If your on desktop, here’s some unsolicited advice. If you’re on mobile, good luck…I’ve got nothing.

LPT: use unlock origin’s element picker to block any unwanted sections of youtube mixed into your feed.

“Premium” gone, “Shorts” gone, “Trending” gone, “Pay to watch” gone, “News” gone, “Survay” gone

LPT2: set a YouTube bookmark to go straight to your subscription page. This way you see the new videos you are most likely to care about first. No need to “hit the bell” and rely on notifications. When I’m caught up there, I’ll head over to home feed to see if there’s anything intresting.

LPT3: get the extention “Enhancer for YouTube”. There’s a ton of settings to basically set your playback defaults the way you like. I change the toolbar setting to " showin video playback bar" and auto expand" to get the various buttons to show up like the default ones. (The names of those setting is by memory).

“Unhook” is also good one for clearing out junk.

Lastly “DeArrow”, from the maker of SponsorBlock. This one crowd sources new video titles with the goal of replacing clickbait for an actual description of the video.

The nice thing about SMS is its on everyone’s phone by default.

No apps to download and no accounts to make. Adding someone is a simple 9 digit number.

imessage bridged the gap between bacsic SMS and feature-rich messages. With them both being in one app and handled automatically, it is very convenient to use. While the extra features are limited to apple phones, you can use imessage to universally message any other phone.

Google made a their own thing, RCS, to compete with imessage. They made it an open standard and worked with carriers to make it so any phone could use it. it took Apple 7 years since release to add support.

Finally, you can text pretty much anyone with a smart phone a message with the “extra features” without hassle.

You can’t schedule RCS messages?

A basic features that has been around since the beginning of time of time is not included?

This sounds like a neat concept.

It’ll probably end up full of spam, bots and marketed b.s after a year, but it’ll be cool at first.

Neat.

Does android auto work? Last I herd it did not…

Not sure but my city refuses to tear some down old buildings for "historical prosperity. These aren’t even nice buildings, they’re all condemed generic concrete blocks.

Price is probably #1.

Bit of speculation here with no real sources ; There was a boom in late 2022 through 2023 when people could finally reliably get parts again. I’m guessing many who wanted to upgrade already did in the past 2 years. Anyone who got a new computer in 2020 onward should be fine for at least a few more years. I think the average is around 7 years.

The market will probably see a surge between 2027-2030 as people begin replacing their “covid era” computers.The market right now is mainly seeing anyone with a pre-covid computer who bought a nice top of line machine for about 1k. They’re looking at current pricing and choosing to go with today’s mid-low teir, which will outclass their old 201x top of the line computer.

Another factor could be AAA gaming hasn’t exactly been pumping out hit new tiles the last 5 years. People who wanted to play cyberpunk or Eldon ring already upgraded by the time Wukon came out.

With less new games requirng the latest and greatest means the need to upgrade is going drop too.

Again all speculation…

Na, that’s a total valid point. In school you could tell anyone who’s note book was a giant yellow soggy mess was not going to adjust well to adult life.

I’d just play it safe, avoid anything that could remotely be considered “suspicious”.

If you can bring your own media, bring a few offline shows and movies, books or what ever else you like.

Otherwise stick to nonral websites.

Survay is anonymous and takes 1-2 minutes.

Everyone fill it out, don’t care if your on iphone (its not like google cares about your privacy), just fill out the damn thing.

Don’t check everything, check a few random things to make it look legitimate.

Let’s all be honest and not fill the survay with bull-shit data that helps 3rd-prarty launchers, that would be imoral. Remember google’s old motto, don’t be evil.

Ramsey has some views that don’t align with everyone. The important thing to keep in mind is that America is so diverse, your neighbor could be a different religion and most of us (despite what media will lead you to belive) don’t give a fuck.

If I were to re-work the advice to be less extreme, I’d say don’t put your self in a finacial struggle trying to help your parents.

There’s a lot terrible articles with clickbate titles too. A lot of the articles I’m interested reading are either clickbate/ragebait or way out of context or just completely false.

I’m not aware of major downsides to using a different luncher.

The biggest incovience is initial setup and putting your home screen apps back where they belong.

Spend a few hours to escape to some of google bloat and set your search bar to use Firefox (which has ublock support).

You can change it on other launchers.

Personally I like neolauncher.

https://github.com/NeoApplications/Neo-Launcher The search bar can be set to immediately directly open Firefox search, or you can pick form a list of various engines.

There’s a dozen other launchers to try. Lawnchair is a more popular choice, probably better for someone switching from pixel default. There’s a few very specific features it’s missing for me.

If you search Lemmy for “Nova Launcher” you’ll find some threads listing a dozen alternatives due to nova’s downfall.

I’ve started ignoring random posts about it.

Its the equivalent of telling your little sibling about it and having to listen to them shout “I lost the game” for next 5 months. It gets old quick.

Now if I think about this post and comment later on my own, then sure I’ll have lost the game.

I hope that’s a good thing…

Good luck. It is a bit weird getting setup at first with the way they do profiles, but once its set you dont have to think about it if you need to make a new alarm.

“Alarm Clock for Heavy Sleepers” also known as AMDroid Alarm clock.

Yes it can shuffle music.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.amdroidalarmclock.amdroid

Downsides; Not FoSS and not free, however it is a cheap one time purchase, no subscriptions. free version ads are just unobtrusive banners. I have Netgaurd blocking WiFi and cell with no issues.

Features: (no idea what’s paid and not)

• Incredibly customizable, I never knew there could be so many alarm options - but there are.
• you can make different alarm profiles, so you only have to set up each “type” of alarm you want once. From there, you just set a time and pick a profile with your settings. Everything from this point on is profile specific.
• pick any sounds on device (or a folder for random picks), set volume, vibrate, ingnore do not disturb, ignore headphones plugged in, etc.
• Calandar integration. If you have a schedule that varies, you can set it up to follow that instead of set-days and times.
• One time skip and one time adjust buttons. Need to wake up an hour early one day, got tomorrow off? Just use these to make the adjustment, next day the alarm will back to normal.
• optional post alarm “are you awake?” notifications. Dismiss the alarm but fell back asleep? After a few minutes (user set time) it will ask if your awake. With no response, after some time the alarm will go again. (With a different sound or volume if you like)
• snooze timmer can decrease each time you use it. First snooze 10 min, next is 8, then 6 and so on.
• various optional challenges that I don’t use. Easy things like type out this text, to the WiFi signal must be higher than X (go stand next your router to shut off alarm).
• location based settings - for example, morning alarms only go off at hone, break alarms only go off at work.
• the list continues for some time, but I’ll stop here.