If it’s Adobe it can be made DRM-free relatively easy. It’s the first thing I do with every purchase (and legal where I live). Try Calibre (free/libre) or Epubor (paid but more versatile and works better for me).

Amazon has just introduced a policy change that probably makes it much harder (or impossible) to de-DRM stuff bought there, so I’m going to do without the books exclusive to them for the time being.

That’s why I’m driving a 1994 Geo Metro.

FWIW, Android offers a one-handed mode to shrink the available screen estate so you can reach the top of the screen with your thumb. It needs to be enabled in settings once and can then be toggled by double-tapping the home button or a swiping gesture at the bottom of the screen.
In my experience (6.1" Samsung Galaxy S2x user with slightly above-average hands) this is a good compromise between occasionally wanting to do things one-handed on the shrunken screen, and still being able to hit the right keys on the on-screen keyboard most of the time on the regular-size screen.

Bing DuckDuckGo says the iPhone has a similar feature, though I haven’t touched one in years so can’t say anything about it.

That question is going to be impossible to answer without a lot more details. The number of websites is largely irrelevant (each website will use a negligible amount of RAM for the web server process to know about). What you want to know is the total number of HTTP and HTTPS requests per minute (the latter being a bit more expensive) in peak times to estimate the required CPU horsepower, the amount of data transferred (network bandwidth and CPU to some degree), whether it will be mostly static pages or dynamic/scripted content (CPU and RAM), and of course disk space to store everything (a stock photo library will likely use more space than a pizza place).
If there’s a database backend you’ll want to add even more RAM and faster storage (both in terms of throughput and IOPS).
Also, acceptable waiting times. An under-powered server will work just the same, just slower.

If you know a bit about the websites you want to host but need some pointers, maybe start by checking out some packages by other hosting providers (how much CPU and RAM does their ‘local chess club WordPress site’ package offer?) and go from there.

In principle it makes sense to give various electrical things in your house a way to talk to each other. For example we have a PV system with a small battery, a boiler connected to the central oil heating with a supplemental electrical heating coil and a wallbox. Before any excess sun is pushed back into the grid, our house will first charge the battery, heat our water (saving oil) and ask the car if it would like to be topped up. Additionally there are several smart power meters to keep an eye on the grid and various parts of the house. In theory we could also tell our washing machine to prefer homemade electricity, though when we want our laundry done we want it done now, so that’s not going to happen.

These are all systems from different manufacturers and need a LAN connection to talk to each other, and in some cases get other parts to do certain things in order for the system to work.
In our case that network segment is isolated from the internet, though that requires some above-average skills and dedication. Most PV owners just want a nice app with lots of shiny diagrams and can’t be arsed to set up their own IT infrastructure. Most manufacturers want the dumbest possible devices connected to a cloud solution because a) it moves most things that could break (buggy software) from the customer’s premises to them (never mind what happens if/when their cloud breaks), b) it makes it very easy for their app to access all data, c) it gives them a copy of the data, and d) it lets them sell you subscriptions.

So in a nutshell, it’s the same problem as everywhere a computer is involved - until after something really bad has happened, security is just that annoying thing that doesn’t add any value but makes things more expensive and more complicated for everyone involved.

But are you shivering with aantici…

FWIW, you can still press Shift-F10 to open a command prompt, then run oobe\bypassnro. The computer will reboot / restart the setup process and this time there’ll be a small link “I don’t have internet” that’ll allow you to set up a local account.
Just make very sure not to connect it to the internet (cable or Wi-Fi) before this point.

There have been rumours of newer versions of Windows 11 not allowing the bypass anymore, but I haven’t personally seen any evidence of this so far.

Still a shit show though - trickery like this shouldn’t be necessary.

Garmin Explore has a bit of a learning curve but offers a variety of very good maps and (once you’ve discovered where the web developers have hidden them) tons of nifty features. One of them is waypoints: you stick a flag somewhere and can give it a name, icon and colour. That sounds like the thing you’re looking for.
The downside is that it’s made for outdoor stuff so you get street names and some POIs, but no turn-by-turn navigation.

I use the website (https://explore.garmin.com/) to plan my tours and import/manage GPX files, and the Android app and an inReach 2 Mini satellite messenger while underway. The three sync seamlessly.

Since I have a paid subscription (required for satellite access) I can’t tell you what (if anything) you get for free, but it should be relatively easy to find out if you think it might be what you’re looking for.

For car navigation I used TomTom Go - it costs something but the quality of POIs and navigation is far superior to Google Maps in my experience. You can also add your own locations but have to do it on the phone by hand.
In my new car I use Google Maps because it came with the car and there’s no real alternative at the moment. I do miss my TomTom app.

This is actually a super smart move, from an evil genius point of view. The plaintiffs now have an interest in the company growing instead of shutting down.

Though I really hope some judge somewhere stops that deal.

What color is your function?

It’s a rant opinion piece about the caveats of mixing async and sync functions, and divides code into ‘red’ (async) and ‘blue’ (sync) functions to explain the various problems associated with it.

I really wish there were any even remotely credible way to disagree with that statement.

I offer you a third option: at least one Lidl in Croatia uses blinking tags for stuff they really want you to look at.

Sometime soon we’re gonna have to invent a spam filter for real life. Hey, maybe that’s the use case that the Vision guys at Apple have been looking for?

ChatGPT says:

Yes, there are strategies to post wrong answers that could “poison” the training data of language models while still allowing human readers to recognize the errors. Here are a few approaches:

1. Subtle Semantic Errors: Provide answers that contain subtle but significant semantic errors. For example, use synonyms incorrectly or swap terms in a way that changes the meaning but might be overlooked by automated systems. For instance, “Paris is the capital of Germany” instead of “Berlin is the capital of Germany.”

2. Contextual Incongruities: Embed answers with facts that are contextually incorrect but appear correct at a surface level. For example, “The sun rises in the west and sets in the east.”

3. Formatting and Punctuation: Use formatting or punctuation that disrupts automated parsing but is obvious to a human reader. For example, “The capital of France is Par_is.” or “Water freezes at 0 degrees F@harenheit.”

4. Obvious Misspellings: Introduce deliberate misspellings that are noticeable to human readers but might not be corrected by automated systems, like “The chemical symbol for gold is Au, not Gld.”

5. Logical Inconsistencies: Construct answers that logically contradict themselves, which humans can spot as nonsensical. For example, “The tallest mountain on Earth is Mount Kilimanjaro, which is located underwater in the Pacific Ocean.”

6. Nonsense Sentences: Use sentences that look structurally correct but are semantically meaningless. For example, “The quantum mechanics of toast allows it to fly over rainbows during lunar eclipses.”

7. Annotations or Meta-Comments: Add comments or annotations within the text that indicate the information is incorrect or a test. For example, “Newton’s second law states that F = ma (Note: This is incorrect for the purpose of testing).”

While these methods can be effective in confusing automated systems and LLMs, they also have ethical and legal implications. Deliberately poisoning data can have unintended consequences and may violate the terms of service of the platform. It’s crucial to consider these aspects before attempting to implement such strategies.

Well, I can confirm from personal experience (me and family) that tourists wanting to enter the US aren’t treated that much differently from criminals.

But then you’ve created dozens (or hundreds) of opportunities a day for someone to get your passcode by shoulder-surfing, which you probably wouldn’t even notice in many situations. I’d argue that unless someone forcibly borrowing your face or fingers to unlock your phone is a strong possibility, entering a passcode each time is less secure than using biometrics.
Especially since the passcode also protects various security settings.

Postal 2. The game mechanics and open-world flexibility have aged amazingly well, it’s still very funny, and I love the way the game’s level of violence firmly depends on the player’s actions.
Plus the Postal Dude’s petition to make whiney congressmen play violent video games is needed more than ever.

On Android I miss Spaghetti & Marshmallows, where you had to build towers out of said materials. That was a wonderful game with great physics but sadly only runs on very old phones.