Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
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Man I love a show that starts with a good Paul rant.
The listener call in portion was fun! 
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Paul should actual learn to use his phone. Apple allows you to set certain contacts as VIPs who always can get through. I use Do Not Disturb which can still allow VIPs.
I turn off notifications on text and messages for the most part, they aren’t important. If something is important, they will ring, if it is text, I can read it at my convenience.
I also tend to put my phone on do not disturb between 21:00 and 07:00, VIP family callers excepted.
My work phone is set to automatically switch into do not disturb mode at 16:30 and turns it off again at 08:00 the next morning (dnd stays on over the weekend). I only get messages if I bother to look at the phone.
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Windows 11 has those capabilities too, Windows key + A and you can toggle focus assist modes that are very configurable. Can be scheduled, allow just certain people or apps to notify etc.
Agree it’s annoying if an app update overwrites your settings, but not experienced that yet.
When I worked I was very notification-driven, but that went with a support and incident management role that was very reactive. So all my calendar/email/messaging alerts were always on (filtered for VIPs). But I can imagine I’d turn all that off if I was in a more strategic, R&D or project role.
My first multi-player game was MUD (Multi User Dungeon), we used to play on the Essex University mainframe, we used to dial into the JANET network after work.
Later, we had a copy of Pacwars, which was good fun, basically a networked maze game, where you went around with Pacmanesque characters and you could collect power-ups, such as weapons, shields etc. and had to kill each other. Homing missiles were the best/worst! 
I did play a bit of C&C Renegade online, but the one I really go into was Anarchy Online, a role playing game set on a distant planet, you crash landed and started with nothing & had to work your way up, sort of World of Warcraft for grown-ups - there was a lot more to the skill system than simply you are level 15, you can use a level 15 weapon, you could spend hours buffing the character to get a level 200 weapon on a level 15 character, excellent for PvP. WoW came along a few years later & many player defected.
The German language server was really excellent, but the English language servers could be an absolute cesspit at times, which didn’t help with non-German player retention.
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Annoying is all the news and images and etc that Edge tries to serve us. I really enjoyed silencing that news “trash”. When I use a browser I have something I need to get done, when I want news I go to one of these Top 4 Unbiased Independent World News Sources
Leo was on to something when he said that the OS is beginning to matter less and less as more people are using web-based solutions over standalone applications (I happen to agree).
Paul seemed to disagree, but let’s face it, it is hard to argue that the MOST UTILIZED application on mobile and desktop/laptop is the web browser.
Sure, there will be standalone desktop applications for some time to come but increasingly more and more people are using browser-based solutions. As merely ONE example, I don’t know the last time I used a client-based email program. I check email strictly via the browser and I know that I’m not alone with that.
Both of my kids went through college without a client side office suite. They turned in all of their research papers and type-written assignments via Google Docs and their separate universities accepted it.
I saw you on the listener portion! Well done😂
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It depends, the most used application for reading news is the browser. But 90% of what I do is still local, at most an encrypted backup ends up in the cloud.
Likewise, at work, it is there for reference, we are not allowed to store any company related information in the cloud. Our email has no web front end, our ERP system has no web front end, our finance software has no web front end and so on.
We have a couple of very old SharePoint sites that we use (locally hosted) and we use an internal Redmine system for support tickets and inventory control. Teams (no file uploads allowed) is the only web based tool we use.
Most of our contracts have terms in them, that no customer informaiton is allowed to be stored on systems controlled by other entities. Likewise, for us, nothing that holds company secrets (our recipes, for example) are allowed to be stored outside of our firewall; we aren’t even allowed to store the information locally on our laptops, it all has to be on the terminal server and stored on internal network drives.
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I have set different alert sounds for important alerts (text message, messenger, Teams, emails [work and personal], calls and have set special ringtones for contacts) so I know without even having to look at my phone what is happening. It’s a bit of a pain initially but once I do it’s great.
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