I’m an old millennial that downloads and keep what I like. It took so long to download anything on dial-up that the habit was to keep everything for later.
And then because I go camping and cycling in places without network coverage, I took the habit of copying a few hundred of MP3s and a few dozen episodes of cartoons on my phone. That way I have some entertainment even when I’m in a forest without network coverage.
I still can’t understand people streaming music on their phones, music that they probably are going to listen and download again and again and again instead of only once. Why not keep it instead of constantly using bandwidth for the same thing over and over?
Same with watching stuff. Your favorite paid streaming service may eventually decide to remove a series you like, or miss a few seasons. That’s if it’s not on another streaming service. Like, I know I’ll watch and rewatch again episodes of the Simpsons, so I download them. It only consumes bandwidth once and can watch it on repeat whenever I want, even without internet.
You can still pay for stuff, but don’t use the DRM ridden streams that can disappear or can’t be accessed without internet… pay for it if you wish but then, pirate and download a version you can keep.
Or I’m just old and living through “bandwidth scarcity” and really owning stuff left its mark on me.
Then they’ll block your road, get out of their fancy car and assault you for hitting that precious car.
I was on a bike path when a car driver cut me while exiting a driveway and I bumped my wheel into his back bumper. Well, he stopped, got out of his car, whined that I didn’t do “my” stop and ended up slapping me twice in the face… because he cut me and I bumped into his car…
So even if you have an old car AND it’s not your fault, they’l still be mad at you for existing and being in their way.
Modern web IRC clients like The Lounge or Convos can now display images, play mp3 and mp4 formats, and they have upload options. It can still be excellent for real time support, but I’m not so sure about documentation though.
In Canada eyes and teeth are not considered “health” and thus is also not covered by universal healthcare.
It was up to the provinces and employers to implement whatever coverage they wanted for those. In my place, dental care is free if you are under 18, or if you live from government assistance. The only way to get healthcare for your teeth as an adult, is to have a dental plan at work. So a young adult working minimum wage in a convenience store doesn’t have dental insurance.
From personal experience, I didn’t have dental insurance between 18 and 30 because I had low wage jobs.
However this is going to change a bit soon, because the social-democrats just pushed a vote to expand dental insurance to everyone that needs it. It’s not universal yet but now people with low wage jobs will be covered.
Indeed, that’s one annoying thing I miss about my new phone, as it doesn’t have a micro SD card slot. Another thing about new phones and this “everything cloud” point of view is that it’s becoming increasingly difficult (for me) to plug a USB drive/stick as a temporary ad-hoc storage device. So in addition to not allowing lots of space on the device itself, and removing micro SD card slots, it’s also becoming difficult to just plug a USB stick in an OTG port.
However, MP3s are not that big and anyone used to streaming shouldn’t bat an eye on compression. The loss on files compressed at 192 kbps is acceptable and you can have thousands of files for a few dozen of GBs. Also, when I started to “keep my files”, it was mainly in SD. Those files are perfect for devices with small screens and they are still small enough to be “portable”. A whole season of South Park is like 2.5 GB and my video player won’t tell my it isn’t available in my country. For 10 GB I can have 4 whole seasons on my phone and because the screen is pretty small, quality will still be more than acceptable. So, there’s still wiggle room even if phones will not allow TBs worth of storage.
So if/when Spotify ceases to exist, you lose everything. Even then, they can just decide to remove whatever music you liked “because” and you now lost access to it. In a few decades when people will want to listen to the old songs they used to like on “the Spotify”, they won’t find them anywhere.
EDIT: A friend just told me he did in fact cache some popular local albums on Spotify, and they just removed them. So those albums were accessible on Spotify at some point, but are not anymore.
It can be a bit of a challenge with Android as it doesn’t support NTFS out of the box. So your experience may vary depending on the storage device and the phone.
I have anxiety and I didn’t mind much when people called me, because I have caller ID, I could just ignore the unknown callers. But then emergency alerts are now a thing in my country and my phone has started to whine and ring multiple times a year, like the end of the world is coming, to tell me a child is missing, or that a big storm is coming. Plus, during the pandemic, my government thought it would be a brilliant idea to send general messages to the public using that emergency system…
The most frustrating part is that I can’t disable nor mute those alerts. My only way not to have my phone blasting the emergency alarm unpredictably, is to mute it permanently. I’m now missing calls but on the positive side, I don’t notice amber and emergency alerts.
It’s a specific 56K protocol. There were a few different types of 56K modems and they did the last part of the handshake differently. One did the “boing boing” and another common one had more of an ascending tone at the end of the handshake.