They should do this everywhere, but the speed should be a bit higher. Like if you’re on a cheap unlimited plan and you get deprioritized, it shouldn’t go lower than 5Mbit. The whales paying for priority can still get 50+Mbit or whatever, but they shouldn’t be given 100+ or 200+ so everyone else gets unusable speeds. Adjust the numbers to make it make more sense.

What if I want something I don’t have to squat down to get into? I like small trucks and small SUVs because I can just lift my leg and slide in. I’m getting older, my knees ain’t what they used to be, I don’t want to feel like I have to squat to get into a car and have to feel like my arse is dragging on the pavement like I’m in Mario Kart. But I don’t love the gas mileage of those bigger vehicles.

I’d prefer a bus (and I’d prefer it to be electric) if I lived in a city that supported either, and if public transportation went to my job (it doesn’t). Cars are necessary where I live, and I’m here because I dream of a better world, but, I also gotta pay bills, and wishes don’t do that.

I saw a 1980s Honda Civic on the road the other day and it made me so happy. I don’t even love that model — the Prelude was the better small car, but I loved the Accord. Still, seeing something from the mid-to-late 1980s (I think they all got a little chonkier in 1988, so this would have been older than that) made me smile. Those cars were good on gas, too.

I would pay a lot for YouTube Premium if it actually blocked all the ads. Unfortunately, it does not. The video itself is allowed to contain ads inside the video, which YouTube does not block. I have heard that if the creator declares it, it can be skipped, but SponsorBlock (aims to) skip all of them by default, and for free.

I have an iPhone — the second worst device for consuming YouTube on, tied with the iPad for the same reason. On my old Android phone, I have Firefox with uBlock Origin. Same with my Macs, and my work PC (which is at work). The worst device for consuming YouTube on, I also own — the Apple TV streaming box (which is ironically the best streaming box due to it not having ads in the OS — I’m dead serious, even if you’re Android all the way, you should get one).

On my iPhone, I’ve deleted the YouTube app. Instead, I have a shortcut to YouTube on my home screen that opens in Safari. I have a Safari plugin called Wipr 2 that I paid $5 for, one time, to a solo developer who uses the Fediverse (Mastodon) and is a woman (this shouldn’t matter, but I do enjoy minority representation, and seeing girls win). I occasionally see ads on YouTube, but it’s rare, and typically, refreshing Wipr (updating its block lists) fixes the issue.

That’s on an iPhone. Wipr2 is not available for tvOS. So mostly, I consume YouTube content on my MacBook, which I can mirror to my TV. Ironically, the TV itself (which runs Android TV) is better at mirroring my MacBook (which is between 1 and 2 metres away) than the Apple TV box, at the same distance. (Make that make sense.) (So, you often hear about Apple and Google being rivals around iOS and Android, respectively, but Apple actually licenses AirPlay to Google for inclusion in Android TV. That is actually a thing, and it works great.) I can also run a Thunderbolt/USB-C to HDMI cable and make my TV a monitor for my MacBook, and just drag a Firefox window up to the TV. But it’s a MacBook Air, I still have to keep the lid open, and the screen on (I turn the brightness all the way down though).

I’m so sick of incest fetishisation, and while Game of Thrones contributed to it, I don’t think it started there. While I agree there are more important things Parliament could be focused on, I think it is important for victims of incest to not have it fetishised and thrown in their faces. If it stayed a niche it wouldn’t have gotten attention, but it’s everywhere these days and it’s not okay.

Givers have to know when to say “enough” because takers never do, and never will. The people pushing incest porn are takers. They’re enjoying and profiting off the trauma of survivors. And they’ve been taking more and more each passing year. I’m 100% okay with the government telling them to let the survivors up, they’ve had enough.

Not by choice.

When I drive with someone else at work (not often but sometimes it happens), they often want to listen to the radio, which means we’re listening to ads for 90% of the trip and then we get one song. And people are okay with that. Fucking mindless drones.

Radio really has gone to shit. If you haven’t listened in a while… the ads are almost worse than going online without an ad blocker. You won’t get a virus or spyware, but you might spend the whole trip listening to ads before you earn the right to hear one censored song. Then you get back in the car and the ads start over again. It really is mostly ads these days. Most radio stations in an area will be owned by the same company, and they sync the ads so you can’t just change the channel.

It’s a good question. I switched from Android to iPhone in 2016, but if you look at my choices, and you think I chose poorly, you’re a damn fool, and I’m 100% confident saying that. Let’s look at my choices:

Samsung Galaxy S7 (and S7 Edge). This was my top choice, but also, the S7 was the last to have the capacitive buttons. And the back button was on the wrong side. So, kind of shit design. I think the S7 was a pretty good phone though.

LG G5. This was a cool phone that had the bottom you could remove to slide the battery out, and there were different bottoms you could install, like a decent/good DAC. This phone was promising but LG was never really high end. I think the G5 was their last big effort to do something good in the Android space.

HTC 10. A friend of mine went through like a dozen of them in a year because the M7 was cool. They couldn’t find him an HTC 10 that wouldn’t brick itself after a week. That phone made him a loyal iPhone guy. (The M8 made me an iPhone user. It didn’t brick, but it needed to be reflashed every couple weeks.)

Motorola Droid Turbo 2. On paper, it was the nicest/coolest one. My wife chose this and hated it. It just ran like shit. Felt nice in the hand, though.

…and the iPhone 6s. I picked this, intending to switch to the S7 while I had 2 weeks to do so. For a day or two I hated it. After one week, I knew I was not going to switch.

A few years ago, I got a Galaxy S10 to put Nova Prime on and just to run emulators and stuff. My main phone is an iPhone 16 Pro Max. I prefer the S10 for typing and customisation. The iPhone is reliable for everything else, plus the screen is gorgeous. Also, I think I can make this iPhone last me 10 years. So I think my next smartphone will be an Android phone, so the S10 can retire. I never disliked Android. I don’t like Google, and I didn’t like some Android phones. The Galaxy S3 was a legend and I like the S10 almost as much as I liked my S3.

But as a guy who has used the iPhone almost exclusively for 10 years… they have absolutely stagnated. They aren’t doing anything new and exciting. I think they hit a wall performance wise, the gains aren’t that great year after year in anything, so they do dumb shit like the foldable one coming out this year (no offence if you like foldables, I mean it’s gonna be less phone for more money but hey, it folds out into a tablet. And costs more than a comparable phone and an iPad Mini.

To be absolutely clear, I’ll keep the iPhone for the health data and the privacy around that. I’ve never heard of a private health feature on Android. Apple’s privacy is questionable, but they claim it, the others don’t. Still, I like what Galaxy has been doing lately, though I don’t much care for AI. It just seems like they do more. And it’s not even the five cameras. I’m also done with premium models. The S24, S25, and S26 models are the only ones I ever considered. The Plus is too big, and the Ultra doesn’t justify its price increase and I don’t want another big phone. So, I might get an S28, S29, S30, somewhere around there. Just the base model. In black. And throw a Spigen ToughArmor and a Flygrip on it and call it a day.

tl;dr: Yes, some iPhone users are tired of the platform’s stagnation, but also, a lot of iPhone users who leave come back because they also love the consistency. (I think they give up too easily. I started with Android, so I know what to expect, and how to make it mine.)

Snickers is made by Mars, and their chocolate has always been higher tier than Nestlé and Hershey’s. Mars also makes the (god tier) 3 Musketeers, the Milky Way/Mars (not sure which one is branded Mars in other countries), and their plain chocolate bar is Dove.

I think there’s a Mandela Effect around Dove. I, for one, thought Hershey made Dove at some point. I don’t know why. Hershey’s does have a higher-end chocolate called Symphony, but I haven’t seen it in years. It’s creamier than their regular bar.

Look up Wilton’s chocolate buttercream recipe. It’s cake frosting. But nothing says you can’t eat it on its own. Pipe it into Hershey’s Kiss shaped dollops on a sheet of parchment/wax paper and chill, eat them like little mousse bites. It’s basically a stick of butter, I think 3 cups of sifted powdered/Confectioners sugar, and milk to control the texture/consistency. Some people add vanilla extract — of course, you could hit it with whatever other extract to tweak the flavour a bit. Maybe you want minty chocolate? Peppermint extract. There are options.

Oof. Didn’t know it went up. We paid a total of $15 and we’re happy with it, but we’ve had the benefit of having used it for the past 16 years.

If the price is too high, Google Keep is pretty good for doing a similar thing.

How? Xbox increased more, and first. And Xbox always did poorly in Japan.

If anyone doesn’t know the history, I think it was NEC, was a big electronics company in Japan that tried to make computers that competed with Windows 95 (because they ran something else, I forgot which) and they got their asses handed to them. So the Japanese have been salty toward Microsoft since then. The grudge has started to fade a bit, but it was still going strong at the start of the Series X|S generation (2020). The problem is twofold: Japanese developers won’t make games for Xbox, only Nintendo and/or PlayStation. And two, gamers aren’t buying Xbox in Japan.

I wonder if Xbox went up at all in Japan. It never moved much there. I wonder if they even bothered installing GamePass CDNs there. I wouldn’t.

Also worth noting, a lot of gamers/power user types in the west have been turning against Microsoft for issues with Windows 11 and Copilot. I got tired of their shit years ago and went to Mac for computers, but I still game on an Xbox Series X.

I do like seeing PlayStation get taken down a peg, because for all Microsoft’s issues, PlayStation has always been more anti-consumer. Trophies exist on PlayStation because Achievements were so popular on Xbox that PlayStation (and Steam) were practically forced to adopt them. Xbox has pushed for cross-play and PlayStation has always rejected it. Backwards compatibility is what the PS2 was known for, and the PS3 did it at first, but since then, they haven’t been as good, whereas Xbox has been great about backwards compatibility. Not perfect but great.

OurGroceries.

The year was 2010, and the iPhone was not yet available where I lived. I could have bought one, and I could have activated service with it, but I would never be able to use it at home or anywhere around home. So it would have been pointless. I wanted one. Android was cool, but it wasn’t really what I wanted. Wife needed a new phone, and our carrier had a deal. Two Android phones for $100, and each came with a $20 Android Market (what Google Play Store was called then) gift card. So yeah, we took that deal. The phones were ass, but I was able to put CyanogenMod (now called Lineage) on them and make them a little better.

We wanted a grocery app, and we discovered an app called OurGroceries. Free with ads, or $5 to remove the little banner at the bottom. Even without paying, it offered synced grocery lists and even Web access. As in, my wife is at the store and I’m on the computer, I just hit the bookmark and add something to the list, she sees it in a second or two (provided she has signal or WiFi). We both paid. The app was useful and it was nice.

When I got an iPhone, I immediately paid the $5 again. They since changed it to where only ONE person on the sync account needs to pay. That is to say, if you and five family members all download it, all six of you get ads. But if ONE person connected to the sync account pays, the paid status syncs and nobody has ads. That said, I’m not mad because $10 of the $15 I’ve paid wasn’t even mine to start with, it was on a gift card. It’s been 16 years, and we still use it.

Is it the best grocery app? I think it still ranks highly. Personally I think the one in Paprika is a little better. Our first requirement is that it must support iPhone, Android (my wife still uses Android), and computer. Paprika checks those boxes — so does Google Keep, which is another good option (that is also free!). Apple has shopping list support in Notes, and our computers are Macs, so that works, but Apple Notes doesn’t really work on Android. It actually does, I think, through the browser (since my wife has an Apple account, on the Mac and on her iPad), but it’s not as robust if you actually have an iPhone. Any note taking app should work, but the sync won’t be there.

So if you don’t want to pay, Google Keep should be your first stop. If you don’t like Google for privacy or whatever reason, you’ll probably have to pay. OurGroceries is either a single developer or a small team, and they’re independent, and deserve at least the $5 they’re asking for a whole family to use their app indefinitely (as long as they keep the server up — I hope, should they ever decide to take their server down, they allow a self-hosted option). If you want more features, Paprika is definitely a solid choice, but you’ll want to wait for a sale. Normally it’s like $10 on phones and $20 on computers or something. But it’s actually not a shopping list app. It’s a recipe manager that has a shopping list and a pantry inventory. And a couple other things. (OurGroceries also has a recipe manager, but it’s not great, it’s really just another kind of shopping list that can be copied into an actual shopping list — you can have multiple.)

I always thought “dump him” was followed by an unspoken “and give me a chance.” In other words, incel culture.

Might not be all cases, but that is what I generally assume when I see/hear about stuff like that.

Floor 796 is a… I’m not even sure what to call it. Mosaic doesn’t quite cover it. There are interactive parts as well. It’s an art piece featuring various pop culture characters together on a space station. See who you can find.

Oh yes, I’ve used diced white onions in my tuna salad as well. I don’t like relish (or celery), it’s just not the flavour profile I’m looking for.

BBQ sauce = ketchup with molasses, more or less, I think, on the off chance you were asking what it was. I don’t think that’s the case, just covering my bases. Anyway, I use the sweet/spicy kind, so it adds a kick. I wouldn’t do both BBQ sauce and Tabasco. Tabasco gives it a kick, but it’s more subtle, the flavour of the sauce is covered by the tuna, but the heat is still there. For heat plus added flavour, I go for the BBQ sauce. Specifically Sweet Baby Ray’s sweet and spicy (or whatever that variety is called).

Not sure I can trust ice cream from Minnesota. I’d think ice cream from Texas or Florida would be better, when it’s a consumable utility for beating the heat. I quite imagine Minnesota as always being at/below freezing.

Joking, of course — it sounds awesome.

The flavour of toothpaste (assuming mint) isn’t what makes it gross, it’s the texture. The taste makes it palatable in your mouth (or at least that is the intention). When I was a kid, cinnamon toothpaste was an option as well. IIRC there are plain options, but they’re worse.

I’ve made mint frosting (since shops don’t seem to sell it, Wilton’s buttercream icing but with peppermint extract instead of vanilla) and my wife says it tastes like toothpaste. Her sister, my niece, and I all love it though. My wife’s the odd one here. Mint aversion isn’t really that odd, though. It’s just a flavour and not everyone is going to like it.

I “get” the hype around the Vision Pro from the Apple Store. They act like people don’t understand it. I tell the guy, “yeah I get it, it’s a whole new computer, and just like the Macintosh in 1984, people didn’t really understand it, so it didn’t sell well at first.” The guy acted like I was the smartest person who came in all week. But then I said, “but I don’t need it, the two Macs I have do everything I need. I’m not going to drop $3500 on something nobody knows what it’s good for hoping what it is good for is something I want.” I have a Mac mini and I have a MacBook Air (both M2, the Mini is a Pro though, both 16GB RAM). And they do what I need.

That being said, my favourite film did come out in theatres, but it only played 8 hours from where I live. Very limited engagement, and it has not returned to theatres (or if it has, I didn’t know and either way I did not have the opportunity to go). So, I could use a Vision Pro to watch it in a virtual theater and almost have the same experience. Is that worth $3500? On its own, maybe not, but when you talk about being able to watch any movie in a virtual theater — assuming the experience is good — it kind of makes sense. I mean, you’ll spend way more than $3500 to build your own home theatre. First of all, you need a place with a big enough room. Second, you’ll want to soundproof it. Third, you’ll want a big TV and a good sound system. The right seats. Raised seats (as in, the ones behind are higher up than the ones in front). And floor to ceiling black carpeting. Assuming you even have the space for it (most don’t), you’re probably looking at closer to $5-8K for the whole setup, but honestly, I’m really not sure. At that point, the Vision Pro is kind of a steal, except it’s strapped to your head and only one person can use it at a time. Now imagine you’re in Utah, big house, seven or eight adults in a polygamous relationship, who knows how many kids, and like five or six of the adults love movies, and the kids all wanna watch Kpop Demon Hunters all day… the theater makes more sense. But to single people or even married couples living in apartments or smaller homes, the Vision Pro might come out ahead for that “rich people” experience.

It’s still a lot of coin, though.

What’s crazy is when you actually want to watch an ad (like a game or movie trailer, or a review of a product you’re considering buying), and you have to watch an ad to watch the ad. You’d think videos advertising a commercial product would pay a fee to cover the ads.

Fry sauce! I add hot sauce to mine. Popularized in the American Midwest but you can make it anywhere.

I wish they either just made straight mint ice cream (less peppermint, and more creme de menthe… like Andes mints as opposed to York peppermint patties), or had mint and chocolate swirled or cubed together (like how orange sherbet is packaged with vanilla ice cream sometimes). I would fuck that shit up.

Mint chip is one of my favourite flavours, but the chips kinda ruin it. If they’re the little flakes or shavings, it’s fine, but hard chocolate chips in ice cream (which is frozen) are just not fun.