I’ve carefully unsubscribed to everything with PaperKarma. Now I schedule a trip to my mailbox each Sunday. It shares a few package delivery boxes and I don’t want to accidentally monopolize one too long.

This work between certain states. For instance, you can drive into Oregon and shop with no sales tax then return to California or Washington with your goods.

Liquor is also much cheaper in some states than others—you can really stock up if you are already driving through a state.

My personal choices are slightly different than yours, but I appreciate your comment. You’re clearly an ally while not being a clone. I often tire of discussions about security and privacy—mainly because I am very pragmatic.

Unlike OP I don’t use Proton’s suite, but considered it. Most of what I want Apple provides (Advanced Data Protection, Private Relay, etc) in a form that meets my minimum requirements. Other things that I use (Signal especially) are well-supported on iPhone.

I’ll talk down Apple all day long in the correct context, but I still believe it is a good choice today. I may re-evaluate at some point in the future when the landscape or my needs change. For now I am very happy.

After coming from Apollo and Reddit, at first I was just unhappy that the clients were not great. Once I moved past my grief state I realized Voyager was good enough. I’ve stopped re-evaluating (though I’m sure I will again at some point) and just appreciate what I have.

I had this problem when Apple introduced this feature a year or so ago. I wish Apple had a way to disable it, but such is apple. Now I unlock a phone that lives on my dresser every few days.

My 86 year old father-in-law has had the roughest time with the new outlook. It keeps losing his settings. I kept him on the (old) outlook as long as possible.

I tried Thunderbird for him, but some parts of the UI don’t respect extremely large fonts. Sigh.

My current solution is just straight up web mail to his provider which has other problems, but I have sorta-kinda mitigated them by installing a separate browser that is set to open that website. This has some other small problems, but it will have to do for now.

I honestly wish Apple made a 20” iPad.

You absolutely can roll back to previous versions using the steps in those links. I believe it has a 30 day limit, but that is pretty good for a consumer product.

OneDrive does offer restoration of individual file versions or even the entire OneDrive contents (for things like ransomware attacks). Details are here

I think OneDrive is a pretty good (but paid) backup utility especially for non-technical people. There are a lot of things that I could nitpick on, but for some of the older people (octogenarians) that I am the family support for, I set it up and anytime I interact with their computer I click on OneDrive to ensure it is replicating. I very occasionally have seen a single file not replicating, but never have I seen it fail completely. These people previous had NO backups of any kind.

I use it myself as an additional backup location, but not in the way most people would.

For my Asus laptop the setting is maintained at the hardware level. I didn’t bother trying to find Linux software that could control it (I think there is one) but instead just booted into Windows and set it there and it will persist after that in Linux.

I use an Asus laptop I bought during COVID as my server. I dropped in 64GB of RAM, a pair of NVM drives and an old 2.5” SATA SSD. More than enough for my use cases. The only real software tweak I made was limiting battery charging to 60%.

My son saw the pan sitting in the kitchen and asked we had bought a new one. It does look very nice. Thanks for the advice.

My pan is already in the oven on self clean, but I appreciate your advice. I do think the black crud is some sort of buildup as I could feel it with my fingertips. It’s the more silver part that I think is a complete lack of seasoning.

But I don’t really know!

I’ll give it a try and post the results!

I didn’t know how to reseason, but running it through the self clean seems like a pretty easy method! Thanks.

I’m so used to using powershell to handle collections and pipelines that I find I want it for small scripts on Mac. For instance, I was using ffmpeg to alter a collection of files on my Mac recently. I found it super simple to use Powershell to handle the logic. I could have used other tools, but I didn’t find anything about it terrible.

I even use powershell as my main scripting language on my Mac now. I’ve come around.

I have seen the same brand of cheese at Walmart in a slightly smaller knot I think. It is such a great melting cheese.

Mmmm…..and that giant Oaxaca Cheese Knot they sell. And 3 pound blocks of tillamook cheddar. God I do love cheese.

I put a pan in my oven on self-cleaning cycle. The weight of the pan and the heat made the rack the pan was on droop permanently.

Edit: I’ve lost the thread a little as this started about laptops not mobile phones. I’m leaving this comment here as the points may be valid even for laptops, but I’m too bored to do any more research. Thanks for the great and civil discussion.

I would agree that a theoretically completely upgradeable and repairable device is better, but I think the real world implementations generally aren’t that good.

It’s hard to get to statista’s summary of lifespan of phones without a subscription, but many summaries that use their data say something like:

In general, the average lifespan of a smartphone is 2 to 4 years. According to reports, the iPhone lasts 4-10 years, followed by Samsung units, which can last 3-6 years. Huawei and Xiaomi units have an average lifespan of 2-4 years, while OPPO units have 2-3 years.

Perhaps there is better data out there that would change my mind, but I haven’t seen it. If Apple products are iWaste, then it appears nearly all other products are even more wasteful. All the data I have seen points to Apple products as generally having a long lifespan followed by an excellent free recycling policy (https://www.apple.com/me/recycling/).