Quick PSA: they don’t currently block VPNs, so you can sign up for an account in a cheap country (I picked Nigeria) and use a foreign currency debit card (I use Revolut) to get Premium for like £1.50 a month for my entire family.

If they close that loophole then I think I’ll be done with it, the ads make it basically unusable these days.

Hard disagree with that, DDG searches are accurate about 90% of the time that I use it (which as a web dev is quite a lot) if they aren’t hitting Google with the same term rarely wields any better results.

I’ve seen a few video games and movies that I’ve gone on to look into from YouTube ads.

90% of them are total annoying bollocks though.

/r/webdev and /r/formulae are the main ones I miss.

This is how I do it.

I pay for Netflix, Prime (only really for the free shipping), Disney+, Apple TV+ and Spotify, if it’s not on any of these then I’m going to pirate it.

The whole exclusivity stuff is just rubbish, I get the reasoning but if you can’t make your content easily accessible then I just don’t want to pay for it.

YSK that YouTube Premium can be bought over a VPN for a whole lot less than the regular retail price, it’s a bit fiddly to set up but I’ve got a Nigerian based family account that costs me £1.76 a month.

Both of these.

American Gods really pissed me off though if they had stuck to the books it could have been an amazing series with great characters and weird but fun storylines in a unique setting. But they added too much stuff and there was a total mess with the show runners leaving so it all sort of fell apart before one of the best plot lines of the whole story.

I kinda want to rewatch it again someday though…

I have friends who are big time LOTR fans who absolutely hate it and didn’t get past the first couple of episodes.

Me - who has no context around the whole thing - found it kinda entertaining :/

If you want to move them elsewhere(or even just get a csv export of them) there are apps for that.

https://freeyourmusic.com will let you pay a one time fee to do it to as many services as you want, it’s a bit slow but it’ll get there eventually.

I think I got my .fun for about £2 from names.co.uk usually price for a .com is £30.

I’ve found most weird TLDs are cheaper than classic ones, but there are some exceptions (.app and .io comes to mind)

How about The Expanse or The Martian? They’re both relatively hard sci-fi that focuses mostly on our own solar system.

The Martian tells the tale of a man stuck on Mars and his ability to survive on his own whilst those back on Earth figure out a way to get him back. Both the book and the film are great so you can’t go wrong with either.

The Expanse covers more of the local system. Earth and Mars are on the brink of war, whilst others live out near the asteroid belt, Jupiter and beyond. It goes a little sci-fi later on but it’s an inherently human story that has some great characters living in a time when space travel is still dangerous but achievable by humanity. It starts a little slow but ramps up brilliantly and has a nice conclusion that wraps everything up pretty neatly. You’ve got 9+ books, a 6 season TV series on Amazon Prime, and a newly released TellTale video game, all of which are well produced and worth investing time in.

It is very different:

• Tabs are always vertical which is better for todays ultrawide monitors
• You have the ability to pin tabs to the sidebar which means that whenever you’re on a particular site (not page!) they’re stored in the same place
• Other tabs are ephemeral, they’re open for at most the 24 hours from when you use them, then they get cleaned away
• There are separate workspaces; like swappable sidebars that you can use to - for example - keep work and personal tabs separate
• The vast majority of commands (going to a tab, getting to settings plus loads more) are access via a Stoplight like global search control
• You can “boost” a particular site and change its style sheet to be different colours - this can be handy if you’re a developer and need to be extra careful when working in a production environment.

That’s just the stuff off the top of my head, there is probably more.

Sorry, missed the Android requirement.

It has just been released for windows though

If you want something a little different, try arc it doesn’t behave like pretty much any browser I’ve used but it’s certainly a unique take on it

Honestly Apple TV+ is a pretty good service; Silo, Severance, Physical, Shrinking, Mythic Quest, For All Mankind and Invasion are all worth a watch, and that’s just the stuff I’ve seen.

I would recommend at least taking a trial for a month, there is less stuff but it’s a lot higher quality than much of the junk on Netflix.

Foundation on Apple TV+, beautiful, complicated, epic sci-fi. I’m rewatching the first season whilst the second is getting released week by week.

I wish I could wipe my memory of Severance and watch it again for the first time again.

Such an incredible show.

As a Brit this seems like such a ridiculous attitude to have.

When you go out for food you are paying for:

• Quality ingredients
• The knowledge and skill of someone to take those ingredients and make a nice meal out of them

If you’re dining in you also get:

• A nice place to sit with good lighting and a nice ambiance
• Someone to bring your food
• Someone to clean away your dirty dishes

If you are getting delivery you instead pay for someone to bring it to you.

The food itself is like 40% of what you’re paying for, the rest is just convenience and atmosphere.

There really is no secret ulterior motive in this case.

Sort of. Smaller images mean it’s less work for Google to crawl and index them, if every image is 40% smaller then that’s potentially saving them millions a year in storage and bandwidth costs.

So, yea, it’s better for the web but it also massively benefits them.

It depends on which bit you’re talking about.

ChatGPT and SEO optimisation ruined the quality of results so sites who have no right to be near the top spot for particular terms get there by cramming as many pages full of tangentially related rubbish as they can.

The SERPs (search engine result pages, where you see the list of links) have been taken over by Google guessing at what you might be looking for, local results, shopping results, instant answers (which is usually aren’t relevant) and of course lots and lots of ads, leaving little to no room for the actual links you want.

If you are sick of it I would suggest trying DuckDuckGo, the results are a whole lot nicer :)