There's a massive cultural thing in the US about the iPhone being the preferred phone and if you don't have one it must be because you're too poor to afford one. Obviously this is a result of marketing and isn't universal but it is a surprisingly widely held view.

Given that, showing up in a group chat as a lone blue bubble marks you out as the inferior group member (in some people's eyes). It doesn't matter so much 1:1 but if there are 10 people the odd one out stands out.

It absolutely discusses phone size - in some detail both in the intro and as part of the reviews.

I've never had to do this sort of thing in a lab, but I now feel I know exactly what that feels like! You have my sympathy!

Isn't dust what you get when things disintegrate?

It's just psychologically nicer. It's a bit like it being nicer to get on with work when my desk is tidy (not that I tidy it that often)

I do it, because it makes a massive difference to me how tidy my bedroom feels and how welcoming the bed looks at the end of the day. I just have a duvet though, so it's 10 seconds of pulling on each corner until it's reasonably even - not going for perfection!

Do not declare your undying love for someone. It puts way too much pressure on, and unless they're in exactly the same mental place it's unlikely to go anywhere.

Instead, just ask them if they'd like to go on a date. That obviously communicates that you're interested in them, and gives a good starting point to build a connection.

I agree, it's a bit annoying. Maybe you could put it in desktop mode, and configure it to turn screen off but not go to sleep? It'll still do updates then.

I've been playing more single player games. My PC has mostly been for multiplayer stuff with friends - Siege, Deep Rock etc. My Deck has opened up time to a load of Single Player things - AAA things like Spiderman, Control, Mad Max and indie stuff like Black Skylands.

Plus I had a load of work travel in the first part of this year. The Deck made hotel rooms much more pleasant!

I'm glad to see some variation in this space (I almost said innovation except that it's a combo of the Deck and Switch). But it's still running Windows (see above) and it's going to be around twice the price of a Deck.

Yeah, the ROG Ally particularly makes zero sense to me and misses the point. It runs Windows and it doesn't have the touchpads.

The touchpads really broaden the utility of the console, from being able to select small UI elements in normal programs to being able to play more mouse enabled games (FTL being the most recent for me).

And Linux is the real special sauce - nobody seems to get why Valve did all that work rather than "just" putting Windows on it. Windows isn't a selling point (you can put it on the Deck if you want), it's slow, the UI doesn't work well on that screen and you lose out on being able to suspend games etc.

Interesting - I'd always thought that G-Sync etc meant the other way around. Thanks for the explanation!

Desktop Linux had been a bit behind the others on display features due to the legacy of X. As everybody moves more to Wayland that better enables these sorts of things, they're catching up.

You can update your version of Fedora through the updater software as well but it's a very clear separate process that is initiated manually.

Distro version updates bring major updates to key packages - the one you'd notice most would be to Gnome, the desktop environment. There will be other things too that get only bugfix and security updates during the life of that version, and then after a while that version will lose support and you won't get any updates at all (https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/releases/lifecycle/).

Updating is very safe and reliable. I've had my Fedora install at work for 3 years, updating periodically and it's working extremely well.

That interface does provide a warm, comforting familiarity, but I do think we can aim higher than a 20 year old bit of web design. I'm really enjoying Alexandrite on Desktop.

I think you're close - someone well travelled is someone who has a broader view of how the world works than just the one country they were brought up in.

That happens when they go to countries and actually experience them. I've just been to the Canary Islands for a week - I went airport to hotel, sat beside the pool for a week and then went home again. This was lovely and relaxing (which I needed) but did nothing for expanding my cultural horizons.

Your instructions are completely correct, but it might make more sense to look at the bands of metal rather than the insulator between them.

TRS stands for "Tip, Ring, Sleeve", referring to the 3 contacts on a TRS jack - one for the left channel, one for right and one for ground. TRRS as you might guess has an extra ring to provide a contact for the microphone as well. So you're looking for the metal tip, two rings of metal and then the metal sleeve.

Yeah, I think you have to acknowledge it or they'll feel (at best) incredibly awkward the whole time. Don't make a big deal of it though - say you're "sorry you ghosted her and no-one deserves that. If she wants to talk about it then you're willing, but otherwise won't mention it again".

One more note on learning Rust: what Rust does is front-load the pain. If you write something in another low-level "direct control of memory" language you can often get something going much more easily than Rust because you don't have to "fight the borrow checker" - it'll just let you do what you want. In Rust, you need to learn how all the ownership stuff works and what types to use to keep the compiler happy.

But then as your project grows, or does a more unusual thing, or is just handed over to someone who didn't know the original design idea, Rust begins to shine more and more. Your C/C++/whatever program might start randomly crashing because there's a case where your pointer arithmetic doesn't work, or it has a security hole because it's possible to make a buffer overrun. But in Rust, the compiler has already made you prove that none of that is possible in your program.

So you pay a cost at the start (both at the start of learning, and at the start of getting your program going) but then over time Rust gives you a good return on that investment.