It is significant if you remain healthy and employed with income.
But it is basically nothing if you get laid off at age 56, and you can't find another job due to age discrimination, your COBRA runs out after 18 months, but you are not 65 years old yet for Medicare . Obamacare may be completely neutered by then, so private health insurance may cost $30k/year for a 57 year-old. You still have a mortgage, you can't afford health insurance, so you take a risk and decide to skip it, because you are healthy. Then you get pancreatic cancer, and without health insurance, your chemotherapy completely depletes your 401k in one year. Then you die of cancer at age 59, because you cannot pay for the treatments anymore.
Given your government is trying very hard to relive the global demand for the US dollar and thus repatriate the trillions of dollars held outside the US that seems very unlikely.
I use Open Core Legacy Patcher (OCLP) to run modern macOS on old Intel macs. The first time the computer boots after an upgrade (e.g. Sequoia 15.7.3 to 15.7.4), it is slow as a dog. Because the macOS upgrade clobbers all the OCLP driver patches.
By "slow", I mean each keystroke on the login screen takes about 20-30 seconds for the corresponding bullet to appear in the password box.
The login screen displays 13 bullets. My password is 18 characters long. (Scammers, don't get excited, it's a unique password that's not used anywhere else on the Internet...) So after 13 characters, I had no idea if the computer was actually working.
It seemed like there is a 6-8 character keyboard buffer limit. Or maybe I typed in my 18-character password wrong multiple times. I don't know. I would type 2 characters, then walk away, come back, then type 2-3 more characters. It took me about 4-5 attempts over 30 minutes to log in. Then I applied the OCLP patches and everything worked perfectly after that.
That's exactly the situation I wanted to avoid with our aging macbook. I knew it would be a hacky mess trying to keep beating that dead horse to get it to run the latest OS. We couldn't update some software that required us to be on the latest version of MacOS (Signal desktop), so the laptop became prematurely obsolete. We bought a Windows PC instead.
No kidding. I had to create a Google Doc document to remember all the little things that I have to clobber in Firefox to make it behave reasonably. Here is an excerpt of how I clobber the defaults:
- Enable pixel-perfect smooth scrolling (Linux): MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1 (why do we still have to do this??)
- Enable: Ctrl-Tab cycles through recent used order
- Disable: "Show an image preview when you hover on a tab"
- Disable: "Use AI to suggest tabs and a name for tab group"
- Disable: "Enable Picture-in-Picture video controls"
- Disable: "Control media via keyboard, headset, or virtual interface"
- Disable: "Recommend extensions as you browse"
- Disable: "Recommend features as you browse"
- Disable: "Enable link previews"
- Homepage and new windows: Blank page
- New tabs: Blank page
- Disable: Web Search
- Disable: Weather
- Disable: Shortcuts
- Disable: Recommended stories
- Disable: Support Firefox
- Disable: "Save and autofill payment info"
- Disable: "Save and autofill addresses"
- Disable: "Ask to save passwords"
- Locations: Select "Block new requests asking to access your location"
- Notification: Select "Block new requests asking to allow notifications"
- Autoplay: Select "Block Audio and Video"
- Virtual Reality: Select "Block new requests asking to access your virtual reality devices"
- Default Search engine: DuckDuckGo
- Disable "Suggest search engines to use"
- Disable "Quick actions"
- Disable "Suggestions from Firefox"
- Disable: "Title Bar"
- Default Zoom: 110%, 120%, depending on the laptop
Yes, Betterfox all the way in + few custom settings.
I am still in position where I need to put some small pipeline to automatically download latest + merge my stuff and deploy, but even if it's manual every month or two it's not too bad.
Did not know about 'user.js', thanks! I guess creating a document that lists all my overrides was the first step. Now I have to figure out how to create a user.js that works on Linux, Macos, Windows, and maybe Android?
But I think you have to add every Meta domain into that container manually. The other one sounds like it's got them all already put into their own container. Convenient if you one day decide to set up an account on Instagram but never used it before, and forget to add it to the container.
Image preview is slightly slower and has noticeable latency, compared to the text popup that is almost instantaneous.
And it is more visually distracting. I hate UI features that interfere with my workflow. I hate most UI animations. I turned animations off on my Android phone, and now the thing just flies.
In practice, the Duracell alkaline battery will leak caustic fluids inside the remote control and destroy it, and you will have to mortgage your house to buy a replacement on eBay, if it's even available. (I pick on Duracell because they are the worst. They leak if you look at them wrong, when they are brand new, inside the original packaging, before their "expiration date". But all alkalines are bad.)
All my remotes get NiMH batteries, no matter what. I don't care if one charge cycle lasts 10 years. It's cheaper than having the battery destroy the remote.
I've only had batteries leak in remotes left unused for over a year. I just pick up Duracell or whatever is at Costco.
I've also bought two replacement remotes off of Amazon in the past year, one Samsung and one Insignia. I think they were $15-20 each, which seemed very reasonable to me.
Generally they won't have the manufacturer's logo, but everything else on the outside looks 100% identical, and all the buttons worked.
I have never, in my 40 years of life, had an alkaline battery leak and destroy something. I'm aware that it can happen, but in practice it doesn't happen very often.
I don't know what to tell you. I'm older than you. I've seen it happen 20-30 times in my life. I've seen batteries leak in flashlights, clock radios (the backup battery), wall clocks, calculators, cameras, remote controls, thermostats, wireless mouse, and so on.
A few years ago, I had an unopened pack of 8xAA Duracell alkalines. They had expiration dates on them, and had 2-3 years left. Two of the batteries were leaking in the pack.
Over the past 15 years, I have gradually migrated almost everything to NiMH. I don't see leaking batteries anymore in my house. But go to a thrift store, e.g. Goodwill, and open up the battery compartments of things. Many of them will have been destroyed by the leaking batteries.
I have many times in my less than 40 years of life. Often things that had batteries left in then and forgotten about for a few years, and often with the cheap batteries something came with. Often with kids toys, TV remotes and rarely used flashlights. If you're the kind of person that takes batteries out when you put things away or you change the batteries somewhat soon after they die you likely never had any leak.
I have a Canon AE-1 that takes a 4LR44 to operate the light meter. When I got it the battery had deteriorated significantly, causing a lot of damage to the battery area. I had to remake the battery contacts cutting and soldering in new springs and pads as the corrosion had practically completely eaten the old ones. That was probably the most notable leak I've encountered. But the previous owners didn't even know there was a battery in it, so it likely had that battery in there for a decade or more.
I have seen every kind of common alkaline battery size leak acid or have corrosion. 9V, AA, AAA, C, D. It helps that I used to fix broken things for a living, I guess.
Can’t recall if I’ve seen a CR2032 leak acid or corrode, but I think I have.
Yeah, most of the devices using 9V are smoke/CO detectors which only accept alkalines. I don't use the few remaining 9V devices enough to justify buying a new charger.
Any chance you can prevent the left hand navigation floating widget of 10 bubbles (no idea what it's called) from rendering on top of the actual content? It obscures the text that I want to read, very irritating. [Edit: I see, it works at 100%. But my default zoom is 110% or 120%. Zooming seems to break your layout.]
What is the trackpoint equivalent of the two-finger scroll? I cannot imagine browsing the web without the two-finger scroll. Or pinch-zooming, how do you do that with a trackpoint?
You have to imagine a world without gestural control, and without the bandwidth or memory for high resolution content worth zooming in on, or the processing power to smoothly scale in real time.
How can that work? Middle click is the "paste" function in X11. If I'm in a terminal emulator, how can I two-finger scroll over the output history buffer?
What if I am hovering over an edit box of a form on a web page. Doesn't that paste some random text into the edit box if I try to middle-click+trackpoint?
Also, isn't the middle button much smaller than than the left and right buttons on a laptop? I recall constantly missing the middle button when trying to paste on laptops that had the middle button.
Pinch-zooming: I assume that it's impossible to pinch zoom with a trackpoint.
I don't know.. Trackpoint seems much less ergonomic and less useful than a trackpad to me.
Middle click is held when you scroll, only pastes if normal quick click. Never have had an issue with accidental pastes, unlike the trackpad which I do palm on occasion and cause various accidental events. You can zoom with ctrl-middle click, I used to have that rebound to just ctrl-trackpoint but in the situations where I am using the trackpoint I tend to prefer zooming with the keyboard so that binding got lost along the way. No idea if there is a binding for scrolling through the history, I never interact with my history that way, you can always do a custom binding.
>Trackpoint seems much less ergonomic and less useful than a trackpad to me.
You still have a trackpad, it is not either or. For more mouse heavy tasks I prefer the trackpad or trackball if it is handy. For things which require lots of back and forth between keyboard and mouse, I prefer the trackpoint. Everywhere else is a mix, scrolling a long website I tend to use the trackpoint but for general browsing tend towards the trackpad, editing this post I will use the trackpoint but will almost certainly use the trackpad to click "reply" since my fingers will be going back to general browsing mode. I just use which ever is most suited to the task.
Pinch zooming is not the same as keyboard zooming though. With pinch zooming, the entire webpage is magnified, including images. With keyboard zooming, the images become smaller (to my great annoyance) while the rest of the web page becomes larger.
Palm rejection on all laptops that I have used has sucked, except for Apple. I don't know how they do it, but palm rejection is almost perfect on MacBooks.
Your zoom issue is probably browser based behavior, with Vivaldi, keyboard zoom does the entire webpage including images. But you can always setup your own bindings for this stuff to get the behavior you want, at least you can do it on linux.
I havn't had any issue with palm rejection on linux in a long time, it is just something that happens on occasion and almost perfect is exactly how I would describe it. The point of that was just that trackpads error more frequently than trackpoint scrolling, which I can't recall ever being confused for a simple middle click; paste happens on release and once you move the trackpoint while middle button is down, it is no longer a middle click so will not paste on release.
Not all reverted. Still waiting for my USB-A ports and the SD card reader, on laptops described as "Pro". It's as if Apple forgot that "Pro" is a shorthand for "professional" instead of a meaningless marketing term.
Did not know that, thanks for the info. But Apple lost me as a customer 10 years ago with their hostile actions. Even if they added back USB-A, I wouldn't go back.
But it is basically nothing if you get laid off at age 56, and you can't find another job due to age discrimination, your COBRA runs out after 18 months, but you are not 65 years old yet for Medicare . Obamacare may be completely neutered by then, so private health insurance may cost $30k/year for a 57 year-old. You still have a mortgage, you can't afford health insurance, so you take a risk and decide to skip it, because you are healthy. Then you get pancreatic cancer, and without health insurance, your chemotherapy completely depletes your 401k in one year. Then you die of cancer at age 59, because you cannot pay for the treatments anymore.
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