pinkythepig

Why would an open source solution improve on that though? If anything, that would be way lower on their priority list as anyone doing large numbers of investments would (should?) have money to pay for a nicer UX solution and probably would want to, as the risk of an audit is a bigger 'cost' than $50-80 in filing fees.

The sheer number of changes that the Tax code makes every year would be hard enough to keep up with for an open source project, let alone making integrations with all of the brokerages to make this process less painful.

There are already affordable alternatives. The people still using turbotax are the same people that spend 0 time looking into alternatives or there is some import feature that an opensource platform realistically would not have the manpower to replicate. Freetaxusa is $15 at a minimum (state fee) and $50ish at the max if you opt into everything. UI isn't loaded with fake loading screens, and they only try to upsell maybe 2 or 3 times during the whole process. My parents complain about turbotax every year and every year I tell them about alternatives... But they still won't switch because 'its what they know'.

I have to wonder, at some point with googles system not being the DMCA, when does it become copyright infringement on the part of youtube that they are hosting your copy righted works and making money off ads from them. Even if they are not taking a cut, they are still facilitating it. Someone selling fake gucci bags at cost of materials would still be in trouble even if they aren't making money off it.

This has so much more potential because its a desktop OS. You could e.g. play WoW using this. Not to mention the huge selection from emulators. I've tried gaming with Android before and the game selection is awful. Realistically, the only good gaming options are from e.g. snes emulators. On top of that, most phone GPU drivers are horrendously broken when doing advanced 3d stuff so even if a good game was released for android, you wouldn't be able to play it on 80% of phones.

I feel like a lot of this article really should be about how bad tarsnap is. Defaults to no progress updates, has no builtin multithreading, has failures around large files, can't backup sym links properly, no builtin way to detect an in progress restore so you have to manually tell it to resume, etc.

If tarsnap didn't have a bad UX, this entire article would have instead been 'the time I forgot to backup my .env file', none of the other issues would have occurred.

my phone had an issue with charging cables falling out. Turns out the port had compacted lint jammed in it. Turned the phone off and used a needle to clean it all out, phone retains cables now like the day it was new.

I can do this with fastmail, though fastmail is a subscription (like $5/month? IIRC, mine auto renews every 2 years so not sure). I have my primary email setup as <firstname>@<lastname>.org. If you set your dns records correctly with them, that allows you to use without any ahead of time setup <randomtag>@<firstname>.<lastname>.org. Setting a different tag where I have <firstname> is can be done too, but you need to set those up individually.

replying to emails, I can change <randomtag> to whatever I want.

They also offer random domains that you can setup burners under, though that does involve some ahead of time setup.

Pretty quick to watch the tapes and see what register you bought from. You have to scan membership id at checkout, so then seeing whos membership was used is simple.

The natural gas genny portion exists, the water one does not. The water one doesn't exist for two reasons:

1. There is only energy in the water system because your city has pumps/water towers to give it pressure. So in a disaster, you running your hydro setup is just placing more strain on the water infra who are likely running on generators.

2. Hydro plants need huge amounts of water to provide power. To even power a single outlet, you are talking in the range of tens of thousands of gallons of water per hour. Your water bill would quickly eclipse the cost of just buying a generator.

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Going back to natural gas, you are looking for an automatic transfer switch. When the power cuts, it disconnects you from the grid, turns on the generator automatically, and you then have power again. When the power is back, it switches you back to grid and turns generator off. Only downside is that there will be a several second power cut while generator turns on. You generally can only get this feature on midrange cost and up generators. For cost savings measures, you can also buy a manual transfer switch, with the obvious downside of you having to flip the switch and go start the genny.

I had this exact problem on mine. I took a panel off from back of inside freezer compartment, and there was a solid block of ice below coils. I didnt own a hairdryer, so used a turkey baster and hot water to melt it. Spray hot water in, wait 30 sec, suck it back out, get fresh hot water, repeat till you get drainage.

I feel like the real problem here is that bash is still the default and bash defaults/UX are straight up awful. The fish shell gets a lot of things right in regards to a sane out of the box experience, though there are a few things it could do better.

The tools themselves leave a lot to be desired from a UX experience too. Things like nonsense names, bad defaults and/or no inherent intelligence in the program, means you have to specify numerous options manually for things that should be easy to automate.

The whole experience would benefit greatly by telling people about things like man/apropros on first startup and other one time tutorials.

There are some days where I feel tempted to write small helper scripts whose sole purpose would be to rename/reorient the default experience/flags of various CLI apps, so that it is not a jumbled mess full of historical accidents that can no longer be changed.

As soon as you walk by someone or shake someones hand, they can copy your implanted RFID. Now, if you want to 'change the locks' to your house and car, you will need to dig out the chip in your hand and implant a new one.

To me, adding the capability to a watch, fitbit or other such wrist wearable is the far more practical option. Easy to change out if it gets compromised, plus you can build in a switch so that it is only capable of broadcasting when you press a button.

I use an xps13 9350. I am running fedora on it and quite literally everything works out of the box on install.