Since my last comments on this topic, time has marched on, and there are new entries to the fray (Amazon and Apple). I recently bought some Sony WF-1000MX4 earbuds, and decided to do free trials of Tidal (I dropped it before) and the newer Amazon Music service to check out Sony's 360 Reality Audio setup.

Spoiler alert! Qobuz is still the best streaming service, especially for classical music.

I have one Windows computer and two Windows VMs running on my Mac Pro using Parallels. One of the VMs is in the Developer's Channel, as is the stand-alone machine. Both of these updated promptly to Windows 11, even though the checking tool on the VM machine said it could not run Windows 11

I do not like the "improvements" in the desktop or the Start Menu. 

I have been using Mac Pros for over a decade as my main desktop. But I also have a Windows 10 computer and a Linux computer (OpenSuSE LEAP 15.2), so am agnostic in my comparisons. I also have Windows and Linux virtual machines running on my Mac inside Parallels.

Windows Update can be very frustrating, especially when it fails after 10 hours!

There is a wonderful free tool to fix this problem, and also to perform many other free Windows maintenance tasks. It is called Reset Windows Update Tool.

News from T-Mobile:

T‑Mobile Nearly Doubles its Supercharged Mid‑Band 5G in Just One Month | T‑Mobile Newsroom (t-mobile.com)

I am 78, and my opthamologist said she did not know how I could see through my cataracts. Indeed, the world looked somewhat dim and yellow, but with my Zeiss varifocal eyeglasses, I could see 20-20 at all distances. But I decided that the time had come to get my yellow, cloudy lenses replaced.

Drupal claims that updating sites from D8 to D9 is easy. That is true if you have no additional modules installed. But in the real world, it is really difficult. I have done 4 sites now, and all were somewhat different, alas. The issue is updating the modules, or removing those that cannot be updated to D9. Here is my procedure.

Make sure your D8 site is fully updated

Update everything to the latest Drupal8 (currently 8.9.6) version.

For many years now, I have been ripping my CDs to my computer and playing them using my Logitech Squeezebox Server (on my Linux computer) and listening to them via my Logitech Transporter players. However, time marches on, and now high-resolution audio is available on the internet via services such as Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify, etc. I highly recommend Qobuz, which offers audio streams up to 24-bit/192 kHz resolution. 

My neighbor, Dr Elaine Bunick is an Endocrinologist and Internal Medicine specialist, and she has been checking out all the facts about Covid 19. She gave me permission to post her recent talks.

Now that many of us are working from home, we are being bombarded with ads and offers to be safe, and use a VPN. This is a scare tactic. VPNs are totally redundant for MOST purposes.

What is a VPN?

A  Virtual private network (VPN) is a secure tunnel that encrypts traffic between its endpoints. If traffic is already encrypted between your computer and a destination, a VPN is totally redundant.