Figs prosper here. They make excellent shade trees, and the birds love them. You can always take cuttings and plant elsewhere. We cut ours to the roots and it grew back into a massive tree over 13 years.

Watering down the brand, lol

It’s cool, but without a way to plug it in, it’s a bit of a PITA… My index controllers had an annoying habit of having one controller die in the middle of a session and need to be charged. One more thing to charge is annoying when we already had corded versions, imo.

Elite Dangerous’s VR mode will blow your nuts off provided you have several dozen - several hundred hours in the game AND you have a HOTAS. The original Boneworks was also quite good.

Hotdogs Horseshoes and Handgrenades and Space Pirate Trainer are great, along with the Museum of Other Realities. Other than those, VR has been trapped in amber since about 2021.

I have an index and will continue to dust it off occasionally. VR kinda died as valve stopped publishing and Facebook did…well… Everything it did.

Nope. PCs haven’t had physical games for well over a decade. Even “physical” games like Battlefield 1 just had a code in them, and that was 2016, a decade ago now. Discs were going away for PC games by the early 10s. I’ve been surprised that consoles held out for as long as they did, considering the always online stuff, the updates, seasonal DLC, DRM, etc. I miss when games were feature complete, like Pokemon Emerald or the early Sonic franchise.

I would like to be able to legally resell my digital games that I don’t want anymore.

GMMK keyboards allow any colors and pretty much any switches as everything is modular. However, their new keyboards don’t appear to be as good as their old ones. If you can find a GMMK or GMMK2, those are the good ones.

No recommendations here other than online advice. I believe we have a Russian version of that plant or a similar tea plant that absolutely loves our 9b region. It’s become a voracious bush and needs to be whacked back yearly, or it will overtake the other plants in the garden bed.

Also, those seeds look like chocolate drops and I have an overwhelming urge to put them in my mouth, lol.

The Stand (by King), The Stormlight Archive (by Brandon Sanderson), and The Player Of Games by Ian M. Banks are excellent.

I also liked Yesteryear by Caro Burke, but it gave off similar vibes to the video game called “Omori” and the nonfiction book called Educated by Tara Westover. All three are not happy stories, lol.

I’m currently reading through the Stormlight Archive series and I’m currently waiting on copies of the third book to become available at the library. It can’t come soon enough!

Edit: I’ve also read through a number of books on diseases and Ebola just before the current outbreak happened. If you like virology and that sort of thing, lmk :)

Diatomaceous Earth (DE) ravages them too. Apply outside/don’t breathe it in. Once it’s in the soil, it will stay there for quite awhile and offers long lasting protection.

It cuts up the bugs!

If the index cost $1000 without a battery, storage, memory and a SoC in 2019, I can’t imagine the frame is going to be anything below $1,500 with 2026 pricing.

If you have 100k saved in liquid cash, you definitely need to be investing that in broad scale index funds. Keeping it liquid means inflation is going to be eating away at your money over time, which is really not good. The whole market is pretty out of balance due to AI, but it’s better to get in now rather than trying to wait and see. You have time to recover from market crashes, just don’t panic sell if the market crashes.

If financial stuff isn’t your thing, you can also save for retirement in prefabbed vehicles called Target-Date Funds. These are kinda annoying as they have a decent amount of fees, but you basically set a retirement goal date, and they will automatically rebalance more and more conservatively over time. However, you are at a bit of a disadvantage if you start at 43. I’d recommend saving aggressively if you can afford to.

Renting vs buying is always a thing, and it highly depends where you live. Having money for a down payment is good, but I’d consider what 100k invested right now would do for you until you are 80 vs what a house would do for you instead. 40 years of interest could be better than a significant debt load, even with several market crashes.

Fwiw, if you don’t have a spouse or kids, I don’t really see much value in a house. Rent a cheap one bed and laugh all the way to the bank when a water pipe breaks and you don’t have to cover 75k in water damage.

Depends on where you live. Significantly flat area? Totally unnecessary. We have some 21% grade hills, and when you are behind five cars at a red light, you can’t even push off to get started because it’s so steep when hauling groceries or kids.

The throttle is the only way you can get the first stroke in to engage the motor as you also use your legs. Ebikes/escooters make up a huge portion of our micromobility culture.

It’s also part of the reason why bike culture never really took off here until electric bikes/scooters/onewheels became affordable.

I got a Motorola Stylus 5g 2024 for $250. There’s probably newer now, but it’s a decent device with a headphone jack, large battery, SD card slot, and a stylus. It feels similarly decent to my Z fold 4, which was surprising. I thought it would be laggy.

My favorite are the ones here, which look like plastic, but are actually reinforced steel and concrete. Someone’s in for a surprise, just like the people who park in the rush hour bus lane (their brand new Mach E was destroyed)

I do! :)

Looks cool! I hope they release a slider, someday. I miss my 00s era slider.

Does Europe have fabs? Or are they purely reliant on Asia and the US fabs?

For me, it wasn’t that, but the ribbon cable inside. A 20 cent part broke, but Samsung won’t allow techs to fix that. Their “fix” is to replace the hinge, inner, and outer screens, a $600 part. Maddening, considering the cable can be fixed.

Reminds me of my childhood :)

I wish I had this for pollen when I’m out biking in spring.