It's similar to Cara Gee being so awesome to work with that she wound up taking the place of like 5 book characters. Ty and Wes both rave about her every chance they get in the podcast. IIRC they've talked about Ashfords actor being fantastic to work with too.
Same, it's kind of a symbolic gesture since I apparently haven't used DB since 2018, but still, I cited them sharing files with AI companies as the reason.
Same, mines like a $40 one from a few years back on black friday. Does it do a great job? No, each individual run is objectively not good and it misses some stuff, but over the course of a week it averages out to pretty freaking great and all I've gotta do is empty its bin when I get home from work at least once or twice. 10/10, would recommend and seeing the amount of cat hair its picked up is pretty disgusting.
On Android you can install unapproved apps and even entire app stores. The barrier to having people install your app is a couple of taps (approximately as difficult as it'd be on Windows when you've got to approve UAC a time or two).
So, it is kind of ridiculous in comparison that they lost but Apple with an entire walled of ecosystem that you can't bypass without finding a zero day exploit won their case.
With that said, I know a lot of people who only buy Apple BECAUSE of that walled off ecosystem and conversely I know people that primarily buy Android for their relatively open system, so I'm in the minority where I think neither Google nor Apple should have to change in this particular regard. Both companies suck, but charging the same price they always have for their app store isn't the issue I'd fight them over.
Blockbusters mail rental service was amazing since if you returned the movies to the store instead of mailing them they counted as a free in store rental coupon AND would flag the movie as returned and prep the next set to be sent to you. They were slower than Netflix but if you were willing to go into Blockbuster, it was crazy worth it.
I had Netflix and Blockbuster and a huge rotation of DVDs coming and going.
I didn't have time to actually watch anything I was ripping, lol, but it was fantastic to expand the collection.
It's the key needed to unencrypt a video DVD, it's how people were able to make duplicates of DVDs. This was technically illegal to use thanks to the DMCA, but not illegal to know, so people had fun with it and plastered it on T-shirts, mugs, etc...
FYI Kindles now support ePub natively and it's fixed a lot of the random issues that used to occur with the spacing and such with no need to convert into AZW3 first (they recently dropped support for AZW ... at the same time they added ePub). It helps that I get everything I can in ePub format or convert to it when I can't.
All in all though, as long as we're all happy with our workarounds, it's all good :-)
I kinda like that mine costs Amazon fractions of a penny in compute time though!
Conversely, I use 'send to kindle' from Calibre all the time and absolutely love how easy it is to send a book to any of the 3 kindles in the house. I just send it and the book is there a few minutes later. The only time I've ever run into any issues with it is when I was loading up a Kindle for a kid with a TON of books and it wasn't happy about so many emails.
Overall though, I agree with your message: you're not really forced into using the Amazon ecosystem at all if you're willing to put in a tiny amount of work and the Kindle's are either sold at a loss or at such a small markup that it might as well be one that it's difficult for me to consider the competition since they cost so much more.
I've got a 20 mile commute and that's basically at the edge of what I'd be willing to do on a daily basis at this point. Sure 50 miles is fine once a week or whatever, but fuck if I'm putting in anything more than 39.9999999 hours if you're expecting me to spend 2+ hours commuting every day (and 2 hours is basically assuming best case highway all the way scenario to come up with it only being 2 hours)!
I know this is the norm for a lot of people, but I'd have to be very desperate to do it again and people that were 100% WFH or worse yet hired to be WFH aren't going to be willing to do it for long.
I've got a couple of Raspberry Pi Zero's that emulate a mass storage device (basically it acts like a USB drive) that I have connected to 3D printers and my wife's embroidery machine.
Instead of using it with a network share like in the link, I share the folder with SyncThing.
It's super convenient to not have to move a USB drive around and can just leave it connected and get the files on there seamlessly.
I switch between the two beds. We'll occasionally all pile into one King size bed, but, at least one person doesn't get a good night's sleep when we do, so, it's not an all the time kind of thing for us.
My wife and I have been poly for going on a decade now and my girlfriend has been part of the equation since damn near the beginning.
My wife, girlfriend & I all jointly own our home together and things have been great!
I (male, cis-het) don't date outside the two of them (I don't have that kind of time!) ... both of the ladies have other partners though, mostly with the goal of them being long term, but like most relationships (poly or mono) they generally fizzle out for one reason or another. Wife has a partner that's been pretty stable for almost a year though and girlfriend has a LDR that's been strong for 5ish years.
We've all "come out" to our family and friends long ago, mostly with no blowback. I am not close with people at my current job, so they don't know, but, I also use the words 'wife' and 'girlfriend' so if they haven't picked up on it, it's not because I'm omitting, I'm just not telling people that don't need to know about my personal life the specifics about my personal life.
If you were to judge monogamy by the shit that pops up in relationship advice threads, people would have a bad impression of it as well!
I love when that happens though!
It's similar to Cara Gee being so awesome to work with that she wound up taking the place of like 5 book characters. Ty and Wes both rave about her every chance they get in the podcast. IIRC they've talked about Ashfords actor being fantastic to work with too.