Your point is a good one, though I’d like to point out that electricity is so useful that if I have power and water in the room (and a bit of prep time) I can make oxygen.

I see OPs point. I donate to Wikipedia, because I love what they do and want to support them. If they decided to put up pay walls, my personal feelings on their model would alter. Even if I got access as a doner.

I would no longer be inclined to donate, because I would no longer believe in what they do.

The answer is electricity. It’s so useful, we take it for granted. Your phones, computers and laptops are not useful if you can’t power them.

I’ll give the people on the dunny their due: toilet paper is still useful in a room without electricity.

I just sort of assume my instance gives away my location - I’m in Australia, not the UK. Not that we can talk, we also churned through about 5 prime ministers in five years a while back.

But I could still talk about any number of issues going on around the world, because our news covers topics around the world. Yours doesn’t. It’s too busy talking about your election and recently a hurricane. Which I know about as it was in our news.

That’s not a criticism, I actually sought out world news while I was there, and there just weren’t any local sources of it.

Eggs look like this:

They don’t need to be washed with hot water and soap, they’re perfectly good as they are.

Sorry about the hospital thing. By “for-profit”, I meant you had to pay to go there. That’s completely alien to everyone in the first world. We have private hospitals as well, and yep: lots of them are (or claim to be) non-profit also.

20 years ago, I used to have custom playlists that I’d load onto a 64mb SD card for my commute. A 64kbit wma file is surprisingly listenable. You can fit more than a standard album onto 64mb. I’m trying to remember now how much, probably 20-25 songs?

At that compression rate, I expect you can get a few hundred songs into half a GB. Of course, picking them would be its own challenge! It’d be the most curated playlist in history.

In Australia and New Zealand: we have skim milk, and call 2% milk “Hi-Lo” - sometimes I see it branded “lite milk”. Then there’s regular milk. It has 4% fat, but you need to read the fine print on the side of the bottle to learn that. I’ve heard it called “full cream milk”, but usually in a cafe setting when ordering coffee.

My brother in the USA had something called half-and-half in his fridge. I think that one was 8%? You guys would know better than I. We don’t have whatever it is.

You’re right, of course - I heard the same stuff referred to as “whole milk”. But the only thing you’re correcting about the wider point is the appropriate adjective. Which I find very funny. 😀

It’s interesting that you picked this one out. I thought the money one in particular was going to be a controversial take.

I’ll try to avoid stuff you know is weird.

1. Adjectives. You can’t just have a thing. It has to have an adjective. For example: Milk. I wanted to buy milk. I get to the milk section, and there’s no such thing. There’s x milk and y milk and about a dozen other variants. Where is the basic milk (it turns out, I wanted “4% milk”) in this damned place?
2. Fresh produce. In fairness you’ve gotten loads better on this one after subsequent visits, but beyond some basic staples like potatoes, carrots, corn etc it was really limiting what fruit and vegetables you could get in the supermarket. Also: baby carrots are weird.
3. Your cheese is radioactive yellow. Cheese is not supposed to be that colour - but you seem expect it to be for some reason, so your producers add yellow colouring to their cheese.
4. Your eggs are weird. I’m not sure what yous guys do to to them, but it’s like you blast away half the shell and are left with a porous super-white textured inner shell. They need to be refrigerated and last a fraction of the time they’d last if you just left them alone and sold them as they are laid.
5. Your bread tastes weird. Maybe it’s sugar or preservatives in it, I don’t know. Bread is meant to have a really short ingredients list like flour, water, salt yeast and maybe a touch of oil and sugar. Take a look at the ingredients on your bread and it’s 5 lines long.
6. Portions! Your food portions are ludicrous. I’d much rather pay half the price for half as much food as they offer on the menu.
7. Money. You have this weird unconscious pecking order thing in your culture where you value people more based on their bank balance. You show a weird unconscious level of respect to someone who is rich. And similarly, unconsciously look down on someone poorer than you. Not in a mean way - just as a “I’m better than this person” way that is hard to quantify. You are aware at some level roughly how rich everyone you deal with is. I see this trait far less in people under 20. I hope there’s a cultural shift on this one, because money on its own is a weird way to measure someone’s worth.
8. Your police are run by the local counties. I think your schools also? I know you have state and federal police also, but most places only have police and schools at those levels.
9. I’ll mostly stay clear of health, because you know your health system is weird. But I will say that it’s weird that very few of your hospitals are run by government. They’re mostly run for profit. Health is meant to be a government service.
10. Outside a few cities, you barely have public transport of any sort. LA is a mega metropolis, and it’s train network is a joke for that level of population - something like 100 stations for 18 million people?
11. You have no idea what’s going on. Most of you couldn’t name the UK Prime Minister (this one has been hard to keep track of, in fairness), the German Chancellor or any of the G20 leaders aside from USA and maybe Canada/China. You don’t know about geopolitics beyond whatever you guys are doing. Your world news is literally stuff USA is involved in.
12. I’ll finish on a weird one: you guys are lovely. This may because I’m white and have an exotic accent to you guys, but almost everyone I’ve ever encountered from the USA in or out of the country has been wonderful. You don’t seem to think of your fellow countrymen you meet as ‘good’ by default. There’s a lot less connection and respect to each other than other nations I’ve been to.

If you know it was the most recent rsync command: just type !rsync.

Rat Poker

Did you honestly think from my comment that I didn’t know who Yoko Ono was?

I was saying that whatever noises she makes, she isn’t a singer. Therefore she doesn’t qualify for a mention in the “worst band or singer” category.

Is there a band called Yoko Ono? I ask, because I’m fairly sure there isn’t a singer.

The problem with this is trust. If you could seamlessly migrate like this, there’s nothing to stop someone faking a long post/comment on their own instance, making them look very legitimate and then migrating that account to a trusted/legitimate instance.

Then using that for spam/selling block chain etc.

People are the reason we can’t have nice things.

I was a mad Opera user about 25 years ago, it was the best browser by miles at the time. One feature it had was mouse gestures. Mouse gestures and uBlock origin are the only two extensions I can’t love without, but these lists never mention them so I feel like the only one who uses them.

It’s hard to explain how cool and quick it is to be able to control your browser with the mouse. Open/close tabs, navigate tabs, back/forward etc. It doesn’t sound useful, I’m usually a mad keyboard shortcut fiend. But with web browsing in particular, your hand is already on the mouse, scrolling.

The specific extension I use is Gesturefy, I encourage people to install it and give mouse gestures a go.

Elle McPherson, obviously.

It’s been over 20 years since I did phones, but I don’t imagine it has changed that much. The “techie” callers fall into two categories: Those who actually know what they’re doing and those who think they know what they’re doing. The latter group are the worst of all callers. I’d rather be on the phone to an 80-year-old who has trouble finding the start menu than with a caller who thinks they know more than they actually do.

If you honestly do know what you are talking about, the way to get this to tech support is to tell them what prompted you to call. An actual competent caller will open the call with something like:

“Hi, this is Cile. I’m calling from ______. My UserID/AccountNo etc is _______. I’m having a problem with ___________. The error message is [EXACT MESSAGE]. I have done a, b, c, but that resolved it.”

For your example where it’s an access matter, adapt the above accordingly. Something like “I need to do ________, but I lack the access to [steps you would take if you did have access]”.

Finally:
Unless you are experiencing something super weird, the tech support people have probably seen this problem before and know how to solve it. Follow their instructions even if it’s something you wouldn’t have done. Even if their way seems less efficient. There will be a reason why they’re doing it that way, and it won’t always be apparent to you.

How you can have an article talking about the history of email and it not be about Ray Tomlinson, I just don’t know. Wait - now I know: This person looked up the Wikipedia article on the smtp protocol and decided Mr. Postal was the pioneer of email.

The conclusion is completely incorrect, also. About the only correct thing was that reputation is important for email transmission.

No: you can’t just set up an smtp outbound server on your home server and expect the world to trust you. For good reason: we’ve had decades of trojans and viruses taking over home PCs and sending spam. Your ISP declares its “home” IP ranges, and those are immediately not trusted.

That doesn’t mean you need to use a big email hosting provider. If you set up on a business IP range, configure your DNS Correctly with declared mx and spf records, the world will trust you (until you demonstrate that it can’t).

Millions of businesses around the world do this.

Oh! I just remembered that I can control my neighbor’s fan! I got tired of the constant notification that I could see it/set it up. So, I connected to it and the notification finally went away. But yeah: I can see when it’s on/off and turn it on/off whenever I wish. I’ve never abused this power, they are old and will probably think their house is haunted or something. I just wanted the stupid notification to go away.

Hahaha great question. It’s funny how I thought it was a silly question when asked the other way. In a way, my response is the same for both phones: ‘The main thing stopping me is that I am not considering switching’.

That said, I carried both for years, so I can probably provide some insight. I switched from Windows Mobile to iOS in 2008. I had one phone until 2012. My “main” phone was iOS from 2008-2017. The biggest factor was (and still is somewhat) who had the best camera. Pixel 1 had a better camera, so I switched to Android as my main in 2017. These days, both have great cameras and it wouldn’t be a reason to switch.

My current job doesn’t need me to have two phones, but I still carry an iPad mini, so I remain in both ecosystems.

I prefer Android on my phone for lots of little reasons, but they all basically boil down to the same thing: Android lets me do what I want with my phone.

It’s difficult to explain if you haven’t been an Android user. If you don’t know what a launcher is, it’s the interface between you and your apps. I’ve never much liked Google’s launcher. I don’t like Google’s keyboard, so I use my own. I like to change the default number of rows/columns of my app icons. I like switching between two bottom-row docks. Then there’s stuff like default apps, and way better widgets, of course. Plus I can arrange my apps how I like.

Now - if you are on iOS and have never had this stuff, you won’t miss it. If you want your phone to “just work” and never think about personalizing it, you have no reason to even value the personalisation that Android offers. But, if you’ve gotten used to your personal phone layout, being forced into the Apple way is restrictive.