macOS doesn't even come with a built-in Paint alternative.
Most people seem to use Paint to crop and annotate screenshots. On the Mac you can use Preview to do that.
And to take screenshots on MacOS without editing, it's built into the OS and has been forever (System7, 1990 or so, the OS Microsoft actually used as the basis for Windows3 after buying a license for MacOS System6).
Command-Shift-3 [full screen] Command-Shift-4 [select an area]
To be honest, the current workday sounds perfectly reasonable to me, and isn't much different from my typical workday if I'm working on my own project or working the jobs I normally accept, except for the 3-hour break part, which is about 2 ½ hours longer than I usually manage.
So an improvement, actually, over what I'm used to. I don't mind a 12-hour workday or a 7-day workweek. Working 100 12-hour days in a row is not a problem for me. On the other hand, most of the people I know would probably attempt to incite an insurrection if they had to work those hours.
Why do I do it? Because I can work more hours than most people do in a year, and am still able to take about three 1-month vacations in that same year. In other words there's a time for work and there's a time for play.
Even America doesn't believe in free market capitalism, judging by its actions. If you truly believed in free market capitalism you wouldn't have telecoms monopolies, utilities monopolies, banks "too big to fail" and so on.
Perhaps the easiest first step would simply be to require public availability of repair manuals and guaranteed public availability of parts for X amount of time (maybe sector dependent) in order to achieve a CE marking.
CE is self-certifying. No European entity is issuing CE marks... the product is compliant if the manufacturer says it's compliant.
Ordinary people don't realize that search is a skill.
Not a difficult skill, but a skill none the less.
They think that because they know how to click on a Google bookmark that they're done.
Often you see someone asking a question on some forum. They claim they "Googled it" but found no answers. Every once in a while in some probably misguided attempt at helping the sad user, I "Google it" and present the answer to them in a followup post, which takes me more time to type than to search and discover.
I don't select the top results, usually. I will dig three pages deep, at least, to find perhaps three or four promising summaries. I open them in a new window in the background without looking at them, until I've decided "I'm done, let's have a look" and then if I don't like the results, I'll rephrase the search terms. It's rare to get three or more good links on the first page result. Others might have different techniques and flexibility if you are not getting the right results is important. Try another engine, force the web to give you what you want somehow.
But that's now how they use Google. And they don't know better.
Other times I will be at someone's house or in public, and we might be talking about something, and they are at the helm and I suggest a search. When I look at the search terms they use, I am dumbfounded. There is no way they will get results with those terms. So people don't even know the first step, properly.
You can help people to a certain extent, but I find they just revert to their old useless habits pretty much immediately. Nothing you can do about it, and many people and entities profit from it. Such is the web.
That is probably an excellent solution. Unfortunately if the practice becomes well known, authorities will counter with methods to defeat it. A simple regulation requiring only firearms and/or ammunition in the case would be all it would take.
Great ideas, in the internet age, are best kept to yourself. The better the idea, the faster it becomes well known, and the sooner it is countered. Your best approach would be to continue with your practice but tell no one, so that you may continue to use it in the future.
Oh, wonderful. More tomatoes that are designer-made to generate higher yields for farmers. And just when I thought a supermarket tomato taste had hit rock bottom, they move the goalposts. Obviously, there has been a hue and cry from the grocery consumers of the planet... they said, as if from one voice: "Hey, farmers! I want a tomato that tastes more cardboard. The last one I ate, I could still detect a trace of tomato.
Apple products are not for everyone, but that misses the point. They make an effort to refine the product that goes beyond just "good enough". If more companies did the same thing... not just in Tech but over all categories... we'd have better products in all aspects of our lives. Other companies do the same thing, but because consumers are so price conscious you can create products that ignore the intangibles and still profit; in fact you can probably profit more that way. So it will never be the norm, but at the same time it's never a bad thing to have the choice.
But what they'll tell the voters is that Canada is paying for it.
Canada might actually be helping... Sea Ice causes the Oceans to fall in level as it melts. Its Landlocked Ice (like Greenland) that causes levels to rise as it melts. Now, I don't know if anyone has done the math, Canada certainly has some of the latter going on as well... I certainly haven't... but maybe the melting in the Northwest Passage is giving it the Old College Try at least.
Where Louisiana is going to come up against the biggest hurdle isn't it's own particular issue, but the problem with regard to the entire Eastern Seaboard, the Gulf, and to perhaps a lesser extent, but just as fraught with pitfalls, the West Coast.
This scares the living daylights out of the White House and Congress, because anything they do in Louisiana will be under a huge microscope, will set perhaps irreversible precedents, and is going to have other states lining up for the same treatment.
Paralysis is clearly the best option, from the Fed's perspective. They see a seemingly endless range of issues, they fear any response will bite them in the future, and, frankly, they can't afford to do much in the first place.; It's like a 30-state Disaster Zone they don't want to know anything about.
Yeah and it's entirely funded by taxpayer money. So subway is essentially suing the people who they are selling allegedly half soy chicken. That'll earn them brownie points with the public.
CBC is far from "entirely funded by taxpayer money." They do receive some public funds (most recent... $C 675 million - $US 506 million) vs. total expenditures of $C 1.62 billion - $US 1.21billion. The difference... about a billion dollars... is earned income.
I find that there are few movies that I can watch more than once, but I've seen The Thing many times and will watch again. The paranoia and fear among the characters is palpable, and there is no lame CGI.
Carpenter's version is good, but it's a remake of a film with multiple remakes. The original "The Thing" was released in 1951.
I was a teen when it first came out, and I have never seen it. At the time, I and my friends thought it stupid and infantile, with a Soap Opera for a plot. I have never seen any evidence we were wrong.
Like other great Sci-Fi (Fritz Lang's Metropolis, The Day The Earth Stood Still, Westworld (the original), etc) it remains entertaining to this day. Aside from being a great movie, the thing I find most remarkable about BladeRunner is that it is almost 30 years old but if you didn't know that, you might think it was made last year.
[Old News but thanks for the reminders]... since some people haven't got the memo, and then there are those that love the counterfeits simply because they are cheaper.
This is an old problem, going on since before China became a manufacturing centre (ie prior to the Special Economic Zone creation of the late 1990's, and the full liberalization of enterprise in 2005... yes, it's only been 15 years since China didn't make squat besides t-shirts).
The IEEE and AES have been warning about counterfeit semiconductors for years. That is, take a 10 cent transistor, sand off the markings, and silkscreen or laser etch new markings representing a higher performance device that sells for... wait for it... 20 cents. And this has to be done in batches of thousands, because that's the quantities these devices sell at.
That's a lot of effort to make 10 cents per chip, less your production costs. It can hardly be a surprise that they would go for higher priced items given the opportunity.
I dabble in electronics. These days you need a good, temperature controlled soldering iron, because lead-free solders are a pain in the ass to work with, and without high temperature capable irons, and precise temperature control, you will simply get either bad solder joints or burn out the component you are eager to install, rendering it useless.
Now, the best soldering irons are made by a Japanese company, HAKKO. Weller makes some, a UK company called Antex is the preferred brand "over there" but if you are serious about the business, you use HAKKO gear. So, a nice temp controller unit and a nice iron with a few hundred available tip types is maybe $125 from them.
The older model, the "venerable" HAKKO 936, which dominated the market for decades, is still a popular unit. Trouble is, it isn't made and hasn't been for about five years, But, you can still buy "brand new" ones in the usual places. How can this be, you ask? Two guesses, one doesn't count.
So we just keep killing people? Because when you kill one billionaire another person becomes a billionaire. and the more you kill the faster it happens.
So, you're saying if we keep killing the billionaires, then the natural outcome is sooner or later, you and I become billionaires?
Are there really lots of US fake phone manufacturers shipping abroad...or is the problem that of fake phones shipped _from_ abroad?
One of the problems with the written word is it is subject to mis-interpretation by readers. I agree that the OP could have created a more concise and unambiguous headline, but it's also true that there is more than one way to interpret the words he did use.
One, as you did, might interpret it to mean that the fake phones "were shipped abroad", that is, from here to there.
Another, as probably the poster intended, was to indicate that the fake phones "were shipped abroad", as in they originated somewhere offshore with no mention of the final destination. Maybe it would be clearer if we substitute something for phones. How about, "A bunch of Americans were robbed abroad by pickpockets." Make sense now?
Nobody's goling to jail for 80 years; to think he may is to misunderstand American justice at work.
The 80 years is the stick; the carrot is the plea bargain. If you refuse to cooperate they may try you with whatever relevant charge and with the prosecution's sentencing recommendation of 80 years, but there will be some rather attractive options given the accused. If he pleads guilty and admits his role, they probably will counter with a maximum of... well, who knows, but for the sake of argument... ten years. That may involve going to court with a lesser charge, or reduced counts, or whatever technical requirement is needed to get a 10 year outcome. The prosecution will recommend the sentence; the defence will (of course) agree, and they present that to the judge. Faced with a joint recommendation, the Judge pretty much always goes along with it.
Then there is the sentence itself. No-one in America serves the sentence they are given, with the exception of natural life sentences. It is actually against the law to not offer time off for good behaviour... it's constitutionally protected as a right against cruel and unusual punishment. "Time Off is Time Served"... you can't be sent back to jail if released due to actual time served and "good time" that adds up to your sentence.
How much time off varies by state and also the Federal system has guidelines as well. The Federal system is the most stingy. Calculating the reduction is so complex that in many cases even prison officials can't tell you the actual release date with good behaviour included (partly because it requires predicting future behaviour, as the reduction is earned per 30 day period of actual time served); one day they figure out you are due to be released, and the next day you're out is often how it works.
But for non-violent offenders, it can be as much as two thirds of actual time served. So a ten year sentence could be fully completed in as little as 3 years and a number of months. And, because good time and actual time are treated identically, that means you are eligible for parole after serving some portion of your sentence, which in this case would be some portion of three years and some months.
Finally, because so many involved in the Justice System are elected, it serves the purpose of "law and order" politics to publish long sentences in the press, when the actual amount of liberty deprived the offender is much less, which is almost never followed up on in the press (with the exception that if an individual re-offends they may list the previous crimes he was convicted of, and the sentence, and the release date, which inevitably illustrates the above is true).
Some jurisdictions give time off merely for showing up at the jail, that's how people in the news like Lindsay Lohan serve 30 day sentences in four hours. But generally speaking most states allow 10 days per month served, plus often additional days if you do things like take a prison job or complete some program, and in some states you can earn up to 20 days per 30 days served. The Feds tend to be closer to 5 days per 30, but you can still earn extra with them as well.
The biggest weakness is they are all the technological style equivalent of the brick-sized cellphones of 1980, and are going to look primitive in three years compared to the ones they will then be selling for $34.95 at Wall-Mart.
I'll buy that for Indiana, but it makes no sense for Arizona, whose economy is based on mining, tourism, and old people.
Casinos don't borrow money? Once you get past a certain amount of funding, you aren't dealing with the local bank anymore, you need New York to raise the funds. The entire Mining Industry worldwide is dependent on Stock Exchanges to raise capital. And "Old People" have more assets in New York-based investment firms than any other demographic.
The areas that do not implement DST do so precisely because farmers don't want it.
It's business interests that drives it... if New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and in Canada Toronto didn't implement it, the other areas that need to be in contact with and in sync with the plethora of Head Offices based in those cities wouldn't lobby to implement or keep it.
A simple alternative to using simple dictionary passwords (appropriately, eg to unlock a more secure password manager) is to get out a map of the world, pick some region you are willing to become familiar with, and choose the name of a town or other small, obscure feature.
You will always be able to re-read that passphrase if forgotten, by searching the same regional map, and it almost certainly won't be in a language dictionary (assuming you choose wisely) as cities and town are normally not included in dictionaries save for large, well known ones.
So, instead of Zagreb (Capital city of Croatia), perhaps choose a small town near there that isn't a Croatian dictionary word, and use that. Say, "Sesvete"
Check that it isn't a dictionary word (with a Crotian dictionary)... you don't want a town whose English translation is "Brother", for example. It will be in the dictionary.
It might take a half hour of playing around to get a decent example, but after that you have a non-dictionary word you can remember, that few, if any, others will guess, and of moderate complexity. You could also use it as a component of a more complex password that has the usual features (uppercase + lowercase + numerals + symbols).
Most of them don't even know that they are a form of two-way radio. They think "cell" means some magic new "digital" technology, not the same waves that carried the Ed Sullivan show to their grandparent's homes via the rabbit-eared B&W TV on Sunday nights.
I would never trust anything I own and absolutely need to work to an electronic lock. Not that I'm a luddite... far from it... but because I know what can go wrong, and in some circumstances absolutely nothing can be allowed to go wrong. So no electronic locks on my home's entry doors, and no home safes with electronic locks (includes gun safes).
Hotels... I can see huge advantages for a hotel to have electronic locks on rented rooms. They will also have staff who can defeat said locks if need be. Downsides? Could be a problem if fire breaks out, but as I understand it (my ex worked for a Federal Prison System) a proper electronic lock must by law fail open, so that would be the type found in hotels.
The only exemptions are for prison locks, which fail closed, and those models are subject to strict controls, only available to bona fide law enforcement or prison purchasing agents, not the general public.
In this case the locks probably hadn't failed so much as were programmed to operate in a closed manner. I wonder if (voluntarily) cutting power could have opened the doors? That would take some effort... almost certainly the hotel had backup generators that would have to be defeated, so definitely a job for the hotel support staff, but from there it should result in open doors.
Slashdot Mirror
macOS doesn't even come with a built-in Paint alternative.
Most people seem to use Paint to crop and annotate screenshots.
On the Mac you can use Preview to do that.
And to take screenshots on MacOS without editing, it's built into the OS and has been forever (System7, 1990 or so, the OS Microsoft actually used as the basis for Windows3 after buying a license for MacOS System6).
Command-Shift-3 [full screen]
Command-Shift-4 [select an area]
To be honest, the current workday sounds perfectly reasonable to me, and isn't much different from my typical workday if I'm working on my own project or working the jobs I normally accept, except for the 3-hour break part, which is about 2 ½ hours longer than I usually manage.
So an improvement, actually, over what I'm used to. I don't mind a 12-hour workday or a 7-day workweek. Working 100 12-hour days in a row is not a problem for me. On the other hand, most of the people I know would probably attempt to incite an insurrection if they had to work those hours.
Why do I do it? Because I can work more hours than most people do in a year, and am still able to take about three 1-month vacations in that same year. In other words there's a time for work and there's a time for play.
Even America doesn't believe in free market capitalism, judging by its actions. If you truly believed in free market capitalism you wouldn't have telecoms monopolies, utilities monopolies, banks "too big to fail" and so on.
Perhaps the easiest first step would simply be to require public availability of repair manuals and guaranteed public availability of parts for X amount of time (maybe sector dependent) in order to achieve a CE marking.
CE is self-certifying. No European entity is issuing CE marks ... the product is compliant if the manufacturer says it's compliant.
Ordinary people don't realize that search is a skill.
Not a difficult skill, but a skill none the less.
They think that because they know how to click on a Google bookmark that they're done.
Often you see someone asking a question on some forum. They claim they "Googled it" but found no answers. Every once in a while in some probably misguided attempt at helping the sad user, I "Google it" and present the answer to them in a followup post, which takes me more time to type than to search and discover.
I don't select the top results, usually. I will dig three pages deep, at least, to find perhaps three or four promising summaries. I open them in a new window in the background without looking at them, until I've decided "I'm done, let's have a look" and then if I don't like the results, I'll rephrase the search terms. It's rare to get three or more good links on the first page result. Others might have different techniques and flexibility if you are not getting the right results is important. Try another engine, force the web to give you what you want somehow.
But that's now how they use Google. And they don't know better.
Other times I will be at someone's house or in public, and we might be talking about something, and they are at the helm and I suggest a search. When I look at the search terms they use, I am dumbfounded. There is no way they will get results with those terms. So people don't even know the first step, properly.
You can help people to a certain extent, but I find they just revert to their old useless habits pretty much immediately. Nothing you can do about it, and many people and entities profit from it. Such is the web.
That is probably an excellent solution. Unfortunately if the practice becomes well known, authorities will counter with methods to defeat it. A simple regulation requiring only firearms and/or ammunition in the case would be all it would take.
Great ideas, in the internet age, are best kept to yourself. The better the idea, the faster it becomes well known, and the sooner it is countered. Your best approach would be to continue with your practice but tell no one, so that you may continue to use it in the future.
Oh, wonderful. More tomatoes that are designer-made to generate higher yields for farmers. And just when I thought a supermarket tomato taste had hit rock bottom, they move the goalposts. Obviously, there has been a hue and cry from the grocery consumers of the planet ... they said, as if from one voice:
"Hey, farmers! I want a tomato that tastes more cardboard. The last one I ate, I could still detect a trace of tomato.
Apple products are not for everyone, but that misses the point. They make an effort to refine the product that goes beyond just "good enough". If more companies did the same thing ... not just in Tech but over all categories ... we'd have better products in all aspects of our lives. Other companies do the same thing, but because consumers are so price conscious you can create products that ignore the intangibles and still profit; in fact you can probably profit more that way. So it will never be the norm, but at the same time it's never a bad thing to have the choice.
But what they'll tell the voters is that Canada is paying for it.
Canada might actually be helping ... Sea Ice causes the Oceans to fall in level as it melts. Its Landlocked Ice (like Greenland) that causes levels to rise as it melts. Now, I don't know if anyone has done the math, Canada certainly has some of the latter going on as well ... I certainly haven't ... but maybe the melting in the Northwest Passage is giving it the Old College Try at least.
Where Louisiana is going to come up against the biggest hurdle isn't it's own particular issue, but the problem with regard to the entire Eastern Seaboard, the Gulf, and to perhaps a lesser extent, but just as fraught with pitfalls, the West Coast.
This scares the living daylights out of the White House and Congress, because anything they do in Louisiana will be under a huge microscope, will set perhaps irreversible precedents, and is going to have other states lining up for the same treatment.
Paralysis is clearly the best option, from the Fed's perspective. They see a seemingly endless range of issues, they fear any response will bite them in the future, and, frankly, they can't afford to do much in the first place.; It's like a 30-state Disaster Zone they don't want to know anything about.
Yeah and it's entirely funded by taxpayer money. So subway is essentially suing the people who they are selling allegedly half soy chicken. That'll earn them brownie points with the public.
CBC is far from "entirely funded by taxpayer money." They do receive some public funds (most recent ... $C 675 million - $US 506 million) vs. total expenditures of $C 1.62 billion - $US 1.21billion. The difference ... about a billion dollars ... is earned income.
I find that there are few movies that I can watch more than once, but I've seen The Thing many times and will watch again.
The paranoia and fear among the characters is palpable, and there is no lame CGI.
Carpenter's version is good, but it's a remake of a film with multiple remakes. The original "The Thing" was released in 1951.
I was a teen when it first came out, and I have never seen it. At the time, I and my friends thought it stupid and infantile, with a Soap Opera for a plot. I have never seen any evidence we were wrong.
Clearly.
Like other great Sci-Fi (Fritz Lang's Metropolis, The Day The Earth Stood Still, Westworld (the original), etc) it remains entertaining to this day. Aside from being a great movie, the thing I find most remarkable about BladeRunner is that it is almost 30 years old but if you didn't know that, you might think it was made last year.
[Old News but thanks for the reminders] ... since some people haven't got the memo, and then there are those that love the counterfeits simply because they are cheaper.
This is an old problem, going on since before China became a manufacturing centre (ie prior to the Special Economic Zone creation of the late 1990's, and the full liberalization of enterprise in 2005 ... yes, it's only been 15 years since China didn't make squat besides t-shirts).
The IEEE and AES have been warning about counterfeit semiconductors for years. That is, take a 10 cent transistor, sand off the markings, and silkscreen or laser etch new markings representing a higher performance device that sells for ... wait for it ... 20 cents. And this has to be done in batches of thousands, because that's the quantities these devices sell at.
That's a lot of effort to make 10 cents per chip, less your production costs. It can hardly be a surprise that they would go for higher priced items given the opportunity.
I dabble in electronics. These days you need a good, temperature controlled soldering iron, because lead-free solders are a pain in the ass to work with, and without high temperature capable irons, and precise temperature control, you will simply get either bad solder joints or burn out the component you are eager to install, rendering it useless.
Now, the best soldering irons are made by a Japanese company, HAKKO. Weller makes some, a UK company called Antex is the preferred brand "over there" but if you are serious about the business, you use HAKKO gear. So, a nice temp controller unit and a nice iron with a few hundred available tip types is maybe $125 from them.
The older model, the "venerable" HAKKO 936, which dominated the market for decades, is still a popular unit. Trouble is, it isn't made and hasn't been for about five years, But, you can still buy "brand new" ones in the usual places. How can this be, you ask? Two guesses, one doesn't count.
So we just keep killing people? Because when you kill one billionaire another person becomes a billionaire. and the more you kill the faster it happens.
So, you're saying if we keep killing the billionaires, then the natural outcome is sooner or later, you and I become billionaires?
Are there really lots of US fake phone manufacturers shipping abroad...or is the problem that of fake phones shipped _from_ abroad?
One of the problems with the written word is it is subject to mis-interpretation by readers. I agree that the OP could have created a more concise and unambiguous headline, but it's also true that there is more than one way to interpret the words he did use.
One, as you did, might interpret it to mean that the fake phones "were shipped abroad", that is, from here to there.
Another, as probably the poster intended, was to indicate that the fake phones "were shipped abroad", as in they originated somewhere offshore with no mention of the final destination. Maybe it would be clearer if we substitute something for phones. How about, "A bunch of Americans were robbed abroad by pickpockets." Make sense now?
Nobody's goling to jail for 80 years; to think he may is to misunderstand American justice at work.
The 80 years is the stick; the carrot is the plea bargain. If you refuse to cooperate they may try you with whatever relevant charge and with the prosecution's sentencing recommendation of 80 years, but there will be some rather attractive options given the accused. If he pleads guilty and admits his role, they probably will counter with a maximum of ... well, who knows, but for the sake of argument ... ten years. That may involve going to court with a lesser charge, or reduced counts, or whatever technical requirement is needed to get a 10 year outcome. The prosecution will recommend the sentence; the defence will (of course) agree, and they present that to the judge. Faced with a joint recommendation, the Judge pretty much always goes along with it.
Then there is the sentence itself. No-one in America serves the sentence they are given, with the exception of natural life sentences. It is actually against the law to not offer time off for good behaviour ... it's constitutionally protected as a right against cruel and unusual punishment. "Time Off is Time Served" ... you can't be sent back to jail if released due to actual time served and "good time" that adds up to your sentence.
How much time off varies by state and also the Federal system has guidelines as well. The Federal system is the most stingy. Calculating the reduction is so complex that in many cases even prison officials can't tell you the actual release date with good behaviour included (partly because it requires predicting future behaviour, as the reduction is earned per 30 day period of actual time served); one day they figure out you are due to be released, and the next day you're out is often how it works.
But for non-violent offenders, it can be as much as two thirds of actual time served. So a ten year sentence could be fully completed in as little as 3 years and a number of months. And, because good time and actual time are treated identically, that means you are eligible for parole after serving some portion of your sentence, which in this case would be some portion of three years and some months.
Finally, because so many involved in the Justice System are elected, it serves the purpose of "law and order" politics to publish long sentences in the press, when the actual amount of liberty deprived the offender is much less, which is almost never followed up on in the press (with the exception that if an individual re-offends they may list the previous crimes he was convicted of, and the sentence, and the release date, which inevitably illustrates the above is true).
Some jurisdictions give time off merely for showing up at the jail, that's how people in the news like Lindsay Lohan serve 30 day sentences in four hours. But generally speaking most states allow 10 days per month served, plus often additional days if you do things like take a prison job or complete some program, and in some states you can earn up to 20 days per 30 days served. The Feds tend to be closer to 5 days per 30, but you can still earn extra with them as well.
US school students have maps of the world? Who knew?
The biggest weakness is they are all the technological style equivalent of the brick-sized cellphones of 1980, and are going to look primitive in three years compared to the ones they will then be selling for $34.95 at Wall-Mart.
I'll buy that for Indiana, but it makes no sense for Arizona, whose economy is based on mining, tourism, and old people.
Casinos don't borrow money? Once you get past a certain amount of funding, you aren't dealing with the local bank anymore, you need New York to raise the funds. The entire Mining Industry worldwide is dependent on Stock Exchanges to raise capital. And "Old People" have more assets in New York-based investment firms than any other demographic.
The areas that do not implement DST do so precisely because farmers don't want it.
It's business interests that drives it ... if New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and in Canada Toronto didn't implement it, the other areas that need to be in contact with and in sync with the plethora of Head Offices based in those cities wouldn't lobby to implement or keep it.
A simple alternative to using simple dictionary passwords (appropriately, eg to unlock a more secure password manager) is to get out a map of the world, pick some region you are willing to become familiar with, and choose the name of a town or other small, obscure feature.
You will always be able to re-read that passphrase if forgotten, by searching the same regional map, and it almost certainly won't be in a language dictionary (assuming you choose wisely) as cities and town are normally not included in dictionaries save for large, well known ones.
So, instead of Zagreb (Capital city of Croatia), perhaps choose a small town near there that isn't a Croatian dictionary word, and use that. Say, "Sesvete"
Check that it isn't a dictionary word (with a Crotian dictionary) ... you don't want a town whose English translation is "Brother", for example. It will be in the dictionary.
It might take a half hour of playing around to get a decent example, but after that you have a non-dictionary word you can remember, that few, if any, others will guess, and of moderate complexity. You could also use it as a component of a more complex password that has the usual features (uppercase + lowercase + numerals + symbols).
I wanted to know what the Stream option could translate into Album Sales, so I did some quick math:
If you streamed music 24/7, your activity could be counted as 9.6 album sales per month.
Assumptions:
A month is 30 days
A song is 3 minutes long
Most of them don't even know that they are a form of two-way radio. They think "cell" means some magic new "digital" technology, not the same waves that carried the Ed Sullivan show to their grandparent's homes via the rabbit-eared B&W TV on Sunday nights.
I would never trust anything I own and absolutely need to work to an electronic lock. Not that I'm a luddite ... far from it ... but because I know what can go wrong, and in some circumstances absolutely nothing can be allowed to go wrong. So no electronic locks on my home's entry doors, and no home safes with electronic locks (includes gun safes).
Hotels ... I can see huge advantages for a hotel to have electronic locks on rented rooms. They will also have staff who can defeat said locks if need be. Downsides? Could be a problem if fire breaks out, but as I understand it (my ex worked for a Federal Prison System) a proper electronic lock must by law fail open, so that would be the type found in hotels.
The only exemptions are for prison locks, which fail closed, and those models are subject to strict controls, only available to bona fide law enforcement or prison purchasing agents, not the general public.
In this case the locks probably hadn't failed so much as were programmed to operate in a closed manner. I wonder if (voluntarily) cutting power could have opened the doors? That would take some effort ... almost certainly the hotel had backup generators that would have to be defeated, so definitely a job for the hotel support staff, but from there it should result in open doors.