My buddy's 1998 personal site just got wiped because he used a free host with a 30-day login rule

He hadn't logged into his Tripod account since maybe 2005, and last month they deleted everything after sending a single email to an old address. The site had his high school band's MP3s and a bunch of animated gifs he made himself. Has anyone managed to recover files from a dead free host like that?

I visited the public records office in Albany and noticed something about old property maps that changed how I look at my own house.

PSA: The day a regular's kid decided my clippers were a toy

So last Friday, I'm about halfway through a simple fade on Mr. Jenkins, a guy who's been coming in for years. His son, maybe 5 years old, is sitting in the waiting area. I turn to grab a different guard, and in that two seconds, the kid darts over, grabs my cordless Andis Masters off the station, and just chucks them onto the tile floor. I heard a crack that made my heart stop. The housing split, and now the motor sounds like a dying bee. That set cost me $250, and Mr. Jenkins just laughed it off like it was nothing, saying 'boys will be boys.' I had to finish the cut with my backups, which just don't hit the same. How do you guys handle kids in the shop when parents just won't watch them?

Tried to download a song on Napster in '99 and my dad's computer got a virus

I was 14 and had just figured out how to use Napster. I wanted that new Blink-182 song, 'All the Small Things', so bad. I found a file called 'blink182_all_the_small_things.mp3.exe' and thought, 'Score!' Clicked it, waited like 45 minutes on our 56k modem. Nothing happened. Next day, my dad goes to check his email and the whole screen is covered in pop-up ads for, uh, adult websites. He was so mad. I had to admit what I did. Learned the hard way that .exe at the end of a song file is a huge red flag. He made me read a whole article about computer viruses from a magazine as punishment. Anyone else have their early internet fun ruined by a nasty download?

Tried fixing a cassette tape with a pencil, got a mess

My old Talking Heads tape got chewed up last week, so I tried the classic trick of turning the spool with a pencil to rewind it. I pushed too hard and the thin tape snapped clean in half. Now I have two loose ends and a pile of brown ribbon all over my kitchen table. What's the right way to splice this back together without special tools?

Digital billboards in my city are showing art, but my files kept looking wrong.

I submitted my work for a public display, and it came out fuzzy on the big screen. After some trial and error, I found that saving images at 300 DPI in RGB mode fixed most issues. What's your go-to method for prepping digital art for large formats?