In Australia, I used to use them the opposite way as you: “mould” for the fungus, and “mold” to shape. These days I live in the USA and use “mold” for both.

Yeah, video game ratings in Australia aren’t great. Australia didn’t even have an adult (R18+) rating for video games until 2013. Before then, all games rated higher than MA were illegal in Australia. Some games were banned, while others were modified to reduce violence, remove sexual themes, remove drug use, etc.

Australia: Consumer protection laws are better than most other countries, even European countries. For example:

• Products must last as long as a “reasonable consumer” would expect them to last, regardless of the warranty period. For example, at least 5-10 years for large appliances.
• If there’s a “major failure” any time during that period (a big problem with the product, if it stops working, if it differs from the description, is missing advertised features, or you wouldn’t have bought it if you knew about the problem beforehand), the customer has a choice of whether they want to have the item repaired, replaced, or return it and get a refund. Customers can also ask for a partial refund based on loss of value.
• The store you bought the item from must accept returns and warranty claims. They can’t tell you to go to the manufacturer.
• For repairs, returns and replacements of large items (like appliances), the company must pick it up and drop it off for free.
• It’s illegal for a store to not offer refunds (unless the items are second-hand).
• Products must match descriptions in advertising, including what a sales person tells you. If a sales person tells you the product does something but it actually doesn’t, you can get a refund.
• Businesses get fined for breaking these rules. A chain of computer stores had to pay a $200,000 fine for showing an illegal “no refunds” sign and forcing people to go to the manufacturer for warranty claims, and were later fined $750,000 for doing it again: https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/msy-technology-ordered-to-pay-penalties-of-750000-for-consumer-guarantee-misrepresentations

This applies for digital goods, too. As far as I know, Australia is the only country where you can get a refund from Steam for a major bug in a game regardless of how long you’ve owned the game for or how many hours you’ve played. Valve tried to avoid doing this and was fined $3 million: https://www.cnet.com/culture/entertainment/valve-to-pay-3-million-fine-for-misleading-australian-gamers/

In the article, Linus explicitly said that it’s not just a US thing:

And FYI for the actual innocent bystanders who aren’t troll farm accounts - the “various compliance requirements” are not just a US thing.

Verizon deliberately conflates the term unlocked to mean not locked to a carrier (can use a non-Verizon SIM)

This is what “unlocked” usually means to the general population though. If you search your favourite search engine for “how to unlock phone”, most (if not all) results will be either about carrier locks or about getting into the phone if you forget your PIN/password.

Someone knowledgeable enough to even know about the bootloader would usually explicitly say “unlocked bootloader” to avoid the ambiguity.

Doesn’t always work, at least on Fedora. On Fedora, it builds the kernel after the package is installed (so you need to wait 5-10 mins before rebooting) and I guess it doesn’t work properly sometimes. I’ve had it happen twice in a few months. It does work properly sometimes though.

I found that Firefox scrolling was janky even with X11 when using a mouse. You can turn off smooth scrolling in the options, and turn off kinetic scrolling in about:config (apz.gtk.kinetic_scroll.enabled).

Working fine for me on Fedora 40 with a 6.12 kernel. You need to ensure your desktop environment is modern and supports explicit sync. KDE added support in Plasma 6.1, so Plasma 6.1 and Nvidia driver 560 or above should have no issues. I don’t use GNOME but they added support in 46.1 as far as I know.

One of my favourite underrated things about Wayland is that I could finally disable pasting when clicking the mousewheel. That’s so ingrained into XFree86/X11 that it’s impossible to disable.
(disabling it only affects apps that use Wayland)

On Linux, AMD GPUs work significantly better than Nvidia ones. If you have a choice, choose an AMD. Nvidia is mostly fine though. Even Wayland works well on Nvidia now (after the 560 driver release).

Sometimes you’ll hit issues with memory management if you have <=8GB VRAM, since the Nvidia driver doesn’t support swapping infrequently accessed parts of VRAM into regular system RAM, like it does on Windows and like AMD does on both Windows and Linux. It’s a long-standing issue.

You may also need to manually reinstall the driver after kernel updates. In theory, it’s improving as Nvidia are moving most of the driver logic into the firmware, and making the driver thinner with the new open-source out-of-tree driver (https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules).

For CPU, I’d definitely go with AMD instead of Intel. Intel aren’t having such a good time at the moment.

I’ve got two Coway Airmega AP-1512HH air purifiers and they’ve helped a lot during the bushfires in California. They’re on sale right now for $140 each during the Prime Day sales.

Waze is owned by Google, and they’re slowly converging over time.

had its own built in lock with a unique key

Is this a common thing? I’m Aussie so I have no idea about guns.

Hot take: If you don’t like ads, then don’t use services/sites that are funded by ads?

I like using Sriracha, or peri-peri sauce from Nando’s or Trader Joe’s.

Very popular in the Netherlands.

the scroll wheel can tilt to scroll sideways

I use these for switching tabs in browsers/IDEs by remapping them to Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab using Input Remapper

I’m just glad that KDE now has an option to disable pasting using the middle mouse button (mousewheel click). Only available on Wayland though - AFAIK this behaviour is deeply rooted in X11 and it’s not easy to disable it.

Your data really isn’t worth that much.

Also, it’s a common misconception that large tech companies like Google and Meta sell your data. They don’t. The data is what makes the company valuable - they’re not going to give away their competitive advantage. Instead, advertisers can target people based on the data. The advertisers never actually see the data nor exactly who their ads are reaching (it’s just aggregate anonymized data).

On Google and Facebook, even individuals can use the same tools that large advertisers use to list their ads, and see exactly what they see.

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Not sure how that’s relevant, but some states do have an equivalent to GDPR. California has CCPA for example.