IT is picky about what I’m allowed to install on their machines.

We’re doing a major bathroom remodel at the moment and as part of the project are planning to replace the 15 year old electric water heater that came with the house when we bought it. Heat pumps work by exchanging heat from the air around to the water in the tank, which means that in addition to reducing humidity they also put out cool air. Usually they are installed in a garage or basement where that doesn’t matter as much, but we don’t have a basement and putting it in the garage would require a lot more work in terms of plumbing and electrical work, so we’re going to keep it where it is in the house but install vents that exchange air from the attic in the winter, then in the summer we can flip open the vents and cool/dehumidify our house.

They’re expensive up front but there are federal tax credits through 2032 (I think) of up to 30% of the project cost ($2000 max) and on top of that our local electric company is offering rebates of $800 to replace an electric or gas heater with an air pump. So that will reduce the upfront cost by a pretty good amount.

The only thing I’m at all concerned about is the noise of the motor, but the heater won’t be adjacent to any bedrooms so I don’t think it’ll be a big problem in any case.

I use it for some tasks at work that don’t function correctly on Firefox (for whatever reason our local intranet doesn’t play nice with FF) but other than that, I am almost exclusively using Firefox.

Now if someone can come up with a better search engine than Google…

I would love to see this happen but I suspect that the number of users who actually install ad blocker extensions and are willing to switch to a new browser once they stop working is fairly insignificant compared to the total numbers of people browsing in Chrome.

Liberia and Myanmar also use imperial units, but they’re both starting to move towards metric in recent years so soon the US truly will be alone in that

Dooooooooooon’t!

What a fucking ding dong this guy is.

I haven’t deleted my account but it’s been dormant for a while. I guess at some point it’ll get deleted if I don’t touch it, which… fine, I guess.

Re the video games, yes absolutely I’ve done this. I don’t think I’ve 100% finished a game, at least not in the last 20 years. Playing through the latest Zelda game I had to pick my moment when to go take on the final boss carefully, I know that once I beat a game I’m a lot less inclined to keep going on side quests and finding shrines/korok seeds/whatever collectibles that particular game has. So I wanted to do as much of that as I could before going after Ganondorf, but I also didn’t want to wait too long because if I make myself do ALL the side quests and get ALL the collectibles I’ll burn and not even bother finishing the game.

Add in a dash of autistic hyperfocus and you can in fact teach yourself enough to get the project done.

Doesn’t mean you WILL get it done of course.

Oh neat, I didn’t know that! Thanks.

My phone (Pixel 6) doesn’t have one but I wish it did. I still use an aux cord to listen in my car or to plug into my amplifier when I practice on headphones, so I have to use 3.5mm to USB-C converter dongles. I also can’t charge my phone while using an aux cable now which is annoying.

Yeah, benzos are not too be fucked with but saying they have no medical purpose is just flat out wrong

The basic problem with AI is that it can only learn from things it reads on the Internet, and the Internet is a dark place with a lot of racists.

Yamaha owns a lot of smaller companies. Line 6 has been one of their subsidiaries for a while and they recently acquired Ampeg as well, so you can buy a full rig with a bass, effects pedals, amp head and speaker cabs all from Yamaha.

My brother in law is a jazz sax player (tenor) and plays a Yamaha. I don’t know the model but he says it’s great and punches well above it’s weight class considering what it cost him.

I’m a bass player so I’m only aware of their guitar models, haven’t ever played them myself (and honestly I lack the experience with guitars to tell a good one from a so-so one). But their BB basses are great and have been for a long time. I bought one for less than $900 a couple years back and it sounds and plays great, and is just a really well designed instrument. They’ve implemented a lot of stuff that legacy companies like Fender or Gibson should, but won’t (6 bolt necks with miter attachments at the end, angled slots for through body stringing, string trees that actually retain strings well for a good break angle above the nut, reversible bridge saddles)

I don’t know which products you’re thinking of but at least for bass guitars (which is my instrument) they’ve got stuff ranging from less than $200 up to just under $2000. My upper-mid tier bass cost just under $900, but sounds and feels better than Fender basses that would cost $1300 or more. Not to mention better designed. Compare that to other top tier production models from Fender, Gibson, Musicman, Rickenbacker etc… They’re all between $2000 and $3000. Musicman might be the only one of those that can claim to be better built consistently.

Yamaha often gets overlooked for instruments, I think a lot of this is that we don’t expect a company that makes jetskis and motorcycles to also know what they’re doing with guitars, saxophones, and pianos, but they actually make good quality stuff.

It’s more accurate to think of Yamaha as a conglomerate that owns several different companies. It’s just that a lot of those smaller companies are also named Yamaha

Fun fact, the Yamaha logo is an image of three tuning forks, laid atop each other.