currency

Alexa. I use Alexa constantly, except my Echos drop off the network and have to be manually restarted by unplugging them. And I curse every time one of them starts up with, "by the way...."

I have several smart power strips that stopped responding; I have had better luck with individual smart outlets.

Digital audio players with Wi-Fi radios that support AirPlay. I've purchased three, two from Hiby and one from FiiO. The idea was to stream AirPlay to the DAP from one of my PCs, getting quality audio over wired headphones, while I walked around the house. The Hiby models would drop the stream occasionally and both had batteries that died in a year or less. The FiiO would accept streams from Apple devices, but not third-party AirPlay streams. I ended up listening to my phone.

I found bone conduction headphones don't come anywhere close to audiophile quality.

Wi-Fi in general, living in a row home in a neighborhood crowded with 2.4 GHz transceivers.

I bought and stored away a large drawer full of microphones, headphones, mice, and keyboards before I settled on the models I like.

I've never used a Windows trackpad that was worth spit. I can't use a Mac without a trackpad next to my keyboard and mouse. The difference on Windows is maddening.

I was getting frustrated with the battery in my old Apple watch as it got older, but now that I have two watches and can switch between them, I wear one or the other 24 hours a day.

Speaking of electronic devices, an appliance is generally locked down, and the manufacturer limits the number of use cases. You end up with something that is not a general-purpose computer, even though many use the same hardware as a computer would.

A game console is a classic appliance. You turn it on and see your current game running or a selection of games to play and you can start playing a game with zero intermediate steps.

The Steam Deck and Steam Box are designed as appliance emulators—they boot and by default operate in appliance mode. They can provide the same exact experience as a console if you use them as designed. They are also general-purpose computers, if you wish to step out of console mode.

If you like and use em dashes, you figure it out

I use em dashes constantly.

I've been a Mac user for years, where the em dash is a modified hyphen on the Mac keyboard. When I moved to primarily using PCs, the em dash alt-key combo was the first one I memorized (alt-0151).

That setting is under User Configuration on my Win11 Pro PC, so look in both.

Or just use http://lite.cnn.com/en. It's great that they still support a "text" version.

Coworking spaces need to colocate with services. Starbucks, Fedex Kinkos, massage chairs....

The author might be formatting for and editing in dark mode. I use edge://flags/#enable-force-dark and the links are readable.

People either bring email etiquette (Hi, how are you, I need...") or phone etiquette (Hi, how are you?" ...) to chat.

Email etiquette has always seemed natural to me, but a lot of people read chat as a synchronous medium, so.

It's just another place where I need to have multiple modes on hand for different people.

Different cultures. Your culture determines who sets expectations and who enforces them in these situations, and Indians can work with their culture's existing system for organizing and managing community homes. Americans would have to figure out a system, agree on it, troubleshoot it, while trying to learn how to be parents. That's almost impossible.

EPub is, like html, reformattable by the reader, so documents aren't fixed in the way PDFs are.

Wouldn't it be much better to just refute the claim instead of attack the person's motives?

No, at some point, and we have absolutely passed it in the US, you can be overwhelmed by the lies and bad faith arguments if you try to respond to them individually, and it's necessary to try to derail the source.

Visiting Ft Lauderdale as students on spring break and chatting with barflies gives one of them the germ of the idea....

It probably should be your own device; the audiogram ends up in the iPhone's health app. It can probably be done by someone else if they don't care and don't need to apply a different audiogram for themselves.

I've received Apple Calendar invites containing Chinese characters from individuals I've never heard of. I deleted them, but just receiving them was a bit alarming.

It's still available for Windows on Steam.

Edit: And yes, over the years I've wasted many many hours on my Atari ST and Macs running Empires.

"Turned" may be the wrong word. "Cozened" might be more correct. There may be no good way for an individual to identify someone who is being paid to take over their project from someone with a genuine interest.

It sounds like they're calling it e-paper because it's a variable refresh reflective LCD, not e-ink.

My first impression is that I'm not seeing increased resolution. It looks a lot like an overapplied sharpness filter (too much contrast around existing edges).

changing people is so surprisingly hard—no matter how much you focus on the person in front of you, you’ll never appreciate the million tiny influences that made them who they are and that keep them that way. If you really want to make someone different, you might have to change the TV they watch, the music they listen to, the things they learn in school, the friends they hang out with, the role models they look up to, etc.

I'm a white guy who grew up in rural Pennsylvania in the 60s and 70s, so you can imagine what my implicit biases are like pretty reliably. What helps me get away from that is access to social media sites like X, reddit, and tumblr, where I follow people who are as different from me as possible. I have updated my influences. I listen. I pay attention to my internal dialogue and reactions and try to challenge myself.

and if you do all that, congratulations, you’ve started what we call a cult.

Right. It's one thing to open myself to worlds I'm not aware of. It's something completely different to try to control what someone else experiences.

Another way of saying that is—as an atheist, I don't find religions interesting or useful. But I know that I'll never be able to sell atheism to anyone if their religion is a deeply meaningful part of their worldview and identity. Any attempt to do so has to start by destroying that world and that identity, and that kind of violence is anathema to anyone with the smallest bit of empathy. We are made of our influences and this essay covers that well.

It's a great essay that covers so much more than smoking (or drugs). Thanks for the link.

I'm not very good at eyeballing it, so it helps me stay consistent.

Making espresso with my semi-auto Breville Infuser is almost exactly as much fuss as a pour-over:

- Turn it on to heat up - Grind the beans - Weigh the grounds - Fill, tamp, and attach the portafilter - Start the infusion - Remove and dump the grounds - Clean the portafilter

It's a $600 electronic device, not a simple funnel and filter, but it's not a fussy process.

I answer a support line for users at my institution installing an unsigned application and almost every MacOS support call is because the unsigned app option is only shown in a normally hidden system setting.

Baking is literally chemistry. You don't get consistent results if you measure a powder of quite variable density by volume instead of mass.

Meta also noted that there was “nothing new here,” continuing that this issue was reported on years ago.

Meta may wish it was no longer newsworthy, but being reported on and being prosecuted for an issue are very different things.

I think part of the point of the quote is that a man who would try to hold a cat by the tail is an example of someone who can ignore the experiences of other people.

People FAFO when they should know better all the time.

I'm not interested in arguing you out of your surety. I do want to note that I believe that when an urban legend is implemented in reality, it is no longer a legend. And you aren't going to argue me out of expressing my opinion.

That's so interesting.

I've just done a quick dive into my electronics. I have a Tonbux power strip where the C and E are definitely too close together.

Edit:The website I linked is a Chinese manufacturer. If it was an urban legend, it seems to be being treated as fact in a way that matters now.

There's a deceptively similar mark that stands for China Export and does not indicate EU certification[0].

[0]https://www.kimuagroup.com/news/differences-between-ce-and-c...

The comments section on the article discuss this at some length.

Personally, I think most governments will eventually decide to legislate both safety and privacy together. The argument will be that requiring ID is acceptable when the data tied to that ID has privacy protections. The EU seems headed in this direction.

I expect keeping that compact will be next to impossible, but governments work with the tools they have—legislation and regulation—and expect the industry involved to solve the implementation details.