Personally, I like Apple's iWork. Keynote is slightly less fiddly than Powerpoint. I like that in Numbers you can have multiple movable tables on one screen without constraining column widths etc to each other. I also like that Pages is simpler than word with much more manageable styles, especially when copy and pasting from multiple other documents. But lots of people don't have Macs or like iWork, and in most businesses you eventually need MS Office to work with outside parties so for work the choice is really iWork plus MS Office vs MS Office.
MS Office collaboration features work well these days but when you are using Office 365 for work, it's almost inevitable that different files get saved locally, on MS teams, Sharepoint, and OneDrive. It's a version control nightmare.
I really like google's suite for work because it nudges everyone towards using only one location for all files, without a other places to save a copy. And it's good enough with Office files that you might only need a few roles to also need MS Office.
15 years ago I had a 7GB mobile data plan (in Japan). After 7GB, it was throttled to 100kbps. If I tethered my PC and there was an update available, or browsed modern sites (especially while tethered), this could easily be wiped out in a few days. After 7GB, sites like hackernews, google search/maps worked fine, and most websites loaded after a minute at most.
10 years ago I still had a 7GB mobile data plan (in Japan). After 7GB, it was throttled to 100kbps. If I tethered my PC and there was an update available, or browsed modern sites (especially while tethered), this could easily be wiped out in a minutes. After 7GB, sites like hackernews, google search/maps worked fine, although most search results failed to load.
5 years ago I still had a 7GB mobile data plan (in Japan). After 7GB, it was throttled to 1Mbps. If I tethered my PC and there was an update available, or browsed modern sites (especially while tethered), this could easily (and usually was) wiped out in a few minutes. Browsing reddit easily consumed 1GB in a day. After 7GB, sites like hackernews, google search/maps worked fine, although most search results failed to load.
I currently live in Europe, I am too old for dealing with the above shit or dealing with wifi in a town/restaurant/hotel so I pay for unlimited data throughout EU. But, it's fairly common while driving or training around that I end up on 3G. I understand 3G is degraded these days, but it should provide 300-2000 kbps. Almost nothing internet-related works at these speeds today. WhatsApp is the exception, it works eventually. I bet hackernews could load if you could somehow disable all the background things happening. I've had a few experiences where I reached a timeout for a login on Apple, google or MS services, and been locked out of my account for a few days because trying to login with low datarate means trying to login 30x in 10 minutes which must look suspicious.
Yesterday I was skiing at a resort and my phone was dying at an incredible rate, like 25% per hour. I don't know for certain but I suspect some app or website was retrying a download of something while in a dodgy service area. I'm sure it's happened that someone has been slightly injured going off into the trees at 2pm at a ski resort (or had a fall on parking lot ice, or fell down stairs in their home, or been run off the road), and not been able to call for help because some app has been loading ads and killed their phone battery.
> Yesterday I was skiing at a resort and my phone was dying at an incredible rate, like 25% per hour. I don't know for certain but I suspect some app or website was retrying a download of something while in a dodgy service area.
Whenever you have poor service (but not none) that's when phones waste the most energy trying to crank up RF transmit power and doing retry loops. I doubt it was actually trying to download much.
You can try this by putting your phone in a homemade Faraday cage with tin foil in a Tupperware or something.
If I had to guess, with so many devices (speakers, microphone, webcam) on top of any external ones you connect, having multiple inputs especially one that can't possibly connect your computer to those devices, is virtually guaranteeing that some users will complain that it doesn't work. I believe there is a similar reason why usb-c hubs rarely have downstream usb-c ports. When you do find one, they always have several reviews complaining that it doesn't work with 3 hard drives and 2 monitors plugged in.
The historical reason why is that UK homes were wired early in history for lighting with a ring circuit going throughout the house, and this was also literally set in stone so impractical to phase out for a long time.
So the regulations had to allow one 50A (for example, I don’t know the actual numbers) fuse supplying an unknown number of outlets and devices, rather than requiring one circuit per small area. Such a large fuse will happily let your radio malfunction and start on fire, so local, smaller fuses are necessary.
In other areas a 10A fuse (for example) on a circuit that only goes to one room or one appliance is enough to protect from overloading the circuit as well as most dangerous malfunctions of one device.
Making different rules depending on the class of e-bikes make sense vs just pretending all e-bikes are "bikes" and allowed everywhere bikes are, even though at some point they are more akin to motorcycles.
In Europe this is mostly working well, although depending on the country there are still a lot of illegal (heavy, fast, throttle-equipped, unlicensed, beyond even class 3) bikes on the roads, bike lanes and bike paths.
One benefit is that when you go to buy an e-mountain bike in Europe, the ones for sale are all class 1, and everyone understands only class 1 are legal and allowed on most mountain bike trails. In America nobody cares about class and many just buy the fastest, crappiest model that comes with a "class 1" sticker as well as a setting to bypass all the class 1 limitations. As a result, there are more and more blanket bans on all e-bikes on mountain bike trails in America.
>In Europe this is mostly working well, although depending on the country there are still a lot of illegal (heavy, fast, throttle-equipped, unlicensed, beyond even class 3) bikes on the roads, bike lanes and bike paths.
There were a lot of these in Oxford (UK) until a year or two ago when they all got replaced with scooters[1]. I suspect the police started clamping down on the illegal e-bikes which are easy to spot.
>Screens are getting bigger and bigger, yet they make things smaller and harder to click on.
And despite things being smaller, there's also white space everywhere so there is less information on your screen.
The trend in UIs is making filenames into discrete icons instead of lists. In outlook this morning all I got 3 attachments and it's 3 icons that all are something almost identical like "<word icon>2026-02-13_A....docx" and I have to hover over them to figure out each filename. I don't get it.
I'm a Solidworks user. It's a 3D CAD program. From about 2012 to 2018, it was unusable with a display higher than 1080p because it did its own bad scaling of UI. Text elements would overlap and be cut off. Since then it works in general but to make 2D drawings I still change to 1080p. Making drawings involves a lot of clicking on lines and vertexes to add dimensions, but the hitboxes are 1 dimension thick, or even 1 single pixel. It's maddening at 4K. There are selection filters that help, but since it's sluggish in general in 4K I just admit defeat and use 1080p.
I launched spotify on my phone today and it had a grid of playlists I could chose from. The grid showed a maximum of 6 characters per playlist over two lines, but there was certainly a lot of whitespace available, and some random album art that told me nothing.
It was basically unusable, but I'm sure some designer thought it was slick.
I had a new one yesterday. In Apple Music (iPhone), you can long hold on a song or album and press "add to playlist" and then select the playlist. The next action you probably want to do is long hold on another album and tap "add to playlist". You have to wait 2 seconds to do this because a pop-up that says "x added to playlist" appears in the exact location you need to click on. It not only obscures the area, it prevents a tap from registering.
These projects are cool but to me they seem like they all come from the place: a programmer opens up a CAD program, and within days concludes that they would prefer if they could use their existing scripting skills to make something instead of learning to use the program, including the parametric features. Which is fine, but as a mechanical engineer 99% of the useful/required features are not there.
I use ABS as a baseline, it holds up well, is easier to sand than most other materials, and is soluble in acetone which gives you some nice methods for smoothing layer lines as well as adhering parts together. It requires a heated chamber though.
MS Office collaboration features work well these days but when you are using Office 365 for work, it's almost inevitable that different files get saved locally, on MS teams, Sharepoint, and OneDrive. It's a version control nightmare.
I really like google's suite for work because it nudges everyone towards using only one location for all files, without a other places to save a copy. And it's good enough with Office files that you might only need a few roles to also need MS Office.
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