I have a Bip as well, and aside from the silly name I love it. Even after 5 years a single charge lasts more than a month.
It tracks my sleep and steps, and is always on (other smartwatches turn the display off to save the battery).
It doesn’t do all the fanciest things. I can’t answer phone calls or send text messages (it will display received messages), but the advantages far away the drawbacks.
I finished two episodes, and I really hope that the interesting part is going to start. So far almost everything has been about how Cowboys are tough, gruff, brooding, and loyal to their families above all else. A couple of SF elements, but those have been incidental.
I really hope that it’s going to do more than just mining the cowboy mythology and showing how rugged individualism is superior to government and corporations.
We have small lights that plug into the socket. They turn on automatically when there is movement and it is dark, or if the power goes out. We can also take them out of the socket and then they become flashlights.
I have a Bip watch as well. I actually bought a fancier one, but the Bip has a display that is on all the time, and after 5 years of use still has a battery life of about 5-6 weeks!
It tells the time, buzzes when I get a phone call, and tracks my steps. That’s about all I need.
It helps if you realize that most people are delighted to talk about themselves, if you can find the right angle. They may be passionate about cars, or gardening, travel, their children.
Also realize that most people have spent a lot of time doing whatever they do, and there are things they know about it that few other people do.
For example, someone who works in a laundry might have insights into the laundry business, or the people who come in late at night or the values of different kinds of detergent.
Someone who works at a mall may well know things about them all that you don’t. There may be aspects to their job that they find challenging or painful.
I seem unable to care much about other people (not officially diagnosed on the spectrum, but it seems obvious to most people who know me), but I am interested in the insights they can give me, and I genuinely want them to be happy.
Having a conversation like that also beats sitting around awkwardly.
The title is just “Pi”, and it’s by Darren Aronofsky, who has gone on to create a number of excellent movies.
Note that this is an American experience. In Canada, every time you renew your mortgage the interest rates are set at the current rate. So people renewing their mortgages now are paying around 7% interest, whereas 5 years ago they might have been paying 2%.
One of my co-workers had his mortgage payment jump from about $2,500 to $3,500/month a couple of years ago.
I see that Focalboard stopped reviewing or merging pull requests since last September, though.
Back in the 1980s, before MS Word was the unquestioned king of the desktop, there was a DOS word processing program called WordPerfect. Everyone used it.
WP had a feature where you could press a special key combination and the screen would split. The top would have your text (not WYSIWYG, that was way in the future, although WP could show an approximation).
In the bottom part you could see your text, along with every control coffee code that turned bolding in or off, marked text for a table of content, etc.
Not only could you see it, you could navigate through it and delete codes, or watch the codes change as you edited text in the to half of the screen.
It gave you a control that I still miss these days. No more wondering why your word processor is doing columns wrong, or why the image you inserted doesn’t line up properly.
Check it out (starting at around 4:20).
Oh, to have “reveal codes” like WordPerfect!
I used to use Rainlendar. Not FOSS but the lite version is free.
Fun fact: the character “&” was a way of writing the Latin word “et”, and used to be known as “per se and”, meaning “the word ‘and’ itself”.
When reciting the alphabet, people would say, “…x, y, z, and per se, and”.
Over time, “and per se, and” got shortened to “ampersand”.
Back in 1996 I was studying computer science, and one of my courses required me to write programs in Prolog. Rather than go to the school to work on the computers there, I bought an enormous book (I think it was a printout of all the man pages) that had Yggdrasil Linux CD-ROM, and ran it on my home desktop.
We Have Ways of Making You Talk, about WWII, now over 600 episodes. Chatty, inspired, incredible guests. Not all about D-Day and Iwo Jima, but dealing with lesser-known stories and personalities. The hosts are Al Murray and James Holland (whose brother Tom does an excellent podcast called “The Rest is History”.
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As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, in Iceland they buy each other books and on Christmas Eve they open the books and everyone sits around reading them.
My wife and I have decided to adopt the Icelandic tradition of buying each other books, and opening them on Christmas Eve. We then have a wonderful quiet read that evening.
We might buy each other small presents aside from the books, but nothing is expected or required.
I am one of six (adult) children, and we have recognized that it is futile to think that we will ever all have Christmas Day together. Instead, we choose another day (this year it is today, December 27) to have our family gathering.
My Motorola G Power lasts for almost two days of regular use. I love not having to worry about running out of juice!
Not a very powerful phone, but it meets my needs.
Did you know that you can edit the title of your post? You should think about it!