MacsWithPenguins

davidw said:

And if you jailbreak an iPhone you can side load apps.

If you pay for a $99 developer account, you can sign and side load apps. (not sure what the limit is.)

There is a free developer account using a free apple ID, that will let you side load apps into your iDevice. But the app will only stay signed for 7 days and limited to 3 apps at a time (with each account). Afterwards 7 days, you need to reload the app again. Plus it doesn't get your app into the App Store. 

https://www.igeeksblog.com/how-to-create-free-apple-developer-account/

Yep. I published Objective-C apps on the App Store back in the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 days. Have been using a free account for several years, developing in Swift and SwiftUI on iPad hardware. The 7 day restriction and 3 apps is a constant frustration, but I’m not going to resume as a paying developer until my apps are ready to be showcased.

mark fearing said:

Are their alternative Xbox stores? Can I side load games onto my Xbox?

Sideloading: Yes, you can, indeed! You boot into developer mode. All the games you bought through the Xbox interface for Windows Store are nowhere to be seen, that’s the catch, the sacrifice you make. Reboot into normal mode and the games return. I guess it’s a dual-boot setup, but unlike PCs I can’t just fire up a partition manager to look at things, unless I open up the Xbox, take out the HDD, etc, and void the warranty. I have an Xbox One S (Xbox One generation — not the 2020 Xbox Series S version). 

Thanks to this, you have videos like these showing you how to enjoy excellent retro emulation without modding.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGAjhjp8dnI

In regards to taxes, we use Simplified tax returns in Sweden, which means: if your employer sent in your tax report correctly to the Swedish Tax Agency, all you need to do in terms of ”filing your taxes” is to either send a simple SMS with some minor content, and wait for an automated reply, or you choose any of the following ways (described in detail on the tax agency website link I posted previously): login to the tax agency website in a web browser or use their app. Once logged in, you confirm that your records and your personal information is correct, click, click, and it’s done. It takes about 5 minutes. Meanwhile in the US, Quicken wants to sell you computer software to make things less cumbersome. That said, you will of course have a very different experience if you need to file things outside of job income tax, like complementary income tax related to stock profits and other investments. People who are self-employed will, as always, need to do a lot more work with tax filings.

Here’s Adam Ruins Everything explaining how US tax filing could have been allowed to be simpler in general (but it isn’t):
https://youtu.be/Fj4anUL-LvY

This must be the most complicated system I’ve seen for secure login. If you want to know how easy filing and checking tax return is in Sweden, you can take a look here:

https://www.skatteverket.se/servicelankar/otherlanguages/inenglish/individualsandemployees/declaringtaxesforindividuals/howtofileyourtaxreturn.4.7be5268414bea064694c620.html

We have been using a national service called BankID for 19 years now (the first offering of the service launched in 2003). It is actually a service from a private-sector company (sort of unusual for a Scandinavian solution). The company is an incorporated company co-owned by a long list of national banks (not all of the banks, but a lot of them). Why is the Swedish solution so easy and convenient to use? Because every citizen has got a Personal Identity Number (introduced in 1947). This number is unique to every citizen and Bank-ID utilizes this as the authenticating username. 

dope_ahmine said:

Who in Sweden speaks Swedish with Siri anyway — except perhaps people older than 70 or so. Can’t imagine they are Apple’s prime target for the HomePod mini. Has Apple even done any real-world market research here?

Either way, it’s kinda late to enter this market now when the real (OG) HomePod is gone. The difference in sound quality is tremendous. Imho, I think the minis sound like cheap crap. But on the other hand, I was looking for good quality speakers so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

”People older than 70 or so”. Well, that’s a very specific age. I’m not even 40 yet, I’m fluent in English and consider it my second mother tongue after 30 years of speaking it, and the 2nd language overall, of the 4 languages I can speak in any sense of the word ”speak” (Swedish, English, German and Japanese), where Japanese is just for fun and without knowing everyday Kanji. I could not even read a newspaper as things are right now.

Anyway, the point is, Siri has been available in Swedish for more than 6 and a half years. Of course we speak Swedish with Siri! If you were speaking English to Siri in the early days of the iPhone 4S, or tried Swedish with bad results on the iPhone 6S in 2015, you should know it’s vastly improved since. Siri itself globally, needs substantial improvement in terms of capabilities, but that’s another sub topic.

What I believe you were trying to say, is that Siri does not always understand your dialect or you have trouble with announcing English-pronounced movies and songs for Apple services when Siri is set to Swedish (I do struggle with that from time to time, but it does work if you are willing to retry a few times. Apple needs to work harder in this regard, but I think their investment in CoreML for machine learning will improve things eventually, if people are willing to opt in to sharing anonymous voice data), English in search engine searches, etc, but if you are having problems, you should know Apple made sure Siri works for as many dialects as possible. Even in skånska, which is great news. To the 99.9 % of forum readers here: skånska is the dialect in the southern region of Sweden called Scania. For historical reasons, it’s a blend of Swedish and Danish. At certain times in history, Scania belonged to Denmark. Fast-forward war conflicts, and since the late 1600s, Scania is no longer Danish. All this influenced the dialect (and their continued relations with Denmark, like people living close to the border having jobs in their nearby country) so much that, these days in the digital age, I know Apple trained Siri specifically for skånska, because I remember seeing job postings years ago where they hired Scanian-speaking people.

If you want to see MacWorld Sweden challenge Siri several years ago (without today’s multiple years of improvements and natural speech), here’s a link:

https://macworld.idg.se/2.1038/1.611803/vi-utmanar-apple-siri---klarar-hon-svenska-dialekter
Google-translated for English speakers:
https://macworld-idg-se.translate.goog/2.1038/1.611803/vi-utmanar-apple-siri---klarar-hon-svenska-dialekter?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=sv