Normal hifi gear, particularly second hand can sound way way better than generic computer crap. However normal hi-fi speakers are designed to work best a certain distance from the wall **and ** a certain distance from you. These distances vary between speakers but it is important to check this before spending any cash as some speakers need to be many feet from you, which isn’t always remotely practical for most pc setups.

I went with Dali Minutes for this reason, so they can be right on the wall and really close to me. I paired mine with a Rega Brio amp and RME ADI 2 USB DAC, then added a monitor audio sub later.

Most proper studio monitors are designed for near field listening they also make a good choice although they can be a little clean for some people’s taste.

What switches does it have? Are they lubed? Are the stabilisers modded? Does it have case foam or other case mods? What type of mount is it? What about the plate? Swing weight and force curve? Linear, clicky or tactile? Silent, oring, ball bearing mod?

There are so many different variables and that’s before you even get to layout changes it’s perfectly possible to build your own keyboard that is perfect or close to it for you.

I have keyboards with different layouts and typing feel that I pick for how I want my typing to feel on any given day. It’s no different from a guitarist having multiple different guitars chasing a different feel and sound.

Not everyone is going to appreciate it and that’s perfectly fine, but there are significant differences with the right changes during a build.

So big vacations we typically plan two to three years in advance and book as soon as the booking opens for the parts of that holiday. Usually means flights about 12 months before, accommodation usually a bit before then. Something like Disney or a sailing holiday we can book two years in advance as an entire package, which in the EU means we ATOL protected, far safer that far out than booking separate. I have terrible anxiety when booking lots of individual components like a backpacking holiday in Japan that had us staying in half a dozen hotels/apartments, hiring a couple of cars, getting internal flights, prebooking tickets to Sumo and Ghibli and so on, but its essential to get the best prices.

We are still paying for a family holiday in a cottage or villa as our kids are still starting their careers. This I book a year in advance, but we plan the locations far in advance of that and scope out where we want to stay.

As we work from home we can work from our van a fair bit. Earlier in the year we did a tour of wales over three weeks while working part time, later this year we are doing a three week tour of Cornwall/Devon/Somerset. We also get away a few long weekends around the bank holidays. As we stay at adult only sites that are very popular and will sell out quickly around the dates we want to go, these are booked as soon as booking opens for them, usually October the year before.

Booking early gets us far better pricing and we get to go where we want, stay where we want. Plus the planning and research is a big part of the enjoyment for us, its also essential if you want to make the most of a planning heavy holiday like Japan or Disney and not pay through the nose to use a quality planning service.

They used it to give away Teams to existing customers then force through price rises later by adding functionality behind additional licenses. They also leveraged Teams to sell a significant amount of conference room equipment that was running Skype Teams. Its likely Microsoft will start to use the embedded Teams usage to push up prices of their core M365 licenses, E3 and E5.

Its also heavily tied into Entra, Exchange, and SharePoint Online as its really three raccoons in a trench coat so its hard to fully use Teams without using those products, which must also be licensed, usually via a E3 or E5.

The timing of it being coincidentally when COVID hit meant everyone wanted a chat and meeting product, so good fortune paid a part as well. Also a lot of organizations wanted off Skype right around this period, so really fortunate timing.

Pretty sure he pays cash or close to it rather than a traditional leveraged buy out. He normally only buys struggling or collapsed brands he can get cheap like Wiggle.

Ashley wants two main things out of his purchases, the brand name to slap on a web store with any head start it can give into running a business in that sector, and the retail space. Any decent retail space he wants to flip into residential property while stripping any fixtures and fittings of any value, anything else will be gone or rebooted into the lowest common denominator for that area.

I use powershell by default on windows and I prefer it for scripting any day of the week vs. shell scripts. It’s not the fastest but you can always plug in .net to your scripts to dramatically improve performance. Sure, I could write the script in rust or whatever to make it even faster, but that’s way more work than I need for the lifespan of the script.

Exactly

While I like the ideas with screens, and fixed buttons even more so, they haven’t gone with them despite the tech being available for a considerable time. I do wonder if its mostly down to how people use them rather than a limitation of the tech itself. Watch how many people nearly swipe or even do scrape exit parking machines, even simple parking meters stop working, people struggle to use the ones inside, then add in weather damage/proofing and vandalism and I would guess thats a big part of it. As its often a closed queue system any problem becomes a major issue almost instantly.

Renault tried leasing the batteries in EV in an effort to lower the initial cost of the car while increasing their tail for future owners. They abandoned it only a few years in as it was a disaster for their used market that got worse the older the car got as nobody wanted the ongoing cost. Only the initial owner saved money, and only if they managed to use PCP finance with a balloon set before Renault realised that the battery leased cars would be worth significantly less.

Renault also did not like that with older cars they would be liable for the battery replacement far sooner than they planned as they (initially) had a higher percentage unusable before they had to do a free replacement vs. a normal battery warranty, made worse as a leased battery has a warranty as long as you are paying the lease.

Renault could repossess the car if you stopped paying the battery lease and refused to buy it out. Its like any car finance that puts a lien or similar on the car, you do not own it till its gone.

Lots of their drive thrus use a person to take the order, and at a busy drive thru this becomes a dedicated person or persons just to take orders. If they can flip it to AI then they could open more lanes and reduce staff. Problem is that a skilled person is going to be better than AI over a shitty audio system, look at how Alexa and Siri struggle even when they have an optimized reception setup than the crappy setup you have at a drive thru with the person sitting inside their car, with music on and so on.

You can offer shares to employees to supplement salary, its very common. It could be used to attract or retain staff by offering less salary but a larger overall package than their rivals and tie in the employees for a period of time till the shares vest.

Only downside with teams is that you can’t accept direct teams calls while in a meeting and they can see you are in a meeting. You always get the odd person who dials before asking via chat if you are available so you don’t get the chance to close your meeting first.

Musk banning Apple devices with how popular iPhones are to use twitter would hurt Musk more than it would hurt either Apple or OpenAI so it just sounds like a win win.

However with their examples you don’t need to write a script, you can solve them that way but you really don’t need to for these examples. This is some basic search refinement skills (Outlook would even help you build this unlike say a Google search with refinement filters) and either a small spreadsheet or a calculator app to max out at their level 3.

Scripting this I would put at a level 4, but I would be interested where the authors of the paper would fit that in as its their research and what sort of percentage would fit into that skill set.

Not the OP but having got rid of my Flair as it was too painful to get great coffee out of at 6am every morning, the learning curve is very steep unless you are already familiar with making espresso.

Getting it exactly the same would be hard, getting it close enough is not that hard. There isnt some magic ingredients in third wave to massively improve solubility, just Magnesium Sulfate, Calcium Citrate, and Sodium Chloride in classic for example. Any decent hand mixer (or electric milk frother) ran for a minute or two is going to spread the ingredients around plenty.

I would recommend getting some testing strips to compare a DIY vs. the ready done packets to at least confirm the alkalinity and pH is a close match, then go by taste for the Epsom salts starting from the baseline from an existing guide. Just scale the recipe for the size you want to make, you do not have to stick to a gallon, its also not a magical prerequisite for making it.

Its not for everyone as Third Wave sure is convenient but it is significantly cheaper if you use a lot of 3rd wave.

Have you seen Kyles video on how to make your own? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGYrEiubq2U

I agree they should do better.

Have you considered taking your preferred water recipe of theirs and making it yourself? Its considerably cheaper and no more individual packets.

And again, I don’t see that it applies at all to what is a parts tracking system, its not a maintenance plan, a direct safety system, operational guidelines for engineers or anything else you are falsely trying to make it.

You keep describing the maintenance schedule, which is again, irrelevant to tracking the history of parts. Age of the system is also irrelevant to the problem here, a system outside or inside its operational life span can still have shitty black market parts fitted to it making it more unsafe than using the correct part.

The airline industry in particular has been hit with a number of planes being fitted with bogus parts, this is despite all of the things you talk about, they have not worked for tracking parts and proving their provenance. Hence, a more robust system is needed.

I am intentionally not accounting for it, as its irrelevant to an end to end parts tracking system.

Your difference is only really relevant to the standards that the part is made, the safety systems the vehicle needs to have including redundancy, and the frequency and depth of the maintenance schedule.

Both need to be able to prove that shoddy third party parts haven’t been fitted, that the parts have been replaced on schedule, even if the quality of the parts and the frequency of replacement is completely different.