dex

lame nerd. he/him

[lifehacksthatwork]

Just a bunch of Useful websites - Updated for 2023

Removed/checked all links to make sure everything is working (03/03/23). Hope they help!

Sejda - Free online PDF editor.

Supercook - Have ingredients but no idea what to make? Put them in here and it’ll give you recipe ideas.

Still Tasty - Trying the above but unsure about whether that sauce in the fridge is still edible? Check here first.

Archive.ph - Paywall bypass. Like 12ft below but appears to work far better and across more sites in my testing. I’d recommend trying this one first as I had more success with it.

12ft – Hate paywalls? Try this site out.

Where Is This - Want to know where a picture was taken, this site can help.

TOS/DR - Terms of service, didn’t read. Gives you a summary of terms of service plus gives each site a privacy rating.

OneLook - Reverse dictionary for when you know the description of the word but can’t for the life of you remember the actual word.

My Abandonware - Brilliant site for free, legal games. Has games from 1978 up to present day across pc and console. You’ll be surprised by some of the games on there, some absolute gems.

Project Gutenberg – Always ends up on these type of lists and for very good reason. All works that are copyright free in one place.

Ninite – New PC? Install all of your programs in one go with no bloat or unnecessary crap.

PatchMyPC - Alternative to ninite with over 300 app options to keep upto date. Free for home users.

Unchecky – Tired of software trying to install additional unwanted programs? This will stop it completely by unchecking the necessary boxes when you install.

Sci-Hub – Research papers galore! Check here before shelling out money. And if it’s not here, try the next link in our list.

LibGen – Lots of free PDFs relate primarily to the sciences.

Zotero – A free and easy to use program to collect, organize, cite and share research.

Car Complaints – Buying a used car? Check out what other owners of the same model have to say about it first.

CamelCamelCamel – Check the historical prices of items on Amazon and set alerts for when prices drop.

Have I Been Pawned – Still the king when it comes to checking if your online accounts have been released in a data breach. Also able to sign up for email alerts if you’ve ever a victim of a breach.

I Have No TV - A collection of documentaries for you to while away the time. Completely free.

Radio Garden – Think Google Earth but wherever you zoom, you get the radio station of that place.

Just The Recipe – Paste in the url and get just the recipe as a result. No life story or adverts.

Tineye – An Amazing reverse image search tool.

My 90s TV – Simulates 90’s TV using YouTube videos. Also has My80sTV, My70sTV, My60sTV and for the younger ones out there, My00sTV. Lose yourself in nostalgia.

Foto Forensics – Free image analysis tools.

Old Games Download – A repository of games from the 90’s and early 2000’s. Get your fix of nostalgia here.

Online OCR – Convert pictures of text into actual text and output it in the format you need.

Remove Background – An amazingly quick and accurate way to remove backgrounds from your pictures.

Twoseven – Allows you to sync videos from providers such as Netflix, Youtube, Disney+ etc and watch them with your friends. Ad free and also has the ability to do real time video and text chat.

Terms of Service, Didn’t Read – Get a quick summary of Terms of service plus a privacy rating.

Coolors – Struggling to get a good combination of colors? This site will generate color palettes for you.

This To That – Need to glue two things together? This’ll help.

Photopea – A free online alternative to Adobe Photoshop. Does everything in your browser.

BitWarden – Free open source password manager.

Just Beam It - Peer to peer file transfer. Drop the file in on one end, click create link and send to whoever. Leave your pc on that page while they download. Because of how it works there are no file limits. It’s genuinely amazing. Best file transfer system I have ever used.

Atlas Obscura – Travelling to a new place? Find out the hidden treasures you should go to with Atlas Obscura.

ID Ransomware – Ever get ransomware on your computer? Use this to see if the virus infecting your pc has been cracked yet or not. Potentially saving you money. You can also sign up for email notifications if your particular problem hasn’t been cracked yet.

Way Back Machine – The Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites and loads more.

Rome2Rio – Directions from anywhere to anywhere by bus, train, plane, car and ferry.

Splitter – Seperate different audio tracks audio. Allowing you to split out music from the words for example.

myNoise – Gives you beautiful noises to match your mood. Increase your productivity, calm down and need help sleeping? All here for you.

DeepL – Best language translation tool on the web.

Forvo – Alternatively, if you need to hear a local speaking a word, this is the site for you.

For even more useful sites, there is an expanded list that can be found here.

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

they're called "bootlickers" because when there's a boot stomping on their neck they lean forward to kiss it

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

as soon as i clicked post i realized damn that's such an evocatively erotic description, i should be using this sort of language about noble kinksters, not wasting it on class traitors

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

you could be licking the boot of a magnificent leather mommy or daddy and instead you're slobbering over billionaires and cops? who aren't even gonna call you a good puppy after screwing you? hobbyless behavior

[tiktoksthataregood-ish]

[squeakitties]

flingo

[thespacebird]

Northern lapwing

[todaysbird]

i’ve said it before and i’ll say it again - if you want a pet bird, and you’re in the USA, you can just get a free pigeon. you can pick them out yourself in fact. you can’t take any *native* bird species from the wild, but rock doves (and house sparrows and european starlings) are not native, so they only cost the effort of catching a wild bird :)

[todaysbird]

seeing a lot of understandable shock/horror/confusion in the notes. this is mostly a joke and only for those who are not faint of heart (and accept potentially never being loved reciprocally by their pet / paying hefty specialized vet bills / building or acquiring a roomy aviary with appropriate friends)

[nealashitposts]

I cant go to my local libary anymore because last year when I stopped by a librarian was reading a book I wrote under a pen name years ago. This book sold under 10k copies and I've literally only heard people talk about this book online *if* I went looking for it so I went up to them and tried to start a conversation like "oh hey I've heard of that book is it good?" Like hoping for some real feedback and she goes "yeah I love reading things by queer writers" and in a moment of terror I was like "oh but- hold on, I thought the author was some old hetero white guy?!" A thing I thought because I used my own dead grandpa's picture for the author pic because grandpa never had internet. I fake looked it up and was like "yeah if he was queer its not public?" And without looking up this absolute unit goes "oh the author bio is obviously fake. I'd bet my left leg the author is a west coast millennial non-binary queer who has never lived on the east coast." And then proceeded to rattle off a dozen linguistic flourishes that are specfic to the pacific northwest that are in the book and several that are nearly ubiquitous in the state where I said my pen name lives that are somehow completely absent from the book.

So you know. Got read for fifth and didn't even find out if she liked it.

[pangur-and-grim]

this is her lifestyle

[pangur-and-grim]

her decadent life

[prokopetz]

I think it's actually essential to children's moral development to be exposed to short stories moderately beyond their reading level where a bunch of fucked up shit happens and then instead of offering a moral lesson or any sort of emotional or narrative resolution it just ends.

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

I’ve hear about how having cats makes you immune to hauntings, ghosts, spooky midnight noises etc but. for years I’ve been dealing with a panic response to unexpected nighttime noises, major enough that the adrenaline can keep me from falling back asleep for hours.

A few weeks of living with a cat and my brain’s been reprogrammed. last night at 4am the furry little shitmuppet broke a vase & I only woke up long enough to call her a rat bastard & roll over back to sleep

[phinarei]

Oh shit. This totally made me realize that it must have been my cat that killed my fear of the dark. I used to be intensely scared of walking into dark spaces. Hated any area where I had to turn a light off before I could turn another one on.

Enter my mostly black demon who likes to jump out of dark spaces at me.

Now I can just walk through dark rooms with no anxiety. I’m now used to the darkness taking physical form and jumping at me. At this point if a monster did jump out of the darkness I’d instinctively reach for the cat treats to offer it.

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

holy crap what other fears do cats make you immune to?

I’m no longer scared to dangle my foot over the bed bc of demons with sharp claws & glowing eyes, i’m scared to dangle my foot over the bed bc of one specific small furry demon with sharp claws & glowing eyes

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

#fuck off beelzebub my cat has dibs

[so-i-did-this-thing]

My cats are legit part of my grounding strategy for when I have sleep hallucinations. As part of my sleep paralysis, I “see” corpses in the bed next to me on a frequent basis, or shadow men lurking in the doorway; if there is a cat blissfully, softly snoring at the foot of the bed, I know I am safe, despite what my brain is trying to conjure.

[notsafevorework]

the sound of my door opening slowly, but theres no one there. my cat. somethings clawing at the walls, glass or window screens, cats. somethings fucking licking my toe in the middle of the night, my fucking cat again. nothing can hurt me its all cat

[vicshush]

Unearthly noise? Cat.

Movement out of the corner of your eye? Cat.

Objects moved? Cat.

Inexplicable smells? Cat.

Corpses (small)? Cat.

Ectoplasm right in middle of the room, which you won’t notice till you step in it? Cat.

[jenroses]

Do cats make the ghosts go away? Nah. They just make you stop being scared.

[the-haiku-bot]

Do cats make the ghosts

go away? Nah. They just make

you stop being scared.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[somanyfandomsonly1username]

My cats got rid of my fear, not because I assume every noise I hear is from them, but rather if my OCD is telling me not to look outside because someones out their waiting for me to see them so they can kill me, I know they aren’t actually there because my cats aren’t reacting.

Until they do some stupid shit like staring at my vent for 2-3 hours without moving at all for seemingly no reason what so ever

[sp0re-speaks]

[regal-bones]

Creatures of the Continent

HOOKJAW HERMIT (PAGUROIDEA NERKA)

LOST BLADES (FERRUM MONOCEROS)

LAKE MAJESTY (CYGNUS MONARCHA)

WHALEWALKER (VERSIPELLIS ORCINUSTHROPIA)

BLOODWYRM (DRACO HEMOCRACIA)

(Click creature name for lore!) (Size chart) (Continent Map)

You can support me on Patreon for £1 and help me make stuff like this!

[regal-bones]

hey so this post is sums up about the last 4 months of my work - it takes a long time not to only design these guys, but then illustrate, animate, and write the lore to go alongside them.

I will always share my art here for free, but if you like seeing me on your feed consider supporting me on Patreon - it’s just £1 a month and it’s like tossing a coin to my hat after a performance.

Patreon is my only source of income at the moment, and being able to focus entirely on personal work instead of commissions is why I’m able to do silly projects like this here bestiary

so yeah, if you wanna support my work, please consider signing up for £1 at this link here! There’s also a ton of exclusive stuff from my game I’m working on up there too!

thanks! Have an awesome day ❤️💕

[regal-bones]

I will put this here in hopes u might interact. YOU 🫵 can support butt dyke house girl in making her weird art

[phantomrose96]

Coworker (60) was cursing under his breath to himself trying to get something to work on his computer. Other coworker (25) asked, "Are you winning son?" which went unanswered for quite a while, until finally coworker (60) very quietly went "..........'son'?"

[phantomrose96]

The other week the topic of memes came up, and coworker (60) went "You know I saw a meme recently which I did not understand." He spent a while searching around on his phone to find what he saw and eventually managed to produce this image

[phantomrose96]

Yes we explained Loss.jpeg to him

[phantomrose96]

At lunch, coworker (23) was talking about all the ingredient combinatorics possible at the local lunch bowl place, which seemed as good a time as any to tell him about None Pizza Left Beef (tradition must be kept alive). I watched him pull out his phone and check in real time that you can in fact order None Pizza Left Beef from Dominoes. At which point he stared at his phone for a long and contemplative moment and went, "I really want to order this."

[mumblesplash]

it's such bs that the whole guilt-ridden stoic self-sacrificing martyr thing doesn't work outside of fiction. repressing all your emotions and neglecting your physical wellbeing should make you god's most tragically beautiful morally unassailable little soldier of righteousness but all it does is give you bad skin and gastrointestinal problems

[kness]

Cute raccoons - a watercolor.

Inspired by the fluffly goblins roaming my neighborhood in Montreal. The next painting will include that tailless blonde raccoon I met in the spring. He's no Jimothy but he's still super special.

This original sold out but I have prints waiting for you on Inprnt, links in my highlights.

[nerunodaisuki]

[horreurscopes]

never forget the universal rule of the order of things: People Will Not Read It

[horreurscopes]

signs at stores? émail? menu ?? instruction ? post online ? caption with andswer to question ? group hand outs ??? street sign ??? no. The Written Word Is The Enemy

[lasrina]

#The number of compliments i have gotten for reading a thing

The ability to occasionally Read A Thing will make you a hero in your workplace, especially if it is for example an error message that tells you what you need to do differently, or instructions on unjamming a printer.

[stephaniematurin]

how dare you say we put jam in the printer

[berkelbites]

Ok reblogging this again because story time.

I work in tech, and much of what I do is support sales reps within the company by resolving errors with the software they use.

There is one sales rep who, every single time I send her a message or email with extremely specific instructions that will resolve her issue, does something completely different from what I tell her. Every time. Without fail. It is so glaringly obvious that she has never read even a single word that I have written to her.

So one day, she sends me a message that says little more than "(software) is broken, help"

So I do my standard song and dance of asking her what she's trying to accomplish, and what specifically is stopping her from doing that. And eventually, after much unnecessary back and forth, she tells me there's an error message. I ask her to send me a screenshot of the error message. She does.

The error message basically says, "these two required fields are blank. To resolve this, please fill in these two specific fields, and then click save."

So I take a few deep breaths.

Then I lie to her.

I message her back, saying "hey yeah, for some reason it's not loading that screenshot on my end. Could you type out the full text of the error message for me?"

She does.

I ask her if she still needs help.

She does not respond.

[samueldays]

I have similar story from tech support.

Client is reporting that Some Thing Program doesn't work. I ask if there's an error message with further information about what's not working. Client says "no". I go over and ask Client to open Some Thing. Client double-clicks on the icon for Some Thing, it starts to boot, an error message dialog flashes up on screen, Client closes error message before I can read it, Thing closes after the error.

"What did that error message say?" I ask.

"What error message?" asks Client.

I tell Client to open the Some Thing again and then not click anything else. Client opens Some Thing, error message appears, Client clicks it away again.

I tell Client to stand up, step away, and give me physical control of the computer. I open Some Thing, start looking at the error message without closing it, and Client says "You should close that." I tell Client that I am reading the error message. Client is apparently accustomed to treating error messages as a kind of spam email that should be deleted as fast as possible, and gets agitated that I'm reading it.

I read the error message. It tells me what the problem is. I fix the problem. Some Thing works now.

---

Later, I start thinking about how such an error message might perhaps be engineered to be more attention-grabbing and close-resistant as a way of making people read it. It's not important for some random program here, but there are more important systems (medical, etc) where it would be reasonable to demand the user's attention because people's lives depend on paying attention to the error message.

But then people with a perverted intellect would still be thinking about ways to avoid reading the message, like dragging it off edge of screen or hiding it behind another window. So maybe the dialog box could have an always-in-front feature to override other windows, and the alert could use the computer's hardware "beep" functionality that can't be switched off by muting the regular sound system, and keep beeping... shit, I realize I'm reinventing pain, and get philosophical about it.

[doccyuk]

Story from The Past about My Mum:

She was a computer programmer / analyst, a... Long Time Ago. Called in for a system she'd installed before, the office folk said they kept having problems where it Didn't Work Right (no error, a malfunction)

She investigated, and told them that could only happen if they did 3 specific things in a specific order, which they should not ever do.

So, she asked, did they ever do that?

No! Of course not, was the answer.

So she made a couple of small changes, packed up and said that should be fine, but they should call her if there were problems.

The next week

She had a call saying "We're getting a strange error message on the system, can you help?"

She said, of course, can they tell her the error?

And the message was:

"You Said You Didn't Do This"

[escuerzoresucitado]