Well, maybe now Oculus can have a Facebook icon that can nag you without the option to log out of Messenger.

That did it for me and removed the FB app. The constant nagging that I had to install their messenger, one you cannot log-out from.

On a more serious note: I am hesitant to get a HTC/Oculus because I had (have) a HMZ-T1 and it is very uncomfortable and never in focus.Also a Gear VR that is a bit more comfortable but always out of focus.

One eye just always gets this rainbow pixel sprinkled out-of focus treatment that really tires my eyes.

The other issue is that I play once a week - give or take. And only games that support 3 monitors either team based shooters or racing games. Both benefit a lot more from the super-wide angle the 3 monitors provide.

VR has to have a wider FOV and better optics. When it has it: take my money. Until then I keep my 3 x 1080p .. yes I have a 4k screen (43'' for work), no, I don't care about movies or games on it. 1080p x 3 is better than that too.

One lovely morning (about a month ago) I woke up to realise that my s7 edge gained some weight .. more specifically it was bloated to the point that the rear glass was de-laminating from the rest of the phone.

OK, took the glass off (and broke it), ordered a new one, along with a new battery. 20 minute operation later it was working.

2 weeks ago a grey spot appeared in the centre of the screen. Dead pixels. Googling around revealed that this is common.

My S4 is 4 years old at least. In perfect shape (3rd battery). Wife's S5 same on original battery (screen cracked, but that's her fault) . ...

Also my new Samsung bluetooth headphones lasted 3 months before they died (one side dead).

I guess I will not get a Samsung as I am not happy with the quality control that's going on right now.

My 12.2 Note Pro haven't seen a software update for ages. Never dropped, it is doing strange stuff, at 50% the SD card unmounts, screen flickers. The chrome peeled, the whole case is peeling fake leather rubber. The ipads and iphone twice its age are still working (minus the one eaten by the dog after dropped by the kid)... but I don't want that other OS anymore :)

Maybe a flip phone and a cheap tablet. Tether them and done, I can browse. I am tired of expensive crap dying for no reason under good care.

Well .. my 10c .... I loved Samsung and now I don't anymore. Quality turned shit.

Get a filter. A coarse + fine + reverse osmosis filter gets that micron size out.

Add a UV steriliser for $70 or so and that kills most if the living stuff.

I have well water with 100-140ppm of solids and my filter makes it 2ppm water.

It is a PITA though. Super slow even with dual osmosis cartridges it takes 2 minutes to fill a pitcher.

+1 ...

And why on Earth would someone conduct private business on a company email account.

Now if they sniff my private mails going to my phone through an external provider, or my home email, that would be a different story.

But again, I wouldn't use the company's wifi to even receive private mail or access private stuff. For that, you have your data plan.

And yes, a company computer, a company connection and a company account DOES BELONG to the company, thus should and will be monitored by the company.

Lo-Jack called to have me renew my sub. And told they had to do maintenance as the transmitter stopped working. They raised the price and I no longer wanted to be tracked by them, so I said, no thanks, when can I take the car so you can remove the tracker.

They said it had a fee ($100?? or $75) and I had to leave the car there. I told no thanks, please tell me where the tracker is, I remove it and return it free of charge. They refused this. So somewhere in my car, I have a dead tracker, apparently not worth for them to recover.

If I ever have a tracker or kill switch in my car I want to be the only one on the other end at the "button". You can get a tracker for less than $30, and a prepaid card here will set you back .. huhh ... nothing.. really, a $10 recharge every 3 months and a sent SMS or call is all it takes to keep it alive.

I am thinking of my firewall I spent 8 bitcoins on. Still works, nice unit, end of service life.

Still a bit of a bitter taste in my mouth as today I could buy a car with that money.

But I am not alone. Think about the pizza that cost 10,000 BTC, and the endless list of crap bought with it that could buy a car, a house, a large property or a finance a retirement with your kids' college education paid for the amount.

I think, that's why the people who saved some are still saving it.

As for the "black markets". Yes it works. But people exchange it to USD or other fiat.

That said, once I thought this would be "the thing". Invested in and spent 2 years of 12-hour coding work into a multi-coin project. Failed, fell on my arse. And realised, that people don't want to spend it. It is criminals and grey-area markets that want it. The rest is mining/speculation and pump and dump.

I was hoping to to buy with it, get paid in it and use it as a better "currency" ... several years after it is worse than it was before. $3 on a $9 xfer? ... yeah, even Paypal is better than that, and they charge the hell out of you.

MS mouse and MS keyboard quality was indeed pretty good.

I am using the Kinesis Advantage and it rocks. I was looking at the Maxim, but AFAIK it is rubber dome and I went through those 1-2 a year.

I actually replaced the brown MX to blue MX in one of my Advantages. Super CLICKY :)

I have too = I have two :) ...lol ...hundreds wasted on keyboards and I cannot type :O

I am typing on a Kinesis Advantage. I have too. My favourite started to fail. Keypresssss reeeepeeeats and other issues. So I went ahead and un-soldered all the brown stem MX keys and replaced them by blue stem MX keys.

Now they click.

I also built an Ergodox with blue ckickies. Which is a nice project. Thru hole and SMD practice.

Which brings me to my point: clickies are cool. Heavy keyboards are cool. Slim, compact keyboards are cool.

But if you are typing on the staggered design that was designed to a 150cm tall woman, then you are ... I am tempted to say: doing it wrong, but I won't.

Getting used to a Kinesis Advantage is a royal giant pain in the butt. It literally hurts your brain. Typing stuff (text) is kind of OK, but writing code makes you want to kill yourself. For a week or so. ... then the magic happens, and you realise, that nothing can touch it. Replaceable switches. Curved key-wells. Programmable.

When people ask me how I spend $300 on a keyboard, $100 on keys, then hours and hours in labour to replace the keys. I always ask them how they spend $30.000+ for a car they use less than 8 hours a WEEK. I am using this 10-12 hours a day.

BTW, I went through $100 Apple keyboards, 1-2 a year. Un-repairable.

Anyway. While I find the Type M, and Type F really-really cool. Using it as a keyboard is less particular than having a 1950 car as a daily commute.

But ... again. 99% of my friends type on conventional keyboards, so probably I am the odd minority here...

I live in Central America. While most measurements are presented in metric, and interesting anomaly is the construction industry.

Not sure if it is the U.S. imports that caused this, or some other strangeness, but they want to measure short things in inches (pulgadas), while they would talk in meters on longer ones.

You can somehow get used to it, but the problem is, that sometimes they don't know what they are talking about. I went to a store and wanted to by a 40x40 cm concrete flooring "thing" (garden steps). The guy kept insisting it was a 15x15 what they had. So I asked him if it was cm he told me yes (not too convinced). I showed him the approximate size of a 15x15cm tile at which point he literally shook his had and left (I stood there wondering WTF just happened).

I had to ask an other person to actually walk out with me to their storage so I could verify what I was buying as no one knew what units the inventory used.....

Of course, moral of the story is that I am the asshole foreigner because I don't read their minds and always end up getting invoiced for something that then doesn't match because no one knows the difference between centimeters and inches....

OH, ... yep .. hectares, square meters, acres and "manzanas" (no, not apples) are an other interesting animal here. Though at least people usually know the units they are speaking in, so you can do your conversion without going nuts.

And don't even start me on pints, ounces, fluid ounces....

I though modern measurements were in Celsius

This won't help or change anything, but I have to chip in with this thought.

1. Treat your employees like human beings and pay them well so they don't have the incentive to steal from you
2. Hire people you trust. If you don't trust your employees, fire them and hire ones you trust. If you don't trust anyone: write your code yourself.

But most importantly : think about why you cannot trust your employees.

I worked at environments where security guards (more like bodyguard types) were looking over your shoulder all the time. I also worked in banking where
This is not a way to spend 8+ hours a day.

More to the topic:

Develop APIs with a trusted in-house team. Have your contractors work with those APIs ... Might or might not work in your case/code/environment/project.

Your alternative:

Books. Yes I am a jerk saying this, but if you are on a budget: read. You can buy 5-10-15 HOURS of entertainment on Amazon and legally for 0.99, 4.99 and 0-day bestsellers for $10-15 tops.

And yes... I understand the point ... Call of Duty X for an other 59 + 2-3 DLCs for an other 10-15 is a JOKE. And people only buy it because other people buy it so you have people to play with... I stopped that vicious circle a long time ago...

It is more than just the ticket price:

1. some people don't like the movies - I for one hate sitting in a crowd at a less than perfect audio spot where I cannot pause/rewind the movie. On top of that people lately go there to eat loud and stinky things instead of watching the darn movie

2. I learned to hate DVDs : I paid for the damn thing, so I don't want to wait through 5 10s green/blue/red notices/warnings, then have to be forced all the trailers.
Yes, that's right, just want to go to the kids room, put the stupid disk in and press play. This is not possible.

3. not happy with digital purchases: if you leave abroad, (not in the US) Netflix, Amazon, Apple has various content restrictions.
That's one thing. The other is the format: can I just have my mkv/mp4 file, not tied to iTunes, a web browser, a Netflix player.

Also; some people don't have 10-100-1000 Mbit connections - I for one have 3 x 4Mbit lines stitched together (spillover or first load) , because where I live there is no connection available that's faster than 4Mbit. So I can download something overnight, then I can put it on my Raspberry/PC/Mac Mini or my Android tablet and watch it there. If I start to stream a: it is shit quality b: buffering c: ruin the net for other tasks

But this might be just me. I am more than happy to pay for content. E.g. I would pay 2x the money for a .flac audio file, than buy crappy mp3 from iTunes/Amazon.
I would also rather download a series episode, than watch it on Sky. So is it piracy? I have the sky sub, with the the actual thing playing, I just cannot make myself sit there at 7pm every Thursday, then watch a 20 minute show in 40 minutes, filled with ads for stuff I am not interested in ...

True, according to the docs/site you can run it through i2p, but tor advises against it... maybe it is time to try it....

An interesting concept (that has a TPB start page on it) is Zeronet; blockchain based hosting where even the SQL database is in the blockchain. Not sure how it would scale .. sure the demo is cool, but I don't see how gigabytes of pr0n would fit into there...