I think you need a ton of patience, the prices for used hardware are fluctuating by a wkide margin. And all of a sudden one single machine type will be available in quantities, for cheap. Probably when a big player scraps all of their equipment.
I've had some luck with Harlander, mainly with monitors and a document scanner. Might be worth a check from time to time.
Had the same feeling reading Snow Crash directly after Zodiac. Found that I need to read sth different between his books to be able to switch tracks in his world building.
Admittedly, Diamond Age is less fast paced than Snow Crash, with more parallel development and longer threads, which makes it difficult to keep track. But I love it.
German here. According to my experience, on some places you're the weird one not greeting.
Doctor's waitimg room: greet and goodbye expected.
Bus: Usually you enter in front and leave in the back, so only greet the driver, usually.
Nature/dog walk: Indifferent. Usually we greet everyone we meet, due to the shared nature experience probably. And usually nobody greets back. If you make room for cyclists, nobody says thanks or even breaks a bit to give you more time to get out of their way. Last weekend, however, everybody we met greeted first, and every cyclist breaked and said thanks, which was a remarkably strange but positive experience.
Office/company grounds: I tend to greet everyone. Except for a few who regularly don't greet back. Usually at least saying "hi" once a day is expected.
What miffes me most is that most people here are reluctant to thank for services provided (cashier, doc's assistant, cleaners, security...). As if these hardest working people somehow were invisible, or machines.
Illegal or legal aside, afaik nowadays most of these crops are made to withstand certain herbicides. That's the whole business strategy of companies like Monsanto/Beyer, innit?
I think my all time favourite is Excession, most re-read one anyways.
In general, I love all the ship names, as they hint at the ship's personality. My favourites however are the OU/offensive unit ones like "Frank Exchange of Views" and such.
Later comments mention the Fossil Hybrid. I just checked that watch, and have to admit it is really nice. There is a strong want urge, for me.
Then I remembered another pro for the Bip: It is comparatively cheap, at <50€ (I seem to remember 36€ at when I bought it, years ago?).
So for me, with everyday items like mobiles or watches, I use them heavily till they break. I really would hate to get a scratch on that really nice Fossil, but with the Amazefit, it would not hurt that much.
So the tldr pro is: Very good feature to price ratio.
Amazefit Bip - pro: transflective display with backlight, supreme battery life (weeks), virtually indistructible (although I had massive doubts at the start), all the features I need. con: replaced the wristband almost immediately - really cheap.
Yes, correct. I think what made reading the books difficult for me, though - and that was many years ago, not sure if I remember correctly - was that strong "atomic" reference in everything tech related, overused. Yes, at the time of writing this was cutting edge, but for me when reading was extremely difficult to translate/take seriously. It killed the immersion.
Can't describe it better, but did not have that effect at all wit Asimov's contemporaries.
I liked the books back when I read them. But sometimes it was tough work keeping on reading, because p.e. tech references would not translate well to nowadays, and from the social structure depicted they really showed their age. Which for me works with p.e. Heinlein, but not with Asimov and Foundation.
I try to see the series not as adaption of the books, but completely apart from them. And then I have to agree with the author and with OP, its modern, engaging and really well made.
They are TRRS wired. I see they also got USB ones: https://koss.com/collections/headsets-gaming-headphones
I think I've got the CS200i one on an xrest stand, so I can mute it without MS teams showing that.
edit: looked up the correct name of the thing.