If you don't mind me asking, what Bank? I've resolved that this phone will be my last googled phone, and my next will be GrapheneOS.

Halifax UK. It just refuses to work so I left it (Graphene is more secure, so forcing less security for the sake of tracking is off the cards). All the other banks so far say they won't work without Google services but if I click OK they work

Not OP, but I've been on GrapheneOS for a few years and I have no problem with Chase, CiT or Wealthfront. I mostly use them to check balances and unlock debit cards, but they all login and function fine.

You won't be alone. I've resolved that this will be my last Googled phone.

My dad runs the family domain/emails/etc. The hard part will be convincing him to degoogle the whole family.

My university (a very large state school) transitioned from Moodle to Canvas while I was a student (2016-2020). They transitioned because Moodle sucked. Profs hated it, students hated it more. Basic things were difficult to find.

A lot can change in 10 years, sure. Maybe Moodle is better now (I doubt it). I'm all for self-hosting a LMS. But, can we at least self-host a good one?

This. In 2017 I bought the cheapest AM4 motherboard with a USB-C port (a Gigabyte X370 Aorus Word Salad). I'm still using it because BIOS updates gave it Zen 3 support.

Wanna guess how many times I've used that USB-C port? Maybe once or twice in the 9 years I've owned it. Never needed it. I also couldn't tell you what X370 is getting me that B350 wouldn't have gotten me.

This is what I did with 3 roommates in college. We saved a ton of money that way.

After college, I only had one roommate and Costco didn't work as well. The quantities for certain things are just a bit much. Buying 36 eggs for 4 adults made sense. Buying 36 eggs for 2 adults... not so much. I ended up going to Costco for toilet paper and gas, and that's it.

To this day, I'm still the "spouse" on one of those college roommates' costco memberships, LOL.

Eggs last a long time in the fridge! I could definitely go through 36 eggs myself over the course of 3 weeks. :)

When properly cared for, and owned outside of the rust belt, these vans will go a million miles. Hell, I've seen a Chevy Express van in the rust belt with over 500k (that's 800k if you're French).

They're so simplistic, and parts are so easy to find, that frame rot is really the only thing that can permanently kill one. It's really a shame that the Express is the last van of this breed that's still hanging around. The stubby nose makes spark plugs a harrowing experience, but everything else is easy. They were built to be used indefinitely.

I remember reading somewhere that it's the highest-selling IC of all time, which is a little surprising! I'd have guessed the winner would be an op-amp of some kind.

555s are such delightful little guys. I used a pair of them, plus an ebay telephone line driver, to make an old telephone ring: https://hardfault.life/p/telco-2

One timer runs at the ~20Hz ring frequency, and the other runs at ~0.2Hz on a 20% duty cycle. The slow one's output feeds the enable line of the fast one, so you get 1-second burts of ringing, then a few seconds of silence, then ringing... just like a normal phone.

I moved about 5 months ago and haven't had time to get back to this project. The goal is to build a little phone company in a box, so I can have all my old PCs talk to each other with their modems.

Just a guess:

building an amplifier from transistors is sometimes simpler/cheaper than using an op amp. And some designs don’t need the benefit of op amps.

On the other hand, building a timing circuit from discrete components is less obvious. And the 555 does so much of what often needs doing.

Also, the design was not patented so they were commodity chips right away.

By McHealy's logic, we ought not be concerned about that. After all, it's low-stakes content.

Thanks for an interesting read!

It was my default search engine for my formative years of computer use in the mid-2000s. Google was starting to get better at finding results with matching topics, rather than matching keywords. But it wasn't really there yet, and you'd get some really dumb results sometimes. I found ask.com to be much more predictable.