I use a laptop, so I iust put it to sleep. I only restart it when I do updates or when the system crashes. I also turn it off (when I remember to do so…) if I leave it unattended in untrustworthy environment due to encryption.

I also have a mini PC, but I only turn it on when needed, which isn’t often since I haven’t really figured out what to use it for. It’s running Linux Mint headless, because Mint fits my laziness. I can use it via Tailscale, but I don’t really know what to do with it. So far it’s been mostly useful with OpenWebRX, SDR++ server which also offers compression unlike RTL_TCP as well as being able to use any SDR++ supported SDR, and I also intended to use Navidrome on it as well. My intention was to just download full albums on there, rather than picking out individual songs, but I still have the urge to put all of it on my phone.

Well, probably my mistake calling it a plan, but it seems all of them are subscriptions at least. Even “pay as you go” cards I found have monthly payments.
It seems the cheapest was T-Mobile PayGo, but that got sold to Ultra Mobile. I don’t know what they offer though because there’s an infinite captcha on their website for me. But from Google preview it seems they still offer the $3/month PayGo.

Well, I did. And I am in one. Most teachers don’t care about it. Technically the current principal banned them, but only one teacher told us, and it was a pretty sarcastic “I am supposed to tell you that you aren’t allowed to use phones during classes anymore.”

Anyway, they got partially integrated. There’s an online school system we are supposed to use, and teachers often send us study materials there, including during classes. At one point we even took online exams (physically at school) and most used phones for that too (I prefer a desktop if I can use that).
Basically it became an expectation. “Look this up, take a picture of this, open what I sent you, send me this, confirm that,…”

But yeah, anyway, most exams are probably AI-written nowadays. This is known, and not particularly discouraged. Well, one teacher even told us we’ll be given computers with internet access on (part of the) graduation exams, and shown us how we can just copy-paste it to and from ChatGPT. And that was true.
But hey, we also often have classes of absolutely nothing that you just have to wait out.
The level of Slovakian education is setting the bar so low it clipped through the ground.

Already included.

1. SMS and classic calls are dying. Things moved to Discord, Instagram, Snapchat, or whatever else for the most part
2. Burner SIM, or better yet, burner eSIM. Maybe VoIP would suffice.

And the original SIM could still be used in some cheap older phone.

Although it seems everything in the US is a plan, meaning monthly payments. But perhaps I haven’t looked far enough.

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pay bills

I don’t trust the phone browser anymore after I had it crash during a payment. The money was sent, but the token wasn’t sent back to the website.
Thankfully we now have instant bank transfers, so the state of the browser doesn’t matter.

Anyway, I still prefer to take out the laptop for serious stuff like payments.

1. Out with all that generational bullshit
2. Has been done probably for as old as the humankind is
3. Possible demotivation (low pay, bad working environment,…)