Cool Story, Bro time:

My domestic partner is very pretty and the dbag who runs the nearest Tesla dealership was trying really, really hard to get with her. He let her borrow his dealership's loaner Model S Plaid for a week as part of his "That Guy" package.

We thought we'd have some fun since it's supposed to be this super cool sports car. It turned out to have a governor on it that limited acceleration and top speed to something any Honda Odyssey owner would find comfortable.

I'm not sure whether it was that guy's doing or is that's something directly from Tesla itself but we both thought it was hilarious.

Samsung makes three tablet lines: the A, which is a value product that isn't bad for around $200; The S6 Lite, which is a specific mid-tier offering that is updated less than annually and has its own model specs per release. There's also the full-fat Tab S line, which are premium tablets.

I have an S6 Lite from 2020, a Tab S8 and an S9+. The S8 has a fairly normal 10" screen and is actually my favorite of the bunch; I find the 12" screen on the S9+ too big since I mostly want a reading device rather than a watching or playing device. I use the S9+ as a portable monitor and video capture device for my camera when I'm shooting photos with models. It's big and bright enough to see even in outdoors in broad daylight. All three of them have reasonable Qualcomm SoCs and big-boy amounts of RAM. All three of them have an SD card slot for big-boy storage. Newer Tab S series tablets are also water resistant, if you're someone who might use such a device in the bath or near a pool.

Not everybody wants to buy a premium Android tablet and I'll admit I don't pay full price for them either, but they're superb hardware, and I have no problem recommending the S6 Lite or the comparable Lenovo M11 for general use. Those aren't waterproof and they don't have high end SoCs, but they have nice screens, work well in their intended ecosystem and they aren't saddled with a sub-par mobile OS like Apple or Amazon hardware.

Yes, I know it's possible to add the Play Framework to a FireOS device. The problem is that you have to fight to keep it that way since Amazon updates will eventually reset your settings. As far as I know, there's no cure for the limitations of iOS, which is why I'd never bother with an iPad.

I found Sonder because I was desperate to book a weeklong stay in Manhattan that didn't cost $2k and wasn't in some bedbug infested nightmare in Times Square. I was essentially checking every short term rental on Google Maps when I ran across it.

Once I got in their system, I found rentals everyplace I wanted to go. Getting a very cheap flight and a Sonder apartment has been my recipe for an interesting long weekend every few months ever since.

Sonder doesn't really have staff as such. The locations have maybe one cleaner, who doesn't enter your rental during your stay, and MAYBE one person in the lobby, if your location even has a lobby.

Your rental is an apartment, and like any apartment, you're responsible for cleaning your room and doing your own dishes while you're there. That's not to say that the lobby person couldn't stick a note under a door, but I understand that minimal staffing is one of the reasons Sonder rentals are so affordable.

The busiest Sonder I've ever visited had at most two employees in the building. Most of them, you'll never see an employee at all. I've only seen staff in downtown Chicago and in Manhattan and I've stayed at 14 different locations.

If you were looking for a live person to ask, you probably wouldn't find one.
On the other hand, they do get back to you instantly if you message them about something.

Or the people who made the web site were contractors and there's no one doing maintenance.
I have active (future) reservations and I still haven't gotten any direct notification that there's any operational status from the company yet, even though I've been seeing news about this for the last three days.

I've had a bunch of great stays in Sonder apartments. They're beautifully decorated and extremely affordable. I use them as locations for photo shoots as much as anything else, but getting a 3 bedroom apartment that's a block off Canal Street in New Orleans for $120/night, or a $900/week 2 bedroom apartment rental that's literally next door to the Brooklyn Bridge/City hall subway hub is about as nice as I could ever hope to find.

I've been at the point where Sonder has been my first choice for accommodations about the last three years. I'm actually impacted by this news since I had reservations to stay at Sonder locations in December and again in February.

When I got my newest Thinkpad, I immediately took it apart and swapped out the 16GB RAM and 250GB drive it shipped with and replaced them with 96GB RAM and a pair of 4TB drives, which cost me a total of around $600 over the ~$1700 I spent on the laptop. Apple wants US$7200 to get a laptop with 128GB RAM and 8TB of internal storage.

I'll take Lenovo's construction, input devices and global support every day of the week over what Apple offers. I've certainly never had to argue with Lenovo over how I'd prefer to have my notebooks serviced, whereas Apple support seems to think that "Just bring it to the closest Apple Store for a six-hour repair window" is a great answer for everything.

It's not uncommon to find white-box motherboards with a PS/2 port. I've seem them on contemporary AM5 boards from Gigabyte, Asrock and Asus; the Northgate Omnikey I'm typing on is still plugged in to a PS/2 port.

Having an f/.95 aperture doesn't mean a whole hell of a lot the surface area of your sensor is a fraction of a square millimeter. My S24 has an f/1.7 lens on its main camera and it still produces pathetic output compared to a $400 mirrorless camera with a kit lens.

Nova let me turn off animations and effects I didn't care to see and because it allowed me to back up and restore my home screen layout, it made the process of switching to a new device completely painless, even across different Android versions and OEMs. My Android experience has been identical for the last dozen years even as I used LG, Pixel and Samsung phones and a half-dozen different tablets from cheapies to premium models.

Microsoft Launcher probably isn't going anywhere, but I'm still pissed at Microsoft for killing Swype + Dragon, the best keyboard experience Android had. Gboard is barely acceptable, but since it requires me to manually import a user dictionary I have to maintain as a plaintext file, it's never going to live up to just signing in and getting all the acronyms, jargon and proper nouns I use daily back. Lawnchair might be functionally fine for me as well and probably isn't actively fucking me with datamining, but I don't think it fully replicates all the things Microsoft's does.

All in all, this whole deal just sucks.

I'm perfectly willing to do it for others, whether they know how to or not. Someone reading Slashdot comments PROBABLY has the know how to implement the fixes I suggest as well, even if they'd rather just hang out and troll.

Microsoft wants to idiot-proof their OS, but I've run across absolutely tragedies that wouldn't have happened if a user had just not switched to Windows 11, like a retired college professor who can no longer access his life's work because it's on an encrypted PC where he no longer has access to any established authentication due to the effects of early-onset dementia.

I start by using an autounattend.xml that explicitly creates a local-only account and uses relevant ADMX files to set group policies to prevent using Onedrive as a default save location. I run a script on first user login that enables GPOs for Windows Home SKUs if necessary. My default Windows install does not install OneDrive, Recall, Copilot or Outlook by default, although each product can be installed and used by positive user action if they so desire. I also disable automatic Bitlocker encryption on primary drives in Windows 11, which is another massive headache for systems that aren't going on a domain. I know they mean well but it just makes life harder for no good reason. People don't even know what their microsoft account is and then they rapidly become confused about the difference between the account password and the PIN they set up and it's just awful all around. Just fucking say no.

OneDrive / Microsoft 365 is absolutely invasive and if you don't buy the value add of Office in the first place, Onedrive just brings nothing to the table. I have yet to see the combination of misfortunes that would make Onedrive valuable but I've definitely run across people locked out of their own files because they can't get back to a particular wifi network and told microsoft their phone number was an un-textable land line.

Here's the problem with installing Windows 11 on unsupported hardware: Upgrades are very difficult to install. If you were to install Windows 11 24H2 on your i5-7500 PC today, the 25H2 version won't be available to you. Yes, you're on a supported Windows release for about another year and you'll get updates to 24H2 for that time, but soon you'll be back on an unsupported version of Windows again.

There's a fix that involves swapping some files from a Windows Server ISO to the Windows 11 one that DOES make a working upgrade installer, but it's a headache to have to do it every time there's a new version of desktop Windows out in the world.

Soldered RAM is standard for Intel's Lunar Lake lineup and for most AMD's Strix Halo APUs. I can't speak to how well Lunar Lake works but I have deployed some AMD HX 370 systems and they were absurdly nice for ~$750 mini PCs.

I'm not defending the practice of building systems that way but it seems to be an architectural choice by the CPU manufacturers rather than a defect of particular notebook models.

I have nothing but good things to say about the 14" T, X and P series Thinkpads I've bought and supported, even though there is a clear difference in build quality between the T61 I had 20 years ago and the P14s I have now. If nothing else, Lenovo has gradually stepped up its display game in a way IBM definitely never even considered and even without the titanium frame, it's still better made than a Precision 5490.