But it’s not the first time. A couple examples:
https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/19/22845283/fcc-verizon-att-mobile-carriers-911-calls https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/fcc-blasts-verizon-for-911-outages-during-summer-2012-storm/
My highest upvoted comment on reddit was actually in a thread joking about fees to recoup the fine, suggesting they’d call it a “911 Memorial Fee”.
Not to mention car insurance pricing.
It is different, but it’s also logical, simple, and consistent. It handles average use cases very well, whereas KDE is more typical to Windows users, but can be cluttered and confusing because it seems to try to address every use case.
Red Hat fuckery aside, I still feel like Fedora is the best refined distro out of the box for the average user, and Gnome is the most consistent desktop. Immutability is perfect for grandparent types who don’t need much of any customization, so I’d strongly consider Silverblue. Just make it a habit to go upgrade releases every 6 months, you should be visiting more anyway ;)
Wish I had a choice, at work. Technically I can run Linux or MacOS, but I’d need to run a Windows VM for a few things anyway.
TLoU scratched a lot of the same itches, for me.
No, but you can boil/steam to extract flavor before frying. I do this when I make fried potatoes, and a lot of other things. I start the potatoes off in a bit of water with the alliums, butter, and spices added. I cover it loosely, and once the water boils off, the potatoes start frying.
This accomplishes a couple things. First, it keeps the potatoes from ending up hard (not raw, but hard), because the water draws some starch out and hydrates the potatoes. Second, it extracts the flavor from the allium (I favor shallots) and spices, mixing with the starch that ends up coating and browning. The starch being pulled out of the potatoes, but being left to coat them, also makes the end product more cohesive, with shallots clinging better to the potatoes.
So is pourover.
I think the confusion with espresso is that people think espresso should be a darker roast, and that remained pervasive even as other brew methods started to gain market share with lighter roasts. But you can absolutely make great espresso with lighter roasts.
As someone who works for a very large company, on a team with around 500 people around the world, this is what concerns me. Our team will not be 500 people in a few years, and if it is, it’s because usage of our product has grown substantially. We are buying heavily into AI, and yet people are buying it when our leadership teams claim it will not impact jobs.
Will I be able to take a unit of 2 people down to 0 people? No, I’ve never seen a process where I could eliminate every human.
Socially speaking, this is also very concerning to me. I’m afraid that implementation of AI will be yet another thing that makes it difficult for smaller businesses to compete in a global marketplace. Yes, a tech-minded company can leverage a smaller head count into more capabilities, but this typically requires more expensive and limiting turnkey solutions, or major investment into developers of a customized solution.
I don’t think it’s the noise cancelling, I think it’s that headset manufacturers think gamers all want big boomy bass. My Sennheiser Momentum 4 have noise cancelling, and aren’t boomy in the slightest.
I also don’t think that it’s the closed back, though closed back are certainly capable of better bass than open back. My Audeze Maxwell also do not have boomy bass, and the Momentums are also closed back.
All that said, I agree that the sound quality of most gaming headsets is a mess, and I also prefer open back headphones. I don’t want to deal with cables anymore, though, so I’m hopeful that we start getting some nice open back headphones and headsets.
I love my Audeze Maxwell. I use it to listen to music all day while I work, and jump on calls throughout the day. It has excellent sound quality, and a built in mic that works very well. When there’s background noise, I pop in the boom mic and that mic’s noise cancellation is great. It also provides a little better clarity.
There’s both a 2.4ghz wireless dongle (which I plug into my monitor), bluetooth (which I use with my phone using LDAC), USB, and 3.5mm connectivity.
The battery life is excellent. I charge it weekly, and I really don’t need to.
They offer an Xbox and Playstation version. The Xbox version comes with an Atmos license, the Playstation version supports Tempest 3D sound.
The sizing adjustments aren’t great, there’s no telescoping of the ear cups. It just has a sling with three adjustments, by popping it into three different sets of screw holes. It’s ok, but not great, and it’s not the kind of thing you want to move back and forth, say, if you wear hats sometimes, because those holes will wear out. You aren’t supposed to remove the screws.
It’s also closed back, which is not my preference. I don’t have background noise, I don’t care about isolation. I prefer the sound of open backs, and they also provide more spatial awareness if you want to place footsteps.
Also, being closed back, and having a not so great ear pad material, they get fairly toasty. There are third party ear pads that improve upon this, but you can only do so much with a closed back can.
I think dynamic graphics switching would be far preferable for a desktop scenario, but for a laptop an eGPU is an attractive proposition.
I’ve been pretty happy with it. I tried Calyx first, thinking it would be nice to have anonymized play services. But Graphene is much more refined, in my experience, fixing some AOSP annoyances like deleting an SMS message that you opened from a notification leaving a phantom window in the quick switch list. And with my minimal app profile, I don’t find I need google play services at all.
The under screen fingerprint scanner on the Pixel 8 sucks, I wish they’d include face unlock or a rear scanner. It does seem to work better if I only have one finger registered, so maybe it’s a software issue that will get fixed. I know I should be using an unlock mechanism that’s something I know, instead of something I have, but I really don’t use my phone for anything I’m particularly concerned about.
The Graphene FAQ is a good place to start
https://grapheneos.org/faq#notifications
I don’t use very many apps, so I don’t have much experience to share. But I can say Signal works fine. I set K9 Mail to poll, to save battery a bit since I don’t need email immediately, but it worked fine with IMAP push.
It’s funny, I was really excited for Ubuntu when it first released, and actually quite enjoyed it. On the other hand, RPM distros seemed like an absolute mess, at that time. Now it’s the exact opposite. At least in regards to Fedora, it’s a very well thought out and maintained distro if you want things to just work, and Ubuntu makes me uncomfortable.
I have an MBA, from a failed experiment with the Apple ecosystem. I love that it’s passively cooled, and will probably use it as a couch laptop with Asahi until the ARM market heats up in 2025 to 2026.
I’ll go ahead and pre-dial 911.
Trust me, she’s judging you from beyond the grave.
Like most things, the real problem behind GMO is greed. Creating rice strains that grow in impoverished areas, where little else will grow, is hard to see as a bad thing. We could be, and to some degree are, creating strains to solve world hunger, improve nutrition, improve durability of produce without sacrificing flavor. Tomatoes, I’m looking at you.
But so much of GMO is an effort to dominate the market, instead of to make the market better.
I’m happy to trade you some rain, just send some of your sun our way.