So before the question let me add some context: I'm planning to move from iOS to Android, mostly because how difficult is to backup photos from iPhone into my computer. I don't want my photos on iCloud so I make my backups copying all the photos and videos into my computer, I currently use Fedora Linux and keep my photo library on digiKam which I think is better than the Apple Photos app for Desktop. It certainly was easier when I used my Macbook for that, but being a Macbook from 2015 the battery is almost dead and I no longer use it.

Recently I saw reviews for Android phones from last year and fell in love with the Asus Zenfone 10, I love small phones and that one looks amazing, but I'm still tied to the Apple ecosystem, and the service that I would miss the most from them is Apple Music. So that is actually the only reason that I'm still using an iPhone, (that and the camera which was pretty amazing back when my iPhone13 was released).

So I'll have several options:

• Keep using iOS and suck it up, maybe even giving up and doing my backups to iCloud (it's 10 years worth of photos and videos).
• Move to android and use Spotify like everyone else. (I really don't want to go back to Spotify so that's the last thing I want to do).
• Use Apple Music for Android. Which I really don't know how good or bad it is. I'm even surprised that there's a version for Android.
• Just have an mp3 library like in the good old days. This is a viable solution since I listen to music almost exclusively by albums and it's easier to download music album by album than song by song. But that also means I'll need to be caring around my music library and making backups of it.

So the question is: have anyone here used Apple Music on Android? Is it good?.

Last year I inquired how one might take sea passage across the Atlantic. The realistic answer is that there are various ocean liners and transatlantic cruises traveling multiple times per year, none faster than 7 days and many taking closer to 10 or 14. Repositioning cruises, when the ship is being moved from one region to another and you just tag along, are infrequent but the cheapest option.

In February, I will unavoidably be in the United Kingdom. I am flying there, but have not purchased a flight back yet. I am thinking about taking a ship in repositioning from England to the US Eastern Seaboard as there is very conveniently one such ship leaving a couple days after my event is over. That would probably be Southampton to Miami (from there, I would take a train home) and would take 11 or so days, zero of which are at intermediary ports.

I was thinking about a ship over a plane because the last time I flew it was like my ears got blown out for an entire day afterward. I don't know what it is about my sinuses but they have never handled flying well. My height makes the experience particularly cramped and unpleasant and I have gotten sick on every plane I have taken in the last six months. It's the most miserable thing I do to myself on a regular basis.

Unfortunately, all the research I can find on passenger ship emissions seem to indicate that it is worse for the environment on a passenger-mile basis than flying that same route, at least as far as cruise ships are concerned (there is zero research on emissions from being a passenger on a container ship). As of 2006, the Queen Mary 2 ocean liner supposedly emits about 0.43kg CO2e per passenger-mile, compared to 0.257kg CO2e for a long-haul airplane. But emissions estimates vary so ridiculously widely that it is a little bit hard for me to take these figures seriously:

Emissions factors for individual journeys by cruise ships to or from New Zealand in 2007 ranged between 250 and 2200 g of CO2 per passenger-kilometre (g CO2 per p-km), with a weighted mean of 390 g CO2 per p-km.

That's literally an order of magnitude. I think there is some guessing going on here. To translate from p-km to p-mi, that's ~402–3545g CO2e/p-mile or a weighted mean of 628g CO2e/p-mi. I would speculate that a repositioning cruise (which spends no time in intermediary ports because it is specifically supposed to get somewhere efficiently) would be on the lower end of the spectrum. So, honestly, while worse than an airplane in terms of gaseous emissions, it's not... that much worse. From the way articles seem to talk about cruise emissions, I would have thought it would be at least an order of magnitude. (For reference, the difference between a train and a plane is about an order of magnitude.) Which I guess it can be based on the higher figures there, but I am pretty sure that that is derived from non-direct routings (port visits apparently contribute massively to emissions) or from luxury behaviors (i.e. having an enormous stateroom and other amenities that decrease space efficiency).

One may notice that those sources are almost 20 years old. There is more recent research on cruise ship emissions, but the non-academic stuff all seems to cite the Queen Mary 2 statistic (not sure where it even originated). I attempted to discern what cruise ship emissions looked like 20 years ago versus today, but was unable to find any specific information about passenger-mile emissions year-by-year. I don't have institutional access to most journals anymore, so feel free to share if you know anything.

There have definitely been new environmental regulations since 2007. In 2020, some new regulations limiting high-sulphur fuels went into effect. But sulfur dioxide is more of a health concern; it isn't a greenhouse gas. It's toxic to marine life too, and all other life, but wouldn't be considered in a passenger-mile CO2e emissions figure. Apparently the regulation has encouraged more ships to switch to less toxic liquefied natural gas (LNG) fuels rather than the literal bottom-of-the-barrel sludges they've traditionally burned (maybe a 20%-ish improvement at face value), but most ships have just installed scrubbers to continue using the same fuel and emit fewer horrible particulates. Apparently a switch to LNG, while favorable for human health, does not really reduce GHG emissions due to increased methane output.

Aakko-Saksa et al. 2023 seems to be the most comprehensive journal article I can access that covers current strategies in reducing greenhouse gas emissions for ship engines now and in the future. It mainly talks about fuels and technical stuff about engines I don't understand. This paper remarks that the switch to LNG could still be positive; it suggests a 30% reduction in GHG emissions compared to diesel fuel but a 6–23% reduction depending on how much "methane slip" happens; the IEA thinks it's 10% or less. That's still a meaningful reduction, though there is quite a lot of variance. The authors' takeaway is that there could be a significant benefit to switching to LNG and then blending that with greener fuels at increasing proportions over time.

There are many proposed ways to decarbonize the industry. It is not clear to me which of these have been adopted recently. The industry seems to have some interest in decarbonizing, or giving the appearance of having interest, as Norwegian claims to want to "reduce GHG intensity by 10% by 2026 and 25% by 2030, compared to a 2019 baseline with intensity measured on a per Capacity Day basis." And they are actually thinking about it: they have ESG staff and a 2022 ESG Report lays out a few relatively specific and achievable metrics (or so it seems to me, a layperson and a landlubber):

We were very excited to announce in early 2023 that two of our Norwegian Cruise Line newbuilds, expected to be delivered in 2027 and 2028, will be re-configured to accommodate the future use of green methanol. Green methanol is a fuel that we see as a promising future solution. Compared to conventional fuels, it can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by up to 95%, nitrogen oxide emissions by up to 80%, and all sulfur oxide and particulate matter emissions.

Environmental goals:

• Reduce GHG intensity by 10% by 2026 and by 25% by 2030, compared to 2019 baseline, and pursue net zero GHG emissions by 2050
• Decrease fleet-wide fuel consumption of boilers per day by 2% annually, compared to 2016
• 100% of fleet equipped with Waste Heat Recovery by 2027
• Increase the percentage of our fleet with shore power capabilities to 50% by 2024, 70% by 2025, and 100% by 2035
• Increase the percentage of treated wastewater compared to untreated sewage discharged by 2024, compared to 2019
• Reduce bunkering by 4%, as compared to 2019, by 2025
• Decrease the total volume of sludge offloaded fleetwide by 5%, compared to 2018, by 2023

Green methanol is apparently a real thing. The figures Norwegian uses are lifted directly from the Methanol Institute. It does seem like methanol production capacity is increasing and is on track to continue increasing, according to this source. If a cruise ship uses about 250 tons of fuel per hour (91250/year), and current green methanol production is just shy of 1 million tons/year, then if all of that production were directed toward cruise ships then it could fuel about... 11 ships. Hmm. If by 2027 production increases (generously) by an order of magnitude, that's still only about 100 ships, or less than 1/3 of the total fleet worldwide across all cruise firms. Better than nothing...?

Norwegian claims to be "on track" for all of these metrics, especially fuel consumption, but of course they will say that. I can't really figure out what their "-50%" and "-80%" figures mean and I suspect they mean nothing. Frankly most of these commitments are ridiculously insufficient, though it isn't reasonable to expect revolutionary changes to happen in just a couple years. I think we should take these commitments with a grain of salt, but it does make sense from an operational perspective why industry would be interested in improving their own efficiency, especially to avoid potentially crippling regulations from governments who they can clearly see are honing in on emissions.

From what I can tell, many or most of the emissions are not just from the transportation itself (i.e. the burning of fuel for the purpose of moving mass from point A to B) but rather from the hoteling aboard the ship (12x more emissions than land-based hoteling) and from other luxury-related activities. Intuitively, if we know how energy-efficient it is to transport goods by sea, this should come as no surprise: if we're comparing fuel costs, it simply takes less fuel to move objects by water than by air. This is why ferries have so few emissions per passenger-mile. Ship fuel is particularly nasty stuff as far as human health is concerned, but many resources appear to primarily emphasize the non-fuel waste produced by these enterprises. So the CO2e emissions of cruise ships would seem to originate not just from fuel but rather from the inefficiency of human habitation at sea. Norwegian is at least vaguely calculating multi-scope emissions (p. 15) with, for example, "purchased goods and services" apparently making up ~21% of total emissions in 2022 (fuel itself is about 55%, and "fuel and energy-related activities," whatever that means, being another 12%). I assume "capital goods" (18% of their emissions) are the emissions from the ships themselves, which is more of a decarbonization question for manufacturers.

There are also significant non-GHG environmental impacts due to operational procedures taken by cruise ships. Wikipedia has a whole page on the environmental effects of shipping (not just cruise ships, but they are included). Waste dumping, noise pollution, etc. Those externalities are different than the externalities produced by airplanes; same idea, but apples to oranges, so I don't know how to compare them.

Anyway, this is all to say: greenhouse gas emissions from cruise ships are pretty rough. Given the relative lack of information on repositioning cruises specifically, the age of much of the data, and newer emissions reductions which are maybe not yet reflected in the literature, I am going to speculate that such a trip has an approximately equal GHG impact as a long-haul flight, assuming a typical stateroom and a direct voyage. On average, it probably works out to somewhat more emissions, though I personally think ships have a clearer (easier/faster) path toward net-zero (ish) emissions than airplanes given the limitations of each mode.

I will go to sleep and decide tomorrow whether I will fly or sail home, but right now I am leaning toward the sea for this occasion. I am not sure about future voyages yet. We will see.

Apple recently released a journal app in their latest iOS update. I used to journal when I was younger and thought it would be a good opportunity to get back into it. I usually use it as a reflection of my day, but some days nothing happens and I feel like there's probably a plethora of things I could be writing about.

So for those of you who journal what do you like to write in it?

This hit me while watching the latest Gamers Nexus video discussion with Wendell, and Steve recited the quote.

It's often brought up as the inevitability of modern product ownership as company executives push profit-first practices like subscriptions, licenses and anti-right-to-repair designs. However this neglects the fact that these systems don't come from nowhere - they have to be built by programmers, engineers and designers.

I don't know if those same people support right-to-repair and freedom to manipulate what you buy in their private lives (or if they have even thought about it), but it seems like every techie I speak to does support it, yet somehow these things keep getting made.

I want to try and escape my bubble about this. I don't believe the engineers are powerless against the executives - if the engineering community works together and don't backstab, I think these systems can be prevented at the technical level and never see the light of day.

What happens at these notorious companies (John Deere, Apple etc.) that I'm missing? Is the lure of money too great? Is the threat of being back stabbed too large?

I'll try to be brief.

I lost my older brother March this year. Barely a year after I moved to the same city as him, he passed away from a bacterial infection he got in a hospital. He went for stomach surgery, everything went fine. Suddenly, a month later, this bacterial infection got to his brain and he was gone.

It was a big shock to our family and things are not the same anymore. My parents are old, mother is 73, father is 78.

My mother is simply just existing these days. She is barely eating and is now weighing 48kgs (105 lbs). She needed to go to the hospital a couple of days ago because she was so weak.

She already had problems before the death of my brother. She is losing her eyesight and despite all the treatments, it does not get better. She can see up close, she can use her smartphone, but it's hard for her to recognize people if they are not right up in her face.

She has three hernias and can't stand too much. She can get up to make breakfast or coffee, but after 20 minutes has to lie down because of pain. It does not help that she barely eats and is getting weaker every day.

She does not want to go to a psychologist. She just says she is not crazy and won't go. I tried contacting one that can go to her house, but she says she simply won't open the door. My father is trying to convince her, but I know it won't change.

I can understand her and I can't see what more can I do. She never had much going for her, now her oldest (and dearest) son is dead all of a sudden, she has all this physical pain going on for years, eyesight getting worse and I can understand the fact that she simply don't care for it anymore. She simply lost her appetite.

She is going to doctors to take exams, she did a battery of tests and everything seems fine. Even her cholesterol which was problematic is fine.

He prescribed something to help with her appetite and vitamins, but it is not the first time. Don't think this will change much.

I don't know really what I'm asking here. I sometimes think I should do more, but there is already my father which lives with her and my other brother who is there in the same city. I already tried sending a psychologist to help her at home, I don't know what more can I do.

I go visit every two or three weeks (i am going for christmas and new year) and she is the same way. 80% of the time lying down in the couch, she gets up to make food or coffee, go sit in the front of the house for some time, then it's time to go to bed. This is repeated every day.

It's not like it was much different before, but at least she ate some food. There was a day that she just ate an apple and that was it.

She goes out of the house if she needs, like going to the doctor or groceries, but avoids for any other reason.

Long story short--I don't want to connect my mac to my iCloud account, but every time I login to my laptop, I get three popups in a row that say "This Mac Can't connect to iCloud because of a problem with [my email] ...".

I can't find a setting that allows me to disable this, and online searches have been fruitless.

The release of the Meta Quest 3 seems to have been slowplayed but my take is that Zuckerberg is still going full force ahead with MR but doesn't want to have a fiasco like the last round of publicity about "the metaverse” when people were mentioning it in the same sentence as blockchains and NFTs.

I read a lot of very positive reviews about the hardware

https://www.theverge.com/23906313/meta-quest-3-review-vr-mixed-reality-headset

https://www.reddit.com/r/QuestPro/comments/17631ja/24_hours_in_my_quest_3_review/

https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/meta-quest-3

so I got one and I am really impressed. It comes with a very convincing demo where cracks appear in the ceiling and walls of your room opening views onto another planet and then aliens come into your room that you have to shoot with the controllers to stuff them into a tube. I am showing this demo to people on the hopes I can sell some kind of MR exhibit to a local museum.

Karl Guttag could show that the MR quality is "awful" from an eye chart perspective but the motion-to-photon is really excellent, you can throw and catch a ball just fine wearing it, and it is totally practical to walk around the house, interact with people, read (large) text to copy, use a touchscreen, etc.

I get the feeling too that they are doing many of the right things to market it, for instance, it comes with a license for a major game that comes out in two months which will might give people who don't click with it right away a chance to re-engage. There is intensive notification based marketing with discounts and stuff which is totally textbook for a new app store and that I like at the moment but it is possible it just won't connect if the product isn't up to snuff.

I tried Horizon Worlds and ran into the problem of not being able to succeed at the fishing minigame (in real life I've only been able to catch sunfish and smelt, but you really can fill up your freezer with zero skill with the later) and also the way it is weirdly empty. I have some content that I think could be put in there which I think is often a good idea on a new platform that is heavily promoted (e.g. easy to get free publicity and other benefits from the platform) but that emptiness might mean they don't feel pressure to get content. VRChat was more fun but showed me the challenge of onboarding people to that sort of thing, I got into an entrance room where I met one person who was actually attentive and trying to communicate and I think a lot of kids who were "doing their own thing", I figured out some of how to interact in that space but the problem of "getting gud" while sharing the space with other people who might be annoyed seems tough.

My take is that the software is not up to the hardware right now but as a software developer I think that’s a great problem to have.

If you're excited about Apple Vision I think you should be excited by this. Any thoughts? Anyone tried the MQ3? Anyone developing content for it?

Every few months I get the itch to support journalism and expand my news from the low quality high fluff news sources that tend to be free and subscribe to some long-form sources of news, opinion, and investigative journalism, but every time I go through the same process of pricing subscriptions, struggling to decide which one, and then finally just giving up and not subscribing to any of them.

If money was no object I'd probably subscribe right now to:

• The Atlantic
• The New Yorker
• Harpers
• The Economist
• National Review
• WSJ
• NYT

(trying to focus on a variety of political leanings, but mostly from generally high-factuality sources)

I like Apple News+ in concept, and the price is decent, but after a trial subscription I felt like the UI was difficult to navigate, difficult to search and filter, and the news sources were still a subset of the entire publications. I also have to wonder whether the journalists are sufficiently compensated by Apple or whether they get pennies compared to a direct subscription.

So, I come here seeking recommendations -- perhaps somebody here has found a good solution to this problem?

I'm seeing a lot of news in my feed about Qualcomm chips approaching laptop performance, such as

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/10/qualcomm-snapdragon-x-elite-looks-like-the-windows-worlds-answer-to-apple-silicon/

https://www.anandtech.com/show/21105/qualcomm-previews-snapdragon-x-elite-soc-oryon-cpu-starts-in-laptops-

https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/24/qualcomm_x_elite/

Will this turn out any better than the last few times Microsoft tried to break away from Intel? Would you want such a laptop? Will it wake Intel out of its complacency?

My wife has an ipad pro, and we have a baby monitor. So I was watching the baby monitor and noticed that her ipad was also in view of the camera. What I also noticed is that her ipad seems to flash an infrared light every minute or so.

After some googling I think this is the lidar scanner, although I'm not 100% sure.

Anyway, does anyone know why her ipad is doing this? It feels pretty creepy that a device is scanning your house all the time. Normally you don't even notice, it's only when you view the iPad pro from a camera that also shows infrared.

Maybe I'm just a little paranoid, but it feels like a privacy violation.

Spotify recently increased their price, making it the same price as Apple's service. I've had Spotify since 2016 (started with the free version), and got premium in 2018 when they had the college student deal where you would get that and Hulu for only five bucks a month. I've been an off and on Premium subscriber since 2019. Only re-subscribing to it when Spotify would send me offers to sign up for three months for the price of one. This is actually the first year that I've consistently had Spotify all year since I was in college.

But now that they're the same price I was wondering if I should switch over. I don't want to get into the whole quality thing and lossless (I don't even know what that is) but I haven't been happy with Spotify's algorithm for a while. Streaming services have always been how I discovered new music, going back to me using Pandora while I was in high school. But now Spotify keeps suggesting the same songs whenever it's on smart shuffle. For example, if I play a song from the late 60s or early 70s, I know the next song Spotify plays is going to be Ain't No Mountain High Enough by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. Whenever I play an indie pop song, like a Lana Del Rey song or something, I know that the next song is going to be Borderline by Tame Impala.

I'm kind of sick of it at this point, and I feel like it's limiting the scope of what I'm listening to. I'm not sure what Apple Music's algorithm is like, I've heard mixed things with some saying it's better than Spotify and others saying it's worse.

I'm also happy taking recommendations on other things to do or try with Spotify to correct this.

I became a fan of Premier League Soccer after an epic battle with YOShInOn, my smart RSS reader. (I tried to convince it I liked American football and not the other kind of football but in the process of trying to understand why it couldn't learn the difference I changed my mind.)

There's a free Premier League game on NBC OTA TV around 12:30 PM EST and once I got hooked a Peacock subscription seemed like a good idea so I can catch games (somewhat) early on Saturday and Sunday. The university I work at has men's and women's soccer games that I go to (it was fun to go to one where youth players showed up and I felt like we were part of a huge soccer universe) and sooner or later I am going to check out the games of the college on the other hill.

I know there's Major League Soccer here in the US and I understand it's gotten better than it used to be, and I understand you can get an add-on subscription to Apple TV which has all the games. Is there anyone out there who follows MLS?

I try to post a few articles a week about the Premier League and European Soccer and I think it would be great if somebody did the same for MLS, as something interesting has to happen every gameday.

My company has given me a budget of around ~$1200 to purchase a device. Its technically for "education" so my excuse is that I'll be doing online certifications with it, but the reality is that its going to be primarily a toy to play with, watch movies, play some light games, etc.

Does anyone have any recommendations? I know the ipad pro is the big dog in town but I've never been much of an apple fan and don't have any skin in their ecosystem, I'm mostly an android guy but I'm not married to the idea of an android tablet.

Here were some of the ones I've looked at so far:

Surface pro 9

Dell XPS 13 2in1

Lenovo Yoga 9i

Samsung Galaxy Tab S9+

They all seem like decent options honestly, but I was wondering if anyone had first hand experience with them and could give some thoughts.