Urban VPN Proxy targets conversations across ten AI platforms: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Grok (xAI), Meta AI.
For each platform, the extension includes a dedicated “executor” script designed to intercept and capture conversations. The harvesting is enabled by default through hardcoded flags in the extension’s configuration.
There is no user-facing toggle to disable this. The only way to stop the data collection is to uninstall the extension entirely.
[…]
The data collection operates independently of the VPN functionality. Whether the VPN is connected or not, the harvesting runs continuously in the background.
Which Years Have the Same Calendar?
Reuse your yearly calendar by finding years that have the same number of days and start on the same day of the week.
Repeats every 6, 11, or 12 years
Sick of AI summaries? Here's how to remove AI from Google and get back classic search - on desktop and mobile.
Hayek was asked to leave “a statement for the future generations.” His response is brilliant:
“Modern civilization which enables us to maintain 4 billion people was made possible by the institution of private property. It is only thanks to this institution that we achieved an extensive order far exceeding anybody’s knowledge.”
“If you destroy that moral basis, which consists in the recognition of private property, we will destroy the sources which nourish present-day mankind, and create a catastrophe of starvation beyond anything mankind has yet experienced.” //
.
“Those who founded the United States of America, and wrote the Constitution, saw property rights as essential for safeguarding all other rights.”
— Thomas Sowell
.
The real problem with Humanity is this-
We have Stone-Age Emotions, medieval Institutions, and Godlike technology.
And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.
-- Edward Wilson
But ZFS also comes with an uncomfortable truth that doesn't get talked about enough: the filesystem is only as good as the operating system wrapping it. And if you're running ZFS on a generic Linux distribution, you're often signing up for more risk, maintenance, and subtle breakage than you expect. ZFS works on Linux, and many use it daily, but it's not a seamless, built-in part of the kernel. Instead, it's an add-on with caveats, and setting it up can feel frustratingly difficult. //
The problem with ZFS is Oracle
Licensing is a major issue
the Linux kernel's GPLv2 license is legally incompatible with ZFS's CDDL license, meaning that it can't be combined with the Linux kernel. Oracle's licensing is the major bottleneck.
Crucial early evolutionary step found, imaged, and ... amazingly ... works
Computer History Museum software curator Al Kossow has successfully retrieved the contents of the over-half-a-century old tape found at the University of Utah last month.
UNIX V4, the first ever version of the UNIX operating system in which the kernel was written in the then-new C programming language, has been successfully recovered from a 1970s nine-track tape drive. You can download it from the Internet Archive, and run it in SimH. On Mastodon, "Flexion" posted a screenshot of it running under SGI IRIX.
https://archive.org/details/utah_unix_v4_raw //
The very first version of Unix, later known as the "Zeroth edition", was hand-coded in assembly language by Thompson in 1969. He wrote it for a spare PDP-7 at Bell Labs, a Digital Equipment Corporation minicomputer from 1965. The PDP-7 was an 18-bit machine: it handled memory in 18-bit words. This was so long ago that things like the eight-bit byte had not yet been standardized. PDP-7 UNIX was reconstructed from printouts between 2016 and 2019.
It did well enough that a few years later, Thompson got his hands on a PDP-11. Thompson rewrote his OS for this 16-bit machine – still in assembly language – to create UNIX First Edition. At first, the machine had a single RS11 hard disk, for a grand total of half a megabyte of storage, although the rebuilt source code is from a later machine with a second hard disk.
Joplin
A handy OneNote alternative
OpenCloud
Say goodbye to OneDrive
OnlyOffice
An excellent office suite
Syncthing
To sync your local folders
Czkawka is more than just a dupe finder
It has a comprehensive tool set with a wide range of applications
Czkawka's main purpose is to find duplicate files, but it offers a variety of methods for doing so. The Duplicate File Finder feature allows you to check files not only by hash, but also by size, name, or both. And if you search by hash, you can choose between Blake3, CRC32, and XXH3. When I put the app to the test, it turned up a slew of duplicates in my downloads folder (of course) and quite a few in my documents.
But that's not all it can do. I can search specifically for big files, empty folders (which I found a surprising number of), similar images and videos, and even duplicates of music. Each search is customizable, too, allowing more granular control over the results.
OpenCloud
Immich
Vaultwarden
Docmost
HomeBox
Four new portraits have gone up at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, showcasing this year’s recipients of the Portrait of a Nation award for their transformative contributions to American history and culture. One of them is Temple Grandin, who has transformed animal welfare around the world and affected public perception of autism. John Yang speaks with Grandin for our Weekend Spotlight. //
Right now one of the big things I've been working on is recognizing the importance of object visualizers. And I'm worried about them getting screened out. Okay. I went up to community college and they're doing a two year factory maintenance degree and requiring calculus and algebra. Well, you're going to screen out the very best mechanic for keeping a factory running. //
I just talked to a science teacher and her dad was cooking. Airplane mechanic couldn't do any, any higher math. He fixed some hydraulic problem on a Boeing airplane and Boeing put it in every one of their airplanes because he could just see how the hydraulics works. We need these thinkers.
Now where we need our mathematical engineers. Let's take something like a spaceship. The mathematician tells the thruster when to thrust, but the visual thinker has to make sure it's put together properly.
You see, there's two parts of engineering here, the mathematical part and what I call the clever engineers that often don't get enough credit.
While 300 TB comprising roughly 86 million music files, which the group claims represent about 99.6 percent of Spotify’s listens, is a vast amount of audio, it falls well short of the platform’s full catalog. Anna’s Archive says Spotify contains around 256 million tracks in total, meaning the audio files it archived cover only about a third of the catalog, with the remaining tracks represented only in metadata rather than preserved as music files.
By not bothering with all the musical chaff in Spotify's catalog, the Anna's Archive team is apparently content to let those less popular songs languish despite their claim to want to avoid focusing on just the most popular artists.
A staffer at the USA’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) tried to disable backup generators powering some of its Network Time Protocol infrastructure, after a power outage around Boulder, Colorado, led to errors.
As explained in a mailing list post by Jeffrey Sherman, a NIST supervisory physicist who maintains the institute’s atomic clocks, “The atomic ensemble time scale at our Boulder campus has failed due to a prolonged utility power outage.”
Sherman, whose LinkedIn bio proclaims he is “One of the few federal employee actually paid to watch the clocks all day,” says one impact of the incident “is that the Boulder Internet Time Services no longer have an accurate time reference.”
That’s bad because one of the things NIST uses its atomic clocks for is to provide a Network Time Protocol service, the authoritative source of timing information that the computing world relies on so that diverse systems can synchronize events. If NTP isn’t working, outcomes can include difficulties authenticating between systems, meaning applications can become unstable.
At this point, readers might wonder why NIST can’t just turn off the inaccurate service. Sherman said a backup generator kicked in and kept the servers running.
“I will attempt to disable them [the generators] to avoid disseminating incorrect time,” he wrote.
thatanonymouscoward Ars Scholae Palatinae
13y
901
I'm gonna have to prepare more crow for people to eat.
I saw a shark once upon a time long ago... of course I'm an untrusted source by design.
As I often pointed out, courts don't let you create events to profit from.
See they could have owned the films, even openly filed cases on behalf of themselves but then there would have been questions, depositions, etc. So they invented shells to hide the client from view and convince the world it was some poor copyright holder getting screwed by evil pirates.
If your playing the home game -
They forged a name on a copyright assignment & submitted a knowingly forged document to courts.
They placed the content on TPB, knowing it would be downloaded.
They lied about their involvement/control/ownership of various firms & shells.
They lied under oath... a lot.
They funneled money out of Prenda from the main accounts, not a client account where actual lawyers place client funds to keep everything above board.
They shifted the money around rapidly trying to hide the trail.
They hired the best of the best lawyers off of craingslist.
They used another lawyers ECF login to file court documents in his name.
They ghostwrote & submitted documents to courts the lawyer of record on the case had never seen.
They tried to sue the person whos identity they stole to forge the copyright assignment. (Not to mention a bunch of us nice people who called them extortionists online.)
They lost that case before it even began because they lied to amend the filing, lied about what another Federal Judge said about a concurrent case they had filed, and pretty much pissed all over the bench.
When this all went sideways they applied the same pay us or else strategy filing bogus Americans with Disability Act lawsuits, and managed to force several small businesses to go under.
@StanFL - there might be a chance that Hans thinks his father can work miracles one more time to save him. He's bailed him out several times but I think he's burned most of goodwill.
@yasth - Thats the fun thing about copyright you can demand actual damages OR statutory damages. The statutory damages are $150,000. Its a very scary number to threaten people with and makes a few thousand sound reasonable. Of course settlement amounts don't get subtracted from the $150K so they can keep scaring people with that number.
Former attorney John Steele was sentenced this week to five years in prison for his role in the Prenda Law porn-trolling scheme, putting an end to a years-long legal drama wild and stupid enough to be prime-time TV.
Steele pleaded guilty in 2017 to federal charges of fraud and money laundering and then cooperated with authorities in the investigation into his former legal partner Paul Hansmeier. That cooperation weighed heavily in Steele’s favor at his sentencing, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports.
US District Judge Joan Ericksen said federal guidelines recommended a sentence of 10 to 12-1/2 years for Steele’s “vile scheme” but agreed that given Steele’s extreme willingness to cooperate, his defense attorney’s recommendation of five years was “eminently fair.”
Ericksen also said Steele and Hansmeier were liable for paying about $1.5 million in restitution, separate from all the fines and sanctions the two already accrued in recent years. //
Hansmeier was sentenced in June to 14 years in prison for his role in the scheme.
The Prenda Law saga kicked off in 2012, when the copyright troll firm sued Comcast and AT&T, claiming they were accessory to their subscribers “stealing” certain pornographic content. A chain of courtroom events unfolded from there, and in 2013 a judge sanctioned the firm and referred Steele and Hansmeier for criminal investigation.
Prenda made its money by suing people who allegedly downloaded pornographic films online. Its targets frequently agreed to settlements worth a few thousand dollars rather than facing a courtroom process. These copyright trolling tactics netted the company more than $6 million between 2010 and 2013.
But eventual criminal investigations revealed that rather than representing real companies who had a real product that was being traded in violation of copyright law, Prenda was filming its own porn, inventing fraudulent shell companies, and uploading those supposed companies’ content to torrent sites itself. Then the settlement money went directly into the Prenda attorneys’ pockets. //
Disorders and Diseases of Hamsters
Looking west from Tucson, Arizona, USA one day last month, the sunset sky looked strange when it briefly lit up with the plume of a rocket launched from California a few minutes earlier. Appearing at times like a giant space fish, the impressive rocket launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base near Lompoc, California, was so noticeable because it was backlit by the setting Sun.
Any community's arm of force - military, police, security - needs people in it who can do necessary evil, and yet not be made evil by it. To do only the necessary and no more. To constantly question the assumptions, to stop the slide into atrocity.
Lois McMaster Bujold, "Barrayar", 1991