Hello Tildes,

My partner and I are at the point where we need to get more care for my dad and I could use some advice from people who have been down this road. He's in his early nineties and still living in his home, and the family has been lucky in many respects. Dad still has good cognitive function, he has excellent health care through his military retirement (USA: Tricare for Life). My brother is living in the family home, so there's someone in the house overnight in case there's a fall or other serious issue.

Last year we got Dad set up with a medical alert service, so he's only one button press away from talking to a helper if he's in crisis. My partner and I are down visiting him about once a week to help with chores and hang out. Same with my other brother. We've been holding things together.

But Dad's having difficulty with normal life stuff (walking, bathing, eating) and he's transitioning into a bedbound state, losing weight and eating very little. He seems fairly comfortable, just extremely tired and increasingly frail.

To be clear, I'm not asking for medical advice. Where I'm stuck is: How do we initiate and navigate the process of getting him a home health aide? His medical team was entirely unhelpful when we asked about case management. They say "if he's struggling, bring him to the ER" but he absolutely does not want to go to the ER, and we're loathe to force him at his age unless he's in crisis. Also, the ER is full of people with the flu right now.

We've reached the "we can't put this off any longer" moment, I think. Any advice on getting the ball rolling would be appreciated. Do we just randomly call up home health agencies? How do we figure out what his insurance will and won't cover?

Thanks so much.

GP

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Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like venezuela.caracas, usa.mn.minneapolis and uber.eats. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was nosy.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

I have a specific ask at the end, but any and all musings on this topic are invited.

Lately it's become apparent that the endless fire hose of content and subsequent extinction of boredom is one of the most insidious shifts of modern life. While social media and the internet have accelerated this, upon further reflection I realize this battle to hijack our time and attention is something basically all of us were born into (and an even steeper climb for those of us blessed with ADHD).

These reflections have been borne out of a desire to protect my toddler's curiosity and passion for life outside a black mirror for as long as I can reasonably manage.

The issue as I see it is not the existence of content beyond what one could ever consume (books have been that way for centuries). It's the evaporation of friction. One click and you're on an infinite loop, optimized and engineered to keep you there.

I used to think this was a symptom of the smartphone & tik-tok era. However, looking back at my own childhood TV habits, cable TV was the precursor: dozens of channels that never went dark and 24/7 news cycles that bred fear and never stopped churning.

The ask: How have you set up an environment for your kids (or yourself!) to delay the hedonic content treadmill as long as is reasonably possible?

The goal is to avoid a smartphone until we can't. I'm not anti-screen. There are loads of great educational TV and movies, I just want to introduce them slowly and with intention. But unfortunately now every TV front-end is ad-stuffed and every streaming app is basically a recommendation engine in disguise.

How do you share content with your kids without letting the algorithm worm its way inside their brain? How do you give them access to the collective wisdom of mankind in the internet without turning it into a slot machine?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

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Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

January 2026's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games.

Does anyone have experience with any of the games and, if so, would you recommend them? Is there anything in here that you're particularly excited to play?

For reference, I have next to zero knowledge of building electronics. I've replaced the joysticks on two Nintendo joycons (which I actually found pretty fun), and that's it. I also have no experience with 3D printing or designing specific products.

I am also sick of touch screen keyboards on phones, do not like any of of the phones that do have keys or the Clicks phone case (why is it on the BOTTOM—), and currently have a lot of free time.

So my question to you: how would I go about designing my own slide out case with its own keyboard?

Because that is my ideal solution at this point. And in fact, it turns out someone DID make a 3D printed "slider terminal" this year. Except it's for the Note 10 (I have a Galaxy S9), and seems to be used as a full-fledged replacement for a desktop experience with a trackpad. That's neat and will probably appeal to a lot of people here, but personally, I just need physical keys.

Along with the keyboard used for that terminal, I also found this other tiny keyboard which doesn't have the trackpad and is about the same dimensions as my Galaxy S9. Actually I found that first and was trying to figure out if there were any cases that could store and pop that out. The biggest issue is that it would cover my camera except maybe when it's slid out, but screw it, I want a damn physical keyboard.

I do have access to 3D printers (yay public libraries!) and I'm willing to learn Blender in order to make this thing. I just need advice on where to begin and how to tackle this. In particular, I have no clue how to go about the slide out part. I feel like I should be able to figure out how to make a case that fits the dimensions of my phone and the keyboard fairly easily, but no idea where to begin with researching the sliding component.

Besides that, I also know that I'm not alone here in my frustrations with phone keyboards, so I'm hoping we can pool together ideas on how to do this. As far as I can tell there's not really a "one size fits all" solution that would work for all phones (well, except perhaps a foldable case instead of slide-out), but maybe we can at least share decent starting points for people to design their own. For instance, the slider terminal uses a keyboard that came with a remote, and it would never have occurred to me that could be used for this sort of project. And there are a lot of potential workarounds for the camera placements, so Person A may have an idea that doesn't work well for them, but does work better for Person B than their own original idea.

So yeah. Advice, ideas and general brainstorming are welcome!

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Started a new job today and got a mac as a dev machine. I won't do technical onboarding until later in the week, so I haven't seen what the dev tools are like, but today I was driving myself crazy just trying to do basic things like copy, paste, screenshot, change windows.

At the last job, we had ubuntu machines, so I was able to use gnome extensions to mostly replicate the same general layout, menus, and shortcut keys as Windows. Primarily, this allowed me to keep the same "muscle memory". Since the ubuntu gnome desktop is nothing special from a UX point of view, there didn't seem to be a downside. But I understand that the Mac experience is very curated, so I'm thinking I should lean into learning it.

So my questions are: what are your mac pro tips and things that speed up your work? And for others who have made this transition, what did you learn to do the "mac way" and what did you tweak?

I have a computer that is not quite powerful enough to run my flight simulators, but which is still quite capable. I tried to sell it for close to what I bought it for, after using it maybe 50 hours, but the stink of "used" was on it, so I only got low ball offers for the system as a whole. Selling the individual components would be better but take substantially more effort. Instead, after finding an absurdly good 64 GB RAM deal ($150 for DDR4, in early December, crazy), I decided to use it to educate myself on some work-adjacent science simulation capabilities, putting it at home to avoid the feeling like I'm doing work (and also so I can install nonsense on it if I want).

I settled on Pop! OS, after finding out it has the best NVIDIA GPU support of the .deb Linux family, and installed 22.04 on it last month. After a standard "oops I messed something up on a new-to-me Linux distro, might as well wipe it," I reset the bios to see if it fixed things, then loaded 24.04 on a live USB and ran the update at POST.

24.04 made some very big changes to Pop! OS, which I won't list, other than one that puzzles me. After installing, I ran Geekbench 6 to benchmark it, and I found out my system CPU performance was about 33% down from the prior benchmark. I rationalized this as being due to no XMP being on, and tried to enter BIOS on boot...but Pop24 refused to enter BIOS, and my motherboard didn't even POST? But it would load into Pop24 without issue? So I was stuck without a way to tune my system. I eventually removed the SSD, hard wiped it on a separate device, and reinstalled Pop22, whereafter I was able to enter BIOS and enable XMP. Performance was restored, and even better than ever.

My question...why is Pop24 different? I tried to disable fastboot. I tried to have it use systemctl to reboot into settings. I tried everything I could find online. The best guess I have is something to do with UEFI? But I have no clue. I'm not really a computer guy, I just futz around, and I don't know what I'm doing.

A little white lie that got bigger than you anticipated.
A hobby you got a little too into.
The sunk costs of something irreversible in your life.

Whatever it is, you're "in to deep" on it and think fondly of surfacing (whether that's possible for your situation or not).

Share what it is, how it came to be that way, and what's next for you.

What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

not sure if this is the appropriate sub group for this question or if its even allowed but figured I'd try.

I am curious the demographics of tildes users. You can be as specific as you feel comfortable.

I am in a dude in my 30s in Canada who works in software development.