I'm all for voting with my wallet, but it gets exhausting trying to be a few steps ahead. And then nothing guarantees that there won't be a rug pull once you bought the car.

> or petition to government to put pressure on them

Right. Not sure why you have to mention it, since everybody knows this works oh so well.

The problem is that all these T&Cs are just pages upon pages of legalese that not only nobody understands or even reads, but that also aren't exactly advertised before buying. "Buy our smart widget! It only works with its own app, and we'll only support it for a ridiculously short time! Please don't upgrade your phone, or it will stop working!"

Of course governments should do something about it, but even here in the EU, they don't seem too bothered. Hell, even people seem generally fine with it, judging by the number of crappy widgets they buy.

For example, on usb-c iphones, I can plug my camera with a c-to-c cable in mass storage mode and it shows up. So I expect a dumb a-to-c adapter would work. On my lightning-based iphone, a c-to-lightning cable doesn't work.

I'd assume it's the same for androids and keyboards.

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[0] I don't remember when I bought it exactly, but I'm sure it was before covid because I remember having it delivered at my old office with a bunch of other mice to test. I moved to a new office in 2020.

I've also had a yubikey for a long time and can't be bothered to type in codes, so I didn't know their shitty app did OTP or even that OTP was actually a possibility for MS accounts.

Maybe because those enterprises already used on-prem AD? It's much "easier" to have a hybrid monstrosity combining on-prem AD and Azure AD than on-prem AD and Google (or anything non-MS, really). Plus, MS is already a supplier, so for large, bureaucratic entities, they already have a foot in the door.

I'm typing this on a ThinkPad and don't particularly care for the plastic. I much, much preferred the aluminum of my otherwise cheaper-feeling EliteBooks and my 2013 MBP before them.

A friend used to have some XPS, and that thing was atrocious. It felt like a weird combination of mushy and sticky. I hated touching it. The ThinkPad isn't nearly as bad (yet?), but it's clearly something I'd change on it in a heartbeat if possible.

Noctua's signature... brown-orange? Whatever that color is, it has the same issue. The blades are basically gray if I don't wipe them.

Haven't seen anybody start a gray craze, though. Though I have a grayish motorbike that also shows dust and dirt like nobody's business (it's a bike I use strictly on paved roads).

FWIW, in my setup (10th gen i5, RTX 5070 Ti in an old Define R3 case), the 12 cm Noctua G2 fans run quieter and have a much less obnoxious noise than the old P/F series, which wipe the floor with the Arctic fan I bought for a computer that lives in the basement and sounds like it's about to take off.

I doubt it.

Here in France, cell plans have had unlimited SMS for a very long time now. Yet, WhatsApp still is extremely widespread. Now, I'm not the most socially connected guy around, so I may not be attuned to any new developing trends in the matter, but IME it doesn't seem to lose any popularity, and something like 95% of the people I interact with on WhatsApp are locals.

Indeed, but I'd bet many people are in the "can't" category. Especially for low frequencies, you need pretty hefty treatment to make a difference, which is oftentimes impractical to install in a room which wasn't designed for that. And I seriously doubt any sizable number of rooms in apartments are designed for that. Combine this with the ungodly amount of snake oil peddled, and I can easily understand why many people look at Dirac and similar solutions.

And while they are band-aids, in many cases that's enough. I used to live in a studio apartment where room correction made a night and day difference to my listening position. Elsewhere the sound wasn't that great, but I didn't really care since I never listened from theme. I was renting, and the space was rather small, so there was no way to install any useful treatment.

In my current apartment it works much worse, it's actually close to useless. But it's rather bigger, so I could put in some treatment. But I've spent a lot of time researching this, and it's still not clear how to go about doing this. People can't even seem to agree on what kind of material to look at. And while I love listening to music, I'm not keen on investing thousands, plus time living under construction for weeks just to throw multiple solutions at the walls and see what sticks.

See all these multinationals paying close to no taxes in the countries where they operate.

Maybe for more involved situations Dirac does a better job, but, in my case, it didn't really solve anything. Also, I see they now have this newer "bass control" thing, and it's not clear if my version had it when I last tested it (around November 2025).

Dirac seemed to have a fairly heavy-handed correction. In my case, I only had fairly narrow frequency ranges that needed correcting, but Dirac seemed to move much wider ranges at a time. It's also nearly impossible to tweak; you basically can only increase/decrease "the lows" or "the highs". But maybe I'm missing something.

In contrast, the suggestions produced by REW were loaded in EasyEffects on Linux, and I could tweak everything to my heart's content. But I actually just left it alone, since it was good enough.

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[0] https://www.roomeqwizard.com/

But you do have a point about "storing the picture". I think that's why it's very important for whatever solution is chosen to be something that proves you're old enough without saying who you are.

Which is actually all the more infuriating to my eyes: this whole reload the app crap is obviously not necessary!