Hey, it’s good to keep exercising the math muscle, and apparently making mistakes is a better learning reinforcement for us than always succeeding, so I bet it will stick better now.

I got $31.07 here using a calculator. Perhaps you’ve uncovered a plot perpetrated by Big Calculator. (A joke.)

Just ignore the trolls, they have meaningless little lives and nothing better to do than try and make a random person online feel like shit so the trolls can feel like their existence matters in any significant way. Which sucks, as they could probably better focus that time constructively, but instead…this.

Learning to “life-hack” a web site for deals (especially when in a crisis) shouldn’t be a prerequisite for purchasing food at a reasonable price. The onus should not be on the consumer to not get ripped off by the seller.

This is just a continuation of systemic failure of business running rampant on the web without any reasonable regulation to prevent it.

Without band 71 (used for both LTE and 5G depending on parts of the country) you’ll likely see more no service scenarios while rural, but if you’re primarily metro, those will be exceedingly rare.

Ouch, no band 71 at all. That’ll hurt T-Mobile extended range and indoors as it is their largest low frequency band. The EU version at least supports one T-Mobile 5G band, and their largest at that (41).

Band 12 and 13 will help low band scenarios with AT&T and Verizon respectively. No band 14 means no AT&T service in rural areas like (my always go to example) western Nebraska where it is AT&T’s only low band frequency.

Definitely not the worst band support, but not great either.

Too bad the US is such a toxic environment for cool phones with all the carrier-induced “certification” they put in the way to prevent low-volume and niche manufacturers from bothering.

Web sites like that are so annoying, they couldn’t even be bothered to find an image or video of LineageOS running on a Switch?

I actually see this rest stop idea as really cool advantage to bring life back to random locations across the country. Kinda like the 1950s Route 66 road tour theme that was popular back then. Create a stop with some goofy thing to look at, some food, some place to stretch, a park, a rock wall, whatever. Great opportunity to capitalism while creating fun and working around the range problem until technology improves or countries like the US get with the program and go more public transport.

As for:

Stop pretending we need to drive 500 miles without stopping, that’s dangerous anyway.

It is more a functional reality in western states, not a luxury or something to boast about. One can drive that 200 miles (likely your charge range will be less at 85MPH with a 60MPH headwind and ascending 4000 vertical feet over a few hours) without having services, utilities, or even towns. The range is a necessity to get back to civilization, let alone finding a charger or gas station.

Yep, just gotta get off my lazy butt and do it.

There is a reg key to add that disables bing search.

Ooh, do share with the class!

It’s also partly because phones now require 60,000 antennae and radio waves don’t go through metal. Wireless charging, NFC, wifi (x2), bluetooth, cellular (x4), UWB… There’s some ability to reuse the antennas via TDM and other tricks but they just “need” so many these days. Also also, plastic is kinda evil from a pollution standpoint, although one could also argue that it could just be recycled with the rest of the phone.

Electric vehicles aren’t helping with the transition to electric vehicles. Cars are more expensive than ever. If one has a choice between an annoyingly necessary vehicle that can get them to and from work and take care of long trips, or something that costs the same (or more) and can’t even get you halfway across the state on a single charge, which would one with a limited budget pick?

I have some friends that tried to take the plunge with EV. They bought one used, so some age on the traction pack. Cold-ass winter came along, the car doesn’t do active thermal management of the pack. They could barely make it 24 miles between towns. Their next car will be a hybrid. Until EVs are priced similar and behave similar to ICE cars, it’s going to be a slow roll to convert people.

I’ve been plugging it too, but apparently new users have to pay monthly fees to use it? Maybe there are now better alternatives.

Yet another way for the ol’ US to fuck their citizens’ lives up, huh

That’s the smell of freedom right there! Yeah!

iOS in the US doesn’t allow sideload.

Not too bad. Lacking band 71 won’t really matter on t-mobile as they are flipping that to full 5G in many markets. Band 41 still exists for speed in most places for now.

Missing band 14 will hurt long range coverage on at&t though, but still has 12 and 5 for long range on at&t (places like Nebraska where at&t doesn’t have any band 12 or 5 will have a bad time though.)

Band 13 means Verizon long range will work, if Verizon allows it on the network.

It’s actually a bit more subtle than consumers not buying them.

When LTE came out, it was inefficient and used lower frequencies than cell phones used before. So they needed big phones that they could stick big batteries and antennas in.

Smaller phones existed, but often lacked features of big phones, and battery life was terrible due to the aforementioned power consumption problem. Likewise, reception suffered.

Now, the power problem has been solved and LTE uses less power than CDMA techs did. Antenna and radio design has improved to mitigate reception issues so smaller antennae don’t hurt as much as they once did. However, now phones have giant camera modules in them and antennae for a plethora of services and features they think people want like UWB, NFC, wireless charging. (They all have their place, just stating this because they aren’t “essential”.)

People stopped buying small phones because they were “terrible” by comparison. Then manufacturers claimed people didn’t want small phones, so they stopped making them. Now we are stuck because all the junk they throw in phones need all that space.

Tl;dr: the wireless industry killed small phones and blamed consumers.

5G covers the same area as 4G on a given frequency. They’re ostensibly the same technology on the air interface. The original name of 5G was “LTE2” in fact. Carriers are moving to 5G standalone where all voice, text, data are on 5G. In the US, T-Mobile has 5G on their band 71, which is 600MHz, likewise AT&T runs 5G on their 850MHz band. These bands can reach many miles away from a cell site. I regularly have seen a 5G connection to a site 8 miles away from me, for example.

The coverage will be practically the same as 4G, but slightly worse than 3G. (Which was also true for 4G.)

Carriers will likely do a slow roll over the next 5-10 years migrating 4G bands to 5G until only one or two are left on 4G for legacy devices. Not really an if, as much as a when.

Oooh, forgot about that one, good callout.

Just throwing out there that PDF X-Change Editor and WondersShare PDFelement are both exceptional PDF editors. PDF X-Change Editor also has Windows ARM64 builds so you can run them on ARM based PCs. Although the best thing is to try and escape from Windows entirely anymore. Edit: Also, I second other recommends for Sumatra PDF for viewing. It has always been a favorite.