My wife and I live with a wasteful 7.2 kWh/day on average over an entire year in Oregon. I'm not sure he claimed 2 kWh/day as usage, the sentence seems to be formed to indicate that is how much he gets on overcast days and that he could last 4-5 days from the battery with that minimal overcast generation.
Most of my experience has come on flights across the Pacific. On one flight the turbulence was such that the flight attendant who was walking to check that everyone had their seat belts on went a good 6-12" off the floor but was able to catch herself as her feet made contact by grabbing onto the arm of the seat next to her and landing in a crouched position. Most turbulence has not been so dramatic, but it should be taken seriously.
If Chinese is well written it is fairly formulaic and rigid, following an STPVO format. They are talking about news articles, not TV dramas. I've tested a few phrases and usually one of the two seems to be an okay translation, where the other may be far off. I tried phrases like, "When I took my dog for a walk today I found a new Japanese restaurant. The prices seemed reasonable and affordable. The taste was pretty authentic." Which it seemed to do well with. The phrase literally translated from Chinese would read, "I today walk dog at the time realized new japan style restaurant. Prices reasonable, I eat able lift. Taste also authentic." Which may have been closer to what Google Translate would have done some years ago.
Sadly I only type in Traditional Chinese and had to use Google Translate to convert the characters to Simplified which is the current requirement for using their translator. Had they implemented Traditional Chinese I would have tried more phrases.
And I'm taxed to pay for roads that I don't use, to subsidize parking lots, larger lanes, clean up of traffic accidents by impatient drivers who can't appreciate that their 4 hour trip is now 20 minutes, but hey someone in front of them is doing the speed limit, or I can make that yellow light. The entitlement that clown car drivers have while surfing around in their air conditioned luxury motorized sofas is appalling.
I can't really think of what else would compel me to get a new phone over the one I currently have. With 128Gb space hasn't been an issue. I use it mostly for web browsing when out and about, email checking, and Google Maps. I listen to music and sometimes watch Youtube on it. I even make payments with it at checkout at the few places that have that setup.
Longer battery life has been solved with an external 12000mWh pack, which I rarely need to use.
Is there anything I would think, what would I do on a 4" screen?
I bought an i7 16Gb, 512MB SSD Lenovo laptop 13.9" screen for $1050. This is as powerful as my desktop system. Why would I want to spend the same amount on a phone that is marginally better than my current phone, and is missing the headphone jack that I use quite often?
Unlike my previous upgrades which had been due to lack of processing power, limited storage, and screen size and quality, I'm perfectly content with the phone I have now. Truly innovative ideas, like that of the move to smart phone, which reshapes how we interact with the world, will be what drives them forward. Face ID,, removing the headphone jack, or making a prettier screen are not those kinds of ideas.
This is just a ruling concerning the preliminary injunction that Disney sought. The judge didn't make a ruling against the case and this will now continue to trial while Redbox can continue their practice of selling the download codes that came with the boxes.
This same practice I see all the time with Amazon CD + MP3 service. People buy the CD with instant rip and download the MP3's while putting the physical disc up for sale.
I was just thinking about the structural integrity while reading your comment. There would probably be quite a few spills that happen with cups without lids. But then I started thinking about the coffee cups with the lids that are perforated in a triangular shape. That might be something for the interim. Being able to get rid of the plastic lids would also reduce the plastic used, but once people are trained to drink things without straws then it shouldn't be too hard to get people to not spill drinks without lids, or offer sippy lids that are reusable.
Bubble Tea started in Taiwan, then made its way over to the States more recently. Having been traveling back and forth between both places I'm not exactly sure on the timeline of when Bubble Tea made it to the states, but it seems to be within the last 2-5 years, but I had it all the time 12 years ago in Taiwan at every single drink stand which are literally at least one, if not two or three, per block.
Some observations I made while living in Taiwan and plastic bag use.
1. The plastic bag you pay about $0.03-$0.15USD for is much thicker and durable. 2. You don't double or triple bag 3. You fill the bag to the brim 4. You think twice about whether or not you need a bag
Many times I just carried my one or two items out of the store. If I had more people with me, then we carried more items.
In Taiwan even the McDonald's has separated trash bins. Generally recyclable, trash, and a place to dump your drinks and stack the cups. It's really not hard to separate the items before discarding them.
It's a slightly different culture there. It's not that there are multi-use versions of straws, but that they give them out for everything. If you go to a 7-11 and get a 20oz bottle of coke, they give you a straw. Buy two of them, they give you two straws. It's essentially unheard of in a restaurant to have a drink without a straw also given to you even though the reusable cups can be drank from without a straw.
I'm not certain how fast food places will change for this, as their lids make it impossible to drink without a straw, and the cups are flimsy without lids.
One thing I can state, the shopping bags that they charge for there are of a much higher quality than the ones you get in the states. This may be that they start making higher quality cups that don't bend as easily for in restaurant use, or even start having reusable cups in McDonald's.
Arguably the robot didn't fight, it adjusted to the situation as road blocks were put in its way. It didn't attack the human in any way, it just continued to try and go through the door. By this definition roomba vacuums "fights back" when items are placed in its path. The only difference is the robot dog kept trying to go forward again and again whereas the vacuum would turn and do something else or eventually give up.
The dollar an hour is only true in some states, and it is required that if their hourly wage + tips is less than minimum wage that the restaurant has to make up the difference to keep them at at least minimum wage. On the West coast, most states ignore tips in this calculation and require that all staff get paid at least minimum wage regardless of tips, so tips are actually an added on bonus to hourly wage instead of part of it.
Except the bus doesn't let me choose if I want to allow other passengers or not, and are on fixed route. This system would take me from point A to point B with perhaps a couple short detours for other passengers. An algorithm could be used to figure out who is the best match for where I am going and help reduce the number of single occupancy rides, while minimizing time to get there. This idea is what the original ride sharing was supposed to be, actually sharing rides, not being a taxi driver.
What I see being the future of transportation would be to have shared vehicle fleets that act similar to public transit in that they will pick up other people along the way instead of a bunch of single occupancy self driving vehicles. How this might work is you hail one with an app, and get in. Somewhere down the road a message pops up on the console asking if you would like to pick up other passengers, or pay a fee to continue by yourself. Perhaps a rating system for other passengers so you could make a decision based on what rating they have. Sort of Black Mirrorish, but might be interesting.
What I don't look forward to is the inevitable advertising that will be put into these.
I've been car free for over a year, and the only thing I sometimes miss is using the car as a portable storage unit. Without a car that will be the same one when you get done shopping you have to carry everything you take, and buy, with you.
For me it was the sudden jarring alarm that comes out of nowhere and demands attention, not the best thing to have going through heavy traffic with lots of people merging. Perhaps having the alarm start softer and escalate over time would limit that issue, like a 10 second build up to the blazing alarm. This, combined with restricting it to real emergencies would make it a much better emergency broadcast system.
At least with Windows I could create a program to run an alarm with a decent snooze function. Apple got this idea that an old style of snooze in mechanical alarm clocks that set 9 minutes for the snooze time was the only thing users ever needed and would never want to snooze for 5 minutes or 15 minutes. You could install another alarm, but with their lock hold on background apps it has to be literally the last program you use before going to sleep, and to hell with you if you happen to check email or Facebook just before turning off the light and forget to bring the alarm app back up.
I'm thinking my next phone will probably be a Samsung, or some other Android and not an Apple.
I actually love my bezel and think it's a highly attractive feature. I want to be able to easily place the phone face done and have no light leak, or to hold it firmly without accidentally pressing anything. I like that I can place a stand that grips it for a tripod, and that if it somehow slips from my hand it has less of a chance to smash directly on the face.
Most people I know with their bezelless Samsungs have put cases that, guess what, makes a bezel. Yet another reason to stick with my 6s.
Every time I open my Kindle Paperwhite I do not regret paying $20, it is amazing to open the cover and be reading instantly. Plus you get some more screen real estate on the home screen without the banner ad on the bottom when looking through your collection of books.
The Kindle Fire was only $15, but it does feel faster, it's at least much quicker to open now that it doesn't have to stop and load ads, especially the animated ones. I don't see a setting to have it automatically unlock like the Paperwhite does.
How I see it is I sold my soul for the $20 off to make it cheap, the actual cost of the device is without the special offers, if anything they will lose profit over it due to lost ad revenue, and fewer eyes to show to their ad purchasers. The deal feels heavily in Amazon's favor, for $20 off their own device which is essentially a loss leader they get to make much, much more in selling ads residually, where our benefit was a single instance. If they gave us $10 off our prime membership every year for each device then it would almost be a balanced deal.
I recently just paid Amazon to stop serving me ads on my two kindle devices. I can now open my Kindle Paperwhite and NOT have to swipe to start reading. My Kindle Fire feels like it loads faster too without having to display ads, especially the animated variety. The entire time I had them not once had a relevant ad ever been posted, and selling my soul for $20 off just didn't seem worth it any more.
There are competing systems now with BT for higher quality audio. The Airpods use a proprietary Apple connection, and I believe Samsung has their own. With BT 5.0 there will be much more bandwidth to allow for higher fidelity.
I had recently tested the Sennheiser HD1's, and they were almost, almost there. It was painful to come to the decision that despite their flawless cord to BT switching, and multiple device pairing, and call handling, that there were two areas that just didn't cut it.
1) Comfort, they focused on travel size and shrunk the size of the phones to no longer be over ear but on ear. This and the head band was stiffer and had less padding. I could wear these for 15 minutes and be happy when I took them off. As many others described it, their ears felt hot wearing them, a common sign of fatigue in wearing headphones.
2) The audio quality, even with their special app, was just not up to par. Even using the USB cable connected to the laptop where it does this amazing job of allowing for much better audio through the USB cable, but still could not match the pair of Sennheiser HD 598's I got.
Ultimately it was a combination of both that really pushed me to return them. I picked up the HD 598 for $120, and the Sennheiser HD1's for around $300. For that price I was expecting the same performance and comfort that is what Sennheiser stands for.
The noise cancelling was decent, not as good as Bose (which is why cayenne8 sees them so often on airplanes), but enough that my wife would get mad as she was leaving for work as I could not hear anything she said if I had a little music playing. That's sort of the key to their noise cancelling, it works fantastically with other noise going through them, but only mediocre as a system by themselves. Add to it that they get uncomfortable for extended periods of time and I couldn't see making the 14hr trans-pacific flights with these on. Plus the touch interface left me wanting. Solid buttons still have their place, and it would have been great to have a single button I could press and hold, or press again, to allow pass through for conversation, but alas it is stuck in their touch menu somewhere with a two taps to turn on, two to turn off, but don't confuse it with tap to pause, or volume, or something else.
I recently just paid $20 and $15 to remove amazon "special offers" from my devices. It is so nice to open my kindle paperwhite and start reading immediately rather than swiping off a page of ads.
Slashdot Mirror
My wife and I live with a wasteful 7.2 kWh/day on average over an entire year in Oregon. I'm not sure he claimed 2 kWh/day as usage, the sentence seems to be formed to indicate that is how much he gets on overcast days and that he could last 4-5 days from the battery with that minimal overcast generation.
Most of my experience has come on flights across the Pacific. On one flight the turbulence was such that the flight attendant who was walking to check that everyone had their seat belts on went a good 6-12" off the floor but was able to catch herself as her feet made contact by grabbing onto the arm of the seat next to her and landing in a crouched position. Most turbulence has not been so dramatic, but it should be taken seriously.
If Chinese is well written it is fairly formulaic and rigid, following an STPVO format. They are talking about news articles, not TV dramas. I've tested a few phrases and usually one of the two seems to be an okay translation, where the other may be far off. I tried phrases like, "When I took my dog for a walk today I found a new Japanese restaurant. The prices seemed reasonable and affordable. The taste was pretty authentic." Which it seemed to do well with. The phrase literally translated from Chinese would read, "I today walk dog at the time realized new japan style restaurant. Prices reasonable, I eat able lift. Taste also authentic." Which may have been closer to what Google Translate would have done some years ago.
Sadly I only type in Traditional Chinese and had to use Google Translate to convert the characters to Simplified which is the current requirement for using their translator. Had they implemented Traditional Chinese I would have tried more phrases.
And I'm taxed to pay for roads that I don't use, to subsidize parking lots, larger lanes, clean up of traffic accidents by impatient drivers who can't appreciate that their 4 hour trip is now 20 minutes, but hey someone in front of them is doing the speed limit, or I can make that yellow light. The entitlement that clown car drivers have while surfing around in their air conditioned luxury motorized sofas is appalling.
I can't really think of what else would compel me to get a new phone over the one I currently have. With 128Gb space hasn't been an issue. I use it mostly for web browsing when out and about, email checking, and Google Maps. I listen to music and sometimes watch Youtube on it. I even make payments with it at checkout at the few places that have that setup.
Longer battery life has been solved with an external 12000mWh pack, which I rarely need to use.
Is there anything I would think, what would I do on a 4" screen?
I bought an i7 16Gb, 512MB SSD Lenovo laptop 13.9" screen for $1050. This is as powerful as my desktop system. Why would I want to spend the same amount on a phone that is marginally better than my current phone, and is missing the headphone jack that I use quite often?
Unlike my previous upgrades which had been due to lack of processing power, limited storage, and screen size and quality, I'm perfectly content with the phone I have now. Truly innovative ideas, like that of the move to smart phone, which reshapes how we interact with the world, will be what drives them forward. Face ID,, removing the headphone jack, or making a prettier screen are not those kinds of ideas.
This is just a ruling concerning the preliminary injunction that Disney sought. The judge didn't make a ruling against the case and this will now continue to trial while Redbox can continue their practice of selling the download codes that came with the boxes.
This same practice I see all the time with Amazon CD + MP3 service. People buy the CD with instant rip and download the MP3's while putting the physical disc up for sale.
I was just thinking about the structural integrity while reading your comment. There would probably be quite a few spills that happen with cups without lids. But then I started thinking about the coffee cups with the lids that are perforated in a triangular shape. That might be something for the interim. Being able to get rid of the plastic lids would also reduce the plastic used, but once people are trained to drink things without straws then it shouldn't be too hard to get people to not spill drinks without lids, or offer sippy lids that are reusable.
Bubble Tea started in Taiwan, then made its way over to the States more recently. Having been traveling back and forth between both places I'm not exactly sure on the timeline of when Bubble Tea made it to the states, but it seems to be within the last 2-5 years, but I had it all the time 12 years ago in Taiwan at every single drink stand which are literally at least one, if not two or three, per block.
Some observations I made while living in Taiwan and plastic bag use.
1. The plastic bag you pay about $0.03-$0.15USD for is much thicker and durable.
2. You don't double or triple bag
3. You fill the bag to the brim
4. You think twice about whether or not you need a bag
Many times I just carried my one or two items out of the store. If I had more people with me, then we carried more items.
In Taiwan even the McDonald's has separated trash bins. Generally recyclable, trash, and a place to dump your drinks and stack the cups. It's really not hard to separate the items before discarding them.
It's a slightly different culture there. It's not that there are multi-use versions of straws, but that they give them out for everything. If you go to a 7-11 and get a 20oz bottle of coke, they give you a straw. Buy two of them, they give you two straws. It's essentially unheard of in a restaurant to have a drink without a straw also given to you even though the reusable cups can be drank from without a straw.
I'm not certain how fast food places will change for this, as their lids make it impossible to drink without a straw, and the cups are flimsy without lids.
One thing I can state, the shopping bags that they charge for there are of a much higher quality than the ones you get in the states. This may be that they start making higher quality cups that don't bend as easily for in restaurant use, or even start having reusable cups in McDonald's.
Arguably the robot didn't fight, it adjusted to the situation as road blocks were put in its way. It didn't attack the human in any way, it just continued to try and go through the door. By this definition roomba vacuums "fights back" when items are placed in its path. The only difference is the robot dog kept trying to go forward again and again whereas the vacuum would turn and do something else or eventually give up.
The dollar an hour is only true in some states, and it is required that if their hourly wage + tips is less than minimum wage that the restaurant has to make up the difference to keep them at at least minimum wage. On the West coast, most states ignore tips in this calculation and require that all staff get paid at least minimum wage regardless of tips, so tips are actually an added on bonus to hourly wage instead of part of it.
Except the bus doesn't let me choose if I want to allow other passengers or not, and are on fixed route. This system would take me from point A to point B with perhaps a couple short detours for other passengers. An algorithm could be used to figure out who is the best match for where I am going and help reduce the number of single occupancy rides, while minimizing time to get there. This idea is what the original ride sharing was supposed to be, actually sharing rides, not being a taxi driver.
What I see being the future of transportation would be to have shared vehicle fleets that act similar to public transit in that they will pick up other people along the way instead of a bunch of single occupancy self driving vehicles. How this might work is you hail one with an app, and get in. Somewhere down the road a message pops up on the console asking if you would like to pick up other passengers, or pay a fee to continue by yourself. Perhaps a rating system for other passengers so you could make a decision based on what rating they have. Sort of Black Mirrorish, but might be interesting.
What I don't look forward to is the inevitable advertising that will be put into these.
I've been car free for over a year, and the only thing I sometimes miss is using the car as a portable storage unit. Without a car that will be the same one when you get done shopping you have to carry everything you take, and buy, with you.
For me it was the sudden jarring alarm that comes out of nowhere and demands attention, not the best thing to have going through heavy traffic with lots of people merging. Perhaps having the alarm start softer and escalate over time would limit that issue, like a 10 second build up to the blazing alarm. This, combined with restricting it to real emergencies would make it a much better emergency broadcast system.
Or their policy to not be evil.
At least with Windows I could create a program to run an alarm with a decent snooze function. Apple got this idea that an old style of snooze in mechanical alarm clocks that set 9 minutes for the snooze time was the only thing users ever needed and would never want to snooze for 5 minutes or 15 minutes. You could install another alarm, but with their lock hold on background apps it has to be literally the last program you use before going to sleep, and to hell with you if you happen to check email or Facebook just before turning off the light and forget to bring the alarm app back up.
I'm thinking my next phone will probably be a Samsung, or some other Android and not an Apple.
I actually love my bezel and think it's a highly attractive feature. I want to be able to easily place the phone face done and have no light leak, or to hold it firmly without accidentally pressing anything. I like that I can place a stand that grips it for a tripod, and that if it somehow slips from my hand it has less of a chance to smash directly on the face.
Most people I know with their bezelless Samsungs have put cases that, guess what, makes a bezel. Yet another reason to stick with my 6s.
Every time I open my Kindle Paperwhite I do not regret paying $20, it is amazing to open the cover and be reading instantly. Plus you get some more screen real estate on the home screen without the banner ad on the bottom when looking through your collection of books.
The Kindle Fire was only $15, but it does feel faster, it's at least much quicker to open now that it doesn't have to stop and load ads, especially the animated ones. I don't see a setting to have it automatically unlock like the Paperwhite does.
How I see it is I sold my soul for the $20 off to make it cheap, the actual cost of the device is without the special offers, if anything they will lose profit over it due to lost ad revenue, and fewer eyes to show to their ad purchasers. The deal feels heavily in Amazon's favor, for $20 off their own device which is essentially a loss leader they get to make much, much more in selling ads residually, where our benefit was a single instance. If they gave us $10 off our prime membership every year for each device then it would almost be a balanced deal.
I recently just paid Amazon to stop serving me ads on my two kindle devices. I can now open my Kindle Paperwhite and NOT have to swipe to start reading. My Kindle Fire feels like it loads faster too without having to display ads, especially the animated variety. The entire time I had them not once had a relevant ad ever been posted, and selling my soul for $20 off just didn't seem worth it any more.
I screwed up with the product name, it was the Sennheiser PXC 550, not the HD-1 that I had tested out.
There are competing systems now with BT for higher quality audio. The Airpods use a proprietary Apple connection, and I believe Samsung has their own. With BT 5.0 there will be much more bandwidth to allow for higher fidelity.
I had recently tested the Sennheiser HD1's, and they were almost, almost there. It was painful to come to the decision that despite their flawless cord to BT switching, and multiple device pairing, and call handling, that there were two areas that just didn't cut it.
1) Comfort, they focused on travel size and shrunk the size of the phones to no longer be over ear but on ear. This and the head band was stiffer and had less padding. I could wear these for 15 minutes and be happy when I took them off. As many others described it, their ears felt hot wearing them, a common sign of fatigue in wearing headphones.
2) The audio quality, even with their special app, was just not up to par. Even using the USB cable connected to the laptop where it does this amazing job of allowing for much better audio through the USB cable, but still could not match the pair of Sennheiser HD 598's I got.
Ultimately it was a combination of both that really pushed me to return them. I picked up the HD 598 for $120, and the Sennheiser HD1's for around $300. For that price I was expecting the same performance and comfort that is what Sennheiser stands for.
The noise cancelling was decent, not as good as Bose (which is why cayenne8 sees them so often on airplanes), but enough that my wife would get mad as she was leaving for work as I could not hear anything she said if I had a little music playing. That's sort of the key to their noise cancelling, it works fantastically with other noise going through them, but only mediocre as a system by themselves. Add to it that they get uncomfortable for extended periods of time and I couldn't see making the 14hr trans-pacific flights with these on. Plus the touch interface left me wanting. Solid buttons still have their place, and it would have been great to have a single button I could press and hold, or press again, to allow pass through for conversation, but alas it is stuck in their touch menu somewhere with a two taps to turn on, two to turn off, but don't confuse it with tap to pause, or volume, or something else.
I recently just paid $20 and $15 to remove amazon "special offers" from my devices. It is so nice to open my kindle paperwhite and start reading immediately rather than swiping off a page of ads.
Agricultural societies don't give a damn what the clock says and operate when it gets light out and go home when it's dark.