Alexa. I use Alexa constantly, except my Echos drop off the network and have to be manually restarted by unplugging them. And I curse every time one of them starts up with, "by the way...."

I have several smart power strips that stopped responding; I have had better luck with individual smart outlets.

Digital audio players with Wi-Fi radios that support AirPlay. I've purchased three, two from Hiby and one from FiiO. The idea was to stream AirPlay to the DAP from one of my PCs, getting quality audio over wired headphones, while I walked around the house. The Hiby models would drop the stream occasionally and both had batteries that died in a year or less. The FiiO would accept streams from Apple devices, but not third-party AirPlay streams. I ended up listening to my phone.

I found bone conduction headphones don't come anywhere close to audiophile quality.

Wi-Fi in general, living in a row home in a neighborhood crowded with 2.4 GHz transceivers.

I bought and stored away a large drawer full of microphones, headphones, mice, and keyboards before I settled on the models I like.

I've never used a Windows trackpad that was worth spit. I can't use a Mac without a trackpad next to my keyboard and mouse. The difference on Windows is maddening.

I was getting frustrated with the battery in my old Apple watch as it got older, but now that I have two watches and can switch between them, I wear one or the other 24 hours a day.

Yeah bone conduction headphones are awful, I don’t know how people tolerate them.

The Mac trackpads are outstanding. I consider it one of their best hardwares

Speaking of electronic devices, an appliance is generally locked down, and the manufacturer limits the number of use cases. You end up with something that is not a general-purpose computer, even though many use the same hardware as a computer would.

A game console is a classic appliance. You turn it on and see your current game running or a selection of games to play and you can start playing a game with zero intermediate steps.

The Steam Deck and Steam Box are designed as appliance emulators—they boot and by default operate in appliance mode. They can provide the same exact experience as a console if you use them as designed. They are also general-purpose computers, if you wish to step out of console mode.

If you like and use em dashes, you figure it out

I do. The point is that most people won't think about it, which is what we're talking about... There being a few outliers on a site called Hacker News who know the shortcuts for extended typography isn't in any way indicative of em dashes being in common use amongst phone users.

I use em dashes constantly.

I've been a Mac user for years, where the em dash is a modified hyphen on the Mac keyboard. When I moved to primarily using PCs, the em dash alt-key combo was the first one I memorized (alt-0151).

I have all of it on my keyboard: neo-layout.org

That setting is under User Configuration on my Win11 Pro PC, so look in both.

Or just use http://lite.cnn.com/en. It's great that they still support a "text" version.

Coworking spaces need to colocate with services. Starbucks, Fedex Kinkos, massage chairs....

The author might be formatting for and editing in dark mode. I use edge://flags/#enable-force-dark and the links are readable.

People either bring email etiquette (Hi, how are you, I need...") or phone etiquette (Hi, how are you?" ...) to chat.

Email etiquette has always seemed natural to me, but a lot of people read chat as a synchronous medium, so.

It's just another place where I need to have multiple modes on hand for different people.

Different cultures. Your culture determines who sets expectations and who enforces them in these situations, and Indians can work with their culture's existing system for organizing and managing community homes. Americans would have to figure out a system, agree on it, troubleshoot it, while trying to learn how to be parents. That's almost impossible.