Yes! We call it the Harbor Freight methodology. When we’re buying something unfamiliar, we get the cheapest and use it.
When it breaks, we will have learned about using it and why we use it, on what we use it for, we can make a smarter purchase in the next price tier (or top, depending on the outcome)
It depends on where you live. Take Florida for instance, with the insurance companies abandoning you or filing bankruptcy just before paying a claim. It gets more expensive and as you age, maintenance gets harder to do, much less replace big appliances without paying someone to do it.
If you’re young and strong and not working in an industry that breaks you, a mortgage may be smarter (and cheaper) than renting.
Both has pros and cons; one strong con is that if you have a mortgage, you become geo-locked to your land and when you get a job offer that moves you outside of reasonable commute range, you have the extra headache of fixing the property up for sale and having the split attention of working at your new job and keeping in touch with the sales leads.
If you’re older, renting may be better as if something breaks, the apartment manager takes care of it.
So there’s a hidden cost to owning a home versus renting. You can almost count on renting being a fixed cost each month (rent + utilities + insurance) whereas a mortgage, you cannot.
Well-made wood furniture is also lighter and easier to carry (particle or plywood tend to flex when picking up)
And download faster as vectors take up less data space than raster bits
You can locate a copy at the Internet Archives so you can browse before buying
I don’t usually read pdfs on an iPhone but when I have to, I use the adobe reader as it will reflow the text to fit in the small screen
There should be a law that should any book go out of print, to be digitized and made available online. Publishers shouldn’t dictate which books are allowed to be consumed once they allow it out of print when digital versions cost next to nothing to make available for a nominal price.
That goes for authors owning the copyright, as well.
Politics is being blended into religion and vice versa so it still has some life yet.
Homebridge (or Home Assistant) and smarten up your home, then add Node-Red for fancy coding of your devices
Real-time live AI captioning.
It’s not perfect but more words than none.
I hold daily Scrum meetings in Zoom and everyone benefits with the transcript saved at the end of the meeting.
I raid with my guild, with Live Captions window overlaid onto of my chat box.