Didn't know there was red carbonite.

Reminds me of the garage door graphics I see pictures of occasionally - showing a bulldozer, or a tank, or a Ferrari inside. Great fun.

Continuous fuel supplies (electricity, gas, oil) have lots of advantages over batch supplies like coal. In high school and college I worked as a horse wrangler at a camp in Colorado where we had cold running water and electricity for lights, but heat for water came from coal powered pot belly stoves in the bathroom of each cabin. (The main lodge, where everybody ate, had a propane tank for the big stove and oven, and water heater for dish washing.) We didn't take showers in the morning.

One of my mother's great grandfathers married his (23 year old) wife near what is today Charlotte, North Carolina, in May, 1818, and two months later they "moved" (i.e. walked and drove a 2-horse wagon with their worldly goods) to the southern part of the newly admitted State of Illinois. It's ~500 miles as the crow flies and probably twice that on the ground, through mostly wild country in between. (There is a family narrative history that says at one point on their trek they crossed a pass where they could see clouds below them, something they had never seen in NC.) They managed to get to the forest-covered wilds of IL with enough time to build a shelter for the winter and (maybe) have time to clear some land to plant some crops.

But they did get there. And they survived. Those were some tough cookies. Don't know if they traveled alone or with a small group of others from the mostly German community in NC, but I'm pretty sure there were no organized guides or cleared trails like those that came later across the Great Plains to Oregon and California.

Rolleiflex and Leica maybe? Or whatever it was Ansel Adams hauled around in his car - he got some good ones from time to time. ;-)

I wouldn't mind getting a Norwood Director meter at that price. The Sekonic successor today is almost a full $200 more. (Lovely ambient light meters, BTW - if I still used one I'd have kept mine, but I only have a flash meter now for the few occasions where I think balancing multiple flashes is important.)

I've read that the linguistic flaws we see in these scams are intentional, designed to weed out people who are smart enough to see them. Leaving the unsmart and/or oblivious, who are more likely to take the bait willingly.

My first camera - and lens. Got it when I was 12 and went to summer camp in Colorado. Kept it until I was in my 70s and sold off all my film equipment, although it didn't get much use after I got a Nikon F when I was on active duty. I did like rangefinders enough, though, that I had and used other Leica equipment (M3, M5, M6 and CL) along with my reflex film cameras until I went all digital.

WITHIN THIS VALE
OF TOIL AND SIN
YOUR HEAD GROWS BALD
BUT NOT YOUR CHIN

Do both of your phones fail to connect to ANY bluetooth device, or just to the Galaxy smart watch? If just the watch, it might be worth trying something from Amazon that intrigues you since you can send it back for free if it doesn't connect well.

Admittedly, bluetooth can be occasionally flaky, at least in my experience. (Except between two Apple devices, where I have always had complete reliability.)

I've worn a self winding watch of one sort or another for more than a half century. it's always on, viewable from a lot of different angles, accurate enough for daily purposes, and keeps running as long as I keep wearing it. But I recently decided I would like to have heart rate and steps info available and got an Amazfit Band 7 tracker to wear on the other wrist. It doesn't do phone calls, but does have a sleep monitor as well as a lot of workout functions, of which I only use the Walking one for my semi-weekly workouts. It has 10 alarms you can set - I have 2 set permanently, Sunday wakeup and a daily reminder for evening pills, and the others I set as needed for single use.

It was not expensive, and I refer to the thing regularly throughout the day. A charge usually takes less than an hour, and lasts at least a week, usually closer to 2.

Everything seems to be going USB-C, supposedly due to an EU order that all connectors on devices sold in the EU be USB-C after a certain date. So if that were your only quibble I'd just suggest you get a USB-C charger and move on. Even a cheap one should have enough output to charge a watch quickly.

Where do you get it? I used it in tubes years ago, and have looked for it recently but haven’t been able to find any. I got the impression from somewhere that they’ve been out of business for a while.

Anti-Boeing headlines get clicks these days, so that's the way the "news" is presented. Even if the fault is not very likely to rest on Boeing.

And the airlines had facilities for working on them. I know some of those planes are still flying, but I wonder if most maintenance shops can work on all of the engines.

I guess my real uncertainty comes from the fact that the engines seem to be on top of the wings and can be accessed only from the rear. (I don’t think wing surfaces are usually made for maintenance crews to stand on and work for extended periods, although maybe these wings are.)