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If they're anything like typewriter ribbons of the era (and why wouldn't they be?), a really long time if you re-ink them periodically. I don't think any of my dad's fabric ribbons ever actually broke, and he typed a lot.

EDIT: Not "professional secretary" levels, but a lot. Enough that he bought a Selectric II for use at home.


It’s a real problem, just not an unsolvable one. But it will take a lot of awareness campaigns and time.

It's also got half the power output.

> What that means is everything I "enhance" with "smarts" should still work the old way that people are accustomed to.

Also the easiest way to achieve high WAF. I added an internet-connected (but self-hosted) garage door controller. My wife instantly got defensive about things when I said I was going to do this until I said that nothing at all that works now would change. It would add a new feature, not subtract anything. The old remotes work. The wall buttons work. It's just that you can do it from your phone, too. Been very handy, actually.


> Also the easiest way to achieve high WAF.

> It would add a new feature, not subtract anything. The old remotes work. The wall buttons work. It's just that you can do it from your phone, too.

Exactly! If I'm doing my "job" correctly then I should be able to add "smarts" without anyone noticing at all. It's purely additive. It lowers my stress levels immensely as well since there is a never a "P1" emergency of "The lights won't turn on" or "I can't open the garage door" (unless something lower-level is broken, like the power is out or the garage opener burned out).

I want guests to be able to come to my house and not even notice it's "smart". They should be able to stay in the guest room and not think twice about it. Yes, there will be laminated sheet in the side table telling them what the lights/fan are called if they want to talk to the Echos to control it and there will be a labeled remote (Z-Wave) on the bedside table so they can toggle the fan/lights from the bed but none of that is required. They can control it all from the switches on the wall if they want.


I suspect this law does not apply in cases of fraud. If not, simple tag-switching would be rampant.

There is, as you suspect, a carveout:

https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartI/TitleXV/Cha...

(i) ...if there is a discrepancy between the advertised price, the sticker price, the scanner price or the display price and the checkout price on any grocery item, a food store or a food department shall charge a consumer the lowest price. If the checkout price or scanner price is not the lowest price or does not reflect any qualifying discount, the seller: (i) shall not charge the consumer for 1 unit of the grocery item, if the lowest price is $10 or less; (ii) shall charge the consumer the lowest price less $10 for 1 unit of the grocery item, if the lowest price is more than $10; and (iii) shall charge the consumer the lowest price for any additional units of the grocery item. For the purposes of this subsection and unless the deputy director determines otherwise, individual items that differ only by color, flavor or scent shall be counted as the same item if they are identical in all other aspects, including price, brand, and may only vary in random weight. This subsection shall not apply if: (1) there is evidence of willful tampering; or (2) the discrepancy is a gross error, in that the lowest price is less than half of the checkout price and the seller, in the previous 30 days, did not intend to sell the grocery item at the lowest price.


I dunno, having worked in retail I think it is just not that hard to steal in general (I wasn’t going to get killed over some bananas). Most people are honest most of the time.

The law probably doesn’t apply to fraud, but then the cashier only notices the really obvious cases.


They are talking about the price on the shelf vs the price at the register. The price tag on the shelf has information identifying the product. The price at the register is obviously associated to the bar code on the product. So there's no way for a consumer to swap price tags from one product to another.

Source - worked at a grocery store in Massachusetts as a teen


I was being colloquial by referencing the pre-scanner way of doing it, but since this article is all about changing the shelf tag, it seemed relevant.

But in the moment how do you know it's fraud and not an employee mistake? Especially if the price is not egregiously low.

The thing I was responding to was about pricing policy in general, but I would assume so

Just read this thread. Or sideload via USB.

It's not that large of an impediment if you're modestly technically savvy.


If you bought them from Amazon, you won't be able to get them after the cutoff date directly to that Kindle via WiFi. You may not be able to get them in a format that old Kindles can read at all.

Download and back them up now. Or just pirate them if you need them later.

The entire Kindle store system will cease working on older Kindles after the cutoff. Still works as a reader, but expect to lose things like location sync across devices.

I don't buy from Amazon, I don't turn on WiFi on my Kindle because it eats battery life, I always travel with a laptop, and I only use it to read outdoors. So I really don't care. It's my beach book. At home, I'd rather read on my iPad.

Oh, and FWIW, you can install Tailscale to a jailbroken Kindle and Taildrop files to it over WiFi, if it can read the format (for the old ones being discussed, that's mobi or azw3).


The only way in which this makes sense in international is something like courier flights. I don't know if this even really exists in the form it used to, but there used to be small-scale services that would buy regular airline tickets (in advance but transferable) and then resell the seat but not the luggage allowance for major city pairs like NY-London. A person who can fly on short notice with no baggage allowance gets a cheap ticket, and the customers get their essential items delivered more cheaply than last-second air freight.

A key element is that the passenger was contracting out their baggage allowance and so didn't ever interact with the items - they never even saw it. So no liability.


Surely that's dead now airlines are charging to have hold luggage at all.

I would agree, but I suppose there might be somewhere out there that still does this, which is why I said I wasn't sure it existed anymore instead of just saying "30 years ago you could..."

No Kindle Unlimited, though, and library apps will probably drop support for the older stuff in time.

Jailbreak on very old Kindles is reasonably straightforward and the fact that Amazon hasn't even put out point releases to stop it (as the do with newer models) is a strong hint that they've just given up on maintaining them. I still have a K3 (Kindle Keyboard) that not only is jailbroken: it runs Tailscale.

Unprotected books, no problem. Anna's Archive + Calibre will keep working just fine.


As much as I am a fan of annas-archive, Zlibrary Koreader Plugin[1] makes a bargain I can't refuse.

[1] https://github.com/ZlibraryKO/zlibrary.koplugin


Cool. Both my K3 and PW4 are jailbroken and have KOReader...

Possibly, but doesn’t have to be. I grew up in a home that was built as a duplex, one apartment per floor. So the stairs were 17 unpadded wooden steps that were straight down - no landing or turn.

I slipped and fell down them when I was 4. I clearly recall this. But that made me remember that I had done the same thing a year or even two before (which was worse, because at age 4 I was large enough to stop myself before I hit the bottom - not so much at 2-3).

I wouldn’t remember the first incident without the second, but because of it, I do.

The stairs got carpeting shortly after that.


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