I have actually bought an app on the play store once, because I had a gift card. Turns out, they didn’t use the gift card and used my cc on file for Google drive. Had to spend hours sorting that out with automated customer service, never gonna use that again. Their product actually does suck, and a lot of the reason that f-droid doesn’t is that they aren’t charging you to use it.

Given the state of a lot of the summaries I’ve seen lately, that is scary.

It’s the tls certificate that proves your website is legit. Without which, you can potentially be a malicious actor that can pose as the website, and when you download the iso, you could unknowingly download something malicious. It’s pretty hard to forget certificate renewal (most of the time there are plenty of reminders sent and warnings given), so the fact that it happened twice was very impressively bad.

Plenty of things, but the most obvious being the two separate instances they had issues with renewing their certs.

Also, don’t forget creating a bootable USB stick with the distros you think you’d like. Rufus or balena etcher should get you there, just figure out what distros you think you’d like to try out, as sometimes it can be easier to set those up than create a vm, plus you might be able to notice any obvious issues running natively.

I mean, I use Bluetooth headphones on my phone most of the time, but I do still require a headphone jack as a backup. I used a phone without one for a while, and decided I need one on future phones, as well as a micro SD card (I need more than a tb of storage for my music and audiobooks).

Actually, a few of the Motorola phones do have headphone jacks and sd card ports, like the moto G. Which is why I’m really, really hoping those are the models supported.

Nvidia occasionally can be a pain, but that is mostly in laptops in my experience, desktop drivers are generally fine. Try whatever distro you want, might wanna start by burning some distros on flash drives and booting from them to see which one you like the most. Lazy recommendations are Mint, Fedora, Bazzite, and maybe endeavorOS. Also, the most you might have to do with regards to the Nvidia drivers is install them via terminal (which for a lot of people is literally copy/paste the command into a terminal and follow what it says, usually to enter your password and y/n do you want to install), but there are a few distros that have the option to install via GUI.

You absolutely can. Currently running mine off of my desktop, but it’s overkill and have a few coworkers that used nucs/cheap mini PCs to setup jellyfin. Biggest thing is to make sure you have enough storage to hold all of your media, then you’re fine.

My father got and installed two of the newer nest thermostats, and they are bar none two of the most annoying tech devices I’ve ever had the misfortune of having to fix. Have literally spent hours debugging them when changing the wifi password, they don’t support wpa3, and the setup app feels like a half assed student project. I know this audience probably isn’t interested in getting one, but if one of your family members gets some for free, do NOT let them install them.

They’re not really that great compared to AMD for the most part. Plus rumor is that AMDs next gen is a lot further ahead of Intel. Then again, it depends on how good of a deal you get on them and if power efficiency is a priority (I’ve heard that Intel still is pretty decent in that regard). That being said don’t get any of their 13th or 14th gen CPUs, that’s part of what has led to their current state of affairs.

I mean, for a phone yeah, but a small, relatively cheap waterproof device with a battery under a watt will probably start having issues at 5 years, more likely much before that. Waterproofing something that small will probably not be easy after replacing the battery, so while you probably will be able to eventually, it probably will be a little more fragile afterwards. I’ve got a fitbit, and I’ve seen the videos of replacing the 0.25 watt battery, would for sure doubt it’s water resistance afterwards, probably easier to replace.

Yep. And mazda has physical climate button/knobs, with a physical dial to control the infotainment (it’s pretty convenient, if a bit of an older design on most of their vehicles).

As someone who drives a mazda with infotainment designed before touchscreens (it has one), I’m fine with this.

“Points at adoption/fostering (assuming you want children)”

Don’t forget salad. Outback is largely one of the worst if you’re vegetarian unfortunately. Most steakhouses at least have a few vegetable sides and can make a meal out of them.

Seconding this, have made many recipes from it and generally is my go to when first searching for a recipe.

Phys.org or maybe nature? They’re mostly just seem to be reposts of journals or Nature articles, but they don’t usually have drama and can often be rather interesting. They aren’t necessarily about technology, just scientific advances which is a nice change from all of the enshitification news that almost any tech hub is blaring.

Honestly, I can accept the inflation issue of prices never truly going down, but when seemingly very little is done to help offset them you start having issues. Add to that most economists loudly broadcasting that the economy is reaching new highs while a lot of middle class households have to pay more of their earnings on housing and food, and you are just sowing a lot of discontent. That is largely my issue, as irrational as it might appear at first glance to be angry with an article just saying that inflation has decreased from its highs.

Yes, but they don’t even mention the yearly target in the article, just broadly allude to inflation not being an issue anymore, even though it has actively driven prices up significantly for pretty much everything for the last few years. It is absolutely a pain point that is often glossed over when talking about the economy, usually when commenting how good it is.

As for the job market, I’m in tech. It’s insanely hard to get a job right now, as most places simply aren’t hiring (or worse, put up job ads but have no plan to fill them, as insane as that is). Wages have stagnated for sure, and housing has gone up in price. I haven’t actually seen many high wage growth for a lot of stuff around me either, mostly just adjusting lower end wages so that people can (mostly) afford rent. 2% inflation is better than the last couple of years, but the article linked completely downplayed all of those factors. Which is why I said it was bullshit.