I hate this suggestion but it is the only one I’ve been able to stomach as something that operates like Nova: Microsoft Launcher

Its actually quite decent and mostly seems to be a forgotten piece of software so it hasn’t been enshitified.

Agreed, I did something similar where I did 3 courses in 7 weeks and that was by far the worst and most stressful time of my entire degree. Anything more probably would have caused a nervous breakdown.

I once made a CEO a bit unhappy by describing the stock market as socially acceptable gambling, every day I’m proven more and more right.

In North America and Europe, tap to pay was implemented prior to smartphones that could scan QR codes being ubiquitous. Most of us have had cards that support NFC payments for longer than we have had a phone that can read QR codes so it made sense for phones to pick up the technology that worked with the terminals businesses already had than try to implement a new system.

The QR code thing is primarily a Chinese solution to the payment problem (all other Asian countries I’ve been to have widespread NFC acceptance). Payment cards were never widespread within China the way they are in other places, until AliPay and WeChat Pay became a thing people still primarily used cash for their daily communications. If businesses don’t already have credit card terminals but people have smartphones then the QR code starts to make more sense.

One interesting thing about this is that even before North America was widely using NFC payments, people in Hong Kong were using their Octopus transit cards as contactless payment at all kinds of businesses throughout the city. Yet that technology didn’t seems to make it into Mainland China.

I unfortunately have to use Chrome at work and uBlock origin light seems to work well enough. When I’m at home the pihole does most of the heavy lifting for the adblocking.

This article title is a bit confusing. WD cards are only going away because their parent company SanDisk decided to amalgamate their offering into one brand (which makes sense to me, I never understood the WD SD cards when SanDisk is the trusted brand). Totally different circumstances.

Maybe if I used my selfie camera more often than never.