China calling Elon. Come in, Elon! :)

bah.

Let me know when they start making *autographic* 120 film again. I have the camera, and am dying to shoot a roll!

The last rolls were apparently made in 1932. The cameras had a flap that could flip up and allow writing directly onto the film with a stylus. When you see handwriting on an old picture print, it was likely shot on autographic.

[and, yes, in fact my autographic camera *does* have bellows!]

That Electrolux isn't really an Electrolux.

a couple of decades ago, in one of those weird corporate maneuvers, it sold the name, and now sells its vacuums under another name, while the buyer sells non-electrolux as Electrolux.

So what she knows of Electrolux from the late 20th and early 21st centuries no longer applies.

But, yes, they were very good and lasted forever. Also extremely pricey.

As holder of the domain aardvark.co.nz I can already feel the benefit.

try using mirrors. What could go wrong? :)

We had to have our entire roof reshingled after a particularly bad storm.

It turns out that of the various colors, the lightest (or 2?) was actually energy star rated. So we took it.

It turned out to be worth about 2F inside as compared to the prior black shingles.

We got another 2F when we replaced the swamp cooler--the newer model had an 18" pad instead of 12".

Between the roof and the bigger pads, we only had a single non-monsoon season day where we had to switch over to AC this summer--in Las Vegas!

(I'm going to miss the swamp cooler when we move, but they're apparently not allowed in new construction. I have no idea when the cutoff was)

Ok, so AOL is pulling another Amiga. Big deal.

What we all want to know is whether or not we'll soon be getting free coasters in the mail again!

>There is no proprietary infotainment system. GM is adopting Google Built-in.

You say that like it isn't even worse than proprietary . . .

>In 2001 cars didn't come with an AUX port...

yes, but . . . some, such as the Bosch units used in the Northstar Cadillacs of the 1990s, had pads for it on their circuit board.

Open the unit up, attach leads, and apply a signal, and *presto!*, aux appears in the cycle of inputs!

They also tended to be able to mount a CD changer in the trunk.

What suckers!

I'd have built them an AI system to answer the same questions for a tenth the cost!

[and then escaped with $99M while the machine made up answers .. . .]

The videos you watch don't have intrusive sponsorship segments then?

no need for an arial drone.

Whether automatically or by remote operator, drop a wheeled motor with the cones at the specified length on a chain.

Either make it able to collect them, or just have a retractor motor to pul it all back in.

next to controlling the truck itself, this is a trivial task.

I suspect it has in most households -- even boomer ones.

The problem is that nobody wants YouTube to be just like broadcast and cableTV was. The thing that made YouTube so compelling and so popular was its authenticity and variety -- but the management at YouTube are carefully killing the very thing that made it great.

Ever-growing levels of ever-more intrusive advertising. Ads that are (at times) 90 percent scams. Ads and content that are low-value AI-slop which, once the novelty value wears off, will drive people off the platform rather than onto it. Endless spambot comments on videos. -- all these things are slowly souring the formula that made YT what it is today.

Creators are complaining, viewers are complaining and pretty soon, advertisers will be complaining because viewer numbers will decline.

Many creators (such as myself) are now switching to self-hosting via a federated network of servers that we host ourselves (PeerTube or similar). Doing this frees us from the tyranny that is YouTube's arbitrary and unchallengable AI content moderation and it's unwillingness to deal with bogus copyright claims and strikes.

We have reached "peak Youtube" and just like so many companies that have become a huge part of our ever-day lives, it will now begin an ever-steepening decline.

If YouTube doesn't deliver what viewers and creators want they will find an alternative and the self-hosted federation of servers overcomes the single largest hurdle to creating a YouTube competitor -- the problem of matching the company's vast storage, processing and bandwidth capacity.

Watch this space... things are about to get exciting again!

That's right... you don't *really* think YT is giving you a choice do you?

I do not make shorts, I do not want shorts but without using plugins I can not avoid shorts. Successful companies are generally built on tailoring their offerings to match the needs/wants of their customers so YT once again proves that WE are not the customers, we are the product!

Just as with their AI deepfake detection system, YouTube has once again created a problem (Shorts addiction) so that it can deliver a solution (this auto-turn-off function).

I'd actually prefer that it didn't create the problems in the first place.

YouTube is a trainwreck right now and mid-tier creators are not valued at all. Just look at what they have to put up with