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.

Almost there…

A small cordless drill with a torque setting plus a driver set. A short flexible bit holder for the tight spots.

Drop the torque setting all the way down then use the drill for most of the work. Then finish tightening with a reacheting screwdriver.

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.

Lead arsenate was a very common pesticides for decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_hydrogen_arsenate

In my area the self checkout systems at the grocery store often fritz out an don’t register the item. This is even after they beep. It’s truly wonderful. I consistently get 50% or more of the items in my cart for free. Nothing they can do to me either. They have me on video scanning every item. If their system buggers up the total it’s on them.

If they want somebody to catch computer errors then there’s a thing called “pay a employee.”

During the last housing bubble, you could rent the same place for less than 1/2 the cost of buying it. Renting and investing made more sense then.

Currently buying a house is overpriced but rent is even more so.

The best financial decision right now is to live with your parents your entire life. If you don’t have a parent you can stay with, then a tent and cardboard boxes in the park it is.

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.

Because of all your explanation, Terminal should never, ever be touch by the average user. The historical reliance on terminal is the reason that Linux adoption rates have been low.

Linux is a far better system to use for most home users that windows or Mac but terminal is beyond the capabilities of 97% of people.

I have a 11 year old low-end laptop running Mint. All I did was max out the RAM and pop in a SATA SSD. It’s stable, easy to use, and fast… until I have to hit terminal. Then it’s hours of looking up commands online, trying to figure out how to get something done that should have an easy GUI. I’m not a programmer by any means. I’m just cheap and don’t feel like tossing out perfectly functional hardware. So I push through it until I get it working.

Yes most of the 3% of people that use the Linux can mostly use terminal easily. For the 97% of people who are not using Linux, terminal is way beyond their capabilities.

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.

Terms referring to the kernels are combination phrases grain corn, sweet corn, popcorn, indian corn etc.

The plant is a “corn plant”.

Maize is rarely used but understood most commonly as “indian maize” as interchangeable with “indian corn”.

If you don’t know the usage or type it’s common to use the general term like “corn field”.

Tubers are used because the type we eat are tetraploids. Tetraploids (aka 4 copies of every chromosome) produce very little seeds. Generally less than 1/10th what a diploid version will. In potatoes it can be a low as 1/10,000th.

Using tubers transmits all sorts of nasty diseases from one crop to the next. Seeds do too but not as much.

Diploids are not used commercially because they produce smaller tubers and longer vines.

Wheat is mostly self-pollinating with very little outcrossing due to wind.

Dairy cows eat more than grass species. They need a higher protein potion of their ration. This is usually fulfilled by alfalfa, clover, canola seed meal, etc which are mostly bee pollinated.

French fries are fried in vegetable oils like flaxseed or canola. Both are bee pollinated.

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.

I spent a lot of time on places where the coffee is normally brewed a bit stronger (Italy, Turkey, North Africa etc).

I tend just fill up the filter paper to around to 2/3rds.

I have also been banned from making coffee at a few offices I have worked since. Their shrill cries of “Who made the coffee???” were quite fun however.

Not usually in my experience. Almost all target shooting is on relatively flat ranges. Especially not for ranges that short.

For those that don’t know, when firing down the slope the effect of gravity decreases the bullets velocity loss. So the bullet transverses the distance in less time and drops less over a given distance.

When firing up a slope the bullet loses velocity due to gravity. So it drops more due to the extra time it takes for the bullet to transverse the distance.