@georgetakei I just want #Apple to bring back truly random shuffle. The pseudo random version they have now is horrific because so frequently hearing a new band means you know another track by them will play in like 2-6 more songs.
Also, never implementing album shuffle on iPhones is incredibly lame and lazy of them.
People are buying this stock not as a solid investment but as a symbol of allegiance, which is cult thinking. The stock is massively overvalued and these small retail investors are going to end up taking a bath that they can't afford to take. They're going to lose their retirements, all for a man who would loathe them individually and to whom their only value is the money they can give them. They're not even being (actively) defrauded. They're doing it to themselves.
Recommendations for a daypack that A) is able to be stashed into a larger carry on backpack, and B) can carry a MacBook around during the day? Ideally packs and smushes quite flat when empty, but a bit of padding for the laptop
@christianselig I randomly got this Mountainsmith day pack with a separate padded laptop pocket and I love it, especially because you don’t have to open the main compartment to get to the laptop area. Fits my 2021 MBP 16” perfectly.
EDIT: It’s called the Divide although today’s version looks slightly different.
@arstechnica Man, literally the only thing that I caught that doesn’t feel authentic at the end (aside from the obvious additions like an ADB port and a hidden card reader) is that I have pretty strong memories that you had to hold down the mouse button to eject the disk after a restart, didn’t you? Otherwise it just rebooted on the same floppy again. It’s been a hell of a long time since we owned a 512 when I was in high school though, so I could be wrong.
Lossless audio sounds better than the MP3s I made in 2000, when I encoded them at the lowest viable resolution to get as many as possible on my Creative Nomad Jukebox. It does not sound notably better than the high-resolution encoded MP3s I make today. That said, when making music or uploading it to streaming, I do it with lossless files because in those situations, more information is better.
@TucsonSentinel Remember, #Arizona people! Vote the Republicans out of your state legislature this November if you want actual health care and sane government.
@arstechnica Cool article but the easiest way to avoid having to sign in with an MS account initially (IMHO) is to just put in some random string as the username and password. (I usually use test for both.) Windows will tell you there was a problem and ask if you want to create a local account instead. An extra 15 seconds and done, been doing this since it came out.
Over on the the former Twitter, every week or so I would spotlight the new books and ARCs (Advance Reader Copies) that had shown up to the Scalzi Compound. I'm starting that up again here, so: See anything in this stack that is calling to your eyeballs?
Last week I bought a top-of-the-line MacBook Pro M3 Max, and today on Whatever I am giving my initial impressions on the thing, and whether it is worth the frankly ridiculous amount of money it cost (spoiler: probably not BUT):
@scalzi Congrats! I’m sure you will enjoy your nee MBP for years to come. I know my M1 Max is definitely my best friend for computing in quite some time.
One trick for people who can’t afford maxing the specs at purchase time is to just get like a 1-2tb SSD and then but a flushmount SD card tray (they sell them for each specific Mac model) and then buy a good quality 1 or 2tb SD card for extra storage space. My M1 “only” ran $4200 using this trick despite having an M1 Mac and 64gb of RAM.
@georgetakei I feel like the neighbor is so tech illiterate he doesn’t even understand that someone is paying for internet service. He just knows everyone was happily using “the wifi” until this dude had the temerity to put a password on it and claim control of a free resource.
@arstechnica I was behind one in traffic the other day and it really does just sort of look like a sedan from a maker you aren’t familiar with. Definitely not a $100k+ car. Mind you, it was fairly heavy traffic so it wasn’t like they had a chance to open it up at all.
One, the judges in the case very clearly were not buying it, and it doesn't seem likely that the US Supreme Court would either.
Two, let's be clear that if this argument did pass judicial review and Trump did become president, he would absolutely 100% start murdering people. He wouldn't even blink. #uspol
@arstechnica I do agree pricing themselves into Rivian territory was a huge mistake for them (pun slightly intended) as the Rivian actually seems like a much more capable and luxurious vehicle for the price.
Personally, I got a RAV4 Prime as my gas/EV compromise to get me to my folks’ place in the mountains 150 miles away and run around in the city too when needed. And I am planning on getting an Aptera when they come out as my primary city commuter.
@georgetakei It felt like a scam back in the 90’s when I was only paying like $1200/semester for it and could pay it off by the end of the semester on my credit card. I can absolutely see kids these days wondering what the hell they’re diving deep into debt for.
I am not here either to trash or praise Rebel Moon, but I am here to say that one day someone is going to lock Zack Snyder out of the color-grading machine, and that's going to be a bad, crazy day for him
@scalzi The whole “we are simple farmers” schtick had me rolling my eyes so hard I may have strained something. It hearkens back to the script development of Uwe Boll, which is NOT a good thing.
I was flashing back on his Dungeon Siege movie, in which the opening scene is Farmer standing in a northern European medieval looking field. And then he sees a crow threatening his wheat field and he whips out a BOOMERANG to see the pest off.
If you ordered protein powder and it showed up but was opened and had a sealed sticker saying Canadian Border Services inspected it would you still consume it or would you be afraid they wiggled fingies in it
I have to admit this year has been destructively stressful for me. I wish I could feel some sense of accomplishment about work done, but it's just not there, just this sense of a million other things that are urgently overdue and another million I'm forgetting.
@Gargron Late as usual, but Mastodon has been an amazing safe haven for all the Twitter refugees, and hopefully you can take some small comfort in that.
I think what you have done is enough for now if you need time to rest and regroup. It is stable and very, very usable.
Watched the first episode of a highly regarded television show that people I know and like thought was great and I was absolutely fucking bored with it, which goes to show that either individual tastes are ultimately idiosyncratic, or that all my friends and at least some television critic have shit taste in TV, honestly it's a coin flip which it is
@scalzi I long ago learned my sense of humor doesn’t gibe with about 90% of the world so I frequently cannot get with a lot of popular comedy like The Office or Everything Is Always Sunny. People are like “Whaaaat???” But it just doesn’t make me even chuckle.
Luckily(?) Reddit has memed them so hard I actually know most of the history of the shows haha.
