That decent percent is in fact roughly 60%, in my industry. At least according to what my vendor reps tell me.

Only 4 in 10 people even bother to attempt to do their rebates. The manufacturers love that, because it allows them to put a giant "$2000 OFF!!! ^{viamailinrebate}" on their marketing literature and that gets eyeballs on the ad and feet in the door, but they know damn well they won’t actually have to pay out on the majority of those promos and in fact they don’t even budget with the expectation that they will.

Amazon stuff sometimes arrives. For instance, it’s going on 7 months by now I think and they still haven’t found my camera.

This is the sad reality of every company everywhere trying to turn their delivery operation into a “gig” position. Amazon does it, too. Their delivery contractors-who-are-totally-not-employees steal valuable items from deliveries all the time.

Anyway, you are certain to win your chargeback. Banks side with their cardholders more often than not, and Best Buy is going to have to provide proof positive that you received your item. “We handed it off to Doordash and then washed our hands of it” is not going to cut the mustard, there.

(We have to deal with chargebacks in my business, too. Defending ourselves is a pain in the ass because we have to provide indisputable documentation that the client’s order was fulfilled. The issuing bank always starts from the default position of their cardholder being a saint and all retail businesses automatically being scammers. A small subset of people will fraudulently dispute a charge for a big ticket purchase just because they feel this is a way to weasel out of paying for it, and usually they’ve been emboldened by the fact that they’ve tried it before and gotten away with it.)

Heyoo!

I personally do not trust ISP provided routers to be secure and up to date, nor free of purposefully built in back doors for either tech support or surveillance purposes (or both). You can expect patches and updates on those somewhere on the timescale between late and never.

Therefore I always put those straight into bridge mode and serve my network with my own router, which I can trust and control. Bad actors (or David from the ISP help desk) may be able to have their way with my ISP router, but all that will let them do is talk to my own router, which will then summarily invite them to fuck off.

Likewise, I would not be keen on using an ISP provided router’s inbuilt VPN capability, which is probably limited to plain old PTPP – it has been on all of the examples I’ve touched so far – and thus should not be treated as secure.

You can configure an OpenWRT based router to act as an L2TP/IPSec gateway to provide VPN access on your network without the need for any additional hardware. It’s kind of a faff at the moment and requires manually installing packages and editing config files, but it can be done.

We’ll just have to observe him carefully and see if he’s able to complete a left turn without assistance. That’ll tell us for sure.

Oh, I’m sure they do. And charge eight times more than what they’re worth.

The oil filter. Not the air filter.

They typically intend (and indeed, try to) use their machine to suck all the oil out of the dipstick tube and replace it via the same. That’s generally doable within the 5 minute allocation but it’s also only half of the job since that inevitably involves not replacing the oil filter.

The fact that these places always exclude the filter from their price and treat it as a “gotcha” add-on is deeply hilarious.

You have to replace the filter when you change the oil. That’s just how it works. It’s not special and it’s not extra. It’s literally the intended procedure.

If you’ve never actually used the Canon app on your phone: I assure you that it would be faster to ride the elevator down from your hotel room, walk to the nearest store, haggle with the store owner for 10 minutes over the price of the cable, get your money changed, buy it, and return to your hotel room than it would be to wait for the app to connect to your camera over wi-fi.

Ballista > Catapult.

(Orbital ion cannon > Ballista.)

You can configure the app to transfer your images and videos in full original quality but the transfer of large files takes forever, even in the best of conditions. I did the math and the app transfers data at something like 480 kbps over Wi-Fi which is beyond awful in this century. I don’t know if this is a limitation of the camera hardware itself (I’d doubt it) or the app. But needless to say, transferring large batches of images is an excruciating experience that I’ve certainly resolved never to do again. It’s just barely functional if you want to get a picture off to share or chimp at on your phone’s larger screen, but in my opinion can serve no other purpose since it’s so damn slow.

Close, but it could arguably be something compensating for the same!

It might have been CDHK, which is also what I run on my old SX130IS.

You want version 3.2.40.36, which is the last one before the app requirement. It’s available on APKMirror and probably elsewhere as well.

You can still use the camera as an MTP device via a USB cable without any app. Just not wirelessly; that connection is proprietary (-ish, there are third party apps on some platforms).

That was me. FYI, the prior version of the app works without an internet connection. I just tried it and had no problem.

It’s only the current version that needs internet and for that only so it can force you to sign in.

You will assuredly want to disable automatic updates on the app, however, to keep it from updating again behind your back. And it’s still a buggy piece of shit in either incarnation.

Yes indeed, I just wrote a rant about this in the Canon community on here.

The two edges of this sword: All of the functionality worked in the previous edition of the app without the “mandatory” account. The upshot of this is, if you grab an APK of the previous (3.2.40.36) version of the app it still works just fine sans account, because the requirement is completely artificial and your camera’s hardware has not changed.

That’s what I did for now, but given that I only ever used the damn thing as an overwrought remote shutter button when doing macrophotography (you’ll never guess the subject), I just bought $6 aftermarket remote release and moved on with life.

For added fun and excitement, if you don’t have internet connectivity the app won’t work. So, like, if you’re out in the wilds on a hike with your camera. Nobody ever does that, right?

All apps are crap. This one is extra crap, now. I’ve never used it for geotagging and certainly not for transferring images – not more than once, anyway, because on my phone it takes a solid 15 seconds per image. It would be faster for me to not only take the card out, but crack it open and inspect it with a tunneling electron microscope and type the ones and zeroes into a terminal by hand. I just put the damn card in a reader instead. Always have done.

But first they’ll buy Discord and force everyone to abandon their exiting usernames to use a Microsoft account with it instead.

When it’s all the same you can ask for it by name.