Most of the (possibly hundreds of) mp3's I've bought via Amazon (on a PC) offered streaming links, but I chose to download them to local storage (provided you keep backups, this always lasts longer than licensing agreements governing streaming content).

Only on a few occasions did I wind up in the Amazon player app (which still allows you to download purchased tracks), which may have been related to the method of buying multiple tracks at once (i.e. the "MP3 Cart"--an option I haven't seen displayed recently) but mostly once you buy and hit the download button, you get the usual browser download behavior.

---PCJ

Still using an 8GB Clip Sport ( I have another one that locks up on the splash screen, dunno what the issue is with that one is, and a couple of SanDisk's Fuze players that have headphone jack issues).

Easy to add files to, battery lasts a few days between recharges (and I don't run down my Note 4 for music). But the biggest thing I like about the Clip Sport is, its shuffle function is actual random playback (I don't listen to albums, just a large blob of singles--1158 and counting--and don't actually want to know which track the player is going to pick next.

None of the generic Chinese media players I tried can do this--they have a pseudo-random playback mode, which winds up playing the same sequence of songs every time the device powered up. I realized this once I noticed myself correctly "predicting" which song the device would play next, and confirmed it by watching the display's index numbers as I repeatedly tapped the next-track button

One would think after all this time that the latest players would have fixed this shortcoming, but either my listening habits are very unique, or nobody else has noticed the fake random-play mode, as I can't seem to get an answer as to whether any of the newer players, whether cheap or audiophile-grade, can do shuffle-play 'properly'

---PCJ

If I recall correctly, you had to hit the underside of the tree branch with the top of your parachute, and the game would simply slide you right into the hole.

Not sure if that was spelled out in the "cheat sheet" (literally a single photocopied page) I got from Atari's customer service at the time, or discovered it accidentally.

---PCJ

Mine does, but it was hidden in the Widgets menu (long press on home screen) by default. Once I dragged it out onto the homescreen, it became available without hunting for it,

---PCJ

I'm one of the vanishingly few who still use a standalone mp3 player for my music, currently a SanDisk Clip Sport, after my two Fuze players developed...faulty headphone jacks. (I cracked open the case of one (thanks to IfixIt's tools), and was able to restore normal stereo playback by grounding the jack to the adjacent charging port, but have yet to actually solder in a jumper wire to see if it's a permanent fix). Unfortunately the only remaining examples out there are new-old-stock, with the expected battery issues after so many years. Replacement batteries are out there for the Fuze, but I could only find one vendor (on Ebay) who had the ones for the Clip Sport. It's anyone's guess how old either of these aftermarket cells are.

I stuck with the SanDisk players because of my "unique" use case--I don't listen to albums, just a huge folder of singles that I listen to on random playback. Sandisk devices actually *do* randomize the track selection, unlike the (many? most?) generic Chinese media players you can find all over Amazon. All of those I tried after SanDisk discontinued their lineup, only pretend to randomize the tracks. I noticed I was unconsciously predicting what song the player was going to pick next with an unusual degree of accuracy, then realized the devices were playing the same sequence of songs every time I powered them up. Moreover, by watching the display and tapping the 'next track' button I could see that most of the time the device just selected the next track in its index, only occasionally jumping forward or backward, always in the same places, direction, and number of slots.

If any of the presently-available generic devices are capable of true randomized playback in 'shuffle' mode, I haven't heard of any since so many people apparently listen to albums or playlists in pre-defined order that my use case never seems to come up in the reviews. As for using my phone, I tried that when one of my Clip players unexpectedly stopped taking a charge, and the experience (whatever music player came with the Note 4, and then with VLC) was...less than satisfactory, not to mention its effect on battery life.

---PCJ

How many suppliers of such content are located in the EU?

AFAIK, the largest one(s) is/are hosted in the US, soooo......

---PCJ

...to a Milo Murphy accident?

Doctor: "So...technically, we are never supposed to put that lever up to 10..."

---PCJ

Oh, the house centipede? Creepy-looking and they move with disturbing speed when spooked. But if they don't find anything to eat, they generally move on

Spiders on the other hand, don't move on, and I have an issue with them erecting webs in my living space

.(protip, a green laser pointer is particularly useful in lighting up otherwise invisible webs lurking in odd corners where one might stick their hands without looking)

The nearest parallel I've seen to the condition in TFA is the huge nasty-looking "bags of tree cancer" made by the Fall Webworm that infest some trees in the Southeast US (usually where I see them, but have noticed infestations as far north as the Baltimore area). During a particularly bad year in South Carolina long ago, large trees sometimes were festooned with dozens of these nests, and some saplings were so covered with webbing that they looked like a giant pantyhose was draped over them. Gross.

---PCJ

Out of curiosity, I've been using Google Maps' timeline feature to log my commute times and the various paths I take between home and work to see which one offers the shortest travel times. It's not as clear-cut as it would seem, since in my particular corner of NYC, between various combinations of subways and buses, there are upwards of 14 different routes I could take to make the trip without going very far out of my way.

As for location services underground, I have found that if you connect to the WiFi service offered in the underground stations (Transit Wireless) then your phone can get a location fix within a few seconds of establishing a connection to their access points as you move from station to station. Using a navigation app to keep the GPS active, you can watch the pointer indicating your position on the map jump from station to station as the phone re-acquires Transit Wireless at each stop. Naturally, this doesn't work between stations..

(protip: "singledigits.com" is the redirect to the Transit Wireless portal page if your default browser complains that it can't reach the Web upon getting its connection)

---PCJ

They already have this in China. Ever seen some of the gruesome traffic videos?

--> 41 minutes of pedestrian pain,

Not just China. But yeah.(disclaimer: some of these collisions are obviously lethal)

---PCJ

Demon Attack was by Imagic. Coleco was noteworthy for publishing the first home version of Donkey Kong on their own platform, along with a 2600 version.

---PCJ

(reads some more Eve V reviews)

Maybe not so much now...

---PCJ

I used an Eee 901HA to do image editing while out and about. Digital drawings, mostly...until I looked at a drawing I had colored using it, on a device with a better screen--the colors were all wonky. A cartoon character that was supposed to be a light cream color came out looking a sickly greenish somethingoranother.

After that, I went to other machines with better LCD's (eyes his 17" Toshiba P850 on another table) and the netbook served just to run an old portable Canon scanner until I found out how to bamboozle my Surface Pro 2 (Win 8.1) into running an older driver to access it. The image editors I was (and still use) didn't tax the Eee, but the color fidelity of its display ended its career as a portable image editor.

I'm keeping an eye on the Eve V. in the meantime. Given what I'm carrying now though, I'm probably not in the same boat as the OP.

---PCJ

New York City is in the midst of a sodium-to-LED street-lamp upgrade. I was going to get a before-and-after photo of how my block looked at night when I saw the closest main thoroughfare upgraded, but the DOT beat me to it.

The lighting is very directional. So much so that the sidewalk on my side of the street (opposite the poles) looks like it's lit by spotlights (the brightness trails off rapidly as one moves farther back but the opposite sidewalk is mostly in darkness by comparison. The commercial strips on the main streets have had additional short-armed fixtures installed on the opposite sides of the poles to light up the sidewalks, but it remains to be seen if anything will be done about the residential side streets thus affected

Even so, riding above these streets on elevated subway lines makes them look dim by comparison since almost none of the light is visible once you're above the fixture heads. It'll be interesting to see how this makes nighttime cloud cover look after the first snowstorm turns the ground into a reflective surface.

---PCJ

A John Oliver monologue (21 mins) on just how far in the hole PR is, and why it's having such a massively difficult time getting out of it.

And this was all before the hurricane...

---PCJ