I say that about a lot of things, such as streaming services, preferring my collection of DVDs, Blu-Rays, and VHS tapes over paying multiple subscriptions to 'have it all' and end up paying more than a monthly cable price in the end, but people just look at me like I got two heads.

But the reality is the first severe thunderstorm hits, knocks out their internet, and they're sitting staring at a black box while I can still enjoy a movie on VHS or a TV series on DVD.

I also make sure my offline library extends to my phones and tablets and laptops. I got one Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 (2012) filled with my entire Amazon book library. No wifi needed. Original, factory loaded app too. No forced updates or DRM.

My phone has 2K of MP3s on it. Don't need to rely entirely on streaming.

The exceeded connections limit was just one of the many issues I had with Thunderbird. I just went back to what worked for me and still works today. I'll use what continues to work for my entire life if possible. While 3G shutdowns might have killed my HTC Thunderbolt, they can't come into my home and force me to upgrade my wifi router. If the servers for my accounts ultimately break compatibility to those apps I am comfortable using, I'll find other means. I don't give up. I fight constant change. If I'm happy using what I have been for years, just let me do that.

These days, I only consider buying new if 1) the old solution truly does not exist anymore and 2) if it's an actual improvement over what I've been doing. Colour TV was obviously an improvement over black and white TV, but I don't see the improvement with a 4K or other TV that will break in a couple of years when all the content I prefer to watch is standard def and just looks ugly on a modern TV.

Modern cars are too full of screens and 'smarts' I don't want. Plus are totally uncomfortable on long trips. My girlfriend lives 540 miles from me. I still am looking out for an old Buick LeSabre (the last to keep the truly-American couch-like conservative interiors and floaty rides until the marque got replaced) to replace my Saturn ION. I don't like my back being sore or my butt going numb because every car made today is stiff as a board and rides like a military Jeep in that you feel every bump.

If a 'modern' solution just takes something that worked fine and was simple and just makes it endlessly frustrating and worse than it replaces, well, it's not an improvement I want. That's more common now than it ever has been in my entire life.

In the old days (well, if you consider 2009 old, it's still yesterday in my view) there were 'alternative' sites you could plug a YouTube URL into and let it play so even if your browser were 'unsupported' (which wasn't always an Internet Explorer thing, it used to blacklist and block Netscape 9 because it wasn't Firefox to Google) you could get past that. At one point Metacafe was how I viewed YouTube videos that were either country-blocked, private, or blacklisted because they hated Windows 98 SE (I never liked Windows XP so I kept 98 SE going until the rise of SSL pretty much ended it)

Using DDG isn't any harder than Youtube, if you keep the 'video' tab bookmarked, and just search your video there and play it without having to leave the site. It's pretty instant, and it works also for other platforms if you're into the Tiktok or Facecrap.

I pretty much am forced to do it that way if using any Windows 7 machine because today's YouTube is so full of code that even with 8GB of RAM, and a four-core i5 isn't even enough to have it load less than 10 minutes with the browser saying 'not responding' a few times before you can click anything.

It's only useable with an SSD-equipped system. I don't fully trust SSDs. "spinning rust" can always be made to work, while when an SSD dies, it dies for keeps. I will always trust spinning rust more. I got systems well over 30 years old that work fine with their original HDDs. I have already lost a couple of systems due to SSD failures. One is still in the 'dying' phase which means waiting two hours to boot Windows 10, and opening an app like email takes 30 minutes.

A good example of a 'failing' HDD being brought back. Try that with a dead SSD:

ocnbrze said:

reading? is it a graphic novel?which one?

Click to expand...

Wrote back in the early days, of where wonderman and Nick Fury was white.

Looks like GM may start using airless tires as early as 2024 on the Chevrolet Bolt EV
Michelin, GM Take the Air Out of Tires for Passenger Vehicles :: Michelin North America, Inc.

Michelin added some videos of the airless tires, ie, like if they are snow packed
MICHELIN Uptis :: Michelin North America, Inc.

Well back home as of yesterday afternoon. $100 OOP or so, not too bad.

I feel SO much better. Walked 5.5 miles each of the last 2 days. Walking through the airports yesterday I made most of the other travelers look like snails. Not quite 100%, still have some minor pain and discomfort, but I am not noticing anything signifcant like I was prior to surgery. I used to have to stop in the middle of doing things to stretch or sit down. Haven't had to do that since the day after.

Luckily the 3rd party administrator required a 2nd opinion before surgery, otherwise I probably would have ended up with a full spinal fusion with months of recovery. I should only have about 6 weeks or so time for full recovery and specific weight and movement restrictions until cleared. Fusion I basically would not have been able to do anything for quite awhile.

To be fair most of Android 14's features do seem to be under the hood: there's very little that would be visible to the casual user,

.

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Happy belated birthday, I wonder if she can read through the timeless classic fairy tales?

mikedt said:

The Beatles 62-66 and 67-70, aka the Red and Blue albums. Remixed editions.

No other releases this year really caught my attention.

Click to expand...

Yeah sometimes the best albums are the most underrated ones.

I don't think I'd bother checking precise voltage+current combinations. What's important is what charging standard(s) the phone supports. So for example my phone supports USB-PD up to 25W. In practice this means that any USB-PD charger should work with it. In fact three of my four PD chargers are rated higher than 25W, two of them substantially higher, but that's not a problem as the phone controls how much power is delivered. So basically "what standard does the phone use?" "what power does it accept?" and find a charger that ticks both boxes. Job done.

The more important question is "do I trust the manufacturer to have implemented the standard correctly and built the charger to a decent quality?". My PD chargers are 2 Ankers, an Apple Macbook Pro power adapter and the charger from my old Pixel 2, so the answer for each of those is "yes". But if I found some supposed high-power PD charger on Alibaba or eBay for a fraction of the price of the Ankers I'd most definitely not touch it, regardless of what specifications it claimed.

Now it is the turn of the locked U.S.A. devices, F946U, to start receiving the December, BWKI, update...

• ATT
• TMB
• TMK
• VZW

OhioGuy59 said:

Thanks. I might not have asked the question correctly. I'm trying to stick with the 128 version but if I use up all of the 128, can I then view anything that's stored on my phone? I don't even know if I would use up the 128 but I would like a backup plan so to speak.

Click to expand...

no you can't use your phone. there is no way to connect to it. the usb c port on the device is for only charging and not transferring of data.

I leave a browser open to the site when the computer is idle. Whenever I refresh it shows a little number badge, my instinct (since every other forum I'm on also has notifications) is to see if it's a reply, like, etc. It's ALWAYS a stupid 'you have reache level xx' crap. It irks me to no end as I find the notification system convenient instead of looking for every darned thread one by one to check for replies. It breaks my flow. I'm used to things being as they have been for a long time and no other forum does this crap. It's a recent thing so it was part of whatever changes y'all are doing, and there is ZERO setting to disable those particular alerts. It's not an achievement as I got achievement notifications off already. It's something an admin has to fix. I keep asking but get made fun of with 'old man yells at cloud' memes. I am sick of futurists trying to force their will on people who prefer things the old way. I don't tell you how to live YOUR life.

I don't tolerate change well. Once everything is as I like it, once I've built up habits that work for me, I don't want to adapt to changes. It was not broke before. But all I get is rudeness from some of the admins here.

A lot of times the response is 'just get used to it'. No. I cannot get used to something I hate. Because I hate it. I am sure I could get used to living next to sewage treatment plant if one were built next to my home, but does that make it acceptable? Hell no.

Look, I love tech, I have a Galaxy Watch 6 for crying out loud. I'm not opposed to some modern tech. I just don't blindly accept ALL modern stuff as I prefer old school stuff more. If I want I can swap to a mechanical watch. But I cannot get the notifications the way I like them here. Just because I don't like something that is 'new' doesn't mean I must give up all things and return to the 19th century, although that's always the assumption. Hate smartphones and what they have done to people and society? well you must go back to horses and buggies. Good lord....Because the obvious result of hating one modern thing is giving all technological progress because that ALWAYS makes sense...

I don't even know what purpose those level notifications serve. From my end they serve NO practical or useful purpose. My life isn't so empty that I need bragging rights about how often I post. IS that how bad society has become?

Had to remove the 'Norton Safe Web' extension on MS Edge because it kept blacklisting this site for 'malicious content' Couldn't login.

Still ironic that Internet Explorer 11 can pull the site up when it is down for any modern browser.

I had issues with Motorola phones using Google Messages saying 'failed to send' and not getting them until a restart.

Lately I have issues with Samsung phones saying 'currently unable to send message, it will be sent automatically when service is available' while I'm getting four bars of 5G, can make/receive calls and use data fine. A reboot also fixes it but it will happen again. It's something I've come to have to accept. Either some background service for SMS is crashing or it updates PRL in the background and gets hung up at the cellular end. I never have figured out what causes it.

Sometimes I can receive but not send, or send but not receive. This does NOT happen if using RCS/Chat, or apps such as Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp; it's specifically an SMS issue.

mikedt said:

This is probably more about semantics and maybe I'm been pedantic? But I wouldn't define Russia as a European country...

Click to expand...

Why? Would you also not define Ukraine or Poland as European countries?

mikedt said:

...especially when more than half its area is in Asia. I suspect the population somewhere like Vladivostok wouldn't consider themselves European.

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Until 1962, over half of French territory was in Africa! I doubt the Arabs from the African portion of France (Algeria) would consider themselves European. Yet no one (even in 1962) would say that France is not part of Europe.

"American" relating to or characteristic of the United States of America, One country.
"European" relating to or characteristic of Europe. More than one country.

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Comparisons between the US and Europe, such as mine are hardly unprecedented!

the hardest part really is getting the saltwater. i have a ro tank and a saltwater mixing tank ao mixing saltwater is not that bad......but it is still takes work getting it mixed. i then hook up a hose to the pump from the mixing tank and i can then pump the water to my various tanks.

my problem right now is motivation. i clean tanks for a living so that last thing i want to do is clean my own tanks.....lol

right now work is a lot at the moment. once i can relax a bit, i can then focus on my tanks. so the goal is after the holidays are over i can then start working on getting everything back up into shape.

ocnbrze said:

i was thinking at first about the president Franklin Delano Roosevelt....FDR.......LOL!!!!!!

Click to expand...

Sucks getting old doesn't it? There are not only people who don't even know who Franklin Delanor Roosevelt was, but there are even people who don't even know who Lassie was. That show was well before my time and even I grew up with Lassie, and Flipper too.

I still don't fully trust SSDs to last though. I got one PC that my mom gave me that was released in 2017 (has type C USB and all the gimmicks) and its SSD is already on the way out. It literally takes an hour and a half to go from the Dell boot logo to a functional Windows 10 desktop. It takes 10 minutes to launch Outlook. It won't shut down unless you hold the power button. I once killed an SSD that wasn't even a year old by removing all the partitions and attempting to install Linux. Apparently, one of those partitions was intended to NEVER get removed so now it no longer shows up as a drive anymore to ANY OS.

Meanwhile, there are still PCs from the early 1980s with working MFM hard disk drives. There is NO WAY an SSD will last 30 plus years especially with modern OS's always indexing and writing to paging files and such. Maybe if they ran MS-DOS, and did nothing at idle perhaps. They don't make tech to last anymore, see also removable batteries.

shakushinnen said:

Yes, I think it's understood that 'what you see is what you get'; besides there's a no return policy on electronics.
But it's not a big deal, I only pain $10 for it, so, you win some and lose some. I've been trying to jailbreak it with Palera1n and Checka1n, but so far have not succeeded.
...... john

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Next time be more careful when making the purchase. 10 dollars is a steal probably cause it was already in such a bad condition.

ocnbrze ...... Wow!!! They're beautiful. You must be very proud of them. The zoas are breathtaking.
Thanks for show them to me.
...... john

Bearsyzf said:

AI is going to ruin this World.... i said it and mean it .

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Many a dystopian science fiction novel/movie has warned us, the problem is that many use them as a guide for the future.'

Many of the things on the World Economic Forum's website gets me scared to live past the year 2030, if that's the world they have planned for us.

I suppose I'm a hypocrite though as I've been using S-voice since the Galaxy SIII and Bixby since the Galaxy S8, and Google Assistant in the house.

Didn't the video game Portal 2 protray what happened to a specific character who got put into a computer and essentially became GLaDOS? That was in 2011.

All set!! Cheers.

It's not like the PGA has any bargaining chips. It's sad for old school golf traditionalist but it might be good for golf in the long run. Different product, owned abroad, with the power to change a never changing game. I can't think of another professional sport that has had a single leadership that the Saudi might want but I don't know what stops them.... Pro Bowlers maybe. Crazy times.