Sad tale: I left my laptop out in the rain on the 17th, when I’d had a few too many celebrating Koba’s 1000 ranked games party thread. I’d lost my phone, which I had turned off, so I couldn’t even look for a new laptop on Amazon. I just found the phone (which is, to make things even less comfy, a couple of years past its shelf life) and came straight here to explain. I imagine I’ve been disqualified from the online Durham tournament which had its first day today, but perhaps that’s for the best since it would’ve been hard to play by phone anyway. The one silver lining is that that laptop had been damaged for a long time and wouldn’t even register the built-in keyboard’s E key, so it’s not like I could have sold it on. Now I’ll have to assess whether I can even afford a new one… perhaps on eBay. Well, this is why I dropped off, and if I’m not around later then it’ll be because of the phone and data plan giving me trouble. Congrats to my opponents on their forfeit wins.
Oh no thats horrible ;___;
I also expect my games in the OGS Team League to be affected. If I do play them by phone, I’ll need to have stones on submission and I may be a bit unresponsive in chat.
Um first day is tomorrow…
It is?! Oh, in that case I’ll have to try to play by phone, unless I can get my hands on something better. I could’ve sworn it was today, but I suppose this is only the registration close (I registered ages ago.) Thanks for the information.
Why?
Is that a serious question? By accident, of course. To be exact, I left it under a parasol that I mistakenly believed to be waterproof.
Apparently not, I just want to torture you one more time. 
You can easily do this. Plug a mouse into your phone.
I have played over 2000 games on OGS, nearly every single one of them from a Raspberry Pi. OGS is lightweight. I’m not sure you could run the bloated IGS and KGS clients, though.
By the way, maybe that can be your new computer? There is a new model, Pi 400, that looks like this: File:Raspberry Pi 400 (50586757772).jpg - Wikipedia I don’t think you need much more than a screen. Speakers, perhaps. I haven’t tried that model because I use the SoC variant and I am very picky about keyboards. (Note that it may be too slow for some heavy tasks. I only use the Pi for OGS, Duolingo, Memrise, the bank and compiling stuff, which works extremely well. It is now slow at all for these tasks.)
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I’ll still need to order a special mouse, though. My laptop mouse has a full-size USB and my phone only has a small port of some kind.
Do you have an old Bluetooth mouse? Maybe that will work.
I think I may have a “wireless mouse” but I’m not sure it even works.
Is it too late for me to Amazon you a dongle?
Any publicly available PCs? Are libraries open there?
Laptop may be salvageable! I have left electronics out in the rain before a gotten away with it. You just have to dry that thing out big time! Towel first, maybe even open it up to (very gently) dry the inside, then hair dryer on low heat and low air flow, then put it somewhere warm and dry (do people still have airing cupboards these days?), maybe even go as far as to put loads of dry rice near it to absorb the moisture (careful not to get any stuck in the laptop!). Then leave it at least overnight, preferably longer, maybe 24 or 48 hours (no good for Durham but at least you might get your laptop back)… Then… fingers crossed… try turning it on. Hopefully it will work but if it doesn’t come on now, then there is no hope. Might work, might not, but worth a try if it’s the difference between bringing laptop back to life or shelling out for a new one. Good luck 
Yeah, always worth giving it a shot to see if it can be salvaged. Sometimes you can get lucky by drying it out and waiting a few days. Even if it remains dead, you’re in no worse position than before.
However, I do recommend removing the battery pack and leaving it completely unplugged while you are drying it out. When trying to turn it back on later, maybe do it outdoors, just in case it catches fire.
Sorry to hear that.
I wish you the best for salvaging your laptop or buying a new one or playing by phone.
About that last option, I do it since long time. My 6’ android is good enough to play and write this here. I see that you’re having trouble even copying and pasting a YouTube link, but it’s actually quite easy to me.
Maybe practice?
Or am I missing something?
I’ve set up my new laptop; I bought a fairly cheap one for £200.
Getting it ready was a test of endurance.
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Loaded up Windows 10. Cortana was falsely friendly to me. Corporate smallhead art made its appearance. I had to log into my Microsoft account. God, I hate Windows 10 – I swear Windows 7 was usable and non-dystopian.
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Manually deselected ten different kinds of telemetry.
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Loaded up Edge only to download Firefox. Windows tried to prevent me from installing it, making me switch mode in order to run non-Microsoft programs. Firefox opened a (lack of) privacy page asking me to deselect its own telemetry options. Disappointed by a browser I used to respect at one point, I looked around for small open-source browsers.
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Downloaded a little browser called K-Meleon which came in a 7-zip file. It looked like it arrived straight out of the '90s, It was unable to load OGS, although it was happy to bring up the forums, which run on Discourse.
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Remembering BHydden’s advice, I installed Brave. It does the job and looks like Firefox used to before they tried to become Chrome, ironically as Brave runs on Chromium. My only, but not too small, complaint is that it seems to load pages very slowly. I intend to try others like Waterfox, IceCat, and Opera.
Now I’m going to add my antivirus, relax, drink wine and watch Twitch on a (half-) decent screen.
I miss Firefox on Windows 7, ca. 2012–17… since one can’t return to Windows 7, I might shift over to some type of Linux at some point, but I lack any experience whatsoever in changing OS. For the moment, at least, I seem to have something I can use.
Oh, and gmail wants a confirmation code from my phone.
Like twitch wants to send a confirmation email every single time I log in.
I long for a world where programs do what I bloody well tell them to.
I think without internet you don’t need to. For now.
Also, I don’t know what this is about.