I bought a new 2024 vehicle last year with a manual transmission. This will be the last manual I ever own. I don’t expect them to be around by the next time I get a car.
I’ve enjoyed driving stick since I was a teenager. It still makes my commute more enjoyable. A good rev matched downshift still makes me smile. I’m going to miss the experience when it finally comes to an end, but hopefully I can keep it up another 20 years.
I bought a new car with a manual transmission this year. It has a cool feature called “hill start assist”. Basically for the first 3 seconds I won’t roll backwards. It’s been nice.
I appreciate your feedback. Moving more local is definitely a goal. I buy a lot of specialized books which I can’t find at small bookshops so I tend to gravitate to larger companies.
All that being said, I’m going to downvote your comment because I can find no credible sources that supports your claim that Amazon owns Barnes & Nobel. I’d be happy to change my mind if you provide sources, but I dislike misinformation.
I’ve been able to successfully degoogle, and recently came to terms that I need to deamazon too. It’s going to take quite a while. I’m a prime subscriber and use AWS.
I’m looking into Barnes and Nobel for future book purchases. I recently did a larger purchase online directly from the vendor instead of purchasing through Amazon. I plan to do more of that.
What’s been frustrating has been the small things. I needed a pill splitter, so I stopped at Walmart on the way home from work, dealt with some crowd and retraced my steps around the pharmacy a few times before I found it, then had to deal with self checkout. This would have been quicker and wasted less of my time to use Amazon. That’s going to be the hardest kind of benefit to give up.
AWS I’ll probably start migrating this summer. I’m planning to switch to Backblaze for cloud storage. I still need to look into an alternative registrar, and ideally very cheap static web hosting. I also need to find providers that have good ansible support since I use that for all my local and remote configuration.
It took years for me to get off Google. I worry it’s going to take even longer to give up Amazon, but yeah it’s time.
I think there’s a bit more nuance to it than that. I can look up a tax map for my state and see that for every dollar I pay in taxes that only 60 cents come back to where I live. It’s 98 cents back to the big city associated with my suburb.
The areas that get more in taxes than they pay in are the rural areas.
I’m not denying this happens in some places, but it’s not universal. I live in the suburbs and grow veggies during the summer. The state I live in has “right to garden” laws that prevent a lot of HOA restrictions. My city also has a rain barrel program to encourage their use and offers discounts on barrels.
I understand what you’re saying, and being able to drive is definitely a privilege I have. Public transit exists. I can walk to a bus stop within 10 minutes of my home. It’ll take me all over including to a vibrant downtown. It can also take me to a local train station where I can ride affordably into many neighboring communities along my route, ultimately taking me to a major city.
Suburbs don’t have to be these horrible places they’re made out to be.
Yeah, I had another reply in this post where I talk about it. My subdivision is next to a commercial area so I can walk within 10 minutes to a grocery store, pharmacy, restaurants, fast food, gym, dry cleaners, banks, and to a bus stop for public transit.
I’m assuming there are suburbs that have these problems, but I think that’s a city planning problem.
I live in a suburb and enjoy it a lot. It’s very walkable and people bike around the neighborhood all the time. We have a walking/biking path that connects to a larger trail that goes for a miles.
I don’t have access to everything within walking distance, but I have access to a lot within a 10 minute walk.
I live in the suburbs and really love it. My neighborhood is quiet and easy to walk around without much road noise. There’s a small park within our neighborhood that children play in and people take their dogs.
I have a front yard and back yard that’s mostly grass, but we do plant flowers and plants when the weathers nice. It gives me an excuse to be outside during the summer. And yeah, I do grow vegetables and garden in the backyard as do many others. The fenced in backyard makes it easy to have a pet with room to run.
Despite my neighborhood being quiet it’s adjacent to a commercial area, so I can walk within 10 minutes to a grocery store (a Walmart to be fair) and if I’d like, I can hop on public transit that has a bus stop right there. There’s restaurants, fast food, groceries and other small businesses like dry cleaners, hair stylists, banks, and gyms. All easily within 10 minutes of walking. The local public transit can get you to major shopping centers and downtown areas in a reasonable amount of time.
I mostly drive and what I love the most is that I can drive to heavily populated areas with activity within 5-10 minutes but my neighborhood itself is this quiet sleepy little suburb where kids play in cul-de-sacs without worrying about traffic and I know many of my neighbors by name.
I definitely get how suburbs can look bad, but it doesn’t mean they have to be.
I do this with my home network using FastMail. You can create App specific passwords for each service you add email notification support for. This means you don’t risk compromising your full accounts passwords. You can also put constraints on each app password, such as limiting it only to sending emails but not reading email or looking at your contacts and files. This is nice in case any of my passwords are leaked.
My ask here is for System76 to use a popular and shared tool by many Linux distributions to do firmware updates (fwupd) instead of rolling their own solution only installed by default on PopOS.
I’m not sure if a Dell still offers Linux support out of the box, but you can still easily install firmware updates on multiple Linux distributions using fwupd.
I’m going to piggyback off your comment to take a moment to complain about System76 computers, which I own and enjoy. That being said I wanted to run Fedora instead of PopOS.
It’s super frustrating to me that many of my old computers could automatically do firmware updates using fwupd, but to update System76 laptops I have to install from a copr repo their system firmware update service.
The funny thing is they do appear to support fwupd, I assume they just aren’t maintaining it.
A Linux laptop for Linux people, but they’ve managed to set it up where you don’t get the best experience unless you’re running PopOS. It’s little frustrations like this that make me want to go back to a Del laptop for my next computer.
This feels a lot like the common “millennials can’t do X anymore” that we used to see all the time.
I switched careers recently from software engineering to teaching. Young people are fine.
Some things have changed. Those with no previous experience need a little help understanding file systems and moving files around, something they didn’t really have to do on iPads and Chromebooks.
Besides that students pick things up quickly. Find it as interesting and exciting as we did and often impress me by using more advanced features than we discuss in class.
Yes, they try to use AI. I usually explain to them that AI can likely do all their assignments in our classes not because AI is a good programmer but because these are introductory classes where the assignments are simple.
So far AI still can’t produce a perfect assignment for the students. And an easy way to tell they’re using AI is to see if their code is formatted too well. Most beginners will screw up indention somewhere in their programs. So what do I do if they use AI and then ask me for help (because AI didn’t do exactly what they wanted)? I tell them to let AI fix it. They end up having to rewrite so much before I help them that asking AI isn’t worth it to begin with.
Anyway, to summarize kids are still learning to code, still improving, and there’s going to be a lot of talented junior engineers graduating.
For me, piracy isn’t about the cost. I’ve spent 1000’s of dollars on home servers, Apple TVs, NAS, hard drives, Usenet/VPN subscriptions, and indexer subscriptions. Not to mention all the extra time it takes to set up and keep everything running.
I do it because I get a higher quality product. The last time I did the math, for the size of my collection and the cost of everything I’d spent would be the equivalent to having paid $10/Blue-ray for what I have.
I also do have many streaming services through different bundles, but the low bitrates and constant switching of services means it’s harder to find and lower quality to watch than just adding something in Radarr and playing it in Plex.
On the other hand I legally stream music all the time and am very happy with the product. You pick one provider of your choice, pay a reasonable price, get access to nearly all the world’s music, modern and historical, and the audio quality is more than reasonable.
It’s on the movie and TV industry to fix their piracy problem. The music industry has even provided them a template.
Yeah! I’ve been doing the same. I actually find myself thinking “I haven’t participated in a conversation in over a week. I better find something to comment on.”
Same, the builtin sync between devices using WebDAV was the critical feature for me choosing Joplin over Obsidian.
You mean like Wacom tablets? I’m curious to know what’s missing. I’ve been using one of those XP Pen tablets on GNOME and Wayland without much issue. I’m using it for writing more than drawing though.
I used to have a Shield. I donated it to GoodWill when Nvidia updated their UI to start showing ads on the Home Screen. I switched to Apple TV and not only does it not force me to watch ads, it’s actually just been a better overall. I haven’t had a single issue streaming anything from Plex to my Apple TV, where sometimes the Shield would struggle with high fidelity audio tracks.
Psych. A cliche “murder mystery of the week” show has no business being as wholesome, kind, friendly, and upbeat as Psych. I realized a few years ago when I was going through some personal issues and had started rewatching Psych that it was helping me deal with the stress, and it wasn’t the first time I’ve done that with the show.
Maybe a year ago I went to Psych’s first convention near Chicago. It was both surprising and reassuring to hear other fans go up to ask the actors questions and they all shared similar stories to me. People have used to show to help them briefly escape from challenging situations from dealing with the death of loved ones all the way to someone using it as background TV while trying to study in medical school.
One of the few things I miss from Reddit is the active Psych subreddit over there.
Also, the 80’s references are fantastic.