qupada

I have a plastic desk toy of this dumpster.

https://100soft.shop/products/dumpster-fire-vinyl-figure

Truly an object worthy to represent these troubled times.

In my extended circle of acquaintences and colleagues I know around eight people with folding phones. I have seen ONE of them ever use it open - even in situations where you’d think it’d be great, like sitting at the tables in the office kitchen at lunchtime browsing, almost never used unfolded.

It seems like it should be a great idea, but for the majority of people the majority of the time, it appears to be an otherwise normal phone that’s just twice as thick as it needed to be. One of the owners of these devices - who had it bought for them rather than choosing it themself - made that exact complaint to me, in fact.

That said, don’t let this put you off. If it’s a thing you think you would like, the technology has definitely progressed to the point where the more glaring issues (of reliability, mostly) have been worked out. But definitely spend some time playing with one in a store before committing if you can.

In the woods, or???

It’s distressing just how freaking similar the sales pitch is too.

What I’m loathed to even call the “real product”: It’s time to stop flushing away valuable data.

The fake one: If I had information that could save your life or the life of your family members, would you flush that?

Just… wow

Nearly 15 years, and still no progress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsIz8xn3srI

There’s this range of Philips signage displays in up to 32" (~$1800 USD): https://www.ppds.com/display-solutions/digital-signage/philips-tableaux

They even run Android, so should be able to install the Home Assistant app natively. Being intended as a signage solution, there’s also PoE (although it is 45W 802.3bt class5), and even room for four 18650 batteries.

Notably though, they use the newer E-Ink “Spectra” (16 bit, 65,536 colour) panel which offers its full 2560x1600 resolution in both greyscale and colour, not the “Kaleido” one (12 bit, 4096 colour) of this Boox monitor that only has half of its 3200x1800 resolution in colour (Boox recommend using 1400x1050).

I don’t know which of the two panels offers better refresh rates, however.

I feel like “whatevs” is the default position of the capybara under the vast majority of circumstances, but your point still stands.

Except sometimes it pays off massively.

I had accidentally left the voice on for some reason, back when Google Maps’ navigation was fairly new here in New Zealand. Back then it wasn’t the easiest thing to turn off without pulling over and stabbing a bunch of buttons, so I left it.

Approaching a large intersection, it seemed it was taking the words on the street signs somewhat literally, as it told me

Signs for State Highway one-half

Indeed, the sign did appear to read “SH1/2”.

They’ve missed a couple of times over the years.

From LTO 1 to 9, the capacities (TB) were 0.1, 0.2, 0.4, 0.8, 1.5, 2.5, 6, 12, 18. LTO 6 also rather let the side down there.

Apparently though LTO 10 is going to get things back on track? I’ve seen claims it will achieve 36TB, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

The real problem is the environmental requirements for LTO 9 and newer have become too strict. The longevity is still (supposedly) fine, but the tapes are much more sensitive to temperature and humidity fluctuations when in use.

Brand new tapes have to be brought into the environment where they’ll be written for 36-48 hours to acclimatise before being used, and then have a 60-90 minute “calibration” in the drive before they can be written to.

Honestly, it could put the use of the newer types of tapes entirely out of the reach of many.

The only one I got close on was I never had a chequebook of my own, but did on a couple of occasions use bank cheques for mail-ordered things.

Presuming we’re counting that, big fat goose egg.

Rubbish trucks are a good example of this, often being drivable from either side (at least where I am). That allows the driver to better see their colleagues and bins on the roadside while driving in the suburbs, but switch to the regular position for driving to and from a landfill site.

Assuming you’re not talking about this article’s 7.68TB drive and not the mentioned 61.44TB one, actually far less than you’d think.

Solidigm’s equivalent (https://www.solidigm.com/products/data-center/d7/ps1010.html) goes for between $1000 and $1500 USD for the same 7.68TB capacity: https://www.serversupply.com/SSD/NVMe/7.68TB/SOLIDIGM/SB5PH27X076T001_394195.htm

(And performs similarly, 14.5GB/s R / 10GB/s W, vs 14.6/11 for the one in the article).

Reticulated gas is charged by the kWh here in New Zealand. The meter may well be calibrated in m³ (I don’t have gas at home, so I don’t know for sure) but all pricing is energy, not volume.

For bonus points, if instead you buy your gas in cylinders - a pair of 45kg (~100lb) cylinders is a common installation for houses without piped gas - those are sold simply by the unit. The best conversion for that I can find is one energy retailer describing one 45kg cylinder as 2200MJ (611kWh).

I expect this is one of those things that is overall horribly inconsistent depending on where you live.

Fully committing to the bit, their cafe sells penis-shaped waffles: https://www.phallus.is/phallic-cafe

Comparing the amount of noise my laptop’s CPU fans make between the two of them when doing moderately intensive tasks like screen sharing a 4K display, Zoom is measurably worse.

Possibly the one time that Microsoft’s inexplicable inability to make their own software run well on their own OS has somehow not manifested.

Don’t get me wrong, it is still death-by-a-thousand-cuts terrible, but the most current iteration of Teams is not the worst in its field… at this one specific thing.

As people have said, already happening:

https://www.dmarge.com/cars/tesla-owners-rebrand-backlash

And it’s not fooling anyone

Or maybe?

https://i.imgur.com/dK1rp.jpeg

“Binging with Babish” makes gourmet bachelor chow (beef bourguignon):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nowFI0WRpO0

Even for devices that will stand the test of time on their own, they’re still being unnecessarily modified by the addition of extra nonsense to support AI boondoggles.

I was talking to our company’s account manager from one major PC manufacturer, he agreed that a generation of laptops with a likely-to-be-useless-in-future Copilot button permanently emblazoned on their keyboard will really date this era.

The computers themselves will be fine - they have some extraneous hardware but that doesn’t really detract from their usability - but there’s a better than even chance that logo will exist as a reminder long after memories of what it was supposedly for begin to fade.

You might have to consider buying used.

Even older HP printers are fine (and I know people love to shit on them, but they too used to be perfectly safe and reasonable choices). More or less the safe/unsafe divide coincides with the switch from printers with 2x16 character displays to ones with full colour screens.

I’ve got a 2012-designed (but mine is 2017-built) HP Colour Laserjet CP5225dn, it has none of the modern lock-in shenanigans.

Just gotta find one that’s new enough that consumables are still readily available (fortunately this usually isn’t too difficult), and in good physical condition.