This is especially frustrating as a Canadian where our market isn’t big enough to have options for a lot of specific goods. I’ll look to buy something and pick what I want only to find that the choices are Amazon or a US retailer with insane shipping costs plus potential customs charges to Canada. Even if I do find a Canadian retailer that sells it, shipping is often more than the product itself.

I’ve started ordering a bit more from Aliexpress, especially for things less than $20 since shipping is usually free or a couple dollars. Otherwise larger stores in my area like Best Buy, London Drugs and Canadian Tire.

This is effectively impossible. Time in the market beats trying to time the market because it is hard to identify the dip until you have already exited it.

When, no matter how long it has been since you saw each other last it is like you saw them yesterday.

I’ve become fed up with a job I’ve had for a long time. I’m confused about what I even want to do because the changes and decisions that management keeps making has me burnt out at even the concept of my job.

I’ve known for well over a year that it is time to make a change, but that has gotten much more urgent recently. The problem is that it’s really haste to leave a well paying job for another I doubt will pay as well.

Dual booting is easy as long as you have a second drive or can shrink your Windows partition to provide space for your Linux install (this can be done within Windows). Your distro installer should have a couple options during install, one of which should allow you to install it on a specific partition without touching your Windows partition. After you select that option it should install everything including a bootloader like GRUB or systemdboot that will allow you to select Windows or Linux on startup.

A warning about dual booting though, Windows doesn’t like to be installed alongside another OS, it may realize this and fuck with your bootloader resulting in a system that won’t boot into your linux install. You need to boot up a live CD and do something called “chroot” into your sytem to reinstall your bootloader. Its not actually that difficult but can be a pain to figure out the first time. https://discovery.endeavouros.com/system-rescue/arch-chroot/2022/12/

I made the change about a year ago now. I saw the end of Windows 10 coming up and decided to install linux in a dual boot and try my best to use it exclusively for a couple months until I properly got used to it. You will need to accept that not every program you use on Windows will be available and you may have to try out a couple replacements before you find something that works for you. But most things have decent alternatives. Especially considering how much is done in a web browser these days, there aren’t too many programs I really miss from Windows (mostly 3D CAD and RAW image processing).

Also, note that the differences between distros is way overblown when it comes to compatibility, it is mostly just a case of whether your package manager has the packages you want available and how bleeding edge the packages your distro uses are. Debian based distros (e.g. Ubuntu and Mint) tend to use slightly older packages than ones that are rolling release like Arch which should theoretically be a bit more stable.

I was holding onto Prime for the unlimited automatic photos backup (I had 300+ GB backed up) but I finally cancelled a few months ago. I’ve ordered a couple of times since then when I couldn’t find what I needed elsewhere and instead of 2 days shipping is has consistently been 3 days delivery.

Yup, also while prices may have gone up across the board the spread of prices seems to have reduced. At this point eating out is a bad value but I feel like spending $30 on a good meal gives me better value than a nearly $20 fast food meal.

Maybe if I used my selfie camera more often than never.

Honestly, if you want “quick unprofessional photos” stick with a smartphone.

Standalone cameras don’t have nearly the processing or automated modes of modern phones. So while bigger sensors and better glass can get you a better image it comes along with needing to know how to use the camera and processing the photos afterwards.

That said if you still want something at a decent price I’d be looking at a used Fuji x100 or Sony rx100.

I’ve been to China a number of times and it is a very interesting place with many amazing people. A government doesn’t necessarily represent the people that live there.

That said, it is up to you and your moral system whether to visit a country with a government you disagree with.

That kerning issue is so distinctive that I knew where the document was from from the preview snapshot which didn’t show the ISTA header. It is actually funny how horrible their Pdfs on their website are and how nobody cares to fix it.

Other’s here have covered the why’s of how China became a manufacturing powerhouse, but it is also interesting about how they continue to build things even though China is no longer the cheapest place to make things and hasn’t been for awhile.

One of the most amazing things about manufacturing in China is how extensive their supply chain infrastructure is. This allowes your suppliers to react quickly and do things in days or hours that would take weeks elsewhere in the world. I’ve got suppliers in China that I know will get it right the first time, and will build a brand new product in 6-8 weeks rather than 12 weeks anywhere else in the world. The way the supply chain worldwide revolves around China is both amazing and scary. There are many items today that are nearly impossible to get outside of China at any price.

The other thing is people. Due to the years of experience China is the place where the best tooling and manufacturing engineers are. There are so many people concentrated in the manufacturing centers that if you need to hire 1000 people in a couple days to assemble widgets then you could feasibly do that.

That said, there is definitely a push to diversify manufacturing outside of China and I wouldn’t be surprised if they lose some of these advantages in the coming years. This started with the original US tariffs against China, continued due to how China locked down during the pandemic, as well as the current round of US tariffs.

The issue I have with “leagues” is that by assigning them you are essentially reducing your potential dating pool because of an assumption. The whole point of flirting and getting to know someone is to evaluate your compatibility with each other. You can’t know whether you are someone’s exact type without interacting with them.

I’ve been surprised enough times by which women do and don’t find me attractive that I know better than to make any assumptions.

Most cars are black, white, gray, or silver.

I fucking hate these new vehicles with the paint that has no sparkle to it, especially the horrible grey one. So called Putty ass-whips

In many places doorknobs are being phased out of codes precisely because they aren’t accessible like a lever style is.

I’ve interviewed many people and most people are terrible in that situation, even when I try to help them along.

Nervousness is the number one thing that throws people off during an interview. Instead of taking a breath to calm down and think things through they either immediately start speaking without a clear plan, or they clam up and don’t give me anything to talk about. Using the STAR/START method of answering questions works great to give a framework.

The next is that they just don’t demonstrate their skills or that they learn over time. I’ll ask a technical question about something and they show no understanding of why they did something. I love asking questions about what a person learned while doing their work, so many people just don’t have anything to share.

Lastly, interviews are way easier if the other person treats it like a conversation rather than a one way Q&A session. I get a much better idea of what they will be like to work with and I’m more comfortable when I can ask questions that continue on the discussion. On the flipside, some people take over conversations and don’t get that our time is limited and answers need to be concise. That said, even if the interview is the conversation style, make sure to save at least a couple questions for the ending when you are inevitably asked for questions.

Yeah, that is the downside of dual booting, you are almost certainly going to end up learning how to chroot to fix the bootloader at some point. But dealing with a VM, especially if you want to pass a GPU also has its own difficulties.

I recommend dual booting, not a VM. It is easy enough to choose which OS to boot into if you need to go back to Windows, while being enough friction that you don’t immediately fallback to going into Windows every time you don’t know how to do something in Linux.

I don’t code, but from the gaming standpoint, things are pretty decent on Linux these days. I’ve been on Linux full time on my laptop for well over a year now, and 6+ months on my main desktop now and find very few reasons to boot into Windows. I think I booted into Windows last weekend for the first time in at least 2 months because I had to upgrade the FW on a device that only had a Windows tool. Otherwise I do have a windows VM on a server that I use relatively frequently, because the state of 3D CAD software on Linux is horrible.

I bought a restaurant sized container of the Chipotle Tabasco a few years ago. Turns out that might be a bit too much for a single person to get through in a reasonable amount of time.