RMiddleton

Vivaldi on laptop, Orion on iPhone — but as of last week Orion is crashing multiple times a day (after months of use without issues).

I’m curling up to a movie right now on Hooplah & last night watched one on Kanopy, two streaming services I get free with my library card.

List of Fediverse admins pledging to pre-block Meta instances: https://fedipact.online

It will be possible to have accounts on multiple instances, those that block Meta or federate with Meta. Then see what happens.

This, for sure. I live in the US and wanted to learn to understand Celsius so I switched my phone to use it. Internalizing a system works where translating/converting does not. I quickly learned that I feel comfortable in temperatures in the 20s. Since I feel comfortable in Fahrenheit temps in the upper 60s to mid 70s I can guess what the conversion is for most temps, but I don’t have to do it to understand that I like how 22 C feels.

Similarly, if you’re traveling and having to use a foreign currency I prefer to establish an idea in my head of cheap, reasonable, expensive than stopping to convert every price exactly. A “reasonable price” is relative to the item and location, of course, and should also affect my perspective.

Absorbing a new system by this method works fairly easily for temperatures and money, but less so for other measurements. I don’t have as fine-tuned a sense of what ounces, pounds, or grams feel like as I do units of temperature. And I am always adding or subtracting 12 to understand time when expressed as 13h and up.

During the brief period when the US was encouraging metric system understanding there were many highway speed limit signs expressed as 55 mph / 88 kph. Every time I need to make that conversion I think of 5/8 because of that sign. And I usually just make guesstimates that work well enough.

I like learning new things. The generation before me in my family turned off their brains long ago and now suffer dementia. I work to keep my mind active. Learning other units of measure is one example.

Finally I’ll say that I WISH I could get to a point of understanding languages this way without translation.

I’m not currently using RSS, it’s been years. And yes I also felt overwhelmed. I have same problem with Podcasts on my iPhone and honestly email. Just like in most cases I don’t want to be pushed content. My brain feels bad for not keeping up. The best use of RSS that I can imagine for me would be following a small number of original content creators who post erratically in multiple platforms. It’s another reason I love the fediverse so much bc we can slap /feed on the end of many addresses to pull that content elsewhere. And again I’m not currently using RSS lol. I’m just saying that I might use it for passionate follows. I think it’s a useful tool for getting people free of the big bad platforms.