Fairphone or not T-Mobile isn’t anything like what it used to be. If you’re in a major city or suburb it’s worth taking a serious look at T-Mobile. I’m on US mobile which is a MVNO that allows you to freely switch between all 3 networks with two simultaneously active at any given time. 90% of the time T-Mobile has far better and faster coverage than either of Verizon or ATT. It used to be that Verizon was by far the best, but their network capacity hasn’t kept pace with T-Mobile’s growth, even if your Verizon plan has priority data (as mine does). This difference shows most when network capacity is limited.

T-Mobile’s rural coverage isn’t as great as either of Verizon’s or ATT’s, but it’s absolutely good enough for every road trip I’ve done. And when visiting family in rural northern Wisconsin only T-Mobile and ATT have reasonable coverage in their area. You can use a Mint Mobile trial SIM to see for yourself.

I think Verizon knows this too, all of the cheapest MVNOs have been switching to use Verizon’s network in recent years. The ISP mobile networks you can often get a year of for free also nearly all run on Verizon now. If you’re paying for your service, the Total Wireless $20/mo BYO plan with unlimited priority data and 10GB/mo of international data is the best deal out there by far. Verizon certainly wouldn’t be providing MVNOs with the lowest cut rate pricing if they thought they had the best network.

Travel eims are very cheap in China. I’ve never even seen one offering so little data. But I’m amazed you even made it into the country without setting up Alipay/Wechat money. Cash is famously basically useless in China…

The bigger issue I have at the major fast food chains that although you can order and pay using your Alipay/Wechat, receiving the discount coupons requires a local food number. For pizza hut this means you’re literally paying twice as much as a local for a durian pizza.

++Projectivy, it’s top tier software. It’s so clean by default, has lots of customization options, and no ads whatsoever. It’s so good that I worry Google will try to take away the option to use a third party homescreen on Android TV.

Every apartment I’ve ever lived in requires renters insurance. It’s so cheap that I’d argue it’s a good idea to have regardless of whether required by the building. So many things are out of your control (floods, fire, weather damage, etc) and it’s good to know that with the insurance you’d at least he able to get new stuff to maintain a similar living situation.

These things are a pain to use. Especially the cheap ones require more force than you’d expect and occasionally get stuck. They make a good clean cut but it’s so slow and awkward that if you were wanting to do vandalism they’re impractical relative to a reciprocating saw or better yet portable band saw.

I also wouldn’t underestimate the power of spray paint, even though it’s simple to fix it’s still expensive when the contract specifics all the maintenance must be done by flock themselves.

Houston is too sprawled, even within Texas DFW has the bigger metropolitan population. It’s just that DFW has some lines drawn in it separating the cities while in Houston they’re all considered the same city.

That being said culturally it’s definitely not DFW or Chicago. I think Miami is the clear 4th from its city size and unique culture, though I also can see the arguments for DC and SF.

4" screen and 16MB flash is a joke. Ebooks are small, but not that small. Considering how many used, end of life Kindles there are out there stuck on old easily jailbroken firmware, I don’t see why anyone would ever choose this as an alternative. The software for jailbroken Kindles is incredibly mature and at the point of “just works”. E-ink technology hasn’t progressed much in the past ten years, so you really don’t miss out on anything by buying a $30 used one.

Edit: just realized it has micro SD support. So my storage concerns are invalid. It’s still incredibly clunky looking though, a 1cm thick device with only a 4" screen sure is something. My eyes probably couldn’t handle it even with the largest font.

When we do this my wife follows up with trimming if that I am broken and my opinion about her looks is invalid

Even if too expensive for FOSS devs the mega corps relying on their software will still be able to afford them to run their own security testing, feeding the bug reports back to the project. And with time the hardware and models are only getting more efficient (for a comparable performance level).

There’s plenty of long form AI content lately too. Wikipedia articles make for great YouTube videos, and there’s no shortage of them. I’ve run into several channels lately where it took me about 30 seconds to realize something was off, and checking the channel’s history you can usually tell by finding older videos which actually have a person in them who is clearly very different than the narrator in the newer videos, or by just not having any older videos at all.

Apparently their dual extruder implementation works far better than any other on the market which is a huge deal for printing supports that don’t stick. Several of my friends have them and all love the print quality (it’s far better than anything I’ve gotten out of my printers). The pricing is admittedly great too.

I don’t have any issues with my i3 so won’t be getting one anytime soon, but I absolutely see why people new to 3D printing will go straight to Bambu. It sucks that they actively chose to be bad for the open source community they built their company on top of.

You can go far below $300 with very little practical performance compromise, but I wouldn’t even look on Amazon with memory prices being what they are lately. Get an old DDR3 era Optiplex desktop on eBay, throw a $25 Quadro P400 in it for transcoding, and transfer your existing SSDs over. Tons of eBay listings have 2-4 day shipping. With DDR3 you can easily get 16GB of RAM for like $30 if it doesn’t have enough already. Avoiding DDR4/DDR5 will save a ton of money so it’s essential to buy used.

The SSDs and hard drives for the array are by far the most expensive part. I’ve been using an underclocked and undervolted Ryzen 1700 in my server for 6 years now and have zero complaints around CPU performance. I did eventually need more than 16GB of RAM last year, but the only outright failures I’ve had are on the various component’s fans.

We don’t buy great value milk anymore. It’s time for a few days but consistently spoils far faster than any of the other options for us. So it’s not really great value unless you consume a lot of milk.

Ya that would be more than $400 of gold. But there’s only one way to find out…

If you’re not frequently home it’s nice to have a camera feed to make sure everything is okay. I use ESPHome with super cheap ESP32 camera modules personally. The ESP32 cameras have access to the local network only, reaching the internet only via my home assistant installation which I’m in control of. They don’t have any capability to record on their own and unless I’ve enabled the alarm no amount of motion can trigger them to record.

I once caught management entering my apartment unannounced while I was out of town as a result of them. I had a very angry call with the leasing office over that.

Projectivy is incredible. I took a while to try it because I didn’t have any real problems with Google’s launcher besides the ads, but the jellyfin and smarttube integration make it so much better than I realized.

If this is really as straightforward as it sounds then I’d consider this the best case scenario. Google could have gone full Apple style lockdown or even just have implemented this flow on a per app basis, but needing to wait 24hr one time to enable unverified app installation isn’t a bad idea from a security perspective. It prevents a bad actor with temporary access from being able to do much while not getting in the way of us power users after the initial 24hr period.

My bigger problem is how Google is leveraging their monopoly to implement this single-handedly and only for themselves. If they had instead gone through AOSP this perhaps could have been implemented in a better way to allow other parties than just Google to be the verifier, and that 24hr waiting period could be applied to any verifier that is not the phone’s default. I’d argue this would be an equally reasonable security measure considering how many scams are out there preying on those who aren’t technologically savvy, yet would maintain transparency.

Lyft been doing this since last year too. In Chicago our group of 5 was told to have our two men seated in the back row because the driver wasn’t comfortable with men. We were confused but the driver knew the ride was requested by a woman in our group and therefore assumed the whole group for the Lyft XL would be women I guess?

The prices for tech on Taobao in China and in the US are nearly identical for the vast majority of tech items. So much is excluded from the tariffs that it’s silly they even exist on paper. There are indeed some newer items only available there, but they’re rarely on the affordable end of pricing.

Laptops and computer hardware in particular surprise me. I was hoping to get a new Huawei or Xiaomi laptop the last time I was in China since I got my parents a Huawei I’ve been jealous of in the US several years before they were banned. Absolutely nothing I could find on Taobao or in store was comparable value even to computers from Dell/HP/Lenovo.

I can’t say I’ve had a great time with audio in either personally, though it’s indeed much easier to fix audio problems in Linux. But just yesterday pipewire must have hung or crashed preventing all browser based video playback entirely, which due to the symptoms not appearing audio related was quite annoying to debug. I still have no idea what caused it in order to avoid it happening again in the future.