Start with your local library. Mine lends tens of thousands of ebooks. It also has partnerships with other local libraries in the region that allow me to borrow from their collections as well.

I don’t think there is such a thing as inter-library loans for ebooks but you should be able to borrow from pretty much any library in the country if you are willing to wait for a paper copy to be shipped to your local branch. There may or may not be a fee associated with this but my local library allows me ten ILL requests a year for free.

Libraries are such an underrated and underutilized resource.

It can clock up to 3.7 GHz and has a decent GPU for an Intel one. All I can say for sure is that it keeps up just fine.

I have an N100 box running as my Plex server. It has no problem transcoding multiple 4k videos at once. This processor is no M2 but it isn’t really a slouch either.

Almost certainly not since the keyboard is $110 add-on. It is not included by default.

I finally dropped YoutubeTV for the summer months because we are seldom watching tv over the summer, choosing to spend more time outside. I haven’t missed it at all. They’ll probably get me back next month when college football starts again but I’m leaning pretty hard towards dropping it again after the new year. The price increase, even though it hadn’t kicked in for me at the time was absolutely the catalyst.

I do too and it works great. Unfortunately, I tend to be on my iPad in the evenings or early mornings, so I get stymied.

Forgetting where we are for a minute, if you’re willing to throw your local PBS station a fiver every month, you’ll help keep these programs available for those who can’t afford to pay (or can’t even afford a computer) and get online access to all the adult PBS shows through their app.

Some of us old timers remember the bad old days when a CD with two songs you actually liked cost $17.99 (about $35-40 in today’s dollars). As bad as Spotify and others are it sure beats what we had before.

It was definitely available in the US App Store earlier this year because I have it installed on both of my iOS devices. I can’t find any info as to when and why it was removed.

I agree completely with your review of Magic Earth. I will say that I keep some maps on my phone in Organic Maps as well. They are easier for me to follow when hiking on forest trails. When we went trailblazing on snowshoes, it made finding our way back to the main route simple.

The sweet spot lies somewhere between 360p and 4k HDR. Individual tastes vary.

Because my hands are filthy. I don’t want to get my phone all sticky/muddy/bloody or anything else you can imagine.

Mostly, the “laudable goals” language is to shut down the think of the children argument because everyone knows this isn’t really about that.

If they started off denigrating the bill without acknowledging the stated intent, you end up with the nonsense of my favorite radio commercial of the moment. I don’t even remember what it’s for but the following exchange cracks me up.

A: Think of the children.

B: The children aren’t what’s important right now.

A: Fine. Forget the children.

B: No. That’s worse.

….

Worse device depends on the user. In my mid-30s, I loved all the tweaks and options my Android phone gave me. Now, as I push 50, I find I want my phone to just work. iOS does that for me. I have a dozen other devices I can hack around on.