All true, but I am going to be that nerd and point out that there were indeed commercial devices with lithium ion battery packs in them in the mid to late '90s, especially so in the late '90s. By 2000-2001 you couldn’t escape the damn things in cameras, disc players, PDAs, etc. So yes, it did take relatively forever for the technology to become commercially ubiquitous, but not that long. (And yes, the first couple of waves of Li-Ion batteries were indeed crap, and had all of us geeks clamoring for gadgets that still took AA’s for a while.)

Your video player “can” account for latency if you configure it correctly which I imagine the majority of people don’t do, and simply put up with it. Ditto with your music playback always lagging 1-2 seconds behind your control inputs. I have never used a media player on any platform that automatically figured out audio latency. Maybe the iDevices do if you pair them with Airpods, I don’t know; I don’t own anything Apple and I never will.

It also matters for music production, and makes life a lot more pleasant for audio/video editing. Plus, latency is just annoying in any setting.

And also no latency. Even expensive Bluetooth headphones and earbuds have crap latency. The systems that don’t are either proprietary and not widely supported (e.g. aptX) or expensive 'phones-and-dongle arrangements that must always travel in a pair and still don’t compete on latency with a pair of dollar store earbuds.

We’d love to, but manufacturers keep trying to force them down our throats. And when we express a different prererence or use case a bunch of trolls feel the need to pop out of the woodwork and tell us that no, we’re actually wrong and our use cases don’t actually exist.

How about you all don’t worry about what headphones other people are using?

Zoomer Parker will not lug around an SLR camera in the next reboot; he’ll simply be a drone operator.

I have. My former bank disallowed reusing any of your previous passwords, and also did “clever” things like flagging you for using sequences of characters from your old passwords as well.

All provisos that revealed that they were storing passwords (including old passwords) in plain text, because there’s no way they’d be able to make those determinations if they were irreversibly hashing passwords correctly.

TL;DR: They’re no longer my bank.

Hell, most of the major labels post tracks themselves to sponge up that sweet ad revenue. You can just use the tool of your choice to download the audio straight out of it if you decide you want to keep it for later.

I also haven’t forgiven them for trying to sue people for simply watching the Geohot video, or removing alternative OS functionality from the PS3, or for trying to reinvent MMC/SD memory cards in a different shape and charge more for for them. Hell, I still haven’t forgiven them for SonicStage.

I won’t buy anything from Sony for any reason. I don’t care what it is. I made damn sure my most recent camera purchase wasn’t a Sony, no matter what the reviews said. That’s because they pissed me off 20 years ago and haven’t demonstrated any improvement in behavior since. Nerds have long memories.

More likely it’s happening because the password change field silently truncates your input and the login field doesn’t, or vise-versa, because whoever designed the web page or system is stupid.

When they say “repopulate,” what they really mean is “reproduce faster than the brown people.” As usual it’s racism all the way down.

Yes, and possibly also so they can’t get sued or have to license the Michelin name somehow if they can point to the fact that their stars are clearly not the same thing.

Based on the popular trope of Hispanic guys hanging around outside of Home Depot (or other American big box hardware stores) every morning looking to get picked up as day laborers.

Which everyone always gets wrong, since there’s apparently a deeply ingrained cultural misconception that a restaurant can achieve up to five Michelin stars. Even Ratatouille got this wrong (although possibly deliberately), with the implication that Gusteau’s was a “five” star restaurant, its downgrading to four is the event that caused Gusteau himself to lose his will to live, and afterwards it was downgraded again to three. Which is already the maximum. Either Gusteau’s was just originally so good it broke the scale, or it was the sole and singular haute cuisine establishment in all of Paris that was not ranked by Michelin for some reason.

The various hotel ranking schemes have a one-to-five stars scale, though, which is probably what most people conflate the Michelin stars with. Unlike the Michelin ratings there is no central or consistent authority on hotel rankings so they’re pretty arbitrary to begin with and to a certain degree just a marketing ploy.

I’ll bet you it does, but you’ll need to put a new battery in it.

I bought it on Dealextreme back in the day, which was kind of the precursor to our current Aliexpress/Wish/Temu/Shein arrangement. It’s therefore possible that it is a knockoff (or a knockoff of a knockoff?) but the fact remains that it was absurdly cheap, is fully mechanical, and against all expectation and reason it continues to function and also keep pretty good time. It’s actually just a hair fast, and requires me to knock a minute off of it about once per week.

If you’re not squeamish you can get a thoroughly generic – or perhaps heavily “inspired” by some particular name brand – wind-up timepiece from any of the usual suspects for pocket change. $10-20, and other poster in here mentioned they bought theirs for $5.

Nice. It is astounding what you can get for just a couple of bucks, and even more astounding that they genuinely work.

I just took a more detailed look. They do still make quite a few mechanicals but they have indeed shot up in price. $80-90 nowadays, it seems.

My old one is definitely mechanical. I wind it up every morning.

It’s also approachably yet suspiciously cheap. I think I paid $20 for this close to 15 years ago, and Sinobi is apparently still at it making mechanical watches in the $30 range.

This one does two things: Tells you the time, and does so while not needing batteries.

If we’re doing watches today, here’s what I’m rocking lately.

I stopped using my Garmin smartwatch because they finally fell into the enshittification trap and recently tried adding AI slop and a subscription scheme into their watch app. That’s a big old nope from me, dawg.

Decades of the Catholic church demonizing birth control methods and claiming condoms cause AIDS will do that do a continent.