Stories like this wonderfully explain why Windows is as quirky as it is, and I love them for that.

I doubt that, I have a ABL-100 and its step counter cannot be turned off. It even beeps at you when you sit on your butt for too long.

However, the manual recommends to be sparing with the backlight.

Yup, the ingenuity to pull this off fascinates me every day, too.

The button press sequences are still combo-style; when I set one of the alarms on my ABL-100WE, it always ends in trial and error. I mean, basically it's logical, but when the buttons change what they do (e.g. when the display says "SET", the light button becomes "up"), it throws me off.

Despite not quite being an artist, this resonated with me. This fits well in line with my favourite example of corpo-speak: "challenge" instead of "problem". Lately, I find myself replacing these two in my mind occasionally when reading them and the texts still don't change their meaning.

It's a bit depressing watching language get shallow …

But sketchbooks don't run 9front :(

Overall I feel like this is more of an advantage than a problem.

lol

> Wacomized laptops with pens. > Crack the screen open and draw on it.

I don't think "crack the screen open" is the best choice of words here …

I fed the technical data of my motorcycle into the model and it told me right away that this build would destroy a real engine because the piston speed would be too great.

The real thing has been running for 56,000 miles, so it can't be that bad. *g

For me, it's the European Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR). It is intended to reduce/recycle waste from shipping packages.

The eyebrow-raising part is that each country has a registry at which every company that intends to ship goods (independent of size) must sign up. Plus, it has to look for a recycling company. Each year, the company has to give an estimate on what amount of packages it is going to use and pay the recycling cost for it beforehand. Both companies are then required to report that amount to the registry. At the end of the year, they report again, this time the actual amount of packaging used (you get the part of the fee back if you overpaid).

If you ship to other EU countries, you are required to register in similar registries in every single one of them. Plus, they have their own requirements to your packages and Austria, for example, wants you to appoint a representative who does the paperwork for you and takes liability (the EU is working on making the representative mandatory in general).

Needless to say that all this stuff does not come for free. The fees for postage, the registry, the adaptions to foreign regulations and all costs associated with it easily get over a thousand Euros. No problem for the big merchants, but I think you all can guess how well this pays off if you only have a handful of shipments from, say, Germany to Austria.

And that's why shops only ship to selected countries despite the EU having free movement of goods.

PS: Merchants from outside EU (e. g. Temu) don't have to do any of this.

I for my part didn't like the sparse selection of colors. Blue, silver, green, but nothing reddish. But later there came the Zune theme and it was awesome (silver-black with orange X buttons).