Where I live there’s this crazy new obsession with car washes. Like, 3 brand new ones being built on the same street. I get that they became way more profitable when they figured out the subscription model thing, but I feel like so many is unsustainable.

Me and a relative jointly host and manage a server. Over the years we’ve slowly allowed in a handful of trusted friends and family. By now we probably have 20ish connected. Most use it as a supplement to their main streaming services, primarily used for exclusive content like the star wars shows. Some, like those of us hosting, have cancelled every streaming service and use it exclusively.

Mullvad VPN. $5 a month for 5 concurrent high speed connections. No fake sales, no BS.

Music streaming services are close. As I understand it the artists don’t get a great deal, but as a consumer ~$12/m is on the high end of reasonable for unlimited access to high quality music. And unlike with television streaming services there’s very little exclusivity bullshit. You can listen to most anything most anywhere.

Not universally. I live in Alabama and the privately owned power company is very corrupt. We have some of the highest power bills in the US, with the biggest difference being not cost but profit margins. Water in my county is fairly priced IMO, but I’ve heard other counties aren’t so lucky.

I live in the south. We don’t get much snow at all. I think I was thirteen when I saw my first (and so far last) white Christmas. It was only the second my parents had seen in their life. That was pretty cool.

A) A new phone comes out with a feature I’m dying to have, and I happen to have some fun money tucked away

B) My old phone is degraded to the point of noticeably affecting my experience

C (most common)) A little of A, a little of B, and I get a great trade in or upgrade deal

Usually on a 2-3 year cycle, finances allowing

+1 for audiobookshelf, after using tools like Plex for a long time I was honestly shocked by how much more user friendly it felt. And it’s a one man team! The only significant demerit is that the IOS app is stuck in test flight limbo, so you have to find another player. Though most do that already I think.

Headphones vs speakers is way less significant than listening volume. The big thing to be careful of is listening with just one earbud in. When we do this we almost always end up turning the volume in that one too high, because you need on average 6db more volume to compensate for the audio input of the other ear.

I have a 3090. As long as you have the correct drivers and a quality emulator (I think I use glorious eggroll’s experimental proton branch) quality is quite comparable.

I have a 3090. As long as you have the correct drivers and a quality emulator (I think I use glorious eggroll’s experimental proton branch) quality is quite comparable.

Most accessories are plug and play these days, so Nvidia may have actually been the only one. Not all distros can detect the best Nvidia drivers automatically, and finding and installing the right one can be a pain. Which makes it borderline impossible for a low tech person looking to make the jump to Linux.

Notably, it’s also entirely possible that the issues I dealt with were more to do with poor Wayland implementations than drivers. Either way, Garuda has worked beautifully and easily.

I made the switch almost a year ago when they started announcing all the spyware coming to win11. The distro you choose matters a LOT. After several that were buggy and frustrating I landed on Garuda dragonized. Setup was easy with their assistant finding the drivers I needed and I have yet to have any system breaking updates. Better track record than windows TBH. Performance is great, and steam integrates so well with proton that my experience is honestly just as good as windows native. I should probably go make a donation to the Garuda project, now that I’m thinking about it.

Essentially, because it takes labor to create educational material. Unless you own slaves labor isn’t free. And in fact with the modern library and Internet access I’d argue self educating is more accessible than ever in history.

Fox “news” themselves claim to be an entertainment program, not a legitimate source of news

I’ve never tried it, but my father tells me that if you use ABS and include the ASIN in the metadata there’s a tool (possibly built in?) that can fetch chapter timestamps

I use StoryGraph for my personal library management, but Goodreads simply has better coverage of both total books and specific metadata. But Audible is the best source anyway, as it has data specific to the audiobook other sources rarely do. I’ve included Goodreads mostly as a fallback for books Audible doesn’t have listed. One of the roadmap items is to add other sources, like Google books. At that time I would consider a source separate from Amazon/Google if a quality one can be found and conveniently called/scraped.

Metadata is written to the file at the time of operation, so Goodreads failing would not affect any existing metadata sourced from it. But Audible is the preferred source anyway, as it has metadata specific to the audiobook typically not available in Goodreads. I’ve included it as a backup for books (mostly older ones) that are not available on Audible. Goodreads allows user submissions and thus has just about every book available in its library.

It can do some metadata matching, but to my knowledge it doesn’t do any of the big ticket items like combining chapter files

I was alive for but don’t remember 9/11. Some might call me a Zennial.

Good old fashioned RPGs and tower defense reign supreme on long hauls. Not sure if they’re on steam, but for TD the kingdom rush games are excellent. For RPG, bravely default 2 is a personal favorite. If you don’t mind a game leaning difficult.

Edit: oh, and Balatro! Balatro and kingdom rush 5 got me through two 11 hour flights when I traveled overseas.