n1ckn4m3

I gave them a crap review in the Android app store because of it -- I have absolutely no need for my lights to be able to be controlled over the internet outside of my house, and I don't want the feature nor do I want my hue bulbs connected via any stupid cloud link so they COULD be managed over the internet outside of my house. Their response was "as we add new features, so too do we add new security features to protect the platform and that justifies us requiring you to have a login and make your devices controllable via the cloud". Uh huh.

I've set the Android app to never automatically update in the future and I'm really hopeful that I can avoid this garbage requirement by doing so, but I'm sure they've thought of it and I'm going to end up having to move to 3rd party apps to control them eventually.

You are correct about it being shot on a cell phone -- at present the top comment on the video is from @RickAstleyYT and says:

My wife Lene and I shot this video on a phone in Denmark, in a forest beside a beautiful beach. The song in essence is about how there is so much technology out there pulling and pushing us in our daily lives, that we need to remain human in this fast moving world. The idea of making a video simply, somewhere beautiful and real like this resonates with me, and I hope it does with you too! Rick x

^ Exactly this. I was an Apple fanboy (perhaps even shill) until the iPhone 5S when my device had a bad NAND chip causing it to randomly and sporadically blue screen and reboot (as a PC user, the blue screen irony was not lost on me) and Apple jerked me around for 3 months until the phone was out of warranty and then told me I should have bought Apple Care on the phone even though the issue started before the 1 year warranty had expired.

I didn't find this acceptable as I had written proof I'd taken the phone in to the shop multiple times during the warranty period, ended up calling their corporate office of the president where they worked with me to generate logs from the device and send them to Apple techs who would review it, at which point they came back and said "yeah it looks like the NAND chip is bad" and "but it's out of warranty". When I told the person from Apple this was ridiculous because I'd been an Apple customer for decades and I'd had umpteen Macs and Macbook laptops and iPhones and I'd never had this problem with any other Apple device (the whole point being the devices are 30% more expensive because they're high quality and don't have these types of problems), she cut me off and said "Apple doesn't have a customer loyalty program, sir." and dead-ended the entire conversation right there.

I took the 5S out to my driveway and smashed it with a hammer and went and bought a $200 HTC One E8 and I've been an Android user ever since and will never give Apple a penny if I can avoid it. The products were fine, the software was good, but the service/company is rotten.

Sure, but who is going to hold him accountable? The justice department can't do anything when the supreme court is willing to fold on constitutional law in favor of personal interest and partisan loyalism -- checks and balances only work when they're impartial and that's just not the case right now. I definitely wouldn't be holding my breath waiting for any Trump conviction to have any actual impact.

Just makes me think of giving myself a high five. But I still do it :D

This is a very valid point -- elections don't stop at the primaries either!

I think it's a mix of things. I agree a lot of people don't participate in the primaries and they really should, but I'd also stress the importance of elevating the quality of the candidates we have. I don't believe any of the primary candidates right now have any idea what it's like to live in the USA as an "average" person. For starters, the average age of US citizens is 39, but the average age of the 3 current candidates is 74, with each of them being a minimum of 30 years older than the average American. I am not trying to promote ageism in any way, but I would really prefer if we had leadership that was less removed time-wise. I just don't personally believe that someone at 70 or 80 has any reasonable idea what it's like to be an American in the 30-40 age range right now -- their experiences with that age come from a time prior to the advent of cellular telephones, social media, personal computing technology, etc.

On top of that, even if you look past the age gap, the choices we have so far really don't instill great confidence.

RFK Jr is an admitted openly vocal anti-vax believer and also a vocal science denier (he still promotes belief in the link between vaccines and autism which has been systemically dis-proven), neither of which are popular positions to the left and will likely cost him votes. Biden has a low approval rating and a lot of Democrat voters don't see him as a strong or effectual president, but he's likely to get the nomination because he previously beat Trump and seems to be the defacto "if you're voting against Trump instead of voting for someone, vote for him" nominee. Marianne Williamson is at least a fresh, non-dynastic face in the political race with a reasonable track record as an independent, but because she'd been an independent until 2019 and because she's female there's a subsection of voters who will adamantly refuse to vote for her regardless of her political stance, making her unlikely to win the nomination over Biden.

I really hope that we start to see greater candidate diversity in the future and I agree that it starts with showing up to vote, I just wish we had candidates that felt more representative of the party ideals and also of our overall population than what we're getting now.

Agreed -- especially with things like the Secret of Mana remake in the recent rear-view, sometimes it is apparent that the team updating the game doesn't understand the overall charm of the original. Here's hoping that the update is light-touch and manages to keep the charm and fun of the SNES classic, but to your point even if not, the old one is still superb when played on an emulator.

I used redact to do this and my edits were reverted and my comments un-deleted. Presuming that this was because I used a tool and it was easily identifiable as being done via API, I went back in and manually edited about 30% of my comments last night and noticed that they were all reverted again today. I've now manually gone in and edited all of my comments this morning and deleted them as of about 2 hours ago and they have not returned yet.

I used to use 1Password standalone, but they moved away from it and started only selling password management as a service and I really didn't want that, so I'm running Bitwarden now on a private VaultWarden instance for myself and my wife. It's been great and is a good option if you want to run your own platform and not use Dropbox or other third party cloud storage or platforms for the data. Obviously, you're then responsible for backing the data up, etc., but I like the flexibility and data ownership of it.