How about today’s, random complete freeze. Had to hard reboot then spend 30 minutes watching it trying to “fix the issue”. It then failed to find anything. So I had to force it to reboot to windows. Then it worked fine the rest of the day.

While it was down, I was working on my 11 year old, budget laptop running Mint.

I disabled it as soon as they were launched. I also disabled the quick reply, reactions, and to text messages etc.

Yep I did it. There is still some annoying bits of it floating around that you can’t get rid of.

The phones in the midrange are getting to be better than the top end ones in my opinion. Decent enough build quality for the phone to last 3-4 years. Expensive enough that the bloatware is reduced. If the company does do a modified launcher it’s generally pretty clean.

I am liking the OnePlus 13R I picked up. Stable UI, decent battery life, and not a bad price. The stock launcher does a pretty decent job.

For my work phone I have a Pixel 8. I really regret buying it. I had to disable 30 different bloatware apps. Plus I have 4 apps that I have rejected all updates because they can’t be disabled. I also installed a launcher because the stock pixel UI is trash. The hardware is solid and works well once you clear out the buggy bloatware

Apple made a major fuckup with IOS26. I upgraded my iPad and felt nauseous from the blur effect almost instantly. I can’t completely get rid of it, just make it less horrific. Their “new” multitasking options I am not even bothering to turn on or try to use yet. This is like their 10th edition of multitasking. Let’s see if they get it right this time. Then I will bother to learn their “simple” process that usually involves having to read a manual and remember half a dozen new commands. Fuck it still takes me 2 or 3 attempts to get the the home screen without a button.

There’s a vast difference between advertising a good product that is useful to hyping trash.

Good products at a reasonable price usually require a brief introduction but quickly snowball into customer based word-of-mouth sales.

Hype is used to push an inferior or marginally useful product at a higher price.

Remember advertising is expensive. The money to pay for it has to come from somewhere. The more they push a product the higher the margin the company/investors expect to make on its sales.

This is why if I see more than one or two ads for a product it goes on my mental checklist of shit not to buy.

I have “purchased” thousands of books from Amazon, but never given them money for a book.

They run free specials all the time. FreeReadFeed scans for them. It’s a great way to discover authors to purchase their books at another site or use the library apps.

This one is extremely difficult to fix as well. Ad companies bribe politicians with reduced price advertising for political campaigns to prevent laws being passed to regulate them.

Missed a big one.

The U.S. is mostly a net importer of beef. The herd size normally does not satisfy the market and it requires significant imports to make up the difference.

The U.S. herd size is cyclical and historically relatively easy to predict. So producers/exporters/importers had a good guess roughly a year or more in advanced when prices would climb or fall.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/animal-products/cattle-beef/sector-at-a-glance

Toss in some dumbass who fucks up trade with tariffs and the exporting counties can no longer predict the market. Then TACO happens or doesn’t happen at random. Uncertainty in the market trend means that producers are unwilling to increase their herd size to adapt, anywhere.

The safest bet is to sell down their herd size at the high prices to capture the margin now. Then maintain a smaller herd for the duration of the uncertainty.

Dairy farmers are pretty much the only ones that are doing quite well right now. Feed inputs are low, butcher prices for their cows is high and sexed semen means they can cross 1/2 their herd with beef breeds to maximize their profit. Day old 1/2 bred calf’s are selling for astronomical prices right now. Selling off their herd and retiring early is a viable option right now as well.

Lol me either. Their services are not nearly as good as the unauthorized streaming sites.

I always tell people that a bonus is imaginary and should never be considered as part of a job offer.

If you do acheive a partial amount one year the next year the “calculations” to get one will change to fuck you over.

As somebody who grew up with one, root cellars suck.

There is always something rotting in them that you have to throw out. So you get a nasty rotten vegetable and dirt smell going all the time.

Add that in to the brined pickles/cabbage that was fermenting and it was nasty.

Running to get some carrots in the middle of the winter when it’s -25C out is not fun either.

There are assholes in every society.

There is also cultural norms that are in conflict. Tourist commonly fail to adapt or even notice when they are violating them. Which tourist are the worst often depends on which culture clashes the most societal norms.

Memorization of key facts is required for the development of higher reasoning. For example you can not understand global trade if you have not memorized basic geography.

If you turn off a few of Microsoft’s more insane tracking in the privacy settings, it disables the autosave “feature”. The autosave fucked up version tracking badly enough that it was nice to have a global kill button.

I have found that turning off most new “features” that Microsoft makes recently is usually for the best.

A cheap SSD upgradeand a PS4 plays PS4 games the same way a PS5 does.

Leave a USB drive in a drawer for a couple of years and you can prove this one at home.

That’s why my backup drive is an old spinny hard drive.

That’s why I have it uploaded to a cloud service but I have the entire collection backed up on my phone, 3 computers and a few miscellaneous SD cards.

Having a collection of music in files that I own has been my go-to for years. Currently VLC says I have 701 hours of music in files on my phone. That’s only 29.2 days worth.

As a parent two sons who have moved on from the Lego stage to the driving and girls stage…

Bahahahahahahahahahaha!!!.

No more shuffle walking around the house for me!!

By default I always turn off the location setting on the camera. I disabled it as soon as they introduced it as a “feature”. I thought it was creepy as fuck and dangerous. Without the location most of the rest of the information is pretty benign.

For example her is the full metadata from a picture I took yesterday.

Aperture: 182/100 Date: 2025-07-30 15:40:26 Date digitized: 2025-07-30 15:40:26 Original date: 2025-07-30 15:40:26 Digital zoom: 1.0 Exposure bias: 0/6 Exposure mode: Auto Exposure program: Normal Exposure time: 4.7824007651841227E-4 sec. Flash: Off Focal length: 5590/1000 35mm focal length: 24 F-number: 1.8 Image width: 2304 Image length: 4096 Lens model: OnePlus 13R back camera >5.59mm f/1.9 Light source: D65 Camera make: OnePlus Camera model: OnePlus 13R Camera maker note: {“PiFlag”:“0”,“nightFlag”:“4”,“nightMode”: “-1”,“asdOut”: [“0”],“apsAsdOut”: [“1”],“apsAsdClsOut”: [“1”, “0”],“iso”: “286”,“expTime”: “0”,“fType”:“50”,“bkMode”:“0”,“aideblur”:“0”,“aisState”:“8”,“algo”: [“65,72,16,19”],“filter”: “:-1”} Lens max aperture: 182/100 Metering mode: Center weight average Orientation: Normal Photographic sensitivity: 80 X dimension: 2304 Y dimension: 4096 Scene capture type: Standard Scene type: Directly photographed User comment: oplus_2097184 White balance: Auto

The only thing they would get is the model of phone I use. Which is essentially public information for every app maker I have installed on my phone anyways.