European here. I’d say it depends on what you want to see/do and how much you’re willing to spend, resp. to what degree your willingness to spend is influenced by how much you like the place.

SO and me like to flee the dark and cold days a couple weeks a year and mostly fly to Egypt, Mexico or the Dominican Republic.
Last fall we went to Jamaica, which was super super lovely all around, but very expensive compared to every other caribbean place we’ve been to. Pretty much anything they want, they have to import from the US, so as a rule of thumb add a hefty markup to Florida prices.
Besides that, it’s easy to fall in love with the place and people.

Mexico:

Quintana Roo is hot and lovely pretty much all year round, except sometimes during hurricane season. Cheap-ish flights should be available from most larger US airports, and once there you can spend anything ranging from USD 25-500 per day and person for food and accommodation.

Things to avoid:

• The official airport taxis. They’re a mafia like you wouldn’t believe. Book a transport in advance for a fraction of the price and exit the airport through the small exit hidden behind the huge taxi/exit signs. The signs lead you through a one-way gate to the official taxis where you can expect to spend upwards of 80 bucks for a 5min ride. The same money will get you a private driver for several hours.
• Cancún, especially the zona hotelera. It’s the ‘party’ mile (using that term loosely) and full of drunken partygoers pretty much around the clock.
• Holbox - it is as beautiful an island as the ads say, but dramatically overpopulated with tourists, rather smelly (mainly due to the sewage collecting in the streets) and extremely overpriced. Also slowly drowning in trash and mosquitoes.
• Las Coloradas - never as pretty as on the pictures and a huge rip-off. Last thing a local told us is that they now employ guys on motorbikes to interfere with tourists trying to take a picture without paying an entry fee.

Things to do:

• Look for a nice apartment in Cozumel (do stop by Señor Frog’s next to the Playa del Carmen ferry port) or Isla Mujeres (try Villas Najo’). If you don’t feel like feeding The Man, find a nice place on booking.com and book there directly - most landlords will give you a better price and still make more money themselves that way.
• In Cozumel, eat at Casa Denis and then visit that tequila bar on the way from there to the main road that has swings instead of bar chairs. Ask for samples.
• If you feel like scuba diving in Cozumel, go to Jungle Divers and ask for Stéphane. He generally hates having to babysit customers on his dives, but if you manage to get on his good side you’ll have great dives and learn a lot. Only take courses there though if you don’t mind a very impatient teacher.
• In Isla Mujeres, eat at Sonny’s. Don’t order more than half a pizza per person.
• Playa del Carmen is nice for a daytrip or shopping. If you want to stay there, find a place a bit on the outskirts or bring earplugs.
• Chichén Itzá is half a day away and very impressive to see firsthand.

General tips:

• Whenever possible, ask you driver / guide / … if they offer private tours. Sometimes they can’t or are loyal to their company, other times you’ll get a private driver / guide / … for a much lower price.
• You can save a lot of money by buying stuff at the supermarket and cooking yourself.

Two thoughts in case unexplicable stuff happens again:

• SMART doesn’t detect all possible errors, especially not on SSDs. (It was originally designed as an early-warning system for mechanical failures on spinning rust drives, and later somewhat expanded.)
• A faulty RAM chip can cause all sorts of subtle (and not-so-subtle) mayhem but is often overlooked as a possible cause for disk troubles. If in doubt, MemTest86 is your friend!

Well that’s good news, isn’t it? Keeping my fingers crossed for you!

I have skills; they’re just no longer valued.

They may be valued somewhere; and even if that place is too hard to find at the moment, you seem smart enough to adapt and enhance your skillset as needed easily enough.

If the flight is the main issue, I might be able to help with that (and the first couple of days of accommodation), provided you’re moderately flexible concerning the date. Everything else you’d have to arrange yourself, but if a flight ticket (or the lack thereof) is all that’s missing, do get in touch!

There’s been some talk about Brother imitating HP lately. Last thing I heard is that they’ve been attributing it to a ‘faulty’ firmware upgrade and offering a ‘fix’. Personally I’m not yet sure what to think of it - it’s one thing I’ll be keeping an eye on though. My current HP printer will still happily work with third-party toner but is slowly approaching the end of its lifespan.

Generally speaking, for the average user who doesn’t need special hardware to produce ultra-quality borderless photo posters on a regular basis:

• If you only print a few pages each month, the cleaning cycle of an inkjet will waste an insane amount of ink to the point where a laser printer is cheaper.
• If you print a lot, the cost per page will be lower on a laser printer, so you should buy a laser printer.

You repeatedly mentioned that you’re a Swiss citizen. If all else fails, you could always come here and have guaranteed shelter, food and medical care for as long as you need them. I know people less deserving than you living quite agreeably that way - it sure would beat crashing in a van.

Also, if that’s a concern, one part of unemployment support is that you’ll attend paid courses to help you gain more marketable skills.

I think you just did 😅

(The post you were replying to is a quote from Goethe’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”. It roughly translated to “The spirits that I summoned, I now can’t get rid of them again”)

Moderately talented DIYer here - with what you describe, I can’t help but wonder if it wouldn’t be easier and cheaper to build this thing Lego-style from relatively cheap pre-made floor cupboards plus a series of custom-cut big boards as a countertop, and then stack some shelves on top.
In Ikea-land this could be e.g. Metod or Knoxhult ‘Unterschrank’ and Kallax or Billy shelves - I’m sure most furniture shops have something similar with a different name. Then all you’d have to do is arrange them nicely, connect them with some screws and attach them to the brick wall at some neuralgic points.

All cynicism aside, so would I, probably. What good is immense wealth if you don’t use it as a means to gain happiness?
As much as it pains me to say this as a decades-long passionate M$ hater, Bill Gates is doing something right there.

But you’re right about one thing of course …

These are not normal people. It’s never enough for them.

If it’s Adobe it can be made DRM-free relatively easy. It’s the first thing I do with every purchase (and legal where I live). Try Calibre (free/libre) or Epubor (paid but more versatile and works better for me).

Amazon has just introduced a policy change that probably makes it much harder (or impossible) to de-DRM stuff bought there, so I’m going to do without the books exclusive to them for the time being.

I don’t know about other places. Here we were swamped with volunteers offering to help the sick and elderly. It probably wouldn’t last for long, but honestly, at this point I’d be just happy to wait for all the antivaxxers in the world to infect themselves and then either get well or die. How long would that take, a couple of months? After that we’d be down to normal infection levels again.

I don’t know. I were filthy rich, I for one probably wouldn’t mind a small (and quite likely temporary) hit on my net worth if it means I get to buy promising upstarts and some of my competitors for small change because they’re now grossly underfunded/undervalued thanks to the crash.

But then again, I’m a cynic, and probably just projecting here.

Yes, but every sensible person would likely be vaccinated*. Antivaxxers often get away with being unvaccinated just because of sheer dumb luck (they don’t get infected). A mass (self-)infection event could quickly rectify that situation.

• Everybody with immuno deficiency would probably have to stay indoors for a couple of months, but all things considered I’d say that’d be a small price to pay if it means millions of antivaxxers and Trump supporters get to see the error of their ways or outright kill themselves.

I for one am totally in support of all of his backers infecting themselves.

That’s why I’m driving a 1994 Geo Metro.

FWIW, Android offers a one-handed mode to shrink the available screen estate so you can reach the top of the screen with your thumb. It needs to be enabled in settings once and can then be toggled by double-tapping the home button or a swiping gesture at the bottom of the screen.
In my experience (6.1" Samsung Galaxy S2x user with slightly above-average hands) this is a good compromise between occasionally wanting to do things one-handed on the shrunken screen, and still being able to hit the right keys on the on-screen keyboard most of the time on the regular-size screen.

Bing DuckDuckGo says the iPhone has a similar feature, though I haven’t touched one in years so can’t say anything about it.

Almost everyone is happy

Hey, two out of three ain’t bad 😁

If The Onion or another satirical fake news outlet had run this story, the tankies and Putin-lovers would have launched a shit storm of epic proportions. This just adds to the feeling that satire has long been overtaken by reality.

Feeling rather burnt out lately. A lot of stress-inducing things beyond my control have happened this winter, and I’ve found myself forced to violate the self-imposed ‘no more than three prescription sleeping pills a week’ rule on several occasions, which is probably not a good sign.

At least things are looking up now! Most problems have been solved or at least defused, and starting today I get a whole week away from work and family.
The weather helps too! It’s getting warmer and I love that the sound of birds singing in the morning has returned.

The downside is that the dogs feel spring too, which means they do a lot of stupid stuff and consider my increasingly angry yelling to be non-binding recommendations at best, which means lots of walks on a short leash, which in turn means even more pent-up energy for the next walk. Just when we started being grateful for having made it through our youngest daughter’s puberty…

Anyways. Things are mostly looking up, so yay! I’m going to use this week to refuel and work on some absolutely useless but entertaining projects such as an analysis of our collected hotel key cards with respect to their contents and cloneability. So far I’ve found exactly one keycard that used some kind of encryption. Most keycards are just Mifare Classic cards that rely on the UID alone, and one just had an unprotected data block with the plaintext room number. That’s basically one small step above the door locks accepting a handwritten note saying “master key”. This is going to be interesting.

I’m sorry about your experience - I’m afraid for you Yanks it’s usually in dubio contra reum. If you ever visit us again, it usually helps to casually mention that you’re unhappy with the current government or didn’t vote for Trump. Us Europeans aren’t necessarily mean, just jaded, and it helps if you give us something to let us know that you in particular aren’t one of the idiots.