If you buy your phone unlocked, you can get Red Pocket which is extremely cheap for service compared to most post paid plans. You can get ~5gb data and unlimited everything else for 20 a month on AT&T. And then if you go to Europe you can just buy a cheap Sim while there and pop it in.

If you’re not picky about the phone, I have gotten sub 300 USD phones for the last 2, first lasted 4 years and I’m about 6 months into the second. Honestly there’s not much I feel like I’m missing, except spending way more money.

Idk the Republicans seem to really want fascism.

I don’t know how important this is to users of Vivaldi, and I don’t know how good Vivaldi can make their blocker by middle of next year, but this may force me to Firefox. Or maybe someone makes a local proxy like in the old days to do ad blocking Idk.

The apps are super slow though. Like I don’t need a 5 second animation of bouncing fries every time I do anything. Dunkin is another offender.

I think it’s more the cloud being the issue here. Such an obvious and large and valuable target. Of course Microsoft also isn’t that secure historically.

Probably just so you don’t accidentally waste time unknowingly rereading a book.

I have always felt that kids will get out of education what they put in/their interest in actually learning. I also think there is some benefits to learning how to manage technology de jure as it’s likely to come up when they’re out of high school too.

I kind of disagree with some of the points about learning more just talking to an AI, both because I tend to get wrong answers or important missed context in my AI testing, but also because I think I needed to learn some stuff I wasn’t interested in personally.

Today I don’t really have much opportunity to interact with classes beyond the great courses and linked in learning, and unfortunately much of the newer content is more like a YouTube curated Playlist than a traditional course. They are mostly superficial overviews more intended for entertainment than learning details.

YouTube on the other hand is all over the map and you have to know what to search for.

I think some value of the experiment is the part where it got the kids to review their notification settings to suppress things they weren’t interested in. Personally I think having phones in airplane mode / off during class is probably the best plan. Do the notifications during study hall, lunch, bus ride, and other free time.

My sister did that but only netted 30k more not 3x. Still well worth it imo. Of course it’s kinda amazing that more companies aren’t taking this “cheat code” to get cream of the crop “minor league” non major center talent for the discount of amazing wages out in the hinterlands that are 40k or more less than big city prices.

Ehh. That’s like accident billboards. I maintain that most people don’t know they can block ads, and a large part of the masses who have heard of it think it’s complicated or too hard for them.

With ad blocking I have a small tension that if I know a sort of thing exists, I presumably will find it when I search for it. So I don’t want another vacuum ad.

If I don’t know something exists then I have to stumble on it somehow.

The bigger problem would be if they didn’t block their own ads. I honestly didn’t even know they did ads so my blocking, of which they’re a part, apparently is working.

Usenet is hurt a lot by takedown notices unfortunately. So lots of older popular stuff doesn’t work. That said, things like Anime or something that isn’t given a takedown seem to be on there about forever. The server speed is a benefit for sure.

Windows post 7 was and remains annoying and getting worse all the time. So I wanted an OS without telemetry and one that I could control the updates on. I also work with Linux a lot at work. I use Alma 9 for a LTS release. Don’t have to mess with it much.

I have found that you usually have to go to a specialist forum or the like and spend a few months reading it and asking questions etc. Rarely has a community steered me wrong. However they also usually point to expensive or specialty products. Mass market is usually mediocre at best.

Sometimes though there are deals like Harbor Freight hand tools or their higher end power tools.

It’s also the anti commodity stuff IP has been allowing. If Hershey makes crap chocolate, there is little stopping you from buying Lidnt say. But if Microsoft makes a bad OS, there’s a lot stopping you from using Linux or whatever.

What’s worse is stuff like DRM and computers getting into equipment that otherwise you could use any of a bevy of products for. Think ink cartridges.

Then there’s the secret formulas like for transmission fluid now where say Honda says in the manual you have to get Honda fluid for it to keep working. Idk if it’s actually true, but I l’m loathe to do the 8k USD experiment with my transmission.

You’d think the government could mandate standards but we don’t have stuff like that.

I am in NY upstate but travel around the east coast semi frequently, and was kinda thinking about online options too.

This seems like something the optimize charging tool could manage though. Starting the day at 90 percent or 80 percent or whatever is crazy to me - why am I going backwards to needing to babysit my phone when it’s charging, and why would anyone want to charge their phone when they want to be using it vs when they’re asleep?

I looked at both, and went with fastmail because at the time it had a shared calendar you could use, which I do with my family to track events and do scheduling. Fastmail is standard commercial privacy though. Good enough for me, but no where near Proton Mail from what I understand.

Testing the Jellyfin photos thing out now. I don’t know if it’s working right, but when I first looked at it the issue was I thought it seemed very video focused. I guess otherwise I’m learning docker after all.

Fair enough, last time I tried docker, which was a long time ago, I had all sorts of issues with permissions and persistence. I guess it’s probably better now.

I don’t want a research project. I just was hoping there was an easy to use program to make the viewing better than samba shares. Maybe I just need a set of programs that will display thumbnails over samba.

Gaming - too much hassle for me, and I just wasn’t even using my PS4 much. I don’t know if I’d call it outgrowing it exactly though… this one is borderline to me.

What I have outgrown is cable news like CNN etc. Or they went way to clickbait for me. Maybe both happened. Similar with the NYT, they keep getting things wrong that they just shouldn’t and then the more history I read the less I really trust their reporting. The more boring the news source, like AP, the more likely it is to be accurate from what I can tell.

Similar things happened with certain influencers / podcasters. As I learned more I just found they were continually making the same mistakes on things that they should have known better / learned better by now. Sam Harris was a big one, and I narrowly avoided the beginnings of Brett Weinsteins Dark Horse and now it’s completely off the rails.

Certain “nonfiction” authors followed the same path - as I got older I realized how made up the Ancient Aliens thing was, I think I bought in hard in my late teen years and then when I was 25 I had an epiphany that it just has to be crap or more people would believe it, and when I re looked at the “evidence” I was like - oh, well if you just go by the book, sure it sounds compelling - but if you search alternative explanations all of a sudden you’re like, oh yea, that is far more plausible.

Consumer Reports happened about a decade ago. The reason was I always was a little annoyed by their biases that they didn’t really make clear. What really killed it for me though was comparing laptops primarily on screen size. Looking back now, it’s a little less ridiculous than I initially thought, but to not have separate Mac and Windows categories let to the Mac winning over the windows competitor when the Mac was like 3x the price. This all seemed like a crazy result to anyone who knew anything about computers, especially like in 2014 when for something like 95% of the population, the Mac would not run 99% of the software they could possibly want to run, or know about. A great build quality, performance and size doesn’t matter if the computer doesn’t do the computation you need.

In the last 3 years non anime TV shows - mostly because of a mix of already been done better, no FOMO with streaming, and because of all the channels etc no water cooler talk about the 3 shows that were on last night / this week / whatever dragging me to be up to date. Now that there’s so many choices, I don’t have to take “mildly entertaining” as my bar for watching a show, it’s way way higher now. And as the individual shows get longer on streaming for many - it’s harder to set aside 55-90 minutes depending on show. Even 42 minutes is harder as more is going on now for me. I think the only reason I do more Anime is it’s ~20 minute chunks, and I have less experience with it (for half my life I didn’t know it existed, and for the next quarter it was kind of hard to come by) so I am just starting to get more picky about the shows and the “this was done better before”. Konosuba for instance is IMHO a worse version of Slayers series in a lot of ways.

Magazines - I just got tired of both trying to keep up, the rising costs, and then the increase in ads so there was so little there there, along with what to do when I was done with the weeks / months issue? I get a lot of that kind of content now from online anyway.

Physical books - similar. Unless I want to get a collectors edition for the object, the content is much better as an e-book IMO, cheaper, less paper waste, less piles of stuff taking up space etc. I’ve really come back around on the novel contents though - lots of bang for you buck in time vs dollar spent, way more variety in stories than ever get made into TV shows, can be stored locally easily on the device so you’re not burning data like with streaming… Easy to keep place with a decent app, easy to read for 3 minutes or 3 hours.