To the best of my knowledge, the most common parallel universe theory that has any actual real traction in physics is the “many worlds interpretation”
Which is basically that any time some sort of quantum event is observed, the universe splits into multiple parallel universes where every possible outcome of that event is realized in its own universe.
Now people take that and run with it and make up all sorts of pseudoscience bullshit where those splits happen anytime someone makes a choice, or some pseudorandom event like a coin flip or die roll occurs. That’s not really what it’s about.
This is about wonky quantum physics, radioactive decay, collapsing wave function type stuff. I’ll be honest this is high level physics shit, I only kind of understand some of it, which is more than probably 90+% of people out there can say, for most people it probably means about as much as if you came up to them and started talking to them in a foreign language.
So that means that all of those parallel universes are going to be following the same laws of physics since they all diverged from the same universe.
That means that flying reindeer and traveling around the world in a night delivering presents down chimney and such is probably a no-go.
As far as there being a universe where some weirdo named Santa Claus decided to live at the North Pole and build toys, maybe, but probably pretty unlikely. I have a pretty hard time imagining a version of the world where different quantum outcomes would lead to that. Would, for example, a single uranium atom decaying or not decaying make that happen? Probably not. Of course, untold millions of tiny events like that can eventually add up to some big difference, but I still have a hard time imagining a situation where that would be the outcome.
Like I think someone in this thread already said, there are an infinite amount of numbers between 0 and 1 (0.1, 0.2, 0.001234, etc,) but none of them are “2” some things are just impossible.
For me, a lot of it has to do with how it’s presented in schools
Pi, for example. One day my teachers just kind of dumped this magical 3.14… number on me without any real explanation. Just basically “use this number to do stuff with circles,” no real explanation on what pi actually is on anything, just “remember this”
Years later I found a gif of a circle sort of unraveling that showed how the circumference is π × the diameter of the circle
And sure, mathematically, the formula tells you that, but actually seeing that animated out made a hell of a lot more sense to me.
Now I got most of my basic math education before those gifs were so readily available, and smart boards were just becoming a thing when I was in high school, so it would have been a little hard to show that to a bunch of elementary or middle school students without having us huddle around a desktop.
But that’s something that could have been illustrated pretty well with a couple circles of different sizes (cardboard cut-outs, printed on paper, different jar lids, etc,) a piece of string, and a ruler.
And the same goes for a whole lot of different math things.
In the interest of battery life and redundancy, I think it might make sense to have 3 devices.
Ereader with an e ink display for reading, a lot of these can last days or weeks on a charge easily
An mp3 player for music. I don’t know what the current state of mp3 players is, I suspect a lot of no-name imported garbage, but over a decade ago I know my iPod used to go days or weeks on a charge with pretty heavy usage. Probably look for whatever has the least bells and whistles you can find- no touch screen, physical controls, etc. if you’re up for a bit of tinkering I’m pretty sure there’s a pretty active scene for people modding old iPods with better batteries, more storage, etc. that would probably be a great option.
A tablet or smartphone for movies, or possibly a laptop (I’m not an apple guy, but I’ve heard MacBooks have pretty insane battery life these days.) Keep all the wifi/cellular/Bluetooth/gps, etc. turned off, keep it on power save mode, disable anything you can that you don’t need to watch movies. Unfortunately if such a thing as a dedicated video-only tablet exists, I couldn’t find it with a quick search. If such a thing can be found, I’d probably recommend that.
A dedicated device that does one job well will usually be more efficient at that thing than a multipurpose device like a tablet, smartphone, or computer that needs to be able to do it all. An mp3 player only needs to be able to play music, it doesn’t need to be running a full-on OS that’s capable of sending emails, making phone calls, playing games, etc.
Also that way if one of those things does die on you, you still have the other 2.
I saw in one of your other comments your concern about a tablet having a bigger screen would be a bigger drain on battery life. That’s true to an extent, bigger screens draw more power, but since the whole device is bigger they can compensate with a bigger battery. I haven’t exactly done an exhaustive survey of tablet battery life and don’t care to look into it, but in my (fairly limited) experience, they usually pretty much at least break even or surpass phones in battery life. I have a cheap tablet that I really only use for reading it lives in my bag, usually in my car, often forgotten about for days or occasionally weeks at a time, and doesn’t exactly get heavy usage, but it usually can go at least a few days without a change, even with WiFi and Bluetooth left on. If I’m not using it at all, it can sometimes go a couple weeks just sitting idle. It’s usually good for at least a couple hours of streaming HD video, with WiFi turned off and 720p video on internal storage I imagine it’s good for at least a couple movies.
WiFi and cellular data are pretty big power drains too. I know when I check my battery usage on my phone that probably accounts for about ⅓ or so of it. Having those turned off can go a long way. Jailbreaking/rooting your phone to disable unnecessary services probably wouldn’t hurt, but that’s probably a drop in the bucket compared to just keeping your device offline.
I don’t really like brand favouritism, but if you’re able to find a Toyota in your price range, as far as I’m concerned it’s pretty hard to go wrong with them. I’m pretty hard-pressed to think of anyone I’ve ever known who’s had a Toyota who had anything really bad to say about them, even with the few years of Tacomas that had major rust issues around the early 2000s, everyone I know who had one felt that Toyota did a pretty solid job of doing right by them.
My current car is an '07 4runner. I bought it used with around 150k miles on it about 5 years ago, I now at just over 200k miles. and except for the usual shit like brakes that are expected to wear down every few years, the only major thing I’ve had to deal with was replacing the alternator. It does have a small exhaust leak that throws a code for the catalytic converter every so often (it’s on for maybe a couple weeks every few months or so) that I’m not particularly concerned about. I’m fairly confident that with not much beyond regular upkeep this car could make it to 300k+ pretty easily.
My wife is driving a Prius that’s a few years newer (2012 I think) she’s had it for a few years now, only thing she’s needed is new tires so far.
Growing up my mom had an '89 Corolla, and there’s a damn good chance it’s still on the road. At some point we sold it to my uncle who later sold it to a cousin, and after that we lost track of it, but around that time (circa 2010-ish) it was still going just fine, even after having a pretty large tree fall on it and all of the usual wear and tear you’d expect on a 20+ year old car.
Outside of my family’s favoritism for Toyotas, I also have a hard time thinking of people who have anything bad to say about Honda’s. I’ve also never heard anyone complain about their Subaru, I have less personal experience with Subarus overall, I’ve never driven one, but my overall impression of every one I’ve ever ridden in has been positive, and Subaru owners sing their praises.
Most people I’ve known with Kias and Hyundais have also spoken highly about them…
Overall, my general advice is buy from any of the major Asian car brands unless you need a larger pickup truck (¾ ton or bigger,) then pretty much your only options are pretty much American trucks. For ½ ton or smaller trucks, I’d personally stick to Asian brands still, with the possible exception of the Ford Maverick.
As far as specific models, my personal recommendations are
Subaru in pretty much any market segment they inhabit. Smaller sporty cars are dumb regardless of brand, but if that’s your thing, go Subaru.
Sedans/hatchbacks- Toyota Corolla or Prius, Honda Accord or civic.
Compact suvs/crossovers- Toyota RAV4, Honda CRV, Kia sportage, Hyundai Tucson. Wrangler if you actually intend to go off roading, Suzuki samurai if you’re going off roading and not in the US.
Mid-sized SUV: Toyota 4runner (I’ve dialed in that a midsized SUV is the right sized car for me personally at this point in my life, not going to go into all of the reasoning for that, but having driven a few different brands and models I am personally confident in saying that it is the be-all end-all of mid sized SUVs for me, if Isuzu ever makes a comeback in the passenger vehicle segment and resurrects the trooper I may be open to reevaluating that because I loved my trooper, but they’re all 20+ years old now)
Full-sized SUVs: do not recommend. If you can find one of the old school jeep wagoneers maybe do that for the cool factor, but if you’re contemplating a full sized SUV what you really want is a minivan, or maybe a Ford flex. They’re not “cool,” but trust me, minivans are the shit.
Minivans- they’re all pretty good, never met a minivan I didn’t like.
Small pick-up trucks- Ford Maverick, or if you need/want a “real” truck get a Tacoma or Frontier, or go for old rangers/Mazda B series or a t100 if you’re ok with an old truck, or replace all of those recommendations with a Toyota Hilux if you’re not in the US/Canada
½ ton pickup- Toyota tundra
Bigger than ½ ton- you don’t need this unless you are regularly towing a heavy trailer or live and work on a farm, or do major construction business with your personal vehicle, or something to that effect. If that applies to you, take your pick of any of the big 3 American brands, I like Fords, but honestly I view this as the same as picking your favorite color, it’s what you like personally, don’t let anyone else yuck your yum.
Personally, and I’m not saying this applies to everyone by a longshot, what car you need/want is fairly personal, but if I had carte blanche to go out and buy any newish car I could find to replace my current vehicle I’d be looking at
Toyota 4runner or Tacoma
Subaru Crosstrek or Outback
Ford Maverick
But I’m an outdoorsy, DIY-minded person, who goes “off-road” occasionally (I don’t go off roading for its own sake, but my life sometimes tak me driving onto a beach, or down some shitty dirt paths, over fields, etc.) has to commute in the snow, often has to pick up bulky lumber and such, and occasionally how small trailers.
My wife who doesn’t usually have any of those needs would probably be looking at a newer Prius, or maybe a Hyundai Kona if she decided she wanted something bigger.
And in an ideal world, I’d probably have a maverick or 4runner for my various outdoorsy and DIY pursuits, and whatever the smallest cheapest DIY hybrid or electric car I can find is for my daily commuting as long as it has 4 wheels, a/c, and a radio, pretty much anything out there would be just fine for me. But I can only count on having 2 parking spaces.
Honestly at 5k in this economy, you’re probably scraping the bottom of the barrel of anything that can be considered a “good” car, and you’re probably going to just end up with whatever is available near you in your price range with relatively low miles. Go asian if you can’t but don’t expect anything amazing to present itself.
I’ve had a fake account for going on 2 decades at this point, for a long time it coexisted with my regular account before I deleted that.
I have no idea how it hasn’t been flagged as fake yet.
I’ve changed the name on it and all of my information a couple of times, I have like 2 pictures, both just stolen from Google image searches for things like “dude” and “guy with computer”
For a little while I used it for some memes and shitposting and occasionally tagged it from my main account.
At one point I unfriended just about everyone I actually know and added a bunch of randos from around the world.
For the last 10+ years I don’t think I’ve actually used it to post, like, comment, or follow anything. Nowadays I just use it to log in and see what various pages I want to follow are posting.
At this point I think I’m mostly coasting on the account age being old enough that they assume I must be a real person. It probably also helps that the account has never really done anything offensive to warrant anyone actually looking into it.
Few more ingredients but my carnitas have always been a crowd pleaser
- Pork shoulder
- Coke
- Orange juice
- Chicken stock
- Canned Chipotles in adobo
- Onions
- Garlic
- Spices - I mix it up a bit, but salt, pepper, cumin, cayenne, and oregano will usually get you there. Packet or two of taco seasoning would probably do the trick as well
I tend to eyeball everything, but usually about a 12oz can of coke, oj and stock until it looks right, one onion chopped up, however many cloves of garlic I feel like peeling and chopping
If the pork shoulder fits I do it in a pressure cooker on high about 2 hours, if it doesn’t I do it significantly longer in a slow cooker
When it’s falling apart, pull the bones out, shred (I like to use a mixer)
Then like you, crisp it up under the broiler, and maybe mix in some of the cooking liquid
I apologize, this became a long rant, too long for a single comment. This comment is mostly rant, I’m going to reply to it with sort of a TL;DR in a 2nd comment, but it’s still probably going to be kind of long, I have a lot of thoughts about alarm companies.
I work in 911 dispatch. What happens when your alarm gets activated is the alarm company receives the signal and then they call someone like me to send police/fire/EMS.
I’m pretty sure that everyone in my profession has a pretty low opinion of alarm companies. In theory the services are a fine idea. In practice, they’re kind of a shit show. I’m not too sure where the biggest issue is with them- corporate decision making, lazy installation techs, incompetent account managers, terrible phone operators (some of them like to call them dispatchers, they don’t dispatch shit) or the customers are all just idiots, but it’s probably all of the above and more.
Starting from the bottom, a whole lot of these places seem to use the same sort of call centers we’ve all come to know and hate from having to call tech support. Most of them have thick accents, and most of the ones who don’t seem to be borderline illiterate. Think back to grade school when the teacher would go around the room having you read a paragraph or two from a book out loud then pass it onto the next person to continue reading, it eventually would come around to the kid who probably had undiagnosed dyslexia and a fear of public speaking, and he’d struggle through it having to sound out each word syllable by syllable while you all just went ahead and read the paragraph on your own. That’s what talking to some of these operators is like. And if you deviate from their script even the tiniest bit they get totally flustered and don’t know what to say.
That’s all well and good in your high school English class when you’re reading through Romeo and Juliet, but when I’m trying to send the fire department out to see if a house is burning down or not it’s maddening when I can’t tell if the address they’re giving me is “7 main Street” so “11 maple Street” either because of their accent, they’re mumbling into the phone with a screaming baby in the background (I’m pretty sure some of them are working from home now) or they just can’t fucking read.
On my call here are the questions I’m asking.
What is the address- house number, street name, apartment/suite number if applicable, municipality (not necessarily the same thing as the town/city on the mailing address, they’re different sometimes, I’m sending your towns police, not delivering your mail)
What is the nearest cross street- to verify I have the right location, damn near every town has a Maple Street, and because I can’t necessarily count on getting the correct town from the caller, this helps me make sure I’m sending help to the right Maple Street and not the one in the next town over.
If it’s a business, and the name of the business. I’ve had alarms called in as residential alarms but the name of the resident is listed as something like “Anderson Construction LLC” so a commercial alarm under just some schmuck’s name. Or it will be the name of some property management company and not the actual business at that location.
For security alarms- is it audible or silent
The area of activation - half of them are just labeled as something like “zone 2” which is useless. I don’t know where zone 2 is, the alarm co doesn’t know, the homeowner doesn’t know, our police and fire sure don’t, so we don’t know where we need to be looking for the issue. Is it a motion sensor? A window alarm? The garage? Your guess is as good as mine. Or sometimes zone 2 is kitchen windows, bathroom door, side room motion, and basement stairs all on the same zone.
Also once in a while they’ll tell me something like it’s a security alarm but it’s coming from the smoke detector.
If it’s residential - what is the resident’s name?
Some sort of contact phone number. Ideally a premise phone number, but at least a residents cell phone, or a keyholder for the business. Some way to get ahold of someone to make sure everything is ok, see if they know why the alarm is going off, confirm if anyone is supposed to be there, figure out how to re-secure the house if they find an unlocked door, get authorization to force entry if needed, etc.
Will you notify- will you be calling the resident, an emergency contact, keyholder, etc. to let them know about this alarm
That’s a lot of ranting on my part, but it’s not much information I’m looking for. On the rare occasion they have all the information and the operator is competent, it takes me just over 1 minute to get everything I need
My entire call ideally boils down to something like:
123 MAIN ST, TOWNSVILLE NY, APT 4
X-STREET: MAPLE ST
AUD, BEDROOM MOTION
JOE SCHMO - 555-555-5555
W/N
There’s not a single one of those fields that they haven’t messed up- wrong or incomplete addresses, no x streets, no name/wrong name, wrong or no phone number, no list of emergency contacts, or the contacts are all outdated and haven’t worked at a company for 10 years. Sometimes all on the same call. I sometimes wonder how they manage to get paid for their service because I don’t know how they’re able to send their customers a bill or call them to ask for money because they don’t seem to have any of that information.
And sometimes they call the wrong jurisdiction, I’ve occasionally had to transfer alarm calls to other dispatch centers around the country.
We had one once where all the information they had was an “address” that was something like “¼ mile past the motor pool” and the zone. Literally nothing else. Somehow our supervisor managed to track that down to an Indian reservation on the other side of the country. I have no idea why it came to us, but we got that call a couple times before they were able to finally update the account information.
Some of that is lazy installation techs not setting things up properly, or customer service and account managers and such not properly verifying information. Sometimes though I think it’s customers providing them with garbage information from the get go.
Also most of these companies have some sort of verification protocol where they try to reach the homeowner to confirm if help is needed and they ask for a password. I get a lot of false alarm calls where they spoke with the homeowner but they didn’t know their password, so they had to call it in. Maybe write that down and stick it in your wallet or something if you can’t remember it.
They’ll call in 3 hours later with an “update” to a previous alarm that our responders have already been out to and cleared from for 2½ hours. And sometimes they’ll call in 2 minutes later with a new request for dispatch and are shocked to learn that we already have help on the way because I literally just hung up with another operator for an alarm at the same location.
And when a sensor is malfunctioning and giving false alarms, no one ever seems to do anything about it. There are houses and businesses that we legitimately have police or fire at almost every night and sometimes multiple times a night because the alarm keeps going off for no reason and it sometimes goes on for months or years because no one can be bothered to get a tech out fix it or at least take that sensor offline.
We had one alarm we kept getting for about a year. The business it was for had been closed for years and the property vacant, even our police couldn’t track down a property owner or anything. Who the hell was paying that alarm bill? I think it only stopped when the building was demolished.
This all pretty much applies to medical alarms like life alert and such too. Missing or incorrect information across the board there. Same address verification, name and phone number, we also want medical history and access information like a hidden key or garage code. We’d rather not have to break down your grandmother’s door to help her up after she’s fallen and can’t get up if there’s a spare key hidden under a flower pot we could use instead.
And the icing on the cake, of the probably thousands of alarm calls I’ve handled in almost 6 years I’ve been here, maybe a few hundred of them have been legitimate, the rest were false alarms or accidental activations. Most of the legit ones have been fire alarms.
And of those legitimate calls, all but maybe a few dozen of them have been called in faster and more efficiently by the homeowner, employees, or random bystanders/passersby who either noticed something suspicious or heard the alarm going off and called it into us before we ever got a call from the alarm company. Hell, sometimes the alarm never even goes off until the police are there clearing the interior of a building after a break-in.
I live and work in what I’d overall consider to be a very safe area. Break-ins are almost vanishingly rare, and when they do happen it’s more likely to be some sort of a domestic thing where your ex wants to steal back the TV they bought you and remembers your alarm code or something like that than the sort of burglary you probably imagine. And when the more legitimate break-ins happen, it’s either in the super rich neighborhoods when the homeowner is out of town, or it’s in the poorer, more urban (this is the suburbs, none of it is really urban, but a couple towns come pretty close) parts of my county, where most of the people probably don’t have the extra money for an alarm system anyway. For everyone else in the middle, I think security alarms aren’t really worth it.
Slipknot puts on a pretty damn good show.
They’re not a band that’s in my usual listening rotation, I don’t dislike them, they’re just not my usual kind of music. When I saw them it was a situation where someone I knew ended up with extra tickets somehow and I was more interested in the other bands they were touring with
I’d say they stole the show but I think they were actually the headliner, so I don’t know who they would’ve stolen it from.
I’m admittedly a sucker for a spectacle, and let’s be real, that’s kind of slipknot’s whole schtick.
Yeah, malls in the US at least are really dying in a lot of places.
I stopped into one of the smaller ones near me a few months back, I had maybe an hour to kill before I had to meet someone for dinner and it was close by so I figured I’d walk around for a bit, and it was downright eerie.
There were probably as many vacant spaces as actual stores, and half of the occupied stores were closed at like 5:00 on a weekday. Parts of the mall actually seemed like they only had some of the lights on, half of the escalators were turned off or out of service and there were maybe a couple dozen other people walking around the mall.
There was one part of the mall with no open stores, dim lights, and I didn’t see anyone else around and for a minute it almost felt like I had noclipped into the backrooms.
Can’t speak for OP’s situation, but I live near one of the largest malls in the country, and there’s maybe about a half dozen smaller malls scattered around within about an hour or so.
The big mall is still doing pretty alright, but if you were around maybe about 10-20 years ago, it’s pretty obvious that the crowds are way smaller than they used to be.
The mall used to pretty much be the place to go meet up with friends, spend time walking around hanging out, a lot of times there would be different events going on at the malls, they were always packed Friday nights and weekends, etc.
Now except for maybe a few key days during the holiday season, they’re just not busy.
The smaller malls are almost deserted, lots of empty stores, and some of the spaces are being rented out for kind of weird purposes (I think one of our local politicians- a state representative something, has their office space in a mall) a few of them have closed down entirely.
I’ve always thought that most toilet paper holders are over engineered. You don’t need a little springy rod between 2 posts, you just need an L-shaped bar with the short end screwed to the wall and maybe a little knob on the end of the long side to keep the roll from sliding off. And it’s not that the spring style is especially difficult to use or prone to failure or anything, it just seems like a no-brainer to me to use a one-piece holder with no moving parts instead of one that has at least 4 parts (the base, 2 halves of the roller, and a spring) I’m seeing more of that style around these days, which I appreciate.
Stove vent hoods that don’t actually vent outside are fucking stupid. My over the range microwave basically just takes smoke from my stove and blows it back out over my head almost directly at the smoke detector.
I’ve frequently run into shelves, mounting brackets, etc. that seem to totally disregard stud spacing. We got one of those fancy Samsung frame TV’s a while back, to get it to sit so flush to the wall it has its own special mounting brackets, 2 little plates with sort of a modified keyhole slot that you slot 2 little knobs on the back of the TV into. It’s actually not a half bad way to mount a TV, probably one of the easier TV wall mounts I’ve ever personally used, the tv itself is actually pretty damn lightweight (because they moved all the heavy electronics into a separate box you need to hide somewhere) but still I wanted to make sure my fancy TV wouldn’t fall off the wall, so I wanted to mount it to the studs, but of course the spacing of the brackets doesn’t allow that option. I was able to bolt one side a stud but I had to get some toggle bolts for the other side. I’m pretty sure the whole TV is well within the rated weight capacity of one of those toggle bolts in drywall, let alone 2 in drywall and 2 in a stud, but still, it feels like a dumb design choice. (It’s possible that other sizes or newer models do allow for mounting entirely to studs, the size and model I got didn’t)
I helped a friend replace the wax ring on his toilet recently with one of the newer style rubber gaskets, which as it turns out made the toilet sit imperceptibly higher, which meant that the bolts holding it down were no longer quite long enough to screw the nut onto to tighten it down. With a quick trip to ace hardware and a minute perusing my options, I settled on some Danco zero cut bolts, and I definitely think that is a far superior design to the standard bolts that are probably holding down damn-near every toilet you’ve ever used.
On the subject of toilets, I can’t think of any particularly good reason for the tank to be a separate piece from the rest of the throne like on most toilets. The gasket and bolts there just add more places for something to start leaking. It’s probably an ease of manufacturing thing, but we have the technology to make one piece toilets now, the two piece style should be obsolete.
Something you may want to consider is a cell signal booster, cell phones are a bit limited in the size of antenna and how much power they can transmit at because everything has to fit in a neat little rectangle.
But you can get a device to hook up to your car that will retransmit your signal at a higher power. With that you "might* be able to get a signal further out than you normally would.
It would be useful for stuff like this of course but probably also just in general if you’re in an area with spotty service.
I don’t have any particular brand recommendations or anything like that, I think WeBoost caught my eye as a pretty decent-looking option at first glance but I don’t know if they’re actually any good. They’re mostly a product I’m aware exists and I intend to look into more when I have some spare time and money because I camp and hike in areas with spotty reception a lot, but it’s pretty far down my to-do list, so you’re on your own for research right now.
Went to a nudist resort with a couple friend last year, it was a great time.
We camped out, I got there first and started setting up camp. I didn’t exactly have a solid plan but I was kind of figuring I’d set up my tent first so I’d have somewhere to leave my clothes, but it was one of those hot muggy days where the second you step outside your clothes are drenched in sweat, so after about a minute of feeling gross and sweaty unloading my car I decided screw it and ditched my clothes and immediately felt so much better.
Also I’m pretty sure that literally everyone hates doing laundry. If you’re not wearing clothes you don’t have anything to wash and put away. It was pretty nice being away for a few days and having basically no laundry to do when I got home except the clothes I wore for the drive.
Also all-around just a very positive experience. A lot of nudists aren’t exactly the kinds of people you’d necessarily want to see naked, I can pretty much guarantee that whatever you don’t like about your body someone there has the same thing or worse on full display. And once you get over the initial sensory overload you pretty quickly set noticing people’s bodies or the fact that they’re naked.
The average hamster lifespan in captivity is usually only something like 1-2 years, this guy lived for like 4.
He was in rough shape towards the end, his fur was falling out, he’d pretty much set up camp in one corner of his cage and rarely left.
Eventually my mom decided to take him to have him put down. I strongly suspect that we may be the only people to ever request that at the local SPCA
I’d like some PC support for HDMI CEC
My use case is a bit niche, my PC is hooked up to my TV and AV receiver.
My tv, av receiver, and even certain game consoles all talk to each other well enough through CEC controls that I can do a lot from a single remote, and not even a fancy pants universal remote, just the one that came out of the box with my tv. It was a little mind-blowing when I realized I can more or less navigate the menus on my PS4 with my TV remote. The TV remote turns up the volume on the AV receiver, most of the inputs on the receiver, depending on what’s hooked up to them, will come up on my TVs input menu, the TV will wake up the PlayStation when I go to that input, etc.
I’m aware that CEC is a bit of a mess with how different companies implement it, but personally I’ve been lucky and a lot of it has worked pretty much out of the box for me.
Mostly I just want the volume controls on my keyboard to control the volume on my AV receiver.
I recently got a pulse eight dongle that I think in theory will let me do that, but it’s not exactly the most intuitive thing to configure.
I’d be pretty hard-pressed to name any of my friends who graduated “on time”
I’m well into my 30s now, a couple of my friends are still working on degrees or just graduated.
Changing majors, bullshit scheduling nonsense, life
Shit, there was a whole fucking pandemic that fucked up a year or two of your high school years, it’s pretty damn amazing that anyone your age is graduating even roughly on-time as far as I’m concerned.
Maybe it’ll throw a bit of a monkey wrench into your social life because you gotta skip out on a couple things because you have class. That’s life as an adult, we all got scheduling conflicts all the time.
Otherwise, it’s never gonna matter. You’ll have a degree, that’s the only “important” thing about graduating. Unless you’re looking to get into some highly-specialized, super-competitive field, no one gives a shit how long it took you to graduate, how your gpa stacked up against the rest of your class, etc. It’s like the old joke “What do you call the person who graduated at the bottom of their class in medical school? You call them ‘Doctor.’”