superpie

[ Speaking Spanish ]

A manual transmission does have one upside. It creates engagement around the experience of driving, which I believe is something many vehicles lack. I sound like [old man yells at cloud], but people just do not seem to be paying attention to what they're doing in their giant metal death machines these days.

There are the fun aspects obviously. I know that when I want to pass another car, go around a corner at speed, and navigate snowy roads I'll be in exactly the right gear without the computer having to guess what I want. But those are secondary to the demand of attention created by it.

It seems this is more likely for devices that are stationary but limited to battery power. Off the top of my head, I could imagine replacing the battery in my electronic front door lock with a tidy hardwire to avoid the need for occasional replacement.

While I'm for blocking malicious ads, I'm not huge on the idea of one of the biggest advertising companies deciding what ads get blocked in the world's most popular browser.

This seems horrendously expensive at $36 per user per year to incentivize basic community tasks. Maybe it just doesn't fit into my world, where we do things like put dishes in the dishwasher as we use them and put them away when they're clean.

Almost everything they design seems to require a case as well, which contradicts the spirit of the wonderful looking products they sell. Camera bumps that scrape against tables on all of the iDevices, and laptop feet so shallow that the bottom of my MacBook is scuffed up in the center from normal use have cosmetically destroyed my uncased devices.

Facebook sort-of-recently introduced measures to defeat ad blockers, which I think has greatly increased the number of clicks.

A while back I'd explored trying to own my data, especially with email, and found that the efforts involved in hosting your own email server were tantamount to a full-time job.

The amount of fighting you have to do to stay on everyone's whitelists is absurd.

Not a fan of the predatory "Sign up for a 7 day free trial, and if you forget to cancel we'll bill you $60 for the year membership" system. It's also a week trial, but the AI takes 8 workouts to learn -- not great for a comprehensive demo at all.

Michael Crichton did this in State of Fear. It was page after page of graphs, graphs, more graphs, with long detailed explanations. It really put me off of reading his books.

Randall's book "What If?," which is a collection of these absurd hypotheticals, is for sale on Amazon for $3 right now. I've got it, it's a fun read.

Edit: I should add that it's the eBook.

I've heard that carbonation in some drinks acts as a more efficient alcohol delivery system, so mixing heavily carbonated drinks (beer) with higher proof ones (liquor) will maximize absorption and potentially lead to a stronger intoxication / hangover.

This is pure speculation, but I wonder if this has anything to do with the AirPower wireless charging mat's development?