If you can. Medical devices are particularly nasty: there may be only one or two brands on the market that do what you need, because such devices understandably require extensive certification. If the only available option requires an app, you’re stuck. If you need something that meets other legal or professional certification requirements, you might also have very limited options.

For just about anything else, I agree that there’s probably some alternative to an app-locked device, although some level of convenience tradeoff may be necessary.

If you’re going to alter the candidacy requirements, how about requiring candidates to live in the riding for at least a year before running there?

Sad to say, the first thing that popped into my head when Maomao said, “It was a woman,” was, “For someone who grew up in the pleasure district, you sure lack imagination.” I guess I’m incorrigible.

When in the past ten years have they ever been okay?

It does bring the constant closures (actual and threatened) in Thessalon, Ont. into perspective a bit, though.

Which is traditionally a sign of distress . . . Maybe not entirely inappropriate, at that.

They have less power density than other lithium-ion chemistries when both are new, but the dropoff over time is also less. That means that unless you replace your power banks fairly often, the LiFePO₄ version is likely to have higher density for much of its lifetime. They also tolerate at least double the number of charging cycles.

Not sure how to go about marketing that in our current disposable society, though.

Those of us who live in the province but voted for someone else aren’t quite sure, but the fact that a lot of people seem not to have realized the last election was even taking place may have had something to do with it.

There were two different animated PNG extensions, MNG and APNG. Neither of them ever really caught on. I guess they’re hoping to do better by baking it into the core spec.

It all depends on whether Parliament wants the tariffs gone so badly that they’ll back bad moves by Carney (technically, even the DST hasn’t been repealed yet, because Carney doesn’t have the authority to do that by himself—it’s been paused, but it’s still law until Parliament reconvenes and votes on it). Write your MP. Make it clear to them that you’d rather have tariffs than give in to the US on any of this.

Technically, being Deaf doesn’t mean you can’t speak, although fine-tuning for intelligibility is obviously a lot more work than it is for hearing people.

So they’re outsourcing causing scandals to an LLM? I suppose that’s a novel use of the technology.

Some of the existing countertariffs are targeted specifically at the southern states (thus oranges, sugar, tobacco, and such) who tend to be more likely to vote Republican. The idea was originally less “strike out against everyone in the US even if they didn’t want this” and more “hurt the people who caused this mess”. How well that’s worked in practice is difficult to say.

Trigun - Verrrry slowly been watching the OG classic. I’m only a few episodes away from the end. Finally some more backstory filling in details! It’s good, but I’m not quite blown away, while something like OG Cowboy Bebop still holds up.

It’s the last four episodes that really make the show on this one, so you may yet change your mind.

A lot of Broadcom cards are supported, so you either have a missing driver/firmware blob or some really bad luck.

Historically, phone line modems were very often unsupported (some people may remember the term “winmodem”), but hardly anyone uses them anymore, so the problem has effectively gone away. Older consumer-grade printers that didn’t speak Postscript, ditto. I own a very old TV capture card of the analog type that has never been supported, but probably won’t work with modern Windows either.

Modern hardware is more likely to be supported unless it’s too niche to attract developers, or too bleeding-edge for its protocol to have been reverse-engineered yet.

People who wonder why I use a Linux desktop environment whose appearance and behaviour are basically unchanged from what they were 20 years ago, and daily drive a browser that forked from Firefox 27 and still uses that UI: this is why.

Betteridge’s Law of Headlines . . . but they’re not even trying.

Lord of the Mysteries

I’ll watch. It wasn’t in the seasonal list for summer, so nice catch

I suspect it wasn’t on the seasonal list because it’s a donghua rather than an anime in the strict sense. The first episode suggests it may end up being style over substance, but it’s got enough style that I’ll continue with it.

Silly Awards Time!

• Toilet Humour Award: Apocalypse Hotel, which was surprisingly good despite the number of times poop came up.
• Most Overhyped: Lazarus, which was an okay popcorn action series but didn’t deserve anything like the amount of promotion it got. At least it was better than Fractale.
• Most Deceptive First Episode: Kowloon Generic Romance, whose first episode plays like, well, a generic wallflower x pushy asshole romance setup. Until you hit the very end and realize that it’s something else entirely. Runner-up: Yami Healer, whose first episode was just awful, while the rest of the show was okay brain candy. Honourable mention: Once Upon a Witch’s Death—I haven’t finished it yet, but as of the midpoint it seems to be morphing from tearjerker-of-the-week to having a larger plot that affects more than just Meg and her town.
• Biggest Missed Opportunity to Transmit Lore: Your Forma. Instead of repeating the “amicus robot” blurb at the very beginning of each episode, they could have put different sequences in there each time to provide direly needed explanations about other aspects of the setting. The only way to figure out what “your forma” actually is is to read the series’ description blurb on a website; it’s never explained inside the show.
• Dishonourable Mention for Harm to Kitties: Your Forma again.
• Most Confusing: Bye Bye Earth, still. The reveal in the next-to-last episode explains some of the weirdnesses of the setting, but not others. A lot of the lore surrounding the swords is still incoherent, for instance.

One thing I have wondered since season 1 is why its target demographic is seinen. IMO suspense is one of those genres that cater to all age groups and genders.

Hmmm. Shounen publishers might have thought that a political-intrigue-based story with a female lead wouldn’t be popular enough with their demographic, and josei tends so strongly toward mundane modern-day settings with romance that an historical whose romance is very slow burn might have been a hard sell. Shoujo might have fit, but I suspect there weren’t enough flowers, sighs, and bishounen. (Saiunkoku Monogatari, which is the most similar other series I can think of, has a much higher number of pretty young men in the cast and was published as shoujo.)

So it might have ended up seinen by default.

The last part (or two parts?) of the Vampire Princess Miyu OAV when I first saw it ~30 years ago. Of course, it probably didn’t help that I was watching it at weird o’clock in the morning.