That’s without counting the extra money spent on replacing strings, I’m sure using this kind of thing regularly would seriously shorten their lifespan.

The TS80P is lower wattage, technically, but the heating element is right up at the very tip, instead of having a heating element inside the handle with a long metal piece transmitting the heat. It gets hot way faster than you’d expect, it doesn’t feel like 30W at all.

It punches way, way above its weight. Unless you’re soldering pipes, comparing the wattage to traditional irons is misleading. Love that tiny thing.

Only problem is that this design necessitates proprietary tips that are relatively expensive. Not a fan of that, coming from the no name Global South Especiale 2$ firestarter irons that are the norm where I am. Not the end of the world, but worth keeping in mind.

The one I bought came with a USB-C cable that couldn’t handle the current though. That was the only real red flag. Shame too, that cable seemed like it was silicone coated and would have been ideal.

I genuinely believed (some number of) people would homeschool because regular school is too expensive. Interesting. American schools being free by default is really unexpected, especially given how expensive tertiary education is over there, and especially with the volume of complaints I hear about American school education being low quality. The free drinking water at restaurants thing is also unexpected to me.

It’s just weird that police have that responsibility there. I don’t get it. Getting questioned over being outside? I get that. Getting stopped? Weird.

In my part of the world (Lebanon) homeschooling isn’t really a thing. Public schools are seen as the cheaper, worse alternative, with many students who were kicked out of private schools continuing their education there. Teachers there get paid dirt and the buildings are often crumbling. Very few have a noteworthy reputation.

Most schools are private, not all that expensive, and usually religiously affiliated. That’s the default option. Then you have a very small number of expensive private schools mostly full of more affluent people.

The curriculum was last updated in like 1992 though which isn’t good lol

I was once walking down the street in the middle of the day on a weekday, and I literally had a cop stop me, thinking I was a high school student playing hookie from school.

Wait what? Is it the police’s job to make sure kids go to school in the US? What if they’re from a family that can’t even afford public school tuition? That’s so foreign to me. Cutting class should be frowned upon but not to the point of being harassed by police.

My understanding is that this is a deliberate choice, at least for Mercedes and BMW having their models be letters and numbers instead of memorable names. The idea is that all models seem closer together, kind of elevating them all.

Compared to when you look at an Accord and think this is the nice Honda, unlike the other not nice Honda. The implication is that all of the Mercedes ones should be nice.

But what do I fucking know. I like quirky weird cars, I like shitboxes, I’m one of those simultaneous fuckcars car guys (I hope I don’t need to explain how I can be in both camps at once?). I’m not the person any of these companies are marketing for.

I think I just like the retrofuturism of “giga pager”. Of course calling would work but it would be besides the point for me.

A modern phone could do everything this would be used for on a day-to-day.

BT headphones

Or a jack of some description, wires are always better for calls

Drop a SIM card in there and you’re not far off from a modern version of PDAs from back when pocket tech was interesting.

Not for calling of course. Text only (although everyone texts over the internet now - maybe for data as well).

Replying under the top comment but this really applies to all of these, how do these search engines determine what counts as a personal site? For example I had procrastinated for years on finally spinning up a static, barren HTML blog. The infamous Lucidity AI post introduced me to Mataroa and I got over the hump and started writing. Would that get indexed? Etc

Does it just crawl through webrings?

I don’t find it particularly funny but the art style is cool.

I remember people recommending decentraleyes for some time and then I remember there being an argument against it. I don’t remember what the problem was though.

I don’t think I’ve ever expressed this anywhere, but I don’t even consider that place to be a stopped clock. Always saw it as a random number generator with no brakes, which is why all the bad shit gets amplified when it wouldn’t breathing room elsewhere.

I used to like the musical discussions on there, way way back, and the conversations were pretty interesting.

Too bad vaguely gestures in every direction

Oh, I’m well aware. Every few months I search online for used Classics in working condition in my area because that’s a project I’m interested in, but I haven’t committed to it yet. Maybe I should as they are apparently getting expensive and harder to find everywhere.

I don’t think I’ll ever be a Mac user but I’ve seen how fast these newer MacBooks edit video on battery power without breaking a sweat (and without eating through the battery).

People focus on “software magic” with Apple but the M chips are serious hardware that a lot of us don’t take seriously because the company that killed the iPod made them.

My thought process is that in the case of media I’m not accessing the same files over and over, at least not for most of the files. For a media archive it would make sense, to me at least. I’m not familiar with modern tape storage, I’m sure there’s many good reasons why this isn’t done (yet?).

Would be good for self hosted offsite backups too I’d imagine.

Wish smaller scale tape storage was more viable for home use (homelab scale). Would love to have tapes instead of spinning drives for something like a home media server.

Last time I looked into it I didn’t even know where to start. Is it more feasible now? I’d imagine power consumption would also be better than keeping disks spinning all the time.

If you still think the hardware is pretty good, you haven’t been using their newer hardware.

I think I wrote a comment about this recently, but their newest mouse with a layout I like (G604) was made with terrible soft rubber that is practically designed to disintegrate with use. All their mouse switches are also short life crappy switches that stop working relatively quickly.

Soldering new switches into the G604 is an absolute PITA because it was designed by people who didn’t care for repair. Still doable, just annoying. I just wish the rubber was replaced with the grippy hard textured plastic they used a few years earlier.

At least you only need to use the software at first when you’re setting things up.

It’s kind of nice how everyone is in on the joke now? Like I think if you told the average person 15 years ago that a lot of history “documentaries” are racially motivated drivel you’d get a funny reaction.

I think I could show this to my (quite conservative) parents and get a good chuckle out of them now.

Granted I’m from the Middle East and the racist theories we have here have some of the roles swapped around. We don’t have 24 hour electricity but the average person genuinely believes we are the god-chosen enlightened people who are only held back by some combination of hubris, western empire, and “western empire” (this one should have a bunch of parentheses around it, several sets, I don’t want to get caught in some spam filter).

A lot of cool designs actually. Thanks to the LAPD for their endorsement or I wouldn’t have known about it.

I’m not American so maybe different ones appeal to me (Lucky Once is fucking hilarious and the Cantona Kick is very much up my alley)