Some years ago, I did a long-running project at a client, and the manager there was a pretty affable guy, very much into gadgets. When he told me about watching movies on the Quest (VR headset by Facebook/Meta), I listened and then asked, "so I'm really curious, what's porn look like?"

He was actually quite honest and said it first looks really great, but then he said it felt incredibly real. But what happened was that in the porn movie, a naked woman would walk up to him, and would sit on his lap. He said that because it looked so real, he really expected to feel her sitting on his lap. And when that of course didn't happen, the whole VR movie felt the complete opposite, i.e. incredibly fake. Being so thoroughly yanked out of the mood, that ruined it for him.

So I'm not sure that porn is really a killer app here.

Saying that this code was poor would be an understatement.

The report (page 17) has this code as an example - describing it as "Whoever wrote this code clearly has no understanding of elementary mathematics or the most basic rules of programming."

Public Function ReverseSign(d)
If d < 0 Then
d = Abs(d)
Else
d = d - (d * 2)
End If
ReverseSign = d
End Function

The code could potentially be worse because the font that the report uses makes it hard to tell if they are testing "if d is less than zero" or "if d is less than the global variable o".

You'll feel a lot better when it isn't controlling your life.

I'm no doctor, but I don't think that the mere appreciation of the option to (say) listen to an interesting podcast to while away a couple of hours waiting for an aeroplane to land is much of an indicator that my phone is controlling my life.

Once you get over the DTs, you'll find that you never needed a pacifier to get through the day.

It's been 26 odd years now and I've never ever felt my phone to be a pacifier but, if it gets to that stage, then I'll be sure to heed your advice. Hopefully you're in a better place now.

What is you use case for "a load of cards"?

I used to also carry around a number of loyalty cards, membership cards and a library card - which would invariably bulk out my wallet.

Now I digitise them and carry them on my phone. I still carry a debit and credit card as backup, but the size of my wallet is significantly reduced.

If carrying around a flip phone works for people, then I'm happy for them.

That said, I remember the bad old days of carrying around a separate calendar, address book, pocket map, notepad, book and music player. Not to mention the inability to look up something instantly, entertain myself during a wait, and the need to lug around a load of cards in my wallet.

As someone who lived through that, I have absolutely zero desire to go back to anything remotely close to it.

Yup, leasing makes for crazy prices. A buddy of mine drives a Lexus is250 for this decade and it drives so smooth it's like a 6-cylinder sewing machine. My mom and dad regularly make a 750 mi. trip and refuse to stop for charging. The technology isn't there yet.

At some point, Toyota (and daughters) will put effort in an affordable and maintenance-light EV, but that point is not within sight, unfortunately.

As for me, I love EVs so much that I pay more and accept a lot of fidgety technical problems, just for the novelty...

The affordability is a big one, yeah. They all present themselves as oh-so-premium because that's the only way they can justify the price. And if the BMW is within reach, the dealer will suck your wallet dry whenever you so much as walk past the dealership. I don't blame you for waiting a few years. However I can see people leasing something to hold them over.

Or a drastic raise in oil prices.

Okay but what's holding you back then? Like, is it affordability in general? Longish list of specific requirements and not willing to budge on any of them? Range still an issue?

The attraction of the AirTags for this sort of thing is that it's got the brand on it. You say "buy a real GPS tracker" but which one? There's like a dozen weird brands, some have off-brand apps, some configure in clumsy ways via text messages, and I don't know which to pick because they all have fake reviews. I'm overdoing it here, but I don't think there's one brand you can trust.

You are using a different definition of phonics from the parent post. Phonics as used in educational circles means _only_ teachning what sounds the letters (or clusters of letters) make and not reading whole words by sight. Method currently popular in England according to my sources there.

Yep, I'm in England and my kids were taught using phonics as you describe.

The other interesting thing about phonics is that they have the concept of "alien words". These are words that are nonsense, but the idea is for the kids to apply the phonic rules they've learnt to work out how they should be pronounced, rather than using their memory.

Some examples are: Steck, Hild, Quemp, Geck, Chom and Tord.

After reading up on the Steam Deck, it has a lot of software to make games run in the correct configuration. Not only for the graphics, but also for the controls. I'm not a PC gaming person (I have an Xbox), so please comment on this. But wouldn't you need a lot more software to make gaming good?

Last time I considered Apple's Password Manager for my parents (who use iPhones, iPads and a Windows laptop), I found that, without an Apple computer, it was impossible to bulk import credentials from ... well ... anywhere - not even a bog standard CSV file was supported. This seemed rather counterproductive, considering that Apple should be making it as easy as possible for people to migrate existing credentials to their service.

Even more concerning, it was impossible (without buying an Apple computer) to bulk export the credentials in case you decided that Apple's offering wasn't working for you.

At that point it seemed to be far more hassle than it was worth, so I gave up and switched them to Bitwarden instead.

Here in the UK the newest (2023) 55" TV from LG will cost you 600 GBP for the LCD version and 1700 GBP for the OLED version.

I think OLED is great, but persuading the other half to spend 2.8x more money on OLED (when she thinks that the LCD screen is good enough) is an extremely tough sell.

Since no-one else has pointed it out, you can disable WDDA quite simply by SSHing to the Synology NAS and entering the following:

sudo synosetkeyvalue /etc.defaults/synoinfo.conf support_wdda no

You shouldn't have to do this, but at least you can.