Damn I love music! Thanks for sharing your passion with me!

I think in a different life I might have ended up on your path and I appreciate how much it is the right one for many. I’ll toss out a few more comments (mainly cause I am trying to contribute to Lemmy both monetarily and by not just lurking).

I love the fidelity of Apple Music which is what I use—it is certainly much better than my CD collection ever was. I don’t even bother using the lossless option as I cannot tell the difference. I usually have about 50GB of music sync’d to my devices and my wife and I camp without cell service often.

I carefully curate my music collection. I have about 5000 songs I love neatly sorted into decade playlists plus specialty playlists. I keep a textual backup of my playlists in addition to exported playlist backups to allow me to recover from pretty much any issue including apple account loss.
I rarely see removed songs, but do occasionally see them. Since my library is well curated it is easy to see which tracks are unavailable. I would guess I have been impacted on less than 0.1%.

It is extremely rare for me to not find the songs I want on Apple Music, but I have uploaded many tracks to Apple Music that I had to procure from other locations. The most common ones have been live tracks, soundtracks and mixes. At that point they work just like any other music in my library.

It’s been a pretty good experience—not one I would have predicted 20 years ago.

I feel like my opinion is more controversial. I knew how to do all those things. I helped orchestrate a gigantic CD rip and swap using “lab” work computer equipment at a time when hard drive space was very expensive. I knew how to download files before Napster. When subscription music arrived and then the family plan followed, I subscribed and deleted everything. If I didn’t like new music but just relied on a catalog of older music maybe I wouldn’t have gone that route—but even then I think my kids would have wanted access to new music.

Honestly, I like subscription music—I listen to hundreds of new songs every month. I love wireless headphones for exercise. I don’t care about the lack of headphone jack. To me it isn’t enshittification, it is a wonderful product suite that I much prefer to the one I used to use.

I got this for my girlfriend. If I recall it held about 100 CDs worth of music—it had a small hard drive in it. Up until that point she had used a portable CD player in her car. I remember it being a little finicky, but ultimately working well.

I gave my (young) son a 16G Zune HD. It lived through a washer/dryer cycle—I don’t understand how.

I’ve carefully unsubscribed to everything with PaperKarma. Now I schedule a trip to my mailbox each Sunday. It shares a few package delivery boxes and I don’t want to accidentally monopolize one too long.

This work between certain states. For instance, you can drive into Oregon and shop with no sales tax then return to California or Washington with your goods.

Liquor is also much cheaper in some states than others—you can really stock up if you are already driving through a state.

My personal choices are slightly different than yours, but I appreciate your comment. You’re clearly an ally while not being a clone. I often tire of discussions about security and privacy—mainly because I am very pragmatic.

Unlike OP I don’t use Proton’s suite, but considered it. Most of what I want Apple provides (Advanced Data Protection, Private Relay, etc) in a form that meets my minimum requirements. Other things that I use (Signal especially) are well-supported on iPhone.

I’ll talk down Apple all day long in the correct context, but I still believe it is a good choice today. I may re-evaluate at some point in the future when the landscape or my needs change. For now I am very happy.

After coming from Apollo and Reddit, at first I was just unhappy that the clients were not great. Once I moved past my grief state I realized Voyager was good enough. I’ve stopped re-evaluating (though I’m sure I will again at some point) and just appreciate what I have.

I had this problem when Apple introduced this feature a year or so ago. I wish Apple had a way to disable it, but such is apple. Now I unlock a phone that lives on my dresser every few days.

My 86 year old father-in-law has had the roughest time with the new outlook. It keeps losing his settings. I kept him on the (old) outlook as long as possible.

I tried Thunderbird for him, but some parts of the UI don’t respect extremely large fonts. Sigh.

My current solution is just straight up web mail to his provider which has other problems, but I have sorta-kinda mitigated them by installing a separate browser that is set to open that website. This has some other small problems, but it will have to do for now.

I honestly wish Apple made a 20” iPad.

You absolutely can roll back to previous versions using the steps in those links. I believe it has a 30 day limit, but that is pretty good for a consumer product.

OneDrive does offer restoration of individual file versions or even the entire OneDrive contents (for things like ransomware attacks). Details are here

I think OneDrive is a pretty good (but paid) backup utility especially for non-technical people. There are a lot of things that I could nitpick on, but for some of the older people (octogenarians) that I am the family support for, I set it up and anytime I interact with their computer I click on OneDrive to ensure it is replicating. I very occasionally have seen a single file not replicating, but never have I seen it fail completely. These people previous had NO backups of any kind.

I use it myself as an additional backup location, but not in the way most people would.

It’s so hard not to clank dishes together. I won’t do them if I am up late.

For my Asus laptop the setting is maintained at the hardware level. I didn’t bother trying to find Linux software that could control it (I think there is one) but instead just booted into Windows and set it there and it will persist after that in Linux.

I use an Asus laptop I bought during COVID as my server. I dropped in 64GB of RAM, a pair of NVM drives and an old 2.5” SATA SSD. More than enough for my use cases. The only real software tweak I made was limiting battery charging to 60%.

My son saw the pan sitting in the kitchen and asked we had bought a new one. It does look very nice. Thanks for the advice.

My pan is already in the oven on self clean, but I appreciate your advice. I do think the black crud is some sort of buildup as I could feel it with my fingertips. It’s the more silver part that I think is a complete lack of seasoning.

But I don’t really know!

I’ll give it a try and post the results!

I didn’t know how to reseason, but running it through the self clean seems like a pretty easy method! Thanks.