As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their weekend. Did you make any plans? Take a trip? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

Many people have plenty to do just figuring out how to protect themselves and take care of their families. Others are busier than ever with essential jobs. But at least some of us are stuck at home and could probably be doing more to support the common effort, something besides avoiding infection and watching it happen.

There are many to choose from, but what charities do you think are most deserving of support, and why? What are good ways to volunteer?

Edit: LessWrong has a section of their link database devoted to work and donations

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

What is this?

See here for full details on the event.

Post Your Update

• How did your week go?
• What games did you get through?
• How did you feel about them?
• What's up next for you?

Focuses for Week 2

• Games in genres you don't normally play
• Games that take longer than 4 hours to complete
• Story-driven games

Let's burn through these backlogs!

I often come across a topic that I find somewhat interesting, but end up being much more interested in a discussion happening within that topic. I think it would be useful to be able to "watch" a comment/thread to be notified if someone replies to a comment. Thoughts?

This thread is posted daily, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!

Grandma is understimulated in assisted living, and while Mom is looking into ways to either bunk with her, or drag her back to our place, I'm exploring other options. Her apartment does have wireless internet, so we could set up some sort of telepresence or video calling device, but even something as simple as a Relay or a KC2 isn't great, because it loses power, and needs to be explained to her.

I'm thinking that we might have better luck with a Tablet or a PC solution, and I do have a Kindle Fire (5th Gen?) and an off brand Windows 10 tablet around, and I am open to a Pi Project or speciality devices, but it has to be simple enough to plug and play, and the dream would be if it could start a video chat without the receiver having to pick up, or at least as simple as a nurse being able to come in and start a call. Any suggestions?

I've been organizing my personal collection of ebooks (epubs & pdfs) lately so I've been thinking of possible "best practices" to employ and wanted to open a discussion on it.

There are sources for free ebooks online which are trustworthy such as https://archive.org/index.php and https://www.gutenberg.org/ which provide DRM-Free copies in multiple formats.

These are great but a few of my ebooks are from less trusted sources so handling the security aspects should be considered as well. (Example: An interesting PDF from Hacker News or Reddit)

General:
For general organization and management, Calibre (https://calibre-ebook.com/) has been very useful so far. You can use Calibre to handle converting, meta-data, reading, and organization of your library.

Security:
From what I can research the epub and pdf formats can be both vulnerable to malicious but the potential is much higher for pdf. As you then might expect, pdf exploits are more common.

A few precautions you can take include using your browsers pdf viewer versus a standalone alternative, using an up to date and secure pdf reading with JavaScript disabled, or relying on a cloud service such as google drive that allows online viewing.

An offline e-reader is another easy solution as the malicious code would require a much more specific attack vector.

Reading:
https://us.norton.com/internetsecurity-emerging-threats-is-it-safe-to-download-free-ebooks-online.html
https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/notes/epub-javascript-security/

This thread is posted daily, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!