🎼is/can/should be/do🎶
—Frank Sinatra

How did you end up working for him a second time?

A friend lived in a similar small town and if I went down to see him Applebee’s was the only place with TVs where we could watch sports. We were so happy when they got a Buffalo Wild Wings, even if they’re overpriced and I can go to better, local sports bars at my house, it’s a dramatic upgrade for his town.

I’d need to see what comparable x86 processors and graphics are to the M4, but yeah, this seems like it could be one of the first Macs in a while to be really competitive on price. It doesn’t happen often but it does happen. Fifteen years ago, a couple years after Macintosh went to Intel, I bought a Mac Pro. I had a hard time comparing prices at first, but once I finally realized I needed to be looking at workstations instead of desktops the Mac Pro actually came out to be about $300 less than identically spec’d workstations from Dell and HP. That was about the price of a full retail license on Windows Vista Ultimate (or later Windows 7 Ultimate). With Boot Camp and feeling like I could find Windows on sale for less it actually seemed to make the most sense with the added benefit of access to both Windows and OS X. It was frankly the best Windows machine I’ve ever used. No bloat, and all the drivers worked.

Does PeerTube offer RSS feeds?

Ah yes, the man whose ownership of the Dodgers became a messy part of his divorce as his ex-wife tried to claim shared ownership. It turned into what the L.A. Times called the most expensive divorce in California history.

How does that work for discovery, though?

That’s a neat solution

I don’t think PCVR works on Linux yet. The gaming support on Linux being driven largely by Valve is removing a lot of the reasons for consumers to use Windows, though. I wonder how long before big corporations push back on this Microsoft spyware, though.

In one sense this could actually be an interesting idea for an in-between device between the somewhat resurgent dumbphone and a smartphone. Still get some of the connectivity but with an E Ink display it would preclude many of the more time sucking aspects of a smartphone. Of course, they didn’t actually make this a phone.

I find it weird this device has a camera, though.

Mario Kart can be fun depending on how your partner is with video games in general and how you are as a couple competitively. Overcooked can also be a good franchise as a coop game but I’ve also heard in some languages it’s referred to as “divorce kitchen” so your mileage may vary.

Oh yes, the avoidance is entirely for governmental reasons. There is so much that would be interesting to see otherwise. Sadly it seems to be a repeating theme in Russian history where some change happens that seems like the ordinary people are finally starting to get some freedom and stability but then some authoritarian gets in power and cracks down on any dissenting views, even minor. I guess outsiders have to catch it during the right window of time.

I think your last point also applies to Valve. Limiting the number of models simplifies things for Valve; effectively they only have two models to support right now between the LCD and OLED models. From a software perspective I assume they’re extremely similar except at a very low level, mainly with the display panel difference. From a hardware perspective that’s only 2 main SKU families (looks like maybe 6 total with 3 of each?) and still probably a lot of parts overlap except with the panel and I’d assume two variants of the mainboard to accommodate different connections for each panel. Even making the OLED variants complicated things I’m sure, but it should be manageable.

We learned within the past year that Valve is still an astonishingly small company compared to how much revenue it has; I think they were only around 450 employees. That’s pretty doable with software, but dealing with hardware starts to force that level up and would start cutting into the incredible profitability per employee that they’re accustomed to.

Of course they’ve made plays in the hardware space before, but I don’t think anything’s been near the volume the Steam Deck has. Even assuming that they’re outsourcing the manufacturing, and maybe fulfillment, and maybe even warranty repairs, that still means they need employees to manage and support those programs. They need employees trained to support those products. They need to store spare parts and plan to have enough to legal requirements beyond the final sale date. They need to test software updates against every hardware variant prior to release for as long as the product is supported. Keeping the number of SKUs small makes the rest of that manageable and hopefully keeps profitability high and quality of service good. If they start adding too many SKUs then they need more employees, giving lower profitability and they start cutting quality and service until we end up with the bad products and support we see from so many big PC companies.

It seems like they’re working towards opening Steam OS up where other companies can make their own devices. Let other companies handle the incremental updates and making the software work with their hardware. Let Valve keep focusing on just making a few things but making them really good.

Windows are just so unsafe in Russia, aren’t they? I’m never getting near one if I ever go[ing] to Moscow.

I think like federated TikTok/Vine

I’m no expert in this but the passkeys really on some sort of public key, cryptographic pair. Your device will only send your encrypted cryptographic secret when it gets the correct encrypted cryptographic secret from the destination. This makes it much harder to steal credentials with a fake website or other service.

I’m assuming the purchase came from outside Brazil, then? How was the import process? I used to work for a device manufacturer and we had some customers in Brazil. It seemed like import duties were often quite high and there was a good likelihood the customs inspector might want a bribe. Most customers would have us ship to someone in the US and it seemed like they weren’t freight forwarders, just someone they knew traveling to Brazil soon who would bring the device with them. Actually, most of Central and South America was like that.

Any of the color e-ink readers from Kobo, Boox, reMarkable?

The article starts out explaining that other devices are not sold in Brazil; Kindle is the only option.

I was wondering why anyone would go to the trouble when you can just buy a different brand.

In Brazil, you can pick any e-reader you want, as long as it’s a Kindle. (Kobo, Boox, and other brands don’t sell their devices here.)

That’s too bad, and surprising since later in the article it mentions that Kobo does have a store in Brazil to sell EPUB files, but not their readers.