The Philippines were named after a Spanish king, King Phillip, or Felippe in Spanish. Given that the country was first controlled by the Spanish for ages, then the Americans, I’m guessing that at first the Spanish name for both the people and the territory was used, but when the Americans took over, the English-ified name of the territory was used, while the Spanish name for the people stuck as colonial powers use the name for the territory more often? Perhaps the Filipino diaspora also plays a role in this. I don’t know, just my guess.

Pretty cool that both brands show the charging spec on the cable! Props to Startech in particular for labeling that the cables are USB 2 data transfer speeds

Looking at the reviews, the silicone sleeving of these looks pretty cool! And quite neat that Creator Warehouse is able to compete with the bigger brands while not having a ridiculous price tag, the prices seem pretty good actually (but shipping to many countries will be higher, which is understandable as a smaller company). Hopefully they become in stock soon!

Samsung S24 Ultra onwards have the anti-reflective “matte” coating (diffused vs shiny) while the S26 Ultra is the first with the dumb “privacy display” feature.

It’s neat tech, but it significantly reduces the resolution when enabled, it has worse viewing angles when disabled (since half the pixels are less visible when viewing side on) and the feature is done better with a cheap screen protector. Pretty cool that you can use it for notifications, but I think that’s the only part-of-screen tinkering you can do with it, it’s that or the whole screen, so you could just set the notifications to hide message contents?

Math rock is a thing? Quick search tells me that unfortunately it’s not actually about (aboot) mathematics, darn. Pretty neat music though!

At least Ubuntu doesn’t require TPM 2.0 security bits! That’s a silly restriction whose only purpose is to create more e-waste and more money to Microsoft

And yes, as others have said, Win11 with 4 GB of RAM is not nice. I force-upgraded a Win10 laptop with 4GB of ram (but no TPM 2.0 chip) and mouse clicks were quite slow to register, and all the menus took their sweet time to load up. Yikes. And I am certain it was the lack of memory causing the performance hitches, not the missing TPM 2.0 chip. Installing Mint on it lets it live for another day, hooray! Still slow, but usable enough as a computer. I now run a much newer laptop with EndeavourOS (w/ KDE Plasma) and I enjoy it a lot!

If you ever want to try LibreOffice, try using the “tabbed” interface by going to the “user interface” option, then it will look more similar to that! If possible, I would recommend using ODF over MS doc formats (ODT, ODP, ODS vs DOCX, PPT, XLSX). MS Office opens them fine for the most part (aside from specifically PowerPoint on web, it renders reduced opacity images weird! Everything else seems fine though) and the document format isn’t proprietary. Bonus points that it makes it easy to differentiate files (odt is open doc text, odp is open doc presentation, ods is open doc spreadsheets! MS office extensions aren’t standardised at all), downside is you have to try hard not to call presentations “ppts”

Perhaps it’s talking about the Cold War where both sides built enough nukes to obliterate the world numerous times, then began to disarm as the Cold War came to its end, and now rearming yet again threatening another nuclear arms race?

Well it would be weird if they gave you bonus points for it /s

Personally, I use a combination of Codeberg (cloud backups) and a self-hosted Forgejo instance (local backups). Redundancy is always good, if one goes down I still have my projects saved in the other!

I have recently made a short script that converts Gregorian dates to Symmetry454 ones. Additional functionality might be added at some point, but currently do not have the time.

I am also working on two games (using Godot, if you’re wondering). One is a platformer where a duck (the player) is tasked by Prometheus to steal the “fire” from each of the twelve Olympian gods, starting with Dionysus, the god of wine, so the duck needs to steal the knowledge of wine-making for the humans while going through various obstacles and puzzles. I’ve already made some basic levels and I think it’s turning out pretty good! The second game is a HOI4-esque grand strategy game set during the cold war, but with controller support (so wars will most likely be turn-based and focus more on intervention/supporting your side of the conflict). This one is in pretty early days, but I have already implemented basic functionality (selecting nations and occupied territories, factions, basic focus and research system), and I will soon need to add actual fun bits in (like a functioning battling mechanic, actual focus webs and research trees)

I have exams coming up soon so I don’t have much time to work on silly programming projects right now, I need time to revise and such!

then blindly confident

coming from a school-issue Chromebook could get a great upgrade moving to these.

Good point, it looks to be way better than any Chromebook in terms of performance, build quality, etc.

This will certainly sell and will net Apple a lot of market share!

I would expect Apple to stop supporting those sooner than the Neo

Hopefully not! If Apple does cut off support, there’s always the option for Asahi Linux!

Oh wait, I think I misread. You have a Thunderbolt to HDMI, I read that as you suggesting to get a (pretty expensive) Thunderbolt adapter for somebody shopping for a Neo. Yes, any USB 3 adapter would work, not only TB.

The display of the Neo seems very similar to the one in the Air M1 (no notch, similar resolution), but with worse colour accuracy according to reviews. The M2 Air onwards had better displays (but with the notch)

As for battery life, real-world performance (not benchmarks, not “I used it for a day and it seems smooth”), and security updates, I’m not sure. The older M series Macbooks are still getting the latest MacOS updates, but I wonder how many the Neo will get given that it’s an iPhone chip…

10 out of 10 repairability rating by ifixit.

Note that it wasn’t a 10/10, it was 6/10. Still much better than previous Macs, and overall quite good :D

iFixit state that the main complaints are pentalobe screws, soldered RAM and storage, and it’s difficult to repair the keyboard.

https://www.ifixit.com/News/116152/macbook-neo-is-the-most-repairable-macbook-in-14-years

3. And the choice is either windows or Mac

I’m choosing the neo

Yeah, Windows is pretty bad these days.

Thankfully I’m only limited by budget and have no desire to let fine refurbished laptops languish. And I’m all onboard with Linux so I’ll be getting a refurb thinkpad instead.

Nice! Hope you have a good time with one of those :)

It’s better to use a separate password manager, since it’s an additional layer of security, as you must type in a master password or, if you configure it, use a hardware key/biometrics. Also, as others have said, you can use them in non-website logins too, so it’s more flexible!

Personally, I think Bitwarden is a pretty good option for most people. It’s cross-platform, and I think there is an option to self-host the server if you wish.

Another option, the one I use, is KeePass (XC on desktop, DX on Android, KeePassium on iOS), which stores passwords in a local database file, and you can use Syncthing to sync the contents of the database!

Cool, a transformer person!

I will not disagree, the Neo does look to have much better build quality than most laptops in its price range, as well as many outside of it.

As for the chipset, there will be tradeoffs. You can definitely get an older Ryzen 7000 series or Intel 13th gen for cheap. These will be quite a bit less efficient and have worse battery life, and the performance won’t be as good. But they don’t suffer from the limitations of being an iPhone chip, some will be better cooled, some have upgradeable memory/16GB ram option, and most will have better port selection (like HDMI, USB-A ports). The Neo’s A18 Pro is much better in some ways, but also a bit worse in many others.

Yes, it is true that Windows is pretty garbage now. I wouldn’t say 16GB is not enough for it though, even with all its bloat. But it is terrible, really bad indeed, hence why I happily run Linux and encourage others to do the same :D

Apple Silicon really is crazy though, no doubt about that.

A little off-topic, note that “i7”, “i5”, etc. aren’t too helpful when comparing CPUs, only between the specific generation.