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Comment Re:Just now? (Score 1) 15

They're bluetooth. Android has supported this for years. Is there something special about the Joycon that makes it not work with standard drivers? Is iOS just now getting support for bluetooth controllers?

I can't answer your first question but, for the second, iOS 13 (released September 2019) was the first to support bluetooth game controllers.

Comment Re:will be super consumers (Score 2) 230

You honestly expect people to replace a $2 outlet with an USB equipped one at $30? It's cheaper, more convenient and probably safer to stick with a usb wall wart.

The OP picked a pretty expensive one as an example. Twin switched sockets without any USB sockets are going for about £4 on Amazon, whereas those with USB-A go for about £15 - meaning that the premium is 3.75x.

As USB-C becomes more ubiquitous, I'd expect twin switched USB-C sockets to eventually get down to the same price as the USB-A ones today. At that point a 3.75x premium doesn't seem too bad to get 2 USB-C sockets and 2 free plug sockets vs 1 free plug socket with the other permanently taken up by a wall wart.

Comment Re:There is no "good guy" here (Score 1) 45

As of 2021 Amex was accepted at 99% of merchants that also accepted Visa/MasterCard in the US, but does lag behind in the rest of the world.

Ahh yes, sorry, I was talking about UK and Europe, rather than the US.

To be honest, I'm not remotely surprised that Amex is accepted at 99% of merchants in the US - the clue is probably in the name :)

Comment Re:There is no "good guy" here (Score 1) 45

Yes and no.

As someone who voted remain, I agree with your general premise - however Amazon weren't objecting to moving to a cross-border interchange fee structure. They'd been on that fee structure since the beginning of 2021.

Amazon's objection was the significant price increase that Visa decided to apply to cross-border interchange in October 2021 - which was far higher than the price increased for domestic interchange.

Comment Re:There is no "good guy" here (Score 1) 45

Interchange was originally set up to encourage card issuers. This was because there was a lot more money to be made by banks offering payment acceptance to merchants than there were issuing cards to customers. You can't charge customers for having and using a debit card, but you can charge a merchant for accepting one - so the interchange attempted to address that imbalance.

As you rightly said, it's also been used to fund card loyalty schemes and Apple Pay also takes a small cut of that if they are involved in the purchase.

The biggest issue I know of relating to interchange fees is those of Amex which are typically larger than the rest of the market and used to fund their more generous rewards scheme. As a result, a lot of merchants (here in the UK at least) refuse to accept Amex.

Comment There is no "good guy" here (Score 3, Informative) 45

Visa's largest fee increase was for cross-border interchange payments and Amazon UK were stung by it because they process their payments in Luxembourg to reduce the amount of UK tax they pay.

The vast majority of merchants in the UK process their payments in the UK. Whilst their own domestic interchange fees did also rise, they were not affected in any way by the cross-border interchange increase.

There is no "good guy" here. On one hand you have Visa taking advantage of Brexit to hike their fees and on the other hand you have Amazon having a strop because it hurt their their tax avoidance strategy.

Comment Re:Same Boat (Score 1) 109

Go into Settings, then Accounts and Import and click on Add another email address. Pop in your email address, leave Treat as an alias checked and click on Next. You'll now get a screen asking for SMTP details, remove what Google have put and replace with smtp.gmail.com, port 465, your full Gmail address (including @gmail.com) as the username, your password and secure using SSL.

You may find that the first time you send an email it'll be blocked with an error. You need to enable "allow insecure connections" and will need to authorise Gmail to connect to the Gmail SMTP server to send your email. If you've done all that and it's still blocking you sending your email then use the Unlock Captcha page and it should be good to go.

Shout if you get stuck!

Comment Re:Same Boat (Score 1) 109

So you don't get the "on behalf of x" with this SMTP trick/hack?

That's correct, Outlook will display the address simply as yourname@yourdomain.com and replies will go back to that address (as you would expect).

There is one very small caveat and that is that people can still find your Gmail address by delving into the headers and looking at Return-Path, however I doubt many people will go to that effort.

Comment Re:Same Boat (Score 1) 109

Fair enough.

Personally I'm not particularly bothered about the three minutes of one-time configuration effort that it takes to set up SMTP. I also only receive about 1 or 2 actual calendar invitations a year - most people just send an email or IM with details for me to manually add to my calendar.

However I fully appreciate that people might prefer to pay and have it work out of the box.

Comment Re:Same Boat (Score 1) 109

Unfortunately the email you send (and calendar replies) will be displayed with the gmail account rather than your custom domain. Something like "On behalf of x" displays in the recipient email client.

That can be fixed by configuring Gmail to send email through an external SMTP server and then putting in Google's own SMTP settings. You'll have to allow insecure connections and also authenticate Google to access their own servers. It's completely nuts (especially as Google will nag you a couple of times a year to turn off insecure connections) but will remove "on behalf of".

Calendar acceptances always come from your Gmail address. I've found no way to avoid that.

Comment Just use Gmail (Score 1) 109

Many domain registrars offer email forwarding/alias capability. Create a new Gmail account, create an alias to point to the Gmail address and then following these instructions to set up Gmail to send from your address.

(Rumour has it that Google may be offering a migration tool at some point, which makes moving to a standard Gmail account extremely easy)

There are a couple of things you should be aware of, which I wrote about here. However it works well enough that I don't feel the need to pay for anything else.

Comment Re:How to keep using your domain with Gmail for fr (Score 3, Informative) 44

As someone who has been doing this for a couple of years, there are a few things you need to be aware of:

  1. If you don't configure GMail to use an external SMTP when sending your emails then email to Outlook users will show "on behalf of" and your GMail address. To avoid this, configure GMail to send email through an external SMTP server and then put in GMail's own SMTP details and your GMail username and password. You'll also need to enable insecure connections and you may be asked to authenticate Gmail's own attempt to send mail.
  2. Google will occasionally send you an email to nag you to turn off insecure connections. Which you can't do because of the previous point.
  3. If you respond to a meeting invite, it will always come from your Gmail address - there is no way to change that.
  4. On iOS Mail, you need to set up the mail account with your Gmail address first and then change it to your vanity address. This will cause all emails to stop being sent, so you'll need to add a secondary SMTP server with your Gmail credentials. Sending an email will take slightly longer as iOS Mail first fails to authenticate with the primary SMTP but then sends the email on the secondary SMTP.
  5. Occasonally iOS Mail will tell you there is an authentication problem. If you retry, it goes away. I'm not sure if this is an iOS Mail problem, a GMail problem or a symptom of the way the emails are sent (see above point).
  6. There is a bug in GMail for iOS that means that hitting share and then the Gmail app will force you to send the email from your Gmail address. Hopefully Google will fix that one but I reported it six months ago now.

Apart from that, it works pretty well. Certainly well enough not to spend $6 per user per month.

Comment Re:Duopoly preferable to monopoly (Score 1) 50

It doesn't help their customers and certainly doesn't help other on-line and brick-an-mortar retailers who accept Visa (which are now at an even greater disadvantage compared to Amazon).

Worth noting that other UK online and brick and mortar retailers don't generally process their payments through Luxembourg as part of their tax strategy - and so will be unaffected by the Visa (and Mastercard) cross-border interchange increase.

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