It’s all thanks to the Muzak company and studies in the 50s/60s that suggested bland music made people work better.

There’s an article on it here to get started.

They cover most major towns and cities in the UK.

The problem I have with most of these services is that every channel is too hyper-specific, often literally just playing a single show or, at best, 2-3 shows but in multi-hour blocks. Incredibly lazy IMO.

To me, the appeal of linear terrestrial TV is having channels that show a wide variety of things throughout the day. If I wanted to see 24 hours of non-stop Mr. Bean I’d download them and shuffle the folder.

It’s a reference to British road maps. They were ubiquitous before satnav became commonplace - everyone with a car had at least one copy stuffed in their glovebox.

That would still work - asterisk isn’t a letter that can be accented, so the popup wouldn’t appear and the key would repeat as normal.

In typical Apple fashion, ‘that’s the neat part - it doesn’t’. If you want to be able to hold a letter to type it repeatedly, you have to disable the diacritics popup with a console command.

It’s the sort of stubborn ‘getting in my way’ feature that drives some people nuts when using a Mac, but in my experience it’s far more useful to be able to easily type accented characters than it is to be able to save half a second on the rare occasions I want to type ‘ooooooooooooooh’.

And yeah, if the popup is open you either hit the number displayed under the character you want or use the mouse to click on it.

On macOS you either use dead keys (option + backtick and then a letter will add a grave accent, like à) or just press and hold down the letter to get a little pop-up diacritics picker.

There’s a similar incentive to this Windows 11 one, but for macOS. Yikes.

Not sure why that warrants a yikes; macOS is far more usable than Windows 11. I’d go so far as to call it downright pleasant in comparison.

As others have already mentioned:

• Japanese convention is that O means yes (like circling an answer on a test) and X means no (like crossing something out).
• It’s a Japanese console so actually it’s the rest of the world that flipped it.

Another point to consider is that Japanese is typically read from right-to-left, so the ‘first’ button is O. See also: Nintendo controllers, which still use ABXY in a ‘backwards’ arrangement, with A on the right.

As for why western developers decided to flip the controls? No idea who started it or why, but it’s become the global convention. That said, I remember a lot of PS1 games using triangle as the back button.

This is Sicily we’re talking about - local politics is pretty dicey.

It was Palermo, apparently, but yes - there were complaints because of some road closures.

Venice was Bezos.

A lot of the Tahoe icons have this weird soft-focus look that never sat right with me. Glad they’re cleaning it up.

Icons like Freeform are night and day; so much better. Everything looks so much more crisp and physically present (dare I say lickable?).

The only one I’m not a fan of is Find My. The separation of the green wedge breaks the radar screen skeuomorphism.

I would think that whatever browser you use would, presumably, make little difference to how much data a website tries to send you? It would only change what’s displayed. (But happy to be corrected on that by someone more knowledgeable.)

If your connection really is limited to such a slow speed, you might need to find a proxy server that strips out as much as possible before it reaches you.

The UN has officially condemned Israel well over 100 times. I doubt one more will make much difference.

The more important goal, at least for the affected workers, is it can lead to an employment tribunal and compensation (with no upper limit) for their lost income.

It’s easy to be cynical about the bigger picture, but don’t lose sight of the fact this can still be a big win for these workers.

Any Wallpaper Engine enthusiasts here that can educate me as to why it’s so popular?

Is it really that much better than just finding wallpapers with an image search like in the old days?

Honestly, if Musk is against it I’m more inclined to believe they’re doing something right.

They’re not banning IRC or forums, though?

This is just straight-up incorrect. uBOL is not going away.

Regardless of how you may feel, the statistics are not in your favour. Just compare gun deaths per capita in the US vs a country like the UK and it’s clear that the US approach to gun control (or lack thereof) is insane.