"Sorry to hear of your swapout, Ms Kidder."

That's Mr. Kidder, not Ms. I always thought otherwise as well until I just now clicked the links.

I've been on a quest for a while now to replace the old HP keyboard that I inherited along with my current system. The keys are nice, they're labeled appropriately, but the keyboard isn't backlit, which is something I've been trying to rectify for a while now so I can work when there isn't much daylight coming in through the windows. I just received, I think, my 4th keyboard, the previous ones all got returned within a day or so of receiving them. Previous ones had dancing backlight patterns that were too easy to activate unwittingly; I think they were designed to sell to 15 year olds. My latest one, made by Logitech, has decent key feel and a more or less straightforward backlighting scheme, and yet the backlit logos are kind of weird. I'm not a true touch typist, and at my age I never will be, so I do hope that key caps are well labeled, so no "PS" to indicate "Print Screen"..

My lawn, get off of it.

Find podcasts that aren't just two talking heads yammering about politics. I subscribe to a lot of podcasts, to the point that I've had to cut down on the subscription list since I no longer commute two hours a day and started getting ten months behind in my playlist. A few of them are two people talking about that day's topic, but it's not like listening to two drunks in a bar arguing about something. They're all non-fiction topics, and I can easily hit the button to skip forward 30 seconds when an ad comes on.

99% invisible
Cautionary Tales
Cooking Issues
Programming Throwdown
RadioLab
Space Pod
This American Life
Twenty Thousand Hertz

To name a few.

I probably mail out 3 or 4 checks every month, mostly to utilities that want to charge me a "convenience fee" to pay online. Fuck them; I'll gladly pay the $0.70 or so first class postage if it means I make their lives a bit more difficult.

And yet many of these same schools are either providing laptops for the students, or are mandating that the students have laptops. Anything that can be done in a smart phone can be done on a laptop (OK maybe a laptop can't make a phone call, but then kids these days pretty much don't make phone calls).

Having been in the engineering and software field for some 45 years, I knew better than to turn my home into something "smart." If I want to adjust my thermostat, I get up off my ass and manually adjust it, and I don't need to view the contents of my fridge or have my dryer tell me whether it contains an even or odd number of socks while I'm not home.

My wife, who turned 70 this year, took a stumble and landed on her ass one night about a week ago when the walkway was wet from rain. She only got a bruised tail bone, but she realized that it was time to figure out how to handle a situation in which she could not get back up in the same circumstance. She did not have her cell phone with her at the time so there was no way to call for help if she needed it. My mother in law once went through something similar where she fell in her home and could not get back up until someone luckily happened to come by many hours later.

My wife immediately bought a smart watch, even though she doesn't like wearing anything on her wrist, just for these possible incidents.

Smart watches are not necessarily a bad thing, though I agree that paying a huge amount amount for a bed that requires Internet access just to adjust it's tilt is insane.

"There's" is a contraction of "there is".

Would you write "There is 50% Fewer Young Employees at Tech Companies Now Than Two Years Ago"?

and 1200 feet below the sea bed. OK physics students, calculate how much energy it takes to pump a significant amount of that water up to dry land where it's needed.

A month or so ago, for the first time in years, I drove up highway 14 through Mohave, CA, to Ridgecrest, CA. The size of the solar plants that exist our there, and are still being built, is mind boggling. They're measured more in square miles than in acres. But, that land isn't farmland and never has been. It's dry scrub that gets almost no rainfall and has no easy access to irrigation, otherwise it would already be farmland. Donald Trump can go fuck himself.

I'm guessing that any place with a huge mosquito problem probably has millions of them in just a few acres.

Yes, we do care. I have Frigidaire refrigerator that's probably 20+ years old. Various plastic parts of it have broken over the years, vegetable drawers, door shelves, that sort of stuff, and I was able to easily buy replacements online.

Ditto for my food processor. The main bowl cracked after eight years or so and I was able to easily buy a replacement.

Also, about your claim about 1950's versus 2025 owners manuals, show an actual citation, please, or you're just re-posting lies you found on Reddit.

Came here to post the obligatory XKCD comic strip, but I see my work has already been done for me.

I've only ever owned a car with a manual transmission until we had our second child and we bought our first minivan. Ever since then it's been only automatics. Back then it was common knowledge that manual transmissions would give you *slightly* better gas mileage and that they were more reliable and cheaper to repair if something did go wrong; no idea how valid that common knowledge still is.

Every once in a great while I need to borrow a friend's pickup truck that has a stick shift. It takes a bit before my ancient memory takes over and I don't have to think about how to do the next shift. I don't miss them though.

How does anyone that's cooked more than one meal in their life not already know this? Of course a sharp knife will reduce the onion spray that irritates your eyes.