That’s Pure Michigan, friend.

Hey, it’s good to keep exercising the math muscle, and apparently making mistakes is a better learning reinforcement for us than always succeeding, so I bet it will stick better now.

I got $31.07 here using a calculator. Perhaps you’ve uncovered a plot perpetrated by Big Calculator. (A joke.)

Just ignore the trolls, they have meaningless little lives and nothing better to do than try and make a random person online feel like shit so the trolls can feel like their existence matters in any significant way. Which sucks, as they could probably better focus that time constructively, but instead…this.

Learning to “life-hack” a web site for deals (especially when in a crisis) shouldn’t be a prerequisite for purchasing food at a reasonable price. The onus should not be on the consumer to not get ripped off by the seller.

This is just a continuation of systemic failure of business running rampant on the web without any reasonable regulation to prevent it.

Honestly, it wouldn’t have been a bad place to be if they hadn’t destroyed it from the inside. Windows on ARM is super stable. You can still build your own computer, or at least buy one with user-swappable parts. Linux has become much easier and wasn’t too bad to use even a decade ago, but it was nice being able to have a non-Apple computer running programs and getting work done that was just there to do the business. I’m speaking as one that attempted to use the kool-aid for a few years after Apple stopped using user-swappable batteries, memory, disk, their hardware upcharges are pure asshole insanity. I’m fully capable of using Linux, compiling my kernel, modifying driver source to work around problems, but, I don’t want to when I’m just trying to pay my bills. Streaming media services come and go with Linux support, hardware support is often lacking until the work is done to make the hardware work correctly. Windows, for all it’s … windowsness … worked. Until the last 8 months when they decided to put a molotov cocktail under the hood and see what happens.

Apple is headed this way too, now that they don’t have SJ to errantly blow up the current tech to try something new and random (although, had he survived his cancer, he’d have just gone Musky with age like a lot of that generation has, mmmm leaded gas!) Apple will hold on just a bit longer because iOS gave them one new platform reboot (ish) to live off of, while Microsoft is still kicking around technical debt until the end of time.

Oh, edit though, I’ve been migrating my machines to Linux one by one now. Not going to bother sticking around to see that Windows train wreck continue.

To point out that: even on the operating system/platform where the YouTube app comes from, it is pointless. Works fine in a browser.

Without band 71 (used for both LTE and 5G depending on parts of the country) you’ll likely see more no service scenarios while rural, but if you’re primarily metro, those will be exceedingly rare.

There’s no reason to even use the YouTube app. One of the first things I uninstall on Android.

Ouch, no band 71 at all. That’ll hurt T-Mobile extended range and indoors as it is their largest low frequency band. The EU version at least supports one T-Mobile 5G band, and their largest at that (41).

Band 12 and 13 will help low band scenarios with AT&T and Verizon respectively. No band 14 means no AT&T service in rural areas like (my always go to example) western Nebraska where it is AT&T’s only low band frequency.

Definitely not the worst band support, but not great either.

Too bad the US is such a toxic environment for cool phones with all the carrier-induced “certification” they put in the way to prevent low-volume and niche manufacturers from bothering.

Web sites like that are so annoying, they couldn’t even be bothered to find an image or video of LineageOS running on a Switch?

Check out @catsofyore.bsky.social

Like the fruit and internet search giant, they forced RTO and all the smart talent left.

So they have the B team, and likely a bunch of H1-B visa engineers that are basically indentured servants writing the code now. It’s just a paycheck and survival at this point.

Having to do the meta-workaround of running another computer to make your computer usable is just…don’t get me wrong, I love running infrastructure, but that seems like it should be unnecessary just to use a computer.

Hahaha! I’ve been dabbling in live USB thumbdrive copies of various flavors of Linux to see which one I want to go to for a while. Did a few years back and thought, “you know, my time is worth something to me, maybe I’ll give Windows a go, 10 seems pretty stable.”

Booted up Debian Cinnamon, couldn’t get two-finger right click to work on the Synaptics config out of box, it had a few arbitrary prefs for whatever the devs decided people would probably use. Tried Debian Gnome. It had trackpad settings that were more in line with what I expected… Not giving up, but it did make me pause, because I know one can reconfigure the trackpad driver under the hood, but did I really want to jump down the rabbit hole of bespoke shellscripts again just so my audio driver correctly wakes from sleep (if it can even successfully sleep)?

Other funny to figure out, the computer has iGPU and dGPU, both were active and the battery life was maybe 2 hours. Another thing to figure out with bespoke configurations.

So it’s like, Windows and Linux (and lesser, MacOS) pain is definitely there, it is just kinda what kind of pain do you want to subscribe to? Linux pain will probably only occur during initial setup and maybe every few years when a major OS release comes out. MacOS pain is even more rare, unless a major OS release comes out with something you don’t like and you have to find where in the OS frameworks the feature is to disable it, if they have hooks in which to do. Windows pain is…every Tuesday.

“Oh here’s a new lock screen weather widget”

“Oh cool, I can get on board with that!”

Next week:

“Oh, here’s a new stocks and news widget to go along with the weather.”

“Hold on there buddy, I didn’t sign up for the first and you’ve pushed two more? Time to shut those two off. Oh, it’s all or nothing, thanks! Nothing it is.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll reinstall Dev Home next week and flag it a system app so you can’t uninstall it, and then we’ll force Copilot to be present, and then we’re going to screw with the start menu, and then we’re going to delete WordPad, and reinstall all those Office/cloud 365 shim apps and and and.” That was like, last month.

Granted it was a few months ago, but I seem to recall a command prompt keystroke and a command line command that allowed skipping online install during setup.

So you’ve obviously never had to use defaults write com.apple.stupidpreference.fix bool true

Apple has a lot less nonsense than Microsoft, but the amount of nonsense is greater than zero. What’s really annoying (on their mobile platform specifically) is when certain problems occur on iOS that would have been completely solvable on MacOS with a command line tool, but you have to erase the phone because Apple doesn’t give you access to the OS.

MacOS is already deprecating the Keychain access tool, which will obfuscate more of the OS security from the user and make it more iOS-like in trying to fix failures.

Apple is enshittifying in absence of Jobs, they’re just behind Microsoft by one or two decades.

“But we need a better way to monetize it with buzzwords! We can’t have functional code! Quick! Create three projects redundant to this one, five of which we will cancel!”

Best Buy and most retailers offer free shipping on items $100 and above most of the time. You just don’t see that until checkout. No special plan needed. It’s to compete with the likes of Amazon.

I actually see this rest stop idea as really cool advantage to bring life back to random locations across the country. Kinda like the 1950s Route 66 road tour theme that was popular back then. Create a stop with some goofy thing to look at, some food, some place to stretch, a park, a rock wall, whatever. Great opportunity to capitalism while creating fun and working around the range problem until technology improves or countries like the US get with the program and go more public transport.

As for:

Stop pretending we need to drive 500 miles without stopping, that’s dangerous anyway.

It is more a functional reality in western states, not a luxury or something to boast about. One can drive that 200 miles (likely your charge range will be less at 85MPH with a 60MPH headwind and ascending 4000 vertical feet over a few hours) without having services, utilities, or even towns. The range is a necessity to get back to civilization, let alone finding a charger or gas station.