Yeah. On various "Buy it for life" forums it's a daily occurence that someone mentions a brand they bought 5 years ago and then someone chimes in that they were sold or restructured last year and now it's no longer "buy it for life".
Some brands kind of split up so products sold in one market is cheap knockoffs while products sold in the home market is still high quality manufactured at the old factory with 100 years old machinery and experienced workers. If you want to buy quality you've got to do deep research first.
I can't search for Apples own Notes app. I've tried the name in my local language, I've tried the original english name of the app. Nothing. It will show me OneNote which isn't even installed anymore, but not the Notes app. Very strange.
Rookie numbers. As the crow flies it's 250km between me and my old town. Used to drive back and forth a lot back in the days and it takes everything from 8 hours to 10 hours depending on the route you take and whether you hit the ferries on schedule or not. Plus 30 minutes for resting and eating. Flying takes 50 minutes in a propeller airplane + travel to and from airports and airport shenanigans (not too bad at these small airports). If you take the morning flight you'll be in town by the time people start showing up for work. If you drive you'll be in town by the time people start leaving work.
One of my kids got diagnosed with ADHD and autism/asperger. He can sit for hours reading IF IT IS INTERESTING. But homework? Impossible. Even if it's just reading a couple of pages of a book it's nearly impossible for him to do it and it takes so much energy and suffering to get through it.
Europe here. I have several friends that got diagnosed with ADHD as adults.
If you try to do it through the public system it's very difficult to even get an appointment because there's months long waiting lists. Basically if you have a job and function somewhat OK in normal life you won't be diagnosed in the public system. If you do get through it can be a long process where they want to interview your parents etc to determine if you had symptoms as a child. But you can also get a diagnosis through private practitioners and some of them function almost like diagnosis mills. A couple of video interviews and tests and you are done.
that sounds wonderful from the ~1000 square miles of Phoenix, Arizona, where a century of concrete and asphalt retain so much heat that the clouds bounce around the borders of the heat bubble overhead, unable to dump rain regularly enough to evaporate away the stored heat, but with rainfall regularly visible outside the edges of the metropolitan area, in the wide open skies.
My wife and I retired to Tucson last year, and intentionally went through this first summer just to get the full experience. Never again! We've been under flash flood warnings the last several days and have only had a few sprinkles to go with the 108F days.
So... I had a look at Eureka CA weather this morning. Looks like Western Norway. Nice. Spending July and August up there might be mandatory for our mental health.
We spent 3 years in Tempe back in the '80s. It sucked then too.
Eureka is a weird place. It's got a foggy microclimate that you can actually see as you drive into it. Even for the Northern California / Oregon coast it's especially cool and rainy.
As a Portlander I treasure our 3-4 months of sunny weather. I wouldn't be able to handle the year-round gloom.
good info...dad lived in hillsboro so i understand the monotony boredom of overcast skies. interestingly, i personally find phoenix area worse since rain is way more rare than sun up there, and it's mega dramatic insane when it happens, from winds.
that's good info : i'll take a look at Eureka, but think further north would be even better, like Oregon coast. I'm from Chicago outer suburbia originally so miss actual greenery and rain without the mega-dramatic desert windstorm bullshit...and at altitude at the foothills north of the phoenix metro area it's been way over 100 for a very long time, though less insane than som eof the 8 years we've been here (for work and outdoorsiness).
Mackerel is a migrating fish which historically have caused difficulties in managing the fish stock. Between 2020 and 2024 there were no agreement between the nations that has been fishing mackerel in the north atlantic. Iceland was f.ex. fishing mackerel in their zone for 15 years without cooperating with other nations. I think there's an agreement between most of the relevant nations now, except Russia but Russia have a general fishing agreement with Norway which might include mackerel.
Anyway, managing fisheries sustainably is difficult as a lot of fish migrates across huge distances and a lot of fishing is done in international waters. Ideally you need binding agreements between all states bordering an ocean region, which can be difficult when the states are in geopolitical conflict with each other ...
It probably could convert to AAC, but the biggest issue for collector nerds with carefully curated collections of mp3's organized in folders by artist and album and with perfect metadata was that iTunes would take all your hard work, shake it around, rename all the files and dump them in a single folder and fuck up your metadata. At least that's how I remember it, but it's over 20 years ago ...
I think the core lesson of the story is knowing if your hobby is listening to music or curating a music collection. Optimize for one or the other.
I went from meticulously curated MP3 collection on Linux to letting iTunes do it for me, and I realized that the meticulous curation and hunting down album art and everything was a hobby I didn't actually love. But if you do love it, great! Different tools for different jobs.
Submitting to iTunes made syncing to the phone much easier, but I've been using claude to rebuild/repair my 20+ year old library, and have learned that iTunes has very weak if any support for "work" - a feature it has to split up classical music the way the CD does (once file per movement). Frustrating that there will likely never be a high-quality syncing player that works well with iPhones.
I remember the trick was to use a network hard disk or drive for the music. iTunes kept the organized folders and all files untouched while building its metadata-only archive in local. But in general, yes, the tendency to mess with your file was built-in.
The trick was to skip the onboarding and go into the Preferences, there was an option there to disable putting your files in the music library folder and messing with the layout
edit: I just compared iTunes 4 and Music in Tahoe and they still have the same preference! It's funny how they clearly did a s/iTunes/Music/, resulting in the "Music/Music" dir https://kalleboo.com/linked/itunes4-vs-musictahoe.png
Some brands kind of split up so products sold in one market is cheap knockoffs while products sold in the home market is still high quality manufactured at the old factory with 100 years old machinery and experienced workers. If you want to buy quality you've got to do deep research first.
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