If you worked for me (or any other of about 20 PO’s at my company), you’d be comfortable telling me that you were struggling. You’d explain the challenge and your estimate to completion, and I’d either reshuffle our priority list so that you could park the task and pick another one, or find someone for a pair programming session with you. That’s the common practice, and nobody should care whether you’re yellow on Teams or use a mouse jiggler, as long as you communicate your work and challenges.

I’m still using Winamp 2.91. I’m just too used to it to change. Now, if someone added Flac support to the same interface, I’d be happy. And if someone ported it to Linux and Android, I’d pay big bucks for it.

Aux port is precisely what I’d look for when getting a new car. Even though by the time I do, perhaps my last Sansa Clip mp3 player will be dead and I’d get a new model with Bluetooth.

Yeah, I hear you. I’ll settle for an aux port when I get a new car…

As long as it can play tapes, I’m okay. Still using a tape adapter to connect my mp3 player :)

A bit late to the game, but for what it’s worth, my experience with the Shockz. I run about 6-7 hours per week, and listen exclusively to audiobooks. As a result, I can’t comment on the sound quality, but I do have some other observations.

Pros:

• Waterproof. I’ve been running for more than a decade before I got the Shockz, and no earphones lasted more than 6 months in the local rain. No such issue with these headphones.
• Not falling off. By their design, they would not fall off, unlike any and all earbuds I ever tried. I may have weird ears in this regard, but I had to learn to run with a hat or headband to keep earbuds in place.
• Spatial awareness. Excellent at keeping me aware of my surroundings.
• Good battery life. A single charge lasts me through the week, and a quick partial emergency charge can carry me over the next 2-hour run. In addition, the “battery low” status actually works well. With any other brand of earbuds, from Mpow to Anker, once I got the “battery low” warning, I had about 20 minutes of charge left. So, going for a long run at “battery medium” was always a gamble. With the Shockz, I never ran out of charge when I started at “battery medium”, even on my long runs.

Cons:

• Not too comfortable. I have a big head, and even so the band behind my head is standing off enough that I can’t wear my hat over it. So, in winter it’s earbuds, held in place and waterproofed by my hat.
• A bit too quiet. Everything, including the persistent wind here, is interfering with the sound. So, for audiobooks, I have to process them in mp3gain to around 95 dB, and then play them at max. This, however, may be more related to my mp3 player; I didn’t do an analysis of it yet.
• The controls are weird. My sense of touch is not too good, so pressing the controls while the Shockz are on my head is a futile exercise. I just can’t feel the buttons properly, so I have to take off the headphones and see which button I’m pushing.

I didn’t test them with music or calls yet (for the latter, I’d have to pair them to my phone), so can’t comment on those features.

It’s not. 90% of my phone usage is calling, text messages, FM radio, taking quick photos, and checking the weather. The rest is the occasional browsing. I haven’t really found the need to do more with my phone.

Have they? In what way?

This is speculation by Ars Technica. Essentially, a recent firmware upgrade seems to have drastically lowered the battery life of some models. In addition, they are removing all third-party apps in the EU in response to the DMA.

What TVs? Vizio, Hisense, the Chinese junk budget brands?

Most recently Roku. But I used a TV only as an example. A year ago, an OTA upgrade bricked microwave ovens. Google’s history of bricking its smart home products goes back to at least 2016, companies like Wink threaten to brick your devices unless you suddenly start paying a monthly fee on top of your purchase price “for life”, there were reports of smart bulbs or thermostats ceasing working as well.

The following is pure speculation on my part: I think we’re at the beginning of a huge wave of planned obsolescence. Everyone and their mother are now training AI’s, and they want their customers to replace older products, which don’t support AI integration, with new ones. They’ll soon stop supporting the older devices or outright bricking them, to force people to buy the new ones.

Samsung Galaxy S2. With a replaceable battery and good external cover, that thing can last for a long time. I did contribute to e-waste by replacing the battery three times so far, but that’s all.

Just another byproduct of enshittification. Novadays, a top-end Garmin watch lasts about as long as a Chinese watch of a brand with random characters you buy off Amazon. Google is introducing planned obsolesence in Fitbit. Banking apps are beginning to require phones that are no more than 4 years old. TVs get bricked with firmware upgrades. So, consumers are trained to buy cheapest, least reliable electronics, because over time they’ll provide more value than top-end items which used to last much longer. (This was written on a 13 years old phone. I may not have access to my banking app anymore, but otherwise it works for everything I need, and I haven’t contributed to e-waste in this regard. Not that the pollution angle was my reason to keep the phone, but it’s a nice extra bonus.)

I used to work as a financial analyst on Wall Street, and even after I changed careers I invested on my own, roughly following Buffet’s strategy. My annual returns averaged 22%, but given the little starting capital ($2000), I cashed out with just enough for a large downpayment on my house.

Anyway, just a very short primer on how Buffet is investing. He’s a student of Benjamin Graham who wrote the highly influential The Intelligent Investor. There, Graham outlined the most basic fundamental strategy: buy stock in companies where market cap is below book value and hold long-term, until stock catches up. Obviously, that’s hardly feasible in today’s markets, but there are still stocks that you won’t realize they are undervalued until you research the shit out of the companies. Not stocks, but companies. The former, technical investing, has been in vogue since at least the 90s, while the latter is the old school fundamental approach of actually calculating the stock’s underlying value and its growth potential.

Where it all comes together is portfolio building. The conventional theory is to have around 30 stocks to minimize volatility. Buffet’s approach is to maximize upward potential by having fewer stocks (around 10), while minimizing risks by researching and fully understanding companies he invests in. This ranges from understanding financials and operations to analizing the company’s management. Buffet is known for keeping the management of an acquired company in place and not interfering with their decisions because he wouldn’t invest into a company where he wouldn’t trust the management in the first place.

Of course, I didn’t have the means for investing enough to have any influence on the company or market, so I had to really dig into the fundamentals and hope the market would eventually realize the value of the company. It worked for me, as long as I stuck to companies whose business model I could understand. So, I missed loads of winners from the tech sector, but I’ve had a steady above-market return, and that was good enough for me. I followed the advice from the book On Investing by John Neff, which I can fully recommend, if it’s still in print.