This is why its been announced now. With all the tracking Microsoft has in W11, including being able to track usage to an email account for most, they will have a good idea who has binned windows and who hasn’t.

Its this volume of switching that has them worried enough to actually pretend to fix things. I say pretend as its fairly obvious what they need to remove to reduce the bloat on RAM but their business it tied to it now, like concrete over boots on a mafia snitch.

Exactly!

I felt such an idiot when I realized their band name translates to angina, I kept reading it as poutine for some reason.

Microtonal but with super catchy riffs, thumbs up from me.

This performance has just broke out for them.

The R5 is basically the third gen Zoe when it comes to tech, such an upgrade in terms of looks.

I would say it didn’t look enough like the concept car they showed that was so popular it got green lit. Plus it was a few years late in terms of battery capacity at the price point they tried to sell it at. £30k+ for 35kwh was a bit of joke at the time. Renault Zoe was a cheaper and had a nearly 50% larger battery.

Soldered RAM is just about impossible to upgrade/replace, you have to desolder it and do a bunch of other tasks. I have only ever seen one person do it on a modern laptop and it looked horrendous: https://gregdavill.com/posts/dell-xps13-ram-upgrade/

I would just completely abandon any plans to upgrade a soldered RAM laptop unless you are extremely skilled.

Unsoldered RAM is just push fit sockets that have a release clip you need to pull if the socket is already populated. The RAM can only go in one way, its super super easy. Just make sure you double check the spec of RAM you buying against the laptop specs to make sure you buy the right sort.

They were told by the Studio that they needed to add a veteran actor to the cast for season two, Danny was one of the choices so obviously they picked him

https://www.looper.com/349130/the-real-reason-danny-devito-joined-the-cast-of-its-always-sunny/

The object selection tools in lightroom are pretty amazing, being able to choose select subject on the menu and it just selects the ducks or people or whatever pretty much perfectly each time to make your mask is pretty bonkers. It saves so much time over trying to select an object in dark table.

I really like dark table, I actually prefer the way it stacks modules vs. lightroom, and this is just for complex object selection, I can select the sky or background or whatever pretty simply in dark table.

Oh and dark table does not support DNG files. My workflow using PureRAW outputs compressed DNG files and Darktable will not support them currently. Sure I can go other routes for my export but the smaller size of a compressed DNG is very attractive when I can be working with about 100 * 40megapixel images.

PureRAW can sort of be duplicated by dark table, but again its not quite as good, doesnt quite have the same list of lens for correction/denoise capability. I shoot wildlife a lot and high ISO is a factor of life. Its not that dark table is bad at this its just PureRAW is very good at removing that noise and sharpening.

So lightroom and PureRAW forces me to have either windows or macos, and a shitty subscription for the former.

Latest hobby is photography, I had a camera for Christmas after not having a camera with interchangeable lenses in decades. I like that it gets me out the house as like nature/landscape/train photography.

Long standing hobbies are mechanical keyboards and coffee, espresso and pour over.

Keyboards I have really slowed down my purchases to just two or three new keyboards each year.

Coffee I have not purchased anything other than beans in a long time, but I still want to upgrade my espresso machine (marax) at some point.

The Aliens in Aliens are loosely based on Naked Mole Rat cultures and behaviours complete with hive mind that talks via chirps and trills, giant queen with extended baby area, specialized roles (this is more from the expanded universe), not liking other clans of Aliens, resistant to pain/acid etc. There are just so many parallels.

I say Aliens as the Alien in Alien was slightly different depending on if you consider the deleted scenes canon or not.

Its hands down my most useful tool, especially as I can both invite people to my events and I can share my calendar with people I choose. Everything goes into the calendar, from appointments to birthdays to holidays to when things need to be renewed. Only time I forget something now is if it hasn’t gone into the calendar.

I especially like being able to send the address of where I am meant to be going straight to my maps program, as I will usually try and work out where I want to park when going somewhere. Saves so much hassle when you actually get to the event.

I did a large scale data rationalization and migration project for a company that is heavily regulated. They can be asked to prove they have this or that document from seven years ago, for no other reason than they should have it. Not having it means big fines and negative press.

Hundreds of Tbs of data got appropriately labelled and migrated, even more got left behind on the old system till it could be decommissioned safely after a period of parallel running.

As part of the decommissioning the data was backed up twice, and I wanted the backup properly tested with some random file restores. Not a full restore, just a few random restores just a proof of life test that the backups worked. I was told that wasn’t a reasonable request and it wasn’t needed as the architect in charge of backups trusted his backup team and he “designed pragmatic solutions”.

I still mean to call in to the regulator in a year or two to trigger a restore request, lets see if a pragmatic solution design is actually the same as performing some basic testing.

I was diagnosed as dyslexic as a young child, I spent a lot of my childhood reading, and it definitely helped my ability to read. So much so I was ahead of my reading age by the time I hit secondary school.

However it did next to nothing for my auditory processing or my ability to phonetically spell out words. I did have significant coaching around this during school age but nothing ever really stuck with it.

I still cannot reliably phonetically spell out words today, many decades later. Pretty much every word I can spell I have had to brute force learn the hard way, letter by letter with a lot of repetition.

I have had the same problem with handwriting, its completely illegible unless I take my time and draw my letters the same way that people draw pictures, fine for forms but way too slow for notes. Thankfully I can type everything like that now.

I did cooking at school, all the way to GCSE, very nearly went to culinary school instead of doing A Levels and Uni. I decided against it as chefs are more likely to work evenings and weekends than your average IT nerd. I do not regret it, IT can be toxic but nowhere near as toxic as a lot of commercial kitchens.

As I got older I realised that I enjoy cooking, and I am a good cook, but I am not a chef and being a chef is a completely different level due to the volume of food and dishes you have to make. Cooking for yourself you make for a handful of people most of the time, usually a single meals worth of dishes, and you will still eat it even if its bad most of the time. A chef might do over a 100 covers from a menu of dishes and they have to be at least good, while working as a team to do so.

At least for GCSE there was a lot of repetition over dishes to get good at them and their basic techniques, and an encouragement to experiment with them. I must have spent six weeks making victoria sandwich cakes for example.

Post school, cooking books and youtube to expand the range of cuisine that I can cook.

The vast majority of tourists in Japan are Japanese domestic tourists, like over 90% of total tourists.

Queue spiderman pointing meme.

Ford serves two markets, the Americas, and everybody else, with an approx. 2/3rd vs. 1/3rd split respectively.

Sure they sell some small amount of F150s and similar oversized cars/trucks outside of the Americas, but its measured in 1000s.

European market is mostly much smaller cars. Ford has had the best selling car in the UK on and off with its Puma, a small SUV that is a mild hybrid.

Outside of the Americas they are starting to move forward with EVs, and will even have their own Renault produced R5 clone with the new Fiesta, but its too little too late as its not due to 28.

Often they don’t actually use the cards themselves, paying is the job of an assistant so its more likely to be some sort of company credit card.

Heres Rishi Sunak completely failing to get how contactless works, literately the simplest process to pay for something, you don’t need a PIN or put the card into the machine, you just tap the card reader. Its like hes never paid for anything in his life before.

https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/rishi-sunak-contactless-fail-video-b2043035.html

Macro photography is always an option for indoor

Assuming you want to use the laptop for this hobby, I would suggest getting a cheap, secondhand camera, old DSLRs are like £50 with a lens and perfectly fine starting point, but you can spend as much as you want on a setup. Only recommendation I would make, is get something thats still supported today for the lens mount type, that way you know you have a constant upgrade path.

Get the camera with the right lens included for what you want to start taking, additional lenses will increase the budget significantly even at the bottom end as they can often work well with better (and more expensive) camera bodies if you decide to upgrade later on.

Then you can use Darktable & GIMP to play with the photos to your hearts content or “spend” on Light Table & Photoshop. You can do anything from basic image correction up to full blown re-imaginings of your photos. Plenty of online tutorials to walk you through the processes.

Yeah for the average user, a Mac with Apple silicon is a great choice, you do not even have to buy new as a second hand M1 or M2 can have its battery replaced by Apple for about £160 and have a warranty on the work. The M1 for the average user is still more than powerful enough if you avoid the base RAM and storage. If you get really desperate there are also the genius bars, lol.

Sure you can pick up a secondhand Thinkpad for the same amount of money, replace the battery for less, stick whatever flavor of Linux on it you like, but the average user doing that by themselves and ending up with the same easy to use experience is unlikely. I would rather do the latter as I would pick a model I can upgrade RAM/Storage myself, but then I simply do not see the average user wanting to do that.