We have a cheap and reliable black and white laser printer at home for convenient printing of stuff like return labels.

On the rare occasion colour of photo prints are needed, there’s a great little independent print and photo place in town that does prints for pennies.

Seems to be the best of both worlds.

I would also recommend openSUSE Tumbleweed. I’m usually a Debian/Debian-based person but I’ve been running Tumbleweed on my desktop for a few years now and it’s been great.

It has a few peculiarities like any distro but it’s been very stable, with few issues even with things like Nvidia drivers. Docs and community seem good too.

Back in the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube era the SNES and Megadrive seemed to be retro while the PS1 and N64 were just “old”. So maybe 2 generations ago is the start of retro.

I think it’s definitely a lot blurrier now though. The differences between consoles and the leaps between generations are less pronounced, and there are so many y rereleases and remasters now keeping older games fresh.

They were still making MiniDiscs and MiniDV tapes? That seems more of a surprise than the Blu-ray discontinuation.

I’m also using iOS in the UK. I just tried searching for Pixelfed in the App Store and the ad was for some sort of golf tutoring app.

The top search result was the Pixelfed app and the others all other Fediverse apps.

Testicular torsion is no joke. If they get tangled even the manliest of men can be in for a very rough time.

Nintendo consoles tended to be radical, Nintendo handhelds were more iterative.

The Game Boy and DS lines all built gradually on each other, seems the Switch line is following suit. I assume Nintendo see the Switch as a handheld that can be docked, rather than a console that’s also portable, so I guess it makes sense that it’s following a similar trajectory of previous handheld lines.

Everything has to look so serious these days.

The colourful Joy Cons were part of the Switch’s identity, sad to see it reduced to an accent they seem almost ashamed of.

The N-Gage had a bunch of bizarre design decisions.

The game cartridge slot was behind the battery - swapping games required disassembling the phone.

The revised QD version fixed a lot of the mistakes but it was too little too late by then.

Throwing money at AI seems a big gamble for productivity.

I’d rather see the UK invest in its human workers instead, with better education and training. IT skills for example as still lacking in the country. PCs have now existed for 30+ years yet so many still struggle with task like making simple spreadsheets.

If there is going be insistence on platforms being open there shouldn’t be these distinctions.

All of these devices are capable of general purpose computing at a hardware level, phones, tablets, PCs, headsets are now very similar and generalised in that regard. I don’t see why a phone platform should be forced to be open while a games console gets to remain closed, when there is now only a hair’s breadth separating an Xbox from a Windows PC.

Considering the latest changes at Meta, it seems their latest innovation is to transform social media into antisocial media.

USB-C has been a blessing and curse. One port that does everything, except when it doesn’t. Even charging is now complicated by the “guess the cable that supports the right PD type” game.

Not that the old days were much better. I don’t miss faffing around with the myriad of serial and parallel port modes and settings.

Take the AI crap out and give it an open display API and it would be a fun desk toy.

A rotating phone screen in a cylinder creating a hologram-like effect to display notifications/metrics/whatever else.

So the plaintiff’s are claiming Siri was recording them without consent, and that Apple were sharing those recordings with third parties including advertisers.

Apple claims they were sometimes wrongly keeping recordings for internal quality control/analytics but hasn’t admitted to sharing them, and have agreed to the $95m settlement.

The sharing with third parties is the most egregious part here, but it doesn’t seem to be addressed any further.

Considering the doomsday bunker fad that’s popular in techbro and executive circles currently, such honesty might not count against you.

For TVs now, by buying used. Help yourself and the environment by buying an unwanted “dumb” TV that’s free of this sort of crap.

Or if budget allows, look at industrial displays.

Supply answers demand, is we stop buying junk smart stuff and take our money elsewhere the market will eventually follow.

A while ago a company patented a method using eye tracking to monitor whether TV watchers were paying attention to ads.

It can always get worse.

Zuck bending his own knee in the vain hope he won’t get bent over Trump’s.

Maybe he should have spent a little less attention on Caesar and tried to learn a few other lessons from history.

Power costs vary a lot around the world, depending on where OP lives every little saving can help.