I'll often put a couple days of clothes in my carry on, for if/when the lose your bag and it takes a couple days to get it. Or if a connection is cancelled or you miss it, and you're stuck in another city overnight with no access to your checked bag. This has happened to me multiple times, so I always pack overnight essentials in my carry on, and any clothes I would need for the next day or two.

Europe uses brick interior walls. I just renovated an apartment in Spain, completely gutted it, and they used brick for the interior walls. It's pretty standard there. I had multiple ceiling mounted access points installed, thinking the walls would kill the signal, but honestly it's not that bad and I would have been more than the with 2 APs instead of 3. Honestly 1 centrally located probably would have been fine...

The search space is a lot lower for the airports. I've only seen this used for international flights, so they already have a set of passport images for everyone who's supposed to be on the flight. They only have to compare against that set. It's similar to Global Entry, where they already have photos of everyone arriving so can just compare against that set.

On Pixel phones, I think the Google app also contains the launcher

That's actually exactly the way VoLTE (and VoNR) works. It's a SIP VoIP connection on a prioritized LTE or NR data session. There is a guaranteed bitrate, at the highest QoS priority (QCI 1) on the network. IMS also works this way, but at a lower QoS (QCI 5). Regular data sessions are not guaranteed bitrates, and are in the QCI 6-9 range. Often tethering is a separate data session at a lower QoS than regular phone data (for example, QCI 6 vs QCI 8).

Apparently it only works with Indian GPay accounts. Or at least when I was in India, I couldn't figure out how to do it with my US GPay account (that had a balance in it). There wasn't even an option in the app to scan a QR code.

But it would be fantastic if the US moved to this system. Credit card companies charge absurd fees, and they have control over what people can sell. If they suddenly decide that they don't like the physical product that you're selling (has happened with companies I've been involved with), Visa/Mastercard cut you off. No more non-cash payments for you. It's insane that a private company can have that level of power over what people can legally sell.

That's because they come with "starter cartridges" that don't have much toner in them. If you're only going through the starter cartridges every few years, if you buy actual full capacity cartridges they'll last you like 10 years. Or pay slightly more and get the high capacity ones that, depending on the model, have twice as much toner in them.

Sometimes, but not always. For example, in Spain, it's not possible to get an eSIM before traveling. I'm not sure if it's even possible to do eSIM on a prepaid plan actually. Other EU countries charge extra for eSIM if they offer it. Colombia also doesn't have eSIM (at least for prepaid).

I wish that my phone supported dual eSIM, while also keeping a physical SIM (ie, one of the SIMs can be either physical or eSIM, and the other eSIM only, rather than the current 1 physical + 1 eSIM). It would be nice to have the option to use eSIM when traveling, but way to many places are still physical SIM only, at least for prepaid.

I haven't owned an Apple product since my Power Mac G5, but work bought me an M1 Max Macbook Pro. I have to say, I'm pretty impressed with the performance, I really didn't expect it to be as fast as it is. I've been Linux only since 2007 (other than a Windows VM for some applications), so MacOS takes a little getting used to (and is frustrating at times), but homebrew really helps. The one thing that is really nice is that suspend/resume works instantly and reliably, which is something that has always been a bit flakey (will sometimes to fail to enter suspend) or laggy on my Thinkpads with Ubuntu. And battery life is fantastic, though Chromebooks also get similar battery life and run Linux (via crouton or crostini, or both).

Another thing that is annoying is drivers... I had a USB ethernet adapter that I couldn't figure out why it wasn't working (an ethernet device showed on the system). Turns out MacOS didn't have the drivers for it, which was something I wasn't accustomed to coming from Linux where drivers for most things are built into the kernel. Driver installation was a bit of a pain, requiring 3 reboots. Likewise, loading kernel modules in MacOS for things like FUSE are a pain, since you have to do multiple reboots and enable things in the bootloader, etc.

Lastly, the lack of package management or any sort of uninstall method is.... sad. For most applications you just drag their folder into the Applications directory, which makes them easy to also remove, but some are .pkg files which copy files places and run install scripts. The system apparently keeps a record of pkgs that have been installed, but there is no universal way to uninstall them. The system records the files that were copied, so you can manually remove them, but it doesn't track what the scripts do. So to uninstall those you need to save the original pkg and there are tools that can analyze them and tell you which files were touched by the installer scripts. You can then manually remove or revert those files. Some software will ship with an uninstaller pkg as well that you can run. But my point is that cleanup for these types of applications isn't easy.

I agree. I have a 2017 Pixelbook (16GB RAM model) and I love it. Super light weight, fast suspend and resume, great battery life. I turned on developer mode immediately and installed Crouton (pre-Crostini) so that it's basically a lightweight linux laptop with all the pros of a chromebook. GUI apps with Crouton are a bit... ugly/hacky, but CLI is fantastic. Crostini though definitely has a performance hit, since it's running as a container within a VM. Everything is noticeably slower for some reason compared to Crouton (CLI and GUI), even CPU bound tasks. Disk access is much slower (even to the container's filesystem), especially if you need to access the ChromeOS filesystem since it uses an sshfs mount to access it.

My biggest complaint with the 2017 Pixelbook at this point is that CPU performance feels like it's getting worse. I have hyperthreading enabled (disabled by default now for security reasons), and that helped. I tried turning off some of the other CPU vulnerability mitigations and it made Crostini so slow that it was impossible to use (I'm assuming that the VM then did them in software instead?). When I first got it it seemed plenty fast, but now I can tell the CPU is aging even just loading webpages.

All that being said, Chromebooks generally make fantastic Linux laptops, especially if most of your work is via SSH to remote systems. I've always had issues with fast, reliable suspend/resume with Linux on my Thinkpads, along with battery life. Chromebooks solve that issue.

I saw him speak probably 10+ years ago about Palantir, and the take away was more or less the same thing. That they have an insane amount of data on you, which should scare you, but is great for them (and their government customers).

I disagree. Inkjets dry out quickly. You only get a few months (maybe a year if you're lucky?) before the cartridges dry out and you have to replace them (or the printer in OPs case...). You can get a color laser printer, often with duplex printing, for about $300 (duplex seems to be standard sometimes, sometimes it's $50 more). An inkjet is going to be $100 probably, so after replacing it 3 times you're better off with the laser.

I have a Xerox color laser printer that I got close to 5 years ago and is still at 80+% on it's starter toner cartridges. I only use it a few times a month. On my other color laser, I print about 15-20 pages per day in color, and the toner cartridges last months to a year (depending on the color).

The only thing that laser isn't as good at is color accuracy. The one Xerox printer I have defaults to trying to enhance/fix colors, and just makes them not match what's on the screen. Eventually I figured out settings that basically gets it to print as displayed, but if you're printing photos it can't really compete with an inkjet (plus there are odd lines/patterns and such if you look closely... just the way color laser printers produce colors).

Only for the older gen rapid tests, and even then it's only possible. It depends how those rapid tests are designed (the antibodies may not match up. A COVID vaccine likely won't trigger a positive antibody test for example).

Because of the false positive rate with the rapid tests, they often do later gen PCR tests for HIV that look for the virus directly. So this wouldn't be an issue at all.

Because a lot of people at high risk for HIV take PrEP to prevent infection. To be a participant in this trial you'd have to stop taking it.

Install Google's Suspicious Site Reporter extension. You don't have to use it for anything, but simply having it installed will make http and https show up again