this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2025
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. No politics
    • If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
    • A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS

If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.

Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.

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[–] monotremata@lemmy.ca 9 points 2 days ago

I ran into this just yesterday. My dad's Windows 10 computer was reporting our printer as offline, even though it wasn't; it would queue print jobs, but never actually send them. It did this even though it had been printing normally less than half an hour beforehand. It's connected over Wi-Fi.

And I remembered having solved this problem once before, ages ago (I think like twelve years ago?), by digging through the old Microsoft forums and Google search results, and I had a dim recollection of what sort of thing the solution had been, but not the details. So I figured that, most likely, the fix had gotten undone, probably when I switched him to IoT LTSC edition so he could keep getting security updates. (Both my parents were basically unwilling to switch to 11.)

But when I pulled up search on a browser to see if I could reconstruct the solution I'd found all those years ago, instead I got all this SEO and AI slop. Page after page that claimed to have relevant information, and didn't. After about fifteen minutes I decided I was better off trying to dig through the settings myself and see if I could reconstruct it from my own memory, kind of like driving through an old neighborhood and seeing if I recognize any landmarks.

I did manage to fix it that way. There's some kind of dumb aspect to the way Windows gauges whether a printer is online that doesn't work if it's connected over wifi. The workaround is to go into the properties for the printer, tell it to change the settings (which brings up a very similar-looking but not actually the same panel), go to the "ports" tab, scroll down to the TCP/IP port with the address of the printer, choose "configure port" which brings up yet another dialog, and at the bottom of that check the box marked "SNMP enabled." SNMP is "Simple Network Management Protocol," and lets Windows check the status of the printer in a more sane manner. After doing this the printer reports itself as online and prints normally.

But yeah, I had to rely on my rotting meat storage because our global worldwide network of supercomputers now only serves up blather designed to look like it might hold solutions but not actually contain any of them, because it's more profitable to delude you into reading endless ad-filled pages of slop than to solve your problem and let you leave.