It’s also an edition thing. The Home version is the worst, the Pro version is much the same, but the corporate Enterprise version cuts out a lot of the crap.

As someone who’s grown up in the Midwest, Menards used to be just a hardware store/lumber yard but in the last 15-20 years really has branched out to more than just a hardware store. Hence the home goods, pet supplies, clothing, groceries, appliances, etc in addition to the hardware store/lumber yard bit. In some ways it’s a lot more like Fleet Farm than it is like Home Depot, though Menard’s doesn’t have the farming supplies and tractor parts and stuff like that which can be found at a Fleet Farm.

Since they made this change, the newer and remodeled stores are the ones with the multiple floors since they need all the floor space. But I remember some of the original and smaller stores were also multiple floors (electrical was typically upstairs), but those might be all gone by now. The one we went to when I was a kid wouldn’t be anyway close to being ADA compliant today. That store moved locations and the old building is long gone now.

Other than hoarding up the houses, everything is pretty general Monopoly strategy I figured out a long time ago. Basically try to get a monopoly ASAP and then develop it ASAP. I’ve found that strategy to be good, but it depends a lot on luck. Sometimes despite everything you try, the only monopoly you can get are those horrid green properties and you’re pretty much doomed.

I don’t really see it as a conspiracy. What seems to happen is Apple does something like remove the headphone jack. Apple users essentially have to accept it as they are locked in and don’t have any choice in the matter. Plus you have the fanboys that have an amazing ability to rationalize anything Apple does. Everyone else sees that Apple got away with something, and they follow suit.

Losing the SD slot would still be annoying but not as big of a deal with everyone wasn’t also copying Apple’s model of massively overcharging for storage upgrades.

Besides there being no 1998 Aerostar, this is one of the early models. The badges on the front fenders went away after the first few model years, and the later ones have composite headlights rather than the sealed beams.

I can see it. My corporate work laptop is locked down with their security and monitoring software, so I’m not using it for personal things, even if it is allowed for some limited things. And there’s company resources that I can only access through the machines under their control, so I couldn’t ditch it either. And using that laptop for a second job would be a big no-no.

I can see the school laptop being similar, though my experience is that they tend to not be locked down quite as hard as the corporate machine, unless you do boneheaded things with it and piss off the school’s IT department.

So I can see the need for a personal computer, plus it’s always nice to keep that well separated to avoid things like incidents hooked up to a projector and screen sharing.

Because modern houses really don’t give any thoughts about airflow or natural cooling. Heck, even getting the AC compressor installed on a side of the house where it doesn’t get baked in the afternoon sun is too much to ask for.

That’s the problem. A lot of those high-end, expensive appliances are built just as shitty as the low-end, basic models. The difference is just some bells and whistles and a higher price tag.

I have no problem paying extra for a higher quality, better built appliance. But the challenge is differentiating those from the low quality, built as cheaply as possible appliances that have just been marked up with a premium price tag.

At least when I buy the cheap, shitty model, I get what I paid for.

The reason we have timezones is because of the railroads. Before the railroads came in, every town would have its own time, typically set so noon is the time when the sun is highest in the sky. This really wasn’t a problem, as back then it didn’t really matter that the time was different in every little burg.

Then the railroads came in. They needed things running on a coordinated time table out of necessity, and having every town with its own time was unworkable. I’m sure the railroads would have loved running everything off of the same clock everywhere because that would be simple. But people were too used to noon being the middle of the day, so instead we got the compromise of having timezones so that the railroads can still run on a coordinated time table, but also so that noon is still approximately the middle of the day as people were used to.

So the solution is just go back to the 1800’s and convince the railroads that timezones are actually silly and that they really should run everything based upon UTC. And if people want rail service to their town, they can just deal with not having 12PM being when the sun is highest in the sky.

The games that are going to be the hardest to preserve may end up being many of the mobile games that are popular now.

These games are usually installed through an app store, so if the app store pulls it, that could be it for new installations of the game unless the game can be extracted off an existing device. And even if you manage to extract the game off of a device, in order to get it onto another mobile device will likely require some way to side load it.

Many of these games also depend on a server so once the server is turned off that’s another way the game to die.

The mobile devices these games run on aren’t built for the long term either. They are essentially disposable devices meant to last a few years and then be tossed. They aren’t built to be serviced or repaired. Eventually the batteries will die, and while you can replace the battery, there’s no standardization of battery packs and eventually replacement batteries won’t be available either.

Even if you can get an old mobile device going, there’s no guarantee that you’ll actually be able to do anything with it, because the device itself may depend on some remote server just to function that could someday be shut off. There’s already old phones today that if you factory reset them, it effectively bricks them since they need to contact some activation server as part of the initial setup process and that server is long gone.

Of course, many people may ask - who cares? Perhaps so, but I’d bet a lot of people said the same thing about the old Atari and Nintendo and Sega and MS-DOS games that were popular years ago and are still popular today.

It’s kind of interesting that pretty much all the games I played as a kid are still accessible to me today - in many cases the original game is still playable on the original, still functional, hardware. But a lot of kids today growing up today playing mobile games on a phone or a tablet, when they are my age, could very well have no way to ever experience those games again that they grew up with as kids.

Donald trumP?

I did switch over to yt-dlp some time later as development seems to have slowed on Pytube and yt-dlp seems to be where all the activity is.

That reminds me back when some time ago, I was tired of dealing with sketchy, and often broken, websites and programs for downloading videos from Youtube. I figured these sorts of programs must be doing something along the lines of downloading the Youtube page, parsing through the massive pile of HTML and Javascript to find the stream, and then saving that to a video file. That seemed like something I could do myself with Python, so I set out to see if I could figure out how to do it.

A few minutes and a couple of web searches later, I discovered that someone else had figured that all out already and I just needed to do “pip install pytube”.

I did the opposite. After one of the big updates, Windows 10 decided it was no longer going to work with the Vista-era drivers for an old Core 2 Duo laptop. To be fair to Microsoft, was I pretty impressed when I initially installed Windows 10 and it accepted those ancient drivers without any complaints on a laptop that was 10 years old at that time.

So I instead installed Manjaro and everything worked just fine.

There’s always the centrally managed corporate Windows desktops. My workplace is better about this now, but previously they’d just push down updates and with some of them you’d have little other choice but to let it proceed no matter how inconvenient the timing.