Think about it this way: in the unlikely event that your parking brake fails while you’re parked, which direction is gravity going to make the car roll? Park in the gear that opposes that roll. So if you’re facing up an incline, park in first gear. If you’re facing down, park in reverse. If you’re on an absolutely flat surface, park in whichever you want.

By the way, this isn’t just a good idea for hills, but for uneven driveways or parking lots.

Reality Bites.

From 1913 Webster’s, to show how “far” we’ve come:

Pun"dit (?), n. [Hind. pandit, Skr. pandita a learned man.] A learned man; a teacher; esp., a Brahman versed in the Sanskrit language, and in the science, laws, and religion of the Hindoos; in Cashmere, any clerk or native official. [Written also pandit.] [India]

I think you’re supposed to tell us.

June 14, 2022

I think we’re focusing on different aspects. My comment was limited to the way main menus worked — “Play feature” or whatever would just about always be the pre-selected option. I was replying to this:

Those old DVD menus that wanted me to mess with extras sucked.

99% of DVD menus would have the “Play movie” pre-selected, letting you activate it with a single press of the Play or Select button.

Vaudou Game - Lady Bobo

My only controversial opinion is that one must always avoid “/s” indicators, as those are an instant killer of comedy. If an occasional unit of sarcasm flies over the head of another, drawing downvotes and/or unhappiness, it’s a price we must endure as a society.

Sorry, I couldn’t vote for you. You double-space after periods!

The merry, merry month of Chillember.

The current best color eink tech (Kaleido 3) has a handful of limitations, but the big one is how the screen is naturally darker than conventional eink devices you may be familiar with. High contrast and natural light readability are usually the best things about eink, but the darkness of Kaleido 3 screens, caused by the dual layers (one for black pixels, one for color), makes backlighting necessary in a lot more lighting situations, whereas you could probably read a conventional eink device by candlelight, just as you could with a book.

All these devices have backlights because they need them, but by turning it on you lose most of the benefits of having eink in the first place. At that point it’s like using a standard tablet, except the color depth is only 4096, so imagine the worst tablet screen you’ve ever seen… and this just looks far worse.

Color eink tablet. The technology is impressive, but really not ready yet. I’d stick with b&w eink, or if you really need color, just go with a conventional tablet.

Why, when they’re already perfect?

It’s in the corner

Angry ThinkPad noises

That man’s name? Thomas Ediswitch.

President is the head of government

The president is the head of one of three branches of the government.

Are you sure it’s okay to just post the full D-word? Right where anyone can see it?

For the most part, nothing. There are some edge cases where TVs get naggy if left offline, or do something sketchy to gain internet access, but this can pretty much be avoided by reading reviews and/or returning a misbehaving device to the retailer.

I’ve found the look of the UI to be an acquired taste, and maybe easier to swallow if you’re used to using open source stuff. But I’d agree that the way it works is, in places, almost unforgivably unfriendly.

But it’s the “almost” that keeps me using it, because there’s nothing else that works across the platforms I care about, even if the application is so, so difficult to recommend or “deploy” to users.