Brought to you by the same people behind all those #cookingwithgas social trends.

The simplicity of the Slate interior is fantastic. They developed a screenless touch screen that you can rotate without even looking at them. I wish I were in the market for this type of vehicle.

That’s the ideal resolution, assuming they get removed or relocated once the infrastructure has been updated.

Unfortunately many municipalities will grow comfortable with the money brought in by these cameras and decide not to make improvements that would eliminate the revenue stream.

Small shoe.

My perception of Proton was never that users would be kept safe from governments, but that users would be kept away from advertisers.

I can’t help but think those millions could have been more effectively spent on chicanes or other traffic calming measures.

Sam Reich and Dave Wiskus seem to have a good relationship. Hopefully they can help each other out.

Compared to prices and complexities of similar sets, this is on par. This bonsai tree is more expensive per piece, but you could buy a dozen for the price of this new Death Star.

If you don’t like little trees though, then you wouldn’t buy that. Same for not liking olives, you probably wouldn’t want a Greek salad. That doesn’t make those things disgusting, nor unfortunate that they are being sold. It’s just not for you, and that’s okay.

The World Map has eleven elements with a count over 100, four of which count over 1,000, with the highest count being 3,064.

The Eiffel Tower has twenty two elements over a count of 100, with the highest count being 704.

This new Death Star on the other hand has only four elements over a count of 100, with the highest count being 191.

I agree it’s quite the sticker shock, but it’s not as if Star Wars hasn’t dominated the high end Lego set market for many years. While the Eiffel Tower is much cheaper when considering price per piece, it stands in a category of its own both in terms of size and style.

Even so, comparing a wall decoration, a historical building, and a futuristic spacecraft is largely pointless as they aren’t likely to attract the same audience. People will buy what they like. Lego is a hobby, these days more for adults than children. It’s not right to gripe about people enjoying themselves.

Is Signal equivalent in scale to iMessage or WhatsApp? Does it come preinstalled on devices as well? All three are tools, I agree, however one of these things is not like the others. The average toolbox will have Phillips and Robertson screwdrivers, but not a Torx type.

Signal takes at least a grain of interest to even get a user to install it, whereas iMessage is already there ready to go and that suits most people just fine. The question I asked was based on my incorrect assumption that centred in the Venn diagram of people whom bother to use Signal, read a technology forum, and look at an article about backups, there would also be an overlap with people that already had a backup solution in place.

Your Marlinspike comment notwithstanding, thank you for demonstrating that I was wrong. I should have remembered most people just want to drive a car, not concern themselves with how or why the wheels go round.

It does strike me as funny that some fixate on the ‘why bother’ question when viewing what amounts to be another person’s hobby.

Well my point was not that every random maintenance task under the sun gets done and ticked off a mile long list.

It seems a reasonable guess that a person whose hobby is building custom mechanical keyboards probably does keep it clean. I figured people using an encrypted messaging system with backups enabled would probably go to the trouble of ensuring those backups didn’t live in one place.

From your comment and a few others, it’s evident I was wrong in this thought. Among other things, it seems some people don’t want backups at all, which is a bit surprising to me. That’s why I asked the question.

Are people not copying their backup off their device periodically?

Personally I’d find it useful to create backups by year so the process doesn’t take twenty minutes and wouldn’t create a massive backup file.

A couple years ago I had to make an effort of sending gallery links instead of sharing images and video directly through Signal since my backup file had grown so large. It’s a bit arduous.

I wouldn’t have guessed before this image that a hundred blueberries would fit in a dish that small.

While not about France, the prominent example that comes to mind is Star Wars personifying the United States as the Empire.

Golf carts in the city can be done well, with Peachtree City as the prime example. However they have infrastructure, and more importantly, laws surrounding the use of the carts.

Intoxication, unrestricted parking, and no rules combine to be a disaster waiting to happen. In your situation, I would attend city council meetings and speak out regarding the safety concerns you’re witnessing. It would be useful to also begin documenting misuse of these carts to present at these meetings.

Parks in my area have signage forbidding motorized vehicles. There’s no logical reason the people driving carts can’t leave them in the same area as cars. Driving across park fields is bound to become problematic in terms of lawn maintenance. Once your area implements laws, it could be nice to replace some of the vehicle traffic with cart traffic.

A few of the larger electronics retailers here have open box sections on their websites. I called several smaller ones, but due to their size they either didn’t have model units at all or only had one or two. One place I went to found they had some returned televisions in the back that they’d never put back on the sales floor, but being effectively brand new they only offered a ten percent reduction.

The website listings were ideal because as made it less arduous to compare specifications. In my case I was rather particular about certain technical details, so it might be simpler for someone that cares less about colour uniformity or input lag for example.

That said, I’ve now remembered that once I’d narrowed it down from a couple dozen options to three televisions, the deciding factor was nothing technical but instead it was the only user interface factor that I do see: it turns on and off with an animation reminiscent of old tube television. I’m not looking forward to replacing it because I find this power on visual so funny with a modern screen.

It might be handy for you to check out rtings accelerated longevity tests and see if you can find those models at a discount. I make use of their tests pretty often.

Instead of a specific brand, I looked at what open box / display models the local places had available. I ended up with a Samsung model that was marked 70% off MSRP.

The operating system is probably not great but it’s connected to a Nvidia Shield so I’ve never interacted with the OS beyond the initial setup.

I’d say this kind of decision has more to do with the user interface being easily navigable for your parents and what their technical proficiency is rather than trying to pick a television that might last a decade or more.

I didn’t give the privacy concern much thought in the moment, mainly thinking how useless and poorly designed those apps usually are, but I do agree.

Considering it now, I do have loyalty cards in my company vehicle for certain things, primarily fuel, and those of course remain in that vehicle as they serve no other purpose. Perhaps keeping an old phone for purposes of doing this scanning thing might be ideal. Though ideally I’d imagine a few dedicated handheld terminals kept in store for redundancy purposes.

Speaking of redundancy, you’re right about paying in cash. Perhaps as easy as a ‘cash’ button and it would send the purchase total to a customer service desk. Around here, all grocers have a ‘cashier’ desk where you get lottery tickets and gift cards and such.

Though it would be funny to see these handheld terminals have a compartment to accept notes and coins haha.

The only solution for that which I see is taking photos of the labels for every product taken off the shelf, but that’s quite the imposition obviously. Trouble is there are no laws guiding these practices, and the result is going to be quite the mess for customers to understand.

In my opinion, the best purchasing experience for this type of shopping is using a handheld device with which you both scan the product as you take it off the shelf, and also process payment on your way to the exit. No cashier lines, and even better, no more unloading and repacking of your items just to purchase them. From the shelf into your bag, only back out again in your kitchen.

On another note, it boggles my mind to see the square footage used by all these self checkout machines when these terminal systems exist. Sadly I’ve never used one in North America. This is an aspect of shopping that could make me loyal to a single vendor. I would actually install the vendor’s phone app if they built in this functionality instead of having these terminals.

I wonder at what point does a massive series of rocket engines power up and fly the magic kingdom to a market with a viable customer base.