My SO and I discussed that engagement rings shouldn’t be expensive.

Correct answer. This indicates that the two of you have at least some kind of head on your shoulders.

I used a literal piece of costume jewelry for the proposal. It was very shiny, but only $10. The point of this was, we got a “real” engagement ring afterwards and she could pick what she wanted rather than me doing it for her and getting it wrong. We ultimately settled on a moissanite rock which is, it must be said, hella sparkly. And significantly cheaper than getting a diamond which she’d be forever fearful of losing or smashing out of the setting, or whatever. After visiting quite a few jewelry places, believe it or not the place where we found the one she loved was at Walmart. I still feel sophisticated to this very day.

Fellas, if your chickie is more worried about how shiny a pebble you’ve brought her is rather than, you know, the person bringing it, what you have yourself there is a problem.

VHS was 2

VHS did have a halfassed copy protection technology attempted, though, which was Macrovision. It didn’t really work worth a damn in the end, but even in that area the media giants were already huffing on the DRM crack pipe.

It’s easy as long as you’re okay with only being able to fit probably 1-2 minutes of video, the resulting disk not playing in any consumer player ever, and probably not even being capable of real time playback on a powerful PC with a fast drive.

how is my calculator app going to find me a date?

You could turn it upside down and spell “boobies?”

I’d doubt this is a thing that’s unique to Lemmy, but A) moderatorship in general attracts a certain kind of individual and B) Lemmy as a whole seems to attract a user base with a fairly consistent mindset which tends to be overall left leaning and a little bit radical. A lot of the normies are probably still on reddit, or wherever the fuck.

…Says the chump who moderates three communities (one of which is dead), so everything I say on the matter may be bullshit.

There are exceptions, like the various infamous tankie instances. The thing about Lemmy instances is anyone with thumbs and a credit card to pay for hosting can create one and then make it their own ideological hobby-horse.

I am positive I did, but I was making what is known as “a joke” about your assumption that the statistical distribution of states that do/don’t require front plates would have squat to do with it. Did the Ohio bit not tip you off?

TIL that it is a statistical certainty that no one lives in Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Ohio. The more you know! (Okay, maybe Ohio I’ll grant you.)

To save anyone Googling it, 18 states do not require front plates.

Some do, but 18 of them don’t including Pennsylvania and Florida which are quite populous.

He did it on the front bumper, so despite his protestations he probably does have that car plated anyway.

What a wimp.

That is patently false.

…Sometimes we also complain about Facebook or Tesla.

You’re conflating the tuner with the antenna. The person you replied to, however, is correct including the comment about the digital tuner boxes (which convert to an analog signal for old TV’s) being available for free during the analog to digital changeover back when.

Any piece of metal will work as an antenna, even for receiving digital broadcasts. It might not work well, but there is no magical difference between a “digital” antenna and an “analog” one, and since digital television is transmitted over pretty much the same original frequencies as analog was, old analog antennae are already quite well tuned in size and shape to pick up modern digital signals.

You just have to plug your 1940’s antenna into a 2009+ or so television. The antenna itself doesn’t “decode” anything. It just catches radio waves and passes the waveform along to the TV or tuner box. I still use the old 60’s era rooftop antenna that cane with my house, but plugged into my modern TV and it receives digital channels just fine.

His glasses are different in every scene. No consistency. It’s subtle in the first few, but in the last shot they’re a totally different style and shape and have a crossbar over the bridge that wasn’t present in any of the previous scenes.

I was sitting in a diner the other day and one of their TV’s was apparently, for lack of a better word, tuned to that Samsung TV Plus service. I watched it play the same Kia ad four times, back to back. Not in separate commercial breaks. All in one commercial break where the same ad was played four times consecutively.

Just like you, I have to say they found no success in making me want to buy a Kia.

Not even. We just need it to trip over the pronunciation of something, preferably the same thing more than once, and then both the news and social media will latch onto it like a pit bull and with any luck they’ll never live it down.

Carefully watch the kid’s glasses.

Now you can’t unsee it. You’re welcome.

Oh boy. I can’t wait for this to backfire in a spectacular and completely predictable manner.

I rocked an OG Pebble as well as a Pebble Time for a while. The best replacement I could find was the Garmin Fenix watches, which use a similar display and offer comparable battery life (or better, for the bigger ones) but unlike the old Pebbles they cost major bucks. They’re considerably more featureful, though. All of them also have round displays, not the rectangular like the Pebbles.

I’m quite happy with my Fenix 6 Solar and have no desire to ditch it, nor trade it in for any of the newer models.

Like cotton/linen fabrics? Cotton is pretty naturally flame resistant. Probably can’t help you on all the plastics in a modern car interior, though.

The flame retardant thing is baffling me, anyway. Flame retardant fabrics/plastics in a vehicle either toting around 10-20 gallons of monumentally flammable gasoline, or hundreds of kWh of lithium batteries. Sure, chief, the fabrics will keep it from catching on fire…