I have Foxit installed and can usually use that, but am forced to have Adobe Reader installed for other reasons.

Adobe Reader will now never be updated on my machine. It’s a small price to pay. And Foxit is great for most pdf tasks.

There was a point not so long ago where Adobe Collaboration Sync got so bad on my Windows 10 box it wouldn’t let me close any pdfs that were open. “File in use” error, even if all Adobe programs were closed except for that pdf. I’d have to go into Task Manager and manually kill it. Between that and Adobe Updater I couldn’t get rid of it by any known means, and it was choking the shit out of my machine.

I’m transitioning to Linux but not there yet, still need the Windows box for now, so I had to do something. But I’m old school, so it was a DOS batch file to the rescue. I call it “kiladobe.bat”:

taskkill /f /im armsvc.exe       
del "C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe\ARM\1.0\armsvc.exe"      
taskkill /f /im AdobeCollabSync.exe     
del "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat DC\Acrobat\AdobeCollabSync.exe"      

It’s now a scheduled task in taskschd.msc. I put kiladobe.bat in the main Adobe program folder (heh) and run that task as administrator at startup and every four hours or so, give or take an hour.

No more problems.

Now, all that remains is that every so often I see the command window flash up for a split second because this batch file is killing Adobe shit, and it just makes me smile. (I could probably make it stop flashing up the CLI, but I genuinely enjoy the reminder of how I’m fucking Adobe’s virus-like install and lock endeavors up the ass.)

EDITED TO ADD a simple “@echo off” by itself as the first line would probably turn off any appearance of the CLI, if anyone wants to use this text for their own batch file. If that didn’t work I’d probably throw a space and a “>nul” at the end of each line to grab the output and throw it into neverneverland.

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Admin approval with some text that needs a little bit of thought to fill out is surprisingly effective and definitely slows down spammers a lot.

I had to do that on dbzer0 and I think beehaw, they were both a fun exercise and took no time at all. Hell, I ended up submitting a wall of text about Sacco and Vanzetti on dbzer0 if I remember correctly, lol. But if nothing else they knew that it was 1) a human, and 2) I really believe what I was saying.

If the point is to get regular users who are thoughtful participants in online communities, requiring an email address and the typing of a few coherent words on their own behalf is NOT a barrier to entry, or even a much of a bar. After all, these people are applying to join a forum in which they are presumably going to spend unlimited time typing statements of their own creation in the future. Instance owners are just requiring a bit of that up front, and it’s not a huge ask.

It is, however, a very frustrating requirement for people who want to open multiple accounts for spamming and trolling purposes, and for that reason alone is a great filter for applicants.

I am really sorry for your loss. I wish peace and healing to you and all who loved your mother.

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Eventually it started slipping

If you still have the printer (you may not but I’m going to put this out there for others too) that sounds like a simple roller replacement, and rollers/pickup pads are usually considered “consumables” instead of “parts” because they all wear out over time. This is true for most if not all consumer printers, ink and laser alike.

Replacements should be pretty easy to find for even old printers, and the installation is usually pretty straightforward. Last year I was still able to buy a roller replacement set for a 19 year old HP, and it took me ten minutes and one Phillips head screwdriver to replace them all.

You can also just take out and clean the hell out of anything rubber with isopropyl alcohol, letting it dry thoroughly and then putting it back in, or if possible rotate the rubber on it to present an unused side, I’ve done all that a few times too.

For pretty much any model printer, search on the printer model number and “maintenance kit” to find available roller/pickup pad replacements for sale, and printer model number plus “service manual” to get replacement instructions if you need them.

That page is 404 now.

Of the two positions stated, theirs in the interview feedback and yours here, yours is BY FAR the more reasonable. That they would even feel free to say that to you indicates a bizarre level of entitlement or pre-employment loyalty there, one that’s made worse if it was the literal truth.

Entitlement is like an iceberg: what you see is just the tip. There’s always a whole lot more right behind it.

So let’s go there. I haven’t seen anyone else bring it up yet, but hypothetically, let’s say you drank the koolaid about their brand and, to increase your chances, you did spend a wad of cash (that you probably can’t easily afford) on their product before you even got to the interview. You walk in with that experience, able to tell them you’ve had their lessons and talk about their platform from a user’s experience, etc. Great!

Now what? How much farther does that actually get you? Not a goddamn bit, IMO, since you’re still behind anyone who has ever worked on a product of their own brand, and/or kissed whatever other invisible and undefined rings they want most but were not actually disclosed in the job posting. You spent all that cash, but your deficits as a candidate are still hanging in the air: you’ve never actually worked on it, just familiarized yourself with the product, albeit at a cost to you.

I am so glad you are writing this from the perspective of “should I have spent the cash?” rather than the perspective of “I spent this cash and now I’m out” because above and beyond the weirdness of their behavior, the last place you ever want to sink cash is on a job posting that can’t be bothered to include its most important requirements. Doesn’t matter that it’s a well known company, individuals and departments can be unethical too, and these certainly were.

It’s also entirely possible there’s an internal battle going on over this job, with some insisting it should go to someone already in-house and others, possibly even company policy, forcing it to be posted to external candidates – but in reality it has already been decided and they are just going through the motions of ticking the boxes until they can hire the one they wanted from the start. If so, you were never going to win it, and the whole thing was a gargantuan waste of time.

Add to that the fact that the posting itself omitted the company’s own most important requirement for the job, and I can only add to the chorus of people here who have already said you dodged a bullet.

Relax, you did good. Glad you made the decision you did. Best of luck in your job hunt.

You should consider crossposting this to !thenightfeeling@lemmy.world community; it would fit right in. Good pic, OP.

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I can’t address the situation, but you should know that you can always hand wash limited items if you know you’re going to need them, like a spare pair of socks.

At the bathroom sink, get them good and wet, hand wash with ANY available body-safe soap (hand soap, shower gel, shampoo, even mild dishwashing liquid) by rubbing the soap around in your wet hands to create a lather, and then add that lather to the items, rubbing them all together well between your hands for a couple of minutes. Less is more: don’t use so much soap that you have to rewash to get all the soap out. Use as little as you can. Rinse well, and then look and smell: if they look clean and smell clean, and you got as much of the soap out as you can, they won’t embarrass you. No one will be able to tell you handwashed them when you wear them.

Squeeze as much water out as you can, but avoid wringing because it stretches and can even damage your items. Hang them up over a towel rod, a hamper rail, the side of the tub, or even laid out across a bed or the back of a sofa, using a towel underneath if you don’t want to get something wet (like a wooden chair back) and they will dry completely overnight. Don’t try to dry them in a closet or places with limited airflow. Hand washed items tend to be stiff when you air dry them like this, especially if you’re using non-laundry soap, but put them on and the scratchy stiffness goes away instantly.

This isn’t for every day use, or for endlessly repeated practice, but it absolutely works in a pinch and used to be common practice back when people didn’t have so many clothes and/or their own washing machines. It won’t hurt your clothes at all to do this as long as they are machine washable anyway, and even if you do it repeatedly just try get them into a machine every so often to get the non-laundry-soap buildup out of them. As long as it’s not a special care item, you literally cannot screw it up by handwashing it carefully and rinsing it as thoroughly as you can.

Everyone should know how to hand wash an item of clothing in an emergency, and now you do too.

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I think that’s a bit of an overreaction.

It’s neither reaction nor overreaction; it is simply a statement of possibility. One of many, because Meta has not told us what their real intentions are, and no one could believe them even if they did.

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