Itâ(TM)s not quite that early where I live (maybe 4:30pm here), but I love the early darkness. Iâ(TM)m into astronomy and donâ(TM)t have to wait until the middle of the night to see cool stuff in the sky. Spotting the northern lights on the way home from work is pretty cool too.

You can do okay though. The town I live in (of about 14k people and butted against another of 35k) has some code on the books for municipal lighting and light pollution. I donâ(TM)t think itâ(TM)s adhered to as closely as it should be, but itâ(TM)s good enough that I can spot the Orion Nebula and count the stars in Pleades with the naked eye on lots of nights. On particularly clear nights Iâ(TM)ve spotted the Milky Way bands and Iâ(TM)ve seen the northern lights from my back yard as well. Itâ(TM)s not quite the same as I get if I drive 5 minutes north into the farmland that borders the town and out of the light pollution dome, but Iâ(TM)ve had lots of good observing nights from my back deck with various telescope or binocular setups. You donâ(TM)t have to settle for crappy skies just because you live where other people live.

I was just thinking about this a minute before reading the comment, but then thought about if the changing light level would be harder to adjust to while driving. Itâ(TM)s a fascinating idea though, if you light up a few sections ahead of the car you could probably eliminate the adjustment thing entirely.

I have guys at work that whine about having to carry a laptop and tablet with them, and therefore leave the iPad at the office when in the field. If these can be made durable enough with a case, Iâ(TM)m imagining this being their phone/tablet combo device.

Mine is battery powered and talks over WiFi. With a few minutes of effort hooking it to my phoneâ(TM)s hotspot, I could bring it with me. I could be that weird guy with a doorbell on his hotel room or his car lol.

You raise a good point. Iâ(TM)m from the US and was at a meeting at my parent companyâ(TM)s location in Europe a few weeks ago. English is a second language for the people I had a meeting with, and although they are all pretty good at it, they had a Teams meeting running with transcription going and doing live translations. If they didnâ(TM)t catch or understand something that was said, they would look down for a second and read back the conversation to catch up. I was never asked for consent (and not being from the EU, it never occurred to me that this might be a legal grey area there). Exactly the same thing that the watch is proposing doing.

I used to have that belief, but it changed once I started thinking about working across timezones a little more. Let's imagine that the universal time is 16:00. You're in the US, so you're probably near the end of your work day. What is the person in Italy you're working on a project on doing right now? And the other person in India? Can you expect to arrange a meeting today to get a hold of them yet today? Or would you be calling them in the middle of the night?

Under the current system you know how many hours ahead or behind they are and can figure out that it is bedtime or the middle of the night for your colleagues. Universal time means you have to know what people in other parts of the world that you interact with might be doing at a given time. So you're memorizing "it's 12:00, US is eating lunch, Italy is leaving the office, India has already been out of work for a few hours." It's easier to Google the current time in a place and ascertain what your colleagues across the world might be doing at 12:00pm, 6:00pm, or 9pm their time.

I saw a McDonalds in Florence when I was there a few months ago. Google shows a few in the area. I didnâ(TM)t stop to try them though now Iâ(TM)m curious what the local flair would have been.

That works in some parts of the country, but in places that get actual winters, there is no amount of care that is going to keep a daily driven vehicle from rusting after 20 winters. And that's what kills vehicles here. Something minor like a broken brake line but to get to where it connects you have to drop the crossmember, of which the bolts are seized on place and you'll damage the subframe trying to get it out.

Iâ(TM)ve owned two Chevy Volts. The first one (a 2012) got its rated charge range from a battery charge the morning I totaled it at 178,000 miles. My current one (a 2014) is at 197,000 miles and gets its rated mileage out of a charge every day, though Iâ(TM)m starting to notice it doesnâ(TM)t exceed the rating on highway only runs as much as it did when I bought it a few years ago.

I suspect most vehicles suffer the same fate as my first one (an accident or major repair being due totals them before 200,000 miles) meaning that in 2012 we were building EVs where the battery outlasted the car.

How did he get it without a smartphone?

I have had a 17 Pro since launch and just turned it on maybe a week ago because I wanted to see what the big selling feature of my new phone was (they talked about it a lot during the last hardware event). I cannot say I feel like I am missing much, and the iOS 17 beta has done nothing to change my opinion. AI prioritized notifications which are just duplicates shown above the same notification and email summaries in the preview line are sort of underwhelming. My phone never does the thing where you can recognize items from pictures and search on them.

Full disclosure, I do not use Siri all that often. Maybe Iâ(TM)m just not the target audience.

You also get 1/3 the performance and 10 generation old components at 6x the cost of current consumer gear in the manufacturing/industrial IT space. Maybe that aligns with how you use your device, but Iâ(TM)d rather have better performance over a 10 year lifecycle on a cell phone.

Maybe not universal, but I seem to remember the mini-usb being extremely popular before the micro took over. If micro was the first mandated by EU, it would imply that there was somehow a pretty good consensus on what connector to use before micro was specified by legislation.

You must not use your phone very much overall. I manage the fleet of iPhones at my job and we are usually seeing high 70s or low 80sfor battery health at the end of our 3 year refresh cycle. Since we have been observing this for more than 6 years, I canâ(TM)t imagine itâ(TM)s a difference in chemistry between your phone and our phones.