I’m still not convinced in this age of AI image generation.

They did use the same voice actress as the video game on the Windows version, I can confirm. Or at least it was a very good imitation.

I was really hyped for Cortana on Windows and then that faded pretty quick. But I remember hearing her voice and thinking how cool that was.

Scammers are crafty assholes.

Your health insurance information may have been leaked. There’s been a ton of data leaks as of recent and it’s not unlikely that a list of health insurance providers and their customers are on the dark web somewhere and this is where they got that information about you.

Worse about these data leaks is that a lot of the ones being announced happened months ago, so it’s likely we still have some leaks that haven’t yet made it to the news to let people know their information is out there.

Getting your health data from the pharmacy may have just been the next step in their plan of getting to you to trick you into giving up money, or somehow using your information to do something illegal.

Some home Internet plans do. I’ve seen AT&T had in their terms that if you hit 99GB, they would throttle your speeds.

This was years ago, so not sure if that changed or not.

Satellite plans often had limits too because they didn’t want to encourage lots of usage on their satellites. I haven’t checked in a few years, but last I checked, these weren’t throttle limits either, sometimes they had hard limits where you just couldn’t connect anymore once you hit the limit.

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Mine does that. It has a big button on the back that just turns on the brightest setting and then turns it off. The button on the handle will let you cycle through 3 brightness settings and then the strobe effect.

It’s just some off brand, probably from Amazon, that my uncle bought for my dad and I took when my dad passed away.

Yeah but it’s a different experience, if that’s what OP is looking for in terms of how it delivers the search results.

But if this is solely about the quality of results, then yeah, my recommendation for Bing is irrelevant.

Have you tried Bing? I’ve been using Bing for over a decade now as my default search engine and while people give it crap, I’ve only had to go to Google a handful of times over this span of time and even then, I can’t remember a time that Google had what I was looking for either.

Bing is customizable so you can get rid of some of the fluff that comes with searches that you don’t want that bloats your results. Like you can get rid of the colorful background, the trending news sections, the Copilot LLM results, etc.

One plus that Bing Image search has had over Google for many years now is the ability to let you see the full screen image without doing any funky stuff. Like when you just want to load the jpg/png in the browser without the Google/Bing banner surrounding it…Bing Image search lets you do that with the click of a button. Google removed this feature years ago which was so shitty.

It’s not perfect, not like old Google perfect, but that combined with an adblocker like uBlock Origin and my PiHole works for me to remove from sponsored results (not all, unfortunately).

It has its own set of trackers too. I’m no fan of Microsoft and know this, but we’re at the bottom of the barrel with decent search engines anymore.

I like Bing for the other perks like trending news, Bing Rewards (no joke, I have cashed in for over $400 worth of free stuff from a PC VR headset to fast food gift cards just from doing daily searches), and I use Copilot from time to time as a quick ChatGPT alternative (using ChatGPT, but doesn’t require an account to use so good for a quick Incognito session if needed) and also nice with the history under your account. I prefer to use Copilot in Bing than the Windows app since I don’t want that crap installed to my computer and would rather keep it to the browser.

You may also check into extensions for whatever browser you end up going with. There are a few extensions that can help customize your search results like easily removing a website from the results, for example.

If you can, turn off unknown callers from being able to reach you.

I’ve done this and it’s been wonderful. The spams have actually decreased significantly since I don’t answer the phone for them at all anymore.

It’s under Settings > Phone (have to go into Apps in iOS 18) > Silence Unknown Callers

Anyone who is not in your contacts gets a ring but the ring doesn’t go to you so you don’t hear it and don’t answer. They can leave a voicemail but scammers never leave me voicemails.

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I don’t think so. Either that or it’s going to be pricey and not likely to work with a cell phone natively like how it is now with your wireless carrier.

One of my pervious jobs used RingCentral which is what I had in mind with my comment. They do have an iPhone and Android app that can send and receive texts and calls, but it’s all strictly through their app. I suppose you could do a forward to your number, but you’re going to need to have an existing number for that which kind of defeats this purpose.

You can manage call queues and the like on the backend in the browser to create something like this where it would send callers through a maze of menus to eventually be able to get to you.

Additionally, you could program a key press to you that wouldn’t be made known to callers such as pressing 7 to immediately be “transferred” to you (something you’d only tell trusted callers calling you) but that’s not stated in the call queue prompt.

I also imagine any business VoIP has a set minimum of numbers/users to sign up with them since they’re really for business, not personal use. But hey! Give it a shot and see or try one of their competitors.

Kind of an interesting thing to think about since you mentioned it.

The VoIP services they subscribe to usually help with this to some degree in identifying common patterns to cut down on some of the spam.

Beyond that, businesses implementing call queues & bot menus is what helps cut down on the rest of it.

It’s becoming more rare to actually get in contact with a human from many businesses nowadays. Businesses seem to want users to use a bot that will help the customer do whatever it is they’re doing as much as possible.

And the only way to get to said human is through a series of menus and questions, usually confirming they actually are a customer.

Long gone are the days of calling and getting a human to give your information to.

When you call something like Bank of America, they prove you are a customer because you give them your account number or they recognize that based on your caller ID and also have to still provide SSN or date of birth, so even if someone spoofs an actual customer’s number, they’re stuck in the menu and never reach a human.

One of the differences is that Osama bin Laden was not the leader of any recognized state in the world whereas Putin is.

Putting a literal bullseye on another country’s leader would be seen as an act of war.

Also, the US is not currently in (direct) war with Russia while the US was with Osama’s group.

I’ve tried adblocker apps and VPNs with adblockers too but YouTube ads find a way through and this happens even when on my home WiFi for my iPhone where my PiHole is.

I’ve tried various lists in my PiHole and none seem to block ads. I only get to block ads on my computers with the uBlock Origin extension.

I’ve read a lot of people say that PiHole cannot block ads from YouTube because of the way YouTube serves up ads which is on the same server as the video the user wants to play. While adblocker extensions in the browser work similarly to how YouTube Premium does, somehow.

The most I got with PiHole was completely breaking all YouTube videos.

If I could get my PiHole to block YouTube ads, I could create a VPN and have that blocker available on the go on my iPhone too. But it doesn’t seem possible at this time from what I’ve found.

I’d love to find a way to make this to work though. It’s why I set up my PiHole to begin with but kept it up for the other features that have been useful.

It sounds like this is happening because your computer still has Chrome as the default browser. Assuming this is Windows: right-click one of the icons on the desktop, click Properties, then click Change and select Firefox.

This will now set Firefox as the default browser for your computer and these icons should now automatically open in Firefox as well as any new ones you create.

Creating an icon on the desktop is very similar in the process you would have done for Chrome too.

The problem here is that you can’t create icons that are exclusive to Chrome or Firefox, as far as I know, since Windows chooses, by default, one app that will open these by default.

Technically you could bypass this by right-clicking the desktop icon and then select “Open in” and then choose the other browser in case you need to open one in Chrome and the other in Firefox.

What ways are you aware of for adblocking on the iPhone and Apple TV? I have a PiHole for my network, but ads are still getting through to both of these through the official YouTube app. I’d love to get a way to bypass them if it exists for the iPhone/Apple TV!

I’ll have to go see the trailers now after having seen it, but I have to say that the three of us really enjoyed the movie.

That’s a shame that happens. I wonder how often that’s happened for me too, that a trailer turned me off to a movie I likely would have liked.

No, I’m saying that a business has something to gain in not showing customers the actual price because it can be a detriment to their profits if the customer has the full information at their disposal before making a purchase.

I’m not at all in favor of this, because this hurts me as a customer. I’m just saying this may be part of a reason for businesses to not show the actual price to the customer.

I think part of it (not a big part, but part) is that taxes differ so greatly in the US because of so many governments’ hands in the pots that it would discourage business in one town and have everyone flocking to a nearby town with less taxes.

As it is, you pay what you pay and don’t really realize the difference unless you take time to notice. I’ve only become aware of it because I realized how different my usual order at McDonald’s will differ when I’m in different cities.

In one city, my Big Mac meal will be $10.62 but in the next, it’ll be $9.35 because the taxes differ depending on where you are buying this with local city, county, and state.

If McDonald’s in Everytown, Maine showed their actual Big Mac meal price of $10.62 but the next city over in Somewhere, New Hampshire showed their Big Mac meal price at $9.35, more people would drive a little further to Somewhere for the obviously cheaper price with Everytown McDonald’s locations would suffer.

Poeple should show the science of being fat and point out the bad effects of it has on body, but they should not show the science on a living human to mock him, the purpose should be education for the the uneducated not mocking with the shield of science.

Not that I’m condoning making fun of people who are overweight (I am overweight, after all but currently working on it) but this is done in some cases and it’s still seen as a form of mockery to many people today. It’s getting to the point of doctors not feeling comfortable being able to tell someone that what’s happening in their body is harmful to their health and they need to reconsider their current lifestyle.

Which I think the body positive movement has been good in terms of getting away from the jokes and mockery but at the same time has been a detriment to many people in making them think that there’s nothing wrong and they can and should continue on the path they’re going down. Even going as extreme as to say that doctors, health professionals, and family and friends who genuinely care and are not being disrespectful are actually mocking them just for pointing out an unhealthy lifestyle. Not everyone in the body positive movement is this way, but I see what I want to believe is a very vocal minority of people who are trying to shift things in that direction in this movement.

When you think about it, honestly, we’re probably in a better place than we were a few decades ago in terms of the mockery and jokes at someone’s weight. The movies and TV shows of the 80’s and 2000’s were often filled with these jokes and it was common place in general in society. Seemed like every TV show had a dedicated “fat person” who had fat jokes about their weight and overeating, or at least was centered around this like The King of Queens (which I love, by the way, but the fat jokes at Doug can get repetitive after a while). Speaking anecdotally, I remember kids getting made fun of for being fat growing up in those decades, but even though I’m not young in this current generation, judging based off of popular social media, it seems like they don’t condone that anymore among themselves like previous generations had. Our entertainment doesn’t seem to have these as jokes any longer. I’m sure they exist in some specific shows and movies, and the ones that immediately come to mind seem to be ones that were from those times (Simpsons, Family Guy) but just not as prevalent as they once were which seems an indication of a change in society as well.

All in all to say, I agree that mocking people for their weight is horrible and often actually does the inverse of making those same people turn towards more overeating in depression over their constant treatment, but things seem to be getting better, while at the same time, we may be crossing from one unhealthy extreme into another on the polar opposite and should be careful about that. Careful not to go from the extreme of making fun of people who are overweight to the extreme of accepting it so much so that we don’t take time to allow people to provide actual constructive criticism to someone who is going down a dangerous path.