Yes, I didn't read all the posts. I have 4 Raspberry Pi 3b's, a few ZeroWs, For the winter I'm mostly on a Pinebook Pro laptop. All with Debian or Raspbian. I enjoy programming, have half a dozen or so programs on Sourceforge.

There's pregnant porn, pictures of naked pregnant women, so some do. Lactation also. It's something I missed by never having kids.

It pays to make the rounds of a few sites I think. They aren't connected, you aren't going to meet someone nearby if they didn't happen to sign onto the same site you did.

And the unfortunate thing is, with hospitals filling up with covid patients there's less room for other patients like heart attack victims. https://apnews.com/article/pandemics-virus-outbreak-connecticut-south-dakota-birthdays-dc26340a9b1311ad81e0f8b99a7a6dbd I live with my mother who's 90, most of her doctor's appointments in the past 6 months have been telephone calls with doctors because only emergency cases can meet in person. And you have to have an appointment to even get a phone call through. I recently had my doctor retire and getting my prescriptions for blood pressure medications rewritten is taking months.

Just because nobody you know has fallen off the edge of the earth do you believe the earth is flat? The percentage of the population with covid is still under 10% (living), the problem is hospital ICUs are filling up. And guess what, it happens because people don't believe it enough to wear masks in public. It's an epidemic of denial.

Trump's lies, here's a recent tally: https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-ap-fact-check-joe-biden-donald-trump-virus-outbreak-867740a2e552b8b3d9d409c0d0ea5170

He's not well liked except for his followers. https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-54541907

Con man. Very little of what he says is true. Do presidents usually need a team of lawyers to keep their heads above water? He covers lies with more lies. Totally immoral, no ethics at all.

I think it's a misspelled word, typo. It's not in Wicktionary at all:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=pionate&go=Look+up&ns0=1

404 is a page not found error, that's standard http. Possibly there's an old URL in your browser history that doesn't work anymore because the page has been moved (or the history got corrupted). Typing in https://mingle2.com fresh should always work.

That's not a login/password issue.

I'm calling all those things dinosaurs these days. My last desktop tower died years ago, I have 3 working old school laptops.

What I have a few of and use are little credit card sized ARM machines like the Raspberry Pi. https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/ Base price is $35. They're designed around phone CPUs so they run on a watt or two. Most things connect by USB, I have a USB printer, sound card, DVD drive, cameras. You'll need a monitor or two, mouse, keyboard, but most people have some around anyway. The Pi was designed to be an affordable first computer for kids, by a nonprofit in the UK.

You can't upgrade the RAM because it's built in so start with the max you can afford.

Storage by default is SD cards which is OK except they only last a couple years. I have a few USB-connected hard drives (laptop drives in a tiny box really) which has advantages: it only runs when you're storing or retrieving something and you can plug it into anything with a USB plug and transfer files. I have a couple solid state drives which have a mean time before failure of 180 years I've set up the same way.

I surf the web, write programs, watch videos, write documents, edit photographs. The OS is mostly versions of Linux but some can run Android and other things. And guess what, change the SD card and you can change the OS, switch back and forth. If the storage is a USB hard drive or SSD you can still access it. The SD card mostly just holds the OS. And there are Linux desktops and programs that look and work very much like Windows ones because it's more flexible that way. Under the hood it's different but most people don't go there.

One trick I found is to click on somebody in an area you're interested in. That account may be stale but at the top of the page is a "people near" section, and from what I've seen those people all seem to be current. There are only a few of them and I'm not sure why it works.

I think from a programming standpoint it would be simple to run a daily process that moves inactive people into their own area. And another that looks through inactives and moves them back if there's been any activity.

The inactive percentage may vary by area but it's probably at least 75% where I am, very discouraging.

To the original poster: I do get replies as a free member, so that's not it.

I think the ballooning population of the whole world is at the root of a lot of other problems like global warming and we all need to face that fact. There are roughly 3 times as many people in the world as there were in 1950, 30 times as many as when Christ lived.

It's good that we have technology like LEDs and lithium batteries to make electric cars feasible, but those are only temporary relief. The global warming problem exists because more people means more energy consumption. Not to mention countless wars because people can't get out of each other's way any more.

The UN or somebody needs to start on a global program of population control. China and India have faced it but we all have to live on one planet for the foreseeable future. We don't have the technology to move half the population somewhere else, that's a pipe dream. Birth control, attrition, downsize, in a manner fair for everyone, that's why it needs to be an international effort.

I just rarely take pictures of myself, the camera's usually pointed away from me. I don't feel different, do I look different? Oops, don't use mirrors much either. Appearance doesn't matter that much to me. I don't do it to deceive anyone. Mine are less than 5 years old, I think.

The Registry of Motor Vehicles here in Massachusetts takes a new picture of you every 8 years, that's probably about good enough for me.

Hmm, I've unraveled a lot of mysteries using the w3 validator as a troubleshooting tool. Well, OK, trying to post a link that validates the front page didn't work, never tried it before.

Maybe the site only works right in IE and it was made with Frontpage but I don't even use Windows. There isn't a quick fix but when you see the same error multiple times the causes of them are probably related. Glad I'm retired, hee hee.

Database, maybe, depends on the database's role. Many sites now come out of databases, it's the only way to create pages on the fly. But I would examine what's in the database and how the pages are getting created. And be glad it's only web pages and not financial stuff.

What I see is pages that look like they're loading forever, if I walk away for half an hour they'll still be loading (something). They look complete, it's almost like there's a web socket continually updating some field, like on bitcoin sites that have live price quotes. There also seems to be a lot going on with Javascript or PHP or something that shows up as CPU load. Something crashed my browser hard yesterday to the point of my cookies getting trashed, the ones that keep you logged into sites so you don't have to keep looking up passwords.

I fed this page to the w3 validator (validator.w3.org) and it says there are 75 errors. It's hard to keep it happy, I've been a webmaster and worked weeks cleaning up a mess left by my predecessor.

But this one:
character "&" is the first character of a delimiter but occurred as data
happens a lot and it seems to mostly be in javascript, not because there's an ampersand on a page. Makes me wonder if there's an update to some javascript library being used or to whatever's generating the pages.

It's entertaining to see who comes along, I look forward to looking around after being away from my computer.

Other sites, well, there are over 900 of them and not everybody signs up with the same one. It's like a shell game, you don't know where that person will turn up. So I make the rounds of sites, and I see other people doing it too. There are a few women I've run into on more than one site. The sites all have their pros and cons. The forum here is good but there are a lot of stale accounts, probably an average percentage of scammers.

It is possible to script Google Images to prevent uploading stolen images that are already on the web. I think Badoo does that. But that also backfires when you're on multiple sites and the pictures are legitimately yours.

I'd like to be married again someday mostly because it is a hassle to get married and divorced. It's a commitment beyond just the trucking to move somebody in with somebody. I like the planning and anticipation involved in a long term relationship. Making plans to drive 8 hours to her parents' for Christmas, wanting to get home from work to tell her about something that happened. I get tired of being alone for years but I'm not interested in the emotional rollercoaster of short term dating, and I wouldn't want a relationship I dreaded going home to, so mostly it's easier to stay alone and speculate. I want the perfect relationship (yeah, right) and if I found it I'd like to take that extra step toward making it more permanent. It's a sign of love and appreciation, a statement that I'm not going to just walk away. It's a partnership that may transcend things like affairs.

I had a simple JP wedding and an easy divorce where we shared one lawyer (34 years ago). It was painful to have the relationship end but not significantly more than any other. After that I dated someone that was manic depressive, we broke up 3 or 4 times and got back together, that was worse than my divorce.

Yeah, I figured it out, the matches number is the number of people who swiped positive on the app or clicked like in that mode on a computer, it doesn't mean they've even looked at your profile. It's a score, not something worth following up on. Most probably wouldn't remember you if you tried.

I have a policy of taking everyone at face value until the first time they ask for money then goodbye, at least people I haven't met in person.

Not sure what you mean by old matches. There's a lot of deadwood, accounts that have been inactive over a month. That's probably over 90% in my area.

But I found a trick. Go into Search, click on someone near you. Then at the top of that page the people near them seem to be current. It's a limited subset, but it seems to be new people near them.


Bah, old matches probably got soggy and don't work anymore anyway. :)

My connection isn't fast, it's through a cell phone. I'm using Firefox 52.5.2 under Linux and I don't see any actual network traffic, maybe a tiny amount. But the page loading icon stays active on every mingle2 tab in my browser. If I hit the x to explicitly stop it it seems to stay stopped. No other site does this.

I guess now that I've closed everything else and watched to see that nothing's really coming in I should ignore it, it's just odd.

Hmm, I just got "There were problems with your entries
You have entered http://, which is a censored word. Please delete http:// in the about me and submit again."

But I was trying to put 4 or 5 URLs in the about section of my profile. I can't help it, I was a webmaster. My bio, resume, homepage, photography, they're all on the web. Nothing commercial or suspicious there. Let me just try my homepage here as a test: http://ab1jx.1apps.com/

If it's set to flag http:// maybe https:// would go through.

OK, that worked here but didn't link. Let's try it with the bbcode: http://ab1jx.1apps.com/ I wonder if other bbcodes work? OK, it worked here in the forum but not on my about page.