Loads of great suggestions in this thread, but I feel it’s missing some lighter, easy to read and fun fantasy. So, let me suggest two series:

• The Riftwar Saga by Raymond E. Feist. Enough books to last you a year. Can get a bit dark at times, but the prose is really fast flowing, the books are focused on high adventure, and the characters are really likeable. The series contains a trilogy that starts with Daughter of the Empire, which features a far higher quality prose, but it’s tonally so different from the other books that you may want to skip it if you liked the first trilogy (or tetralogy, depending which edition you pick up).

• The Elenium trilogy by David Eddings, followed by the Tamuli trilogy. Eddings is best known for his Belgariad, but this trilogy is such a lightearted fun that I re-read it every couple of years.

That a huge carpet of ants will sweep into my neighbourhood and eat everything, including me. I blame Macgyver.

I can see why Verne would be considered overlooked. While it’s true that some of his works, in particular 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in 80 Days, and The Journey to the Centre of the Earth (and to a lesser extent From Earth to the Moon) are well known, others went unnoticed. His Robur the Conqueror series is fun, and so is Off on a Comet, to name a few of his lesser known sci-fi works. I particularly liked his competence porn works, such as Mysterious Island, and some of his romances. The Green Ray had an impact on me, and I’m still trying to find it.

Wells wasn’t nearly as prolific as Verne, so it may appear that both are equally well covered in the anglophone world, but the truth is that just a small fraction of Verne’s works received recognition.

I still have an unused, boxed WRT-54G. Granted, it’s only 802.11b/g, but good enough for casual browsing, and I have experience setting up OpenWRT there. Thanks for helping me remember; I’ll use that for the kids.

Biometrics, I already do, via my passport. Digital passports, maybe. I don’t have a smartphone, so if the government wants me to have one for all kinds of digital shit, they’d better get me one.

I tried pi-hole, but it turned in a real pain, trying to set it up for normal use, plus two WFH offices. I may give it another try, when I feel more patient.

The idea of mocking websites came from talking to other parents from my kids’ school. I was thinking about some form of a local “internet” for our neighbourhood for all the kids. Heavily curated, a mix of mock sites (like the full download of Wikipedia), news through RSS, moderated message boards, etc. I don’t think it’s an original idea given the current state of the Internet, so at this stage I’m just reading up on design best practices.

My kids are a little older - just learned to read without sounding off the words - so I need to introduce parental controls. But you may see your purchase as an investment: a year from now, the hardware may be worth twice as much.

I have a working emachines desktop with Win98. They’ll pry it off my cold, dead hands…

I’m in the process of getting my kids their first PC this Christmas. They’ll both get a mini-PC, with severely restricted Internet access. I’m actually thinking about just letting them connect to the home server where I’d mock the Web sites I pick for them. For this reason, Win11 with its online account requirement is automatically excluded from consideration. I wated to give them Mint anyway, but this was the argument that convinced my wife.

1. Sherlock Holmes books. New are still written and published, and many are quite good.
2. Warhammer 40k books. A mixed bag, but you’ll find your favourite authors soon.
3. Riftwar Cycle. A few dozen books over three decades. Last book was in 2013, so it’s probably no longer active, but you’ll never know…

Two shows that weren’t mentioned yet:

• Warehouse 13 - An endearing sci-fi show about a warehouse full of weird artifacts. Despite some intense episodes, it offered mainly a light, feel-good entertainment, and featured a really well-crafted send-off.
• Fringe - Starts out weird, then it goes totally off the rails, but in a good way. Also wrapped up nicely.

Because my stereo is so old that it only accepts tape or CD as an input. No bluetooth or even USB stick. However, it works, and it’s adequate for my humble needs, so I haven’t considered replacing it yet.

My stereo still uses CD’s, so that’s what I use. I have a DVD burner in my PC, and a spindle of blank CD-R’s and anothet of blank DVD-R’s. I use the former to burn music CD’s for my stereo, and the latter for extra backup whenever I’m about to upgrade my hardware (once every 10 eyars or so). This is on addition to a NAS and an external drive. I just figured that the disks would have the best chance to be read once I get a new desktop.

(I also saw the mention of floppies in the discussion. I have an old Win98 machine - for gaming only these days - with an internal floppy and zip drives. Those media easily outlast CD’s: I can still read almost all oc them, even though some are over 30 years old.)

I have an account where I only post after I translated my writing through three different languages and back to English. The original input and the output convey the same message, but have very distinct styles. Randomizing the three languages in my translation sequence introduces enough variety that I doubt current LLM’s can identify me. (Full disclosure: I don’t post any sensitive information under any account; I do it just for fun.)

This one speaks directly to me: “The only decision you should make while angry is to stop being angry.” ~ Timothy Zahn, the Icarus series.

My current computer will be Linux, as soon as I stop procrastinating and clean up my documents and back them up on my NAS. Already did that with my travel laptop.

Does Skid Row count? The original band saw people come and go all the time, to the point that nobody really knew who was a member at that point. In 1987, Gary Moore, who hadn’t been a member anymore, actually “sold” the name to a US band. The last original member still disputes the sale. So, you have two bands with the same name, with the original band had members replaced multiple times, with even the last remaining original member leaving and rejoining twice.

Fragmentation of society. Can’t decide whether closer to Stephenson’s Snow Crash or Palmer’s Terra Ignota.

Bed athletics while the kids are downstairs, watching morning cartoons. Then, full day for me, driving the kids to their sports clubs while the Mrs is working on her upskilling certs. Then early bedtime because Sunday is my long run day.

Learned from growing up in a communist dictatorship: don’t discuss politics and religion with strangers. And even with friends or acquaintances, don’t discuss it in writing. It doesn’t mean you can’t have strong opinions, but don’t make them public. Talking (not writing) one-to-one or in small groups eventually toppled almost all communist dictatotships, so there’s absolutely no need to broadcast your opinions, unless your goal is to be martyred.