I got a CA-53 recently myself, for much the same reason.

Nobody ever said anything about my Apple Watch, but holy crap does everyone love a calculator watch.

(Which is hilarious because as a kid, I was teased as a nerd for having such a thing.)

Honestly, I think we’re 3 years out from Windows being replacable for a gaming platform.

Anti-cheat is a big one (sure, there’s “support”, but if none of the games people play are supported, is that support?), but VRR and HDR are also huge.

That trifecta is the only reason I’m still sitting in Windows, and I find myself hopeful we land there sooner rather than later so I can dump Windows and never have to think about whatever dumb crap Microsoft is going to do next.

nVidia released drivers that aren’t a complete tire fire under Wayland.

(It’s more of a regular pile of discarded tires now, but it’s still dramatically better.)

Sure, but the way this usually works is that the government tells you to do something and if you don’t, they’ll find someone (or a couple of someones) on that list, arrest them, and charge them with a crime.

Doesn’t matter if they did the crime, and it doesn’t matter if they’d be convicted, but the play is to keep your friends in jail until you capitulate to what they want. This is actually something that’s happened with tech companies before, like what they did with GoDaddy’s C-level in India.

The problem is that there’s no damn way I’d want to be arrested by the upcoming US administration, because I’d bet $100 that their playbook will portray not doing what they’re demanding as a national security or terrorism offense, and if you’ve been watching ANYTHING for the last damn near 25 years, that’s a free pass for them to basically just vanish you until they feel like doing otherwise.

It’s fantastic leverage against organizations that have US people and are, presumably, not willing to just let their friends spend who-knows amount of time in prison, and could probably result in some cooperation.

And I’m about to both get downvoted and WELL AKSHULLY’d about how you can’t just vanish people under the US justice system, and sure, you’re technically correct. Except we’ve passed law after law after law since 9/11 that have basically given the government the ability to do any damn thing they please if they call you a national security risk or terrorist, up to and including Gitmo, in case you’ve forgotten that existed: which you shouldn’t have, because we STILL have prisoners sitting there.

This is doomer as fuck, and horribly unlikely, but so is a demand to stuff backdoors into everything. But, if we head down that road, the only safe software will be ones that can’t be blackmailed like this which is essentially none of the major projects.

Well, yes, it does: https://www.debian.org/intro/organization

But the corporation that handles all their funding and owns their trademarks is in the US, so they’re possibly subject to the same pressure. And of course a good number of those people in that org tree are in the US, so again, same issue.

My point was more ‘this is silly, because if you REALLY think that, there’s nobody and no project that’s got any ties at all to the US that can be considered safe, and you should maybe get rid of all your computing devices now’, rather than an intent to say that Debian or anyone there is at more or less risk.

Ugh, think this means I should probably kill the navidrome container.

Mostly using Jellyfin for music now anyways, but the whole damn point of hosting my own shit is that it’s not got opt-out data telemetry being sent to who the fuck knows who are going to do who the fuck knows what with it.

I mean, if you want to carry that line of reasoning out, the Linux kernel is governed under a US-based foundation, so should the kernel itself be suspect?

How about FreeBSD? Or something like Debian? Or Ubuntu, which isn’t US-based but they’re in a typically cooperating jurisdiction?

You’re def being paranoid and somewhat irrational, since it’s unlikely to happen and if it did, it’s not like you could trust anything at all anyways.

Artificial meat seems like a scam to me.

Depends what it costs, honestly.

If you can make fake-cow that tastes like actual cow and a pound of ground fake cow isn’t $7, consider me very interested.

Time to rename the blue shell to The Shell of Equity, I guess?

Best as I can figure what got me was some delivery food, lol. The virus that damn near killed me is not especially common, and the usual means of transmission is fecal-oral.

So, some horribly gross restaurant employee was probably sick, went to take a shit, and didn’t wash their hands, though not like that can be proven.

…I don’t get delivery or eat out anymore.

Might have been unclear; I listen basically exclusively to spoken word stuff. Podcasts, audobooks, “raido” plays, etc.

The Airpods actually sound remarkably good and clear (and ANC helps a lot with ensuring clarity anywhere even slightly noisy) with voices, so for my uses, they sound perfectly fine.

I have a pile of Chi-Fi earbuds that absolutely destroy them in sound quality for music, but it’s very much a 99.9% of the time it’s not music situation.

And if you fried your food in lard like God intended, this wouldn’t have happened.

(Also screw things that need phone apps to function and especially screw phone apps that then ask for every permission they possibly can hoping people just spam ‘fine whatever, i just want to make dinner’ as the response.)

(/s, kidding, etc.)

They really do.

The sound great, and the ANC is great, but the “official” battery life for a brand new one (which these are not) is “up to 4.5 hours” with ANC on, and 5 without it.

It ends up being 2-3 charge cycles basically every day, plus a full recharge of the charging case.

They do, however, work amazingly well if you’re in the Apple ecosystem; for example they’ll swap between my iPad and Mac Mini if audio starts on one or the other.

But for actually sitting down with something and listening to a thing, I’d rather just plug in some headphones (via the lovely USB-C dongle) and not have to think about if the stupid things are going to die before I’m ready to stop listening.

(Disclaimer: I’m also a weirdo who doesn’t carry a smartphone, and still uses an iPod for listening to stuff outside of the house, so feel free to roll your eyes and disregard my obviously bad opinions :P )

My complaint has always been that the stupid things need to endlessly be recharged.

I’ve got some AirPod Pros and they’re great… for about 4 hours.

Then you’re stopping what you’re doing, recharging for half an hour, and then you’re good for uh, another 3 hours because that wasn’t a full charge.

And after the 2nd or 3rd time you’ve done that, your case is dead and you get to throw everything on a charger for a couple of hours.

Ooooooooor I can put in my wired headphones, and not give a shit about any of that, because that’s not how those work at all.

I suppose most people don’t spend most of their day listening to podcasts and audiobooks and thus 4 hours is fine, but good lord is it annoying as crap.

I’m going to go with ‘not dying’ as the achievement of the year.

Sounds easy but boy, has it not been.

Had heart failure in 2022, and at some point in early 2023 it turns out I had a stroke and that seriously fucked up my head and destroyed my vision (I went meme-levels of cross-eyed).

2024 was recovery and uh, was not the smoothest. But fuck it, I’m almost normal and I didn’t completely torch anything and so, yay.

When you say you ‘can’t access local devices’ is it just via the browser, or can you also not ping/telnet/ssh/whatever?

100% this: the sole owner of the foundation, trademark, and primary web portal has come across as absolutely unhinged, vengeful, and petty as all hell.

If I had any wordpress sites that I relied on professionally/ran a business on/made money with I’d be SERIOUSLY investigating any option that didn’t involve wordpress since the last thing I want is my business on software beholden to someone who is perfectly willing to be visibly nuts online.

Not a good thing for stability in general, you know?

Historically speaking, it’s rare that one killing actually causes meaningful change.

Usually, it requires killing a whole bunch of the rich and making them good and scared that they’ll be next before they’ll give up one ounce of, well, anything.

So don’t fret: if things get as bad as they might, there’ll be more and maybe improvements will start happening.

Uh, jesus christ, also what the fuck.

Computers were a mistake, and the internet just made it worse.

Can you tell me how to get to that universe?

I fucking loved Windows Phone and was horribly mad that Microsoft bungled it, bought Nokia, bungled it further, then eventually gave up.

It was years ahead of the shit Apple and Google were doing, but good lord Microsoft just couldn’t manage to figure out how to sell the thing, even with super amazing hardware, like the Nokia 1020.