Ha ha, I feel like I really need the bad car analogy of this post!

I'm down with Google. I went to the same HS as Sergei Brin. But out of all the companies on the list, they're the only ones who have made actual progress on all of the things I've ever wanted as a kid...

* Google maps: so I wouldn't have to carry around my laptop plugged into a GPS and loaded with all of the Garmin base maps to see what body of water I was driving next to. I used to love exploring and biking / driving out to the middle of nowhere with or without maps. The first google maps app on my old Blackberry actually let me do that and end up somewhere interesting, and still wind my way down through the mountain trails in time for bed.

* Location sharing: always wanted to keep track of my friends and family on a moving map while splitting up to run errands

* Photos: This does everything I've ever wanted from my pipeline, which used to consist of archiving the original, cropping/tuning, preserving EXIF date/time/GPS location, creating and sharing albums for particular events. Used to use some combination of shell scripts, GIMP, Album, and Gallery 2.0 to achieve parts of this, but Picasa / Photos was the first thing that finally came along and did a great job at the entire process, and handles video as well.

Second place might go to Amazon... even if I don't buy from them that often the database of book and product reviews has been very useful... and especially if they ever do something with that drone delivery system they're working on.

Other than that, none of the other companies have really ever provided a practical answer to a question that I have asked.

Yeah, I think Musk gets the prize not for innovation, but for actually going out and doing all those things I've always dreamed about doing when I was a kid... building the car from Night Rider, flying my friends through space with some Voltron-like gizmos, making vacuum-evacuated trains... you know, all those things featured by those Neil Ardley books visualizing the future in the 70s, before we took a 40-year break to ... make the internet a mainstream thing.

Heat is energy. Heat rises, pulling in cold air, creating weather. Cities create heat islands, measurably changing the microclimate. Can't really say humans are not involved in the ecosystem... just ask India and China how they feel about smog and particulate pollution in recent years. Aren't we glad we don't have their population density yet?

NOAA is tracking the macroclimate, since NASA isn't really allowed to correlate with their independent instruments anymore. "Global temperature anomaly" charts and graphs look interesting, certainly trendy. Ocean acidification and atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations are even more trendy, increasing to levels beyond those seen since the dinosaur extinctions... and those measurements don't swish around erratically with the winds and weather like the surface temperature measurements.

How much can the Earth take before things break down and we see more signs of mass extinctions? Who knows? But do you remember doing the buffer system titration labs from HS Chemistry? In many ways the ecosystem acts like a giant buffer system that keeps things like pH and temperature and humidity balanced in a stable range right up to the point where it can't.

Politicians, of course, don't understand the science, or don't want to since there's no financial incentive for doing the right thing. NOAA and others are trying to provide some of the financial impact information so politicians might find it in their cold hearts to care. But others are content to go along with this grand titration experiment, because... well, maybe cleaning up after ourselves will make us look like fools with clean necks (Russian proverb).

Yep. Google "How to short b..." and several explanations will just pop right up!

I don't print much... This printer has been cheap and perfect... not sure what the latest version of this is... maybe:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00D...

  * Mono laser. Inkjets dry up and jam. We've been saving up for the color laser version of this someday, but the B&W is so cheap there's little excuse not to have one on your network as a backup.

* Prints double-sided

* Networked ... don't worry about setting up a USB print server or whatever.

* Linux drivers ... it's easier to install this thing in CUPS than it is to install even the windows drivers. Just point the CUPS config to the IP address and you're done.

* Cheap. Did I mention it's cheap? Print quality and DPI are great. Replaced the cartridge only once over the past 6 or 8 years.

Added some old laptop RAM to mine... which I guess increases the size of documents it can buffer, but never ran into problems printing large text or graphics either way.

"I'd tell you a DNS joke, but it could take up to 24 hours for everyone to get it."

I try not to invest in anything I don't understand. I mean, I have some tenuous grasp of mathematical transforms and enough cryptography to be aware of its dangers, but yeah, the financial part of bitcoin seems like an awful lot of speculation from other people who probably don't understand it. Apparently the main thing that makes bitcoin valuable is its scarcity, which may be mathematically guaranteed... right up until the time that it isn't. I also don't like investing in money to make money out of money, especially when the moneymakers are the ones writing the rules of the game.

It would also be useful if I could actually use bitcoin for anything... as it is the only reason people seem to be buying / mining bitcoin is to get rich from speculation in drugs and sex trafficking. Oh, I guess I could use bitcoin to buy drugs and sex from the mafia if I were into that sort of thing?

That said, I'm also aware of the advantages of cryptocurrency and am glad it exists and is not really run by a government... that we know of. I wouldn't be afraid to use it... I just don't care to invest in it for the sake of investing.

Ha ha, which Dell are you using? I've had a lot of Inspirons and some Lattitudes, my 14yo son's gaming Inspiron from last year is the latest, but I haven't looked at it that closely other than to monitor him when he was replacing the LCD that he smashed once. He's not much of a tech kid, but he watched the youtube instructional video and went at it. He had even added a second HDD himself to augment the internal SSD.

Compared to the Toshiba Satellite, which had 24 screws (of various sizes) just to remove the bottom cover, 10 still seems like next to nothing... though all of my older Dells still had the removable battery packs and 1 screw securing the HDD cover and DVD insert and even a RAM access panel.

Maybe invest in a little power screwdriver? I'd still rather see something with a ton of screws than the new crop of smartphones and tablets that are simply glued together.

Yeah, I've I've liked all of the Dell keyboards I've ever used, and they're cheap and easy to replace if they get broken or sticky.

We never really agreed upon what was the best keyboard layout, I would think we'd have to determine that in order to rate how far laptops diverge.

I submit:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/...

That's what I look for when shopping for keyboards / laptops.

The Dell keyboards stray somewhat from that to make stuff fit, but not terribly far.

* Apple - I've used these for work for the past few years... I love their trackpad and the magnetic power plug but everything else annoys me. Homebrew makes it a tolerable *nix environment, but it's still weird and running Linux in a VM is still a pain since the keyboard and trackpad act all strange.

* Chromebook - My father uses these... but I think I need a little more software than the app ecosystem can provide, even with some of the GNU CLI tools installed.

* Dell - Cheap decent desktop replacement, they stay close to the standard 104 keyboard layout, easily upgradeable / replaceable parts -- including the GPU... all of my and my son's favorite laptops over the past few decades have been Dells. Sure they could be better quality in some aspects, but they're solid vanilla machines that have never annoyed me with silly/edgy design decisions.

* HP - They always seem to do weird things with their trackpads, and extra buttons. I do like the cheap $80 Stream 7 Windows tablet that I can run 2D Steam games on, though, but only when used with bluetooth input devices that I keep losing. I'm OK with HP for overpriced fully-featured servers, though.

* Lenovo - I want to like IBM, but their hybrid Intel+Nvidia graphics drivers crashed all over the place, and they couldn't even get a working Intel wifi chip into the Z710 I bought my wife. It just drops the wifi connection every 20 minutes, even after replacing it with a newer rev 2 that's on their BIOS whitelist that was supposedly fixed. The square power plug keeps breaking off, the audio jack emits noise when it's sleeping, the built-in speakers are too weak, and I have to keep it plugged into wired ethernet to maintain a good network connection. My wife is never going to let me choose a computer for her again. Plus they always do weird things with the keyboard layout.

* Microsoft - I've heard they make good hardware. I'm a little bit too frustrated at the tiny UI on my HP Stream 7 to bother with Windows 8 / 10 on a more expensive device, though... I still find it pretty useless without a separate KB / mouse... which kinda defeats the purpose of this tablet/surface thing that they've had longer than anyone but failed to sufficiently reengineer the UI for fat-fingered operation until way too late.

* Toshiba - My wife's previous desktop replacement was a Satellite that was cheap and useful. She liked it but it was a tad heavy and the power plug kept breaking from the inside.

* Other (specify in comments) - I still like my Asus EeePC 901 that runs Linux Mint from an SD card... still using it to attach to my son's digital piano for Rosegarden and USB midi, and for video conferencing with my dog using a Hangouts session that I leave running. Does anyone make a more modern spec netbook in that price range anymore?

Here's some 10-year old software for your 10-year old hardware:

http://www.nongnu.org/streamtu...
http://streamripper.sourceforg...

So on my main server I would set up a streaming proxy, that would also save whatever content from internet radio streams I was listening to, and I'd point all of the other clients in the house to it so they'd all be playing the same thing as I walked from room to room. Usually there wasn't any noticeable lag between them, but different internet radio clients do buffer more than others... just not the ones I was using.

As for controlling the primary playlist, back then I just used ssh + screen back to the server since I was using the console streamtuner client, but nowadays you could probably set up VLC or Clementine to be the head node feeding your proxy channel, and both of those projects have good remote control apps.

I got a windows gaming laptop for my son last year when he was 14. He's not a computer nerd by any means, esp. compared to me, but he figured out how to install Steam and take care of everything except the wifi password. Best to let him take care of all that, so he can reinstall from scratch if he hits a bad virus or something. And make sure he has a good experience restoring his schoolwork from cloud storage or whatever.

He broke his screen once and was very upset, but we ordered a replacement screen and even replaced it himself after watching the instructional video.

We had to shutdown or lock him out of the wifi router at night for a time to make sure he would sleep, but haven't bothered with that lately.

When they were younger, I had built them some nice Linux minecraft rigs:
http://trumblings.blogspot.com...
and had Rundeck set up to give them login time using https://github.com/grover66/ki...
Not sure if we could assert that much control on Windows, but we waited until he was more mature to have the freedom and responsibility to manage his own tech.