I prefer mailing lists to forums, and forums to IRC, Slack to Discord and Discord is dead last just because it’s so fucking annoying. Forums can be annoying too but they are far more usable/searchable than the stream of consciousness, ephemeral nature of chat.

Even if you’re a Discord user it’s still annoying as fuck.

You’re not as familiar with IRC as you think you are if you believe it doesn’t have (sometimes large) servers and it works in a peer-to-peer arrangement with each user contributing to the “power of the network”…

This is my main point of conflict with shopping strictly on price. I do try to support local when possible. I’m price conscious of course, but community support is also important. Not all (or even many it seems) local businesses do support their communities but when I see it I make a note that they’re one of the local B&Ms I will buy from.

I comparison shop almost religiously. Vendor sites are oftentimes more expensive and add shipping on top of that. BB, Walmart, etc. have similar prices but most times it’s actually third party marketplace bullshit using these big name sites as a shittier Amazon.

Prime doesn’t matter so much for me, but 5% on all of my purchases with the Amazon credit card is definitely worth it.

And if you go to Best Buy, staples, Walmart, target… what is different? I’m actually close to a microcenter and they’re also no different.

Where do you go for a desk mounted USB hub?

You are conflating abandoning a product (such as iPhone) with abandoning a model (such as iPhone 13). These are not the same thing.

Yay I’m part of something! :-)

I updated to the latest mini iPhone after rumours it would be the last. I hope not, but the trend seems to be bigger and more ridiculous “phone” form factors.

You can create another Apple ID in the country you need. I am a Canadian in the US and couldn’t change the country of my Apple ID because I have active subscriptions (another idiotic limitation) I created a second ID with a US address and CC. Downloaded US-only apps just fine and didn’t lose my Canada-only ones either.

There’s no way a typical BLDC/ACIM can’t spin at the tire’s RPM. If you’ve got a 16” tire then at 100mph you’re spinning at roughly 1000rpm; these motors typically spin 3.5x that fast.

I’ll never understand why there’s a transmission in a fully electric. Put four pancake motors at the wheels. Easier to cool, smaller motors, redundant power.

What about the ad blocker changes they’re making? That’s pretty much the line for me. I use chrome everywhere but when ublock stops working well that’ll be me jumping ship. The web is a fucking unreadable cesspool without a solid adblocker running.

Not OP but I’ve been using duplicity for over a decade. Zero lock-in to any particular cloud storage, uses rdiff and gpg for the incremental computation and encryption… it’s awesome.

Just this month I’ve switched over from S3 to Dropbox for cloud storage due to price, and other than the large first backup, my backup script worked flawlessly.

I can’t recommend it enough.

I know I’m an outlier, but I prefer text mode IRC, then slack, and then all the other shit (telegram, signal, discord, teams, etc) fall way behind. “Everything is a walled-off app” is a horrible way to communicate. I get why these companies do it, and I also even understand the headache over maintaining useful open APIs, but honestly, they drop that ASAP because it doesn’t make them money.

It makes a lot of sense to post where the people are. Roll your own and note the people need your app/etc. granted, everyone is reading X on their smartphone and I’m 100% positive that Japan has the same kind of emergency broadcast system that we have in North America, but again that’s not meant for lots of messages, where a social networking site is.

“Nothing is perfect” Is a hell of a way to minimize the enormity of the issue. Like wow…

That doesn’t sound right. I’ve got 200,000 miles on my 2015 Passat TDI, and expect another 100,000 easily with minimal repair/maintenance cost.

What’s the service life of the battery of a ten year old EV? The electric motor should be almost indestructible, but I have serious doubts that the battery capacity will still be reasonable after the same amount of time, even if you baby it.

“Simple cable to transfer data” is hiding a lot of detail. USB 2 speeds? USB 3 (and which version of USB 3?) speeds? Transfer video data? Is it Thunderbolt data?

It sucks. The standards committee really dropped the ball and now just shrugs their shoulders and throws more shit on the pile.

For myself, any power-only cable is literally cut in two and thrown out upon discovery. And the data stuff is handled by intuition: thin cables are assumed to be slow, heavier/higher quality cables are assumed to be faster, and the thunderbolt cables are kept separate. Fortunately the only TB cables I have are actually marked as such on the connector moulding, but that apparently isn’t a requirement.

Not to mention how unbelievably ugly stringing that shit all over the service area is. Electric buses make a ton of sense.

I used instant ink when I was living temporarily in Vancouver. It was actually worth the price back then. Now? Forget it.