I bought a new 2024 vehicle last year with a manual transmission. This will be the last manual I ever own. I don’t expect them to be around by the next time I get a car.

I’ve enjoyed driving stick since I was a teenager. It still makes my commute more enjoyable. A good rev matched downshift still makes me smile. I’m going to miss the experience when it finally comes to an end, but hopefully I can keep it up another 20 years.

I bought a new car with a manual transmission this year. It has a cool feature called “hill start assist”. Basically for the first 3 seconds I won’t roll backwards. It’s been nice.

I appreciate your feedback. Moving more local is definitely a goal. I buy a lot of specialized books which I can’t find at small bookshops so I tend to gravitate to larger companies.

All that being said, I’m going to downvote your comment because I can find no credible sources that supports your claim that Amazon owns Barnes & Nobel. I’d be happy to change my mind if you provide sources, but I dislike misinformation.

I’ve been able to successfully degoogle, and recently came to terms that I need to deamazon too. It’s going to take quite a while. I’m a prime subscriber and use AWS.

I’m looking into Barnes and Nobel for future book purchases. I recently did a larger purchase online directly from the vendor instead of purchasing through Amazon. I plan to do more of that.

What’s been frustrating has been the small things. I needed a pill splitter, so I stopped at Walmart on the way home from work, dealt with some crowd and retraced my steps around the pharmacy a few times before I found it, then had to deal with self checkout. This would have been quicker and wasted less of my time to use Amazon. That’s going to be the hardest kind of benefit to give up.

AWS I’ll probably start migrating this summer. I’m planning to switch to Backblaze for cloud storage. I still need to look into an alternative registrar, and ideally very cheap static web hosting. I also need to find providers that have good ansible support since I use that for all my local and remote configuration.

It took years for me to get off Google. I worry it’s going to take even longer to give up Amazon, but yeah it’s time.

I avoid getting political news from social media, including Lemmy. I don’t subscribe to any political communities. Once in a while I’ll scroll through all active posts to find new communities. But when I do that I know I’m going to run into political stuff and skip over it.

While most of the political posts on both Reddit and Lemmy lean the same way politically as I do, they can often be sensationalized so I have a general distrust of those stories. If something does happen to grab my attention I try to look it up from a reputable news source.

I use Apple News to track current events. I even pay out money for their “News+”. It aggregates many news sources. I can block sources I don’t want to see, and more importantly I can add a list of favorites news sources for quick viewing and to encourage those sources to take priority in my feed. As for my sources I try to pick the most boring and bland news organizations available. Think PBS, NPR, Reuters, etc.

Nothings perfect but this has been working for me for over a year now. I feel reasonably well informed without a lot of the drama.

Apple News isn’t perfect. I still get pushed a lot of celebrity gossip news no matter how many times I click “suggest less”.