CleoTheWizard

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) compared new charges against former President Trump that accuse him of working with Mar-a-Lago employees to delete surveillance footage at the club to the tactics of the fictionalized Corleone organized crime family.

“It appears that way,” Christie said in an interview Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” when asked whether he sees a clear-cut case for obstruction of justice.

It’s pretty brazen. These guys were acting like the Corleones with no experience. I mean, the day after a grand jury subpoena is served, which includes the surveillance tapes, they go down to Mar-a-Lago, and Walt Nauta appears to be the Fredo of this family. They sent him to go down there. And they sent him to go and delete it. This is bad stuff,” Christie continued.

A superseding indictment against former President Trump included three additional charges related to the former president’s alleged efforts to work with employees to delete security camera footage in the case examining his willful retention of classified documents, bringing the total number of charges to 40.

Christie, a former Trump ally-turned-critic and now 2024 GOP contender, pushed back on the claim from fellow Republican challenger Vivek Ramaswamy that there was no underlying potential crime committed – and that this was simply an alleged “process crime.”

“You can’t say there was no underlying potential crime here. This was the withholding of confidential classified information from the government after 18 months of asking Donald Trump to return it voluntarily. Not only did he not return it, he lied about having it. This is not the kind of thing we could do,” Christie said.

Christie, a former federal prosecutor, noted the potential harmful effects “on our troops and our intelligence officers by having this stuff just laying around, and him willy-nilly showing it to whoever he feels like, to be a show off on the back deck at Mar-a-Lago.”

“This is not what a former president should be doing. And it’s certainly not something that someone who wants to be president should be doing,” Christie said.

Gene X Hwang knew his days on Twitter as @x were numbered.

"Elon had been kind of tweeting about X previously," Hwang said. "So I kind of knew, you know, I had an inkling that this was going to happen. I didn't really know when."

Since 2007, Hwang's username on the site was @x — but after Elon Musk renamed the social media platform to X earlier this week, it was only a matter of time before the company commandeered the handle.

The news came shortly after Hwang had competed in a pinball tournament in Canada. "So when I landed and fired up my phone, I just got all these messages and I was like: 'What is what is going on?' "

Hwang received an email from the company explaining that his account data would be preserved, and he'd get a new handle. It offered Hwang merchandise, a tour of its offices and a meeting with company management as compensation.

Hwang's account is one of the latest casualties in the chaos following Musk's takeover of the social media company. On Monday, Twitter's iconic blue bird logo was replaced with the letter "X."

The rebrand is the company's next step in creating what Musk has called "the everything app." Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino envision the platform becoming a U.S. parallel to WeChat — a hub for communication, banking and commerce that's become a part of everyday life in China.

But experts are skeptical X will be able to become an "everything app." "I'm not sure he has enough trust from his user base to get people to actually exchange money or attach any type of financial institution to his app," Jennifer Grygiel, a professor at Syracuse University, told NPR.

Hwang is among those who have been looking for Twitter alternatives. "I've been checking out, you know, other options like Threads and Mastodon and Bluesky," he said. "I'm still on Twitter for now, but ... it's changed a lot. So we'll see how much longer I'm on there." Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit NPR.

I’m here to give an update to my journey from an Android to an iPhone after much debate in a previous post (from a different account). TLDR at the bottom.

If you’d like to see the old post: Click Here

For those wondering on details, I switched from a Galaxy Note 10+ to an iPhone 12 Pro Max. I won’t explain my reasons for model choice but it was a balance of price, size, and features in that order.

I’ll discuss my main pros and cons in sections here, going from what is most important to me to least important.

USER INTERFACE The user interface and experience on android isn’t awful, but I don’t think there’s much contest here. I said in my other post that apple has an advantage here and I was absolutely right. iOS has smooth animations for everything, is quicker for searching and finding apps, and just plain looks better to me. And while the android toolbar provides many more buttons for quick actions, I never used many of them. Most of the usable settings are here on iPhone in that easy drop down menu. Even long presses on icons to quickly change settings is here. And the mute button on the side is and has always been a no brained for me, should be standard on every phone.

I come from Samsung and their OneUI so I recognize this could be better on other phones, but I was plagued with some stutter in animations and slow app indexing through their search bar. The UI always felt a little clunky and that’s clear with how much was changed in OneUI versions. Things were often easier to access, sure, but the common actions I was taking reduce to simpler menus. Not only that but scaling is very wrong on android phones for some reason. I had my text somewhat smaller because if I blew it up, it looked very strange to me.

iMESSAGE AND FACETIME This was another big reason to switch because a lot of my friends have iPhones and use iMessage frequently. I can tell you that this is a problem specific to the US but so far I do enjoy the maturity of having a put together messaging app. Only recently has Google created something even close where before each android phone had their own app and it was a massive headache. As I stated, having RCS on android and iOS communicate would be big in bringing me back to android but until that happens, the social cost is not worth it to me. I know other apps fill that void in other countries but I couldn’t get my friends to migrate. Aside from that though, it’s one of the best messaging apps I’ve used and FaceTime seems more stable than most video apps.

APPLE ECOSYSTEM

Now look, I know how it works and they stock you in a walled garden. But consider that other companies do the exact same and *sometimes * the benefits can be worth it. For instance, my partner has an Apple HomePod speaker. It’s incredibly easy to stream music to it and as a plus, the Siri assistant has gotten much better. I can’t pick this apart by each strand, but the smoothness of the connections to my devices has definitely improved. I used to fail just to cast YouTube to my Tv on android for random reasons. It would take a couple tries. Now, first try every time. Same with the speaker. No fiddling with Bluetooth with this one. And the menu to change what device is playing sound is miles better than on my android phone.

VOICE ASSISTANT

This one is unexpected, but I’ve enjoyed the voice assistant a lot more. This is something that should be current across android phones so I feel comfortable speaking on it. If you’ve used SIRI previously, it used to suck. Like a lot. Google was miles ahead by every metric. Now though? I can ask Siri to play music and it knows what app Im asking for and doesn’t take up to 15 seconds to phone home and do the task. It’s faster. Much faster.

The only area in which Siri suffers is when asking for web based questions. Other than that, it works better for the much more common tasks I do.

RANDOM OBSERVATIONS

I mentioned Siri but the real benefit is with CarPlay. Where to start? CarPlay is quite a bit ahead here as well. It starts up on my head unit in about 1/5th the time before the warnings even disappear. And the interface is simple and knows where to put things. Putting the time near the driver and putting the app bar on the left near where I sit just seems like the way to go. So yeah, CarPlay is smooth and even has easy ways to make it wireless with unofficial dongles. Can’t say the same for android auto.

Charging times are worse on the iPhone but it’s not that bad and the phone does last me longer. My battery in my old phone was a bit older though, so I’ll call it even.

Grudges

I hate the lightning connector, it’s a PITA compared to UsbC but I don’t interact with it often, only for charging. And MagSafe would solve most problems and can be used with cases unlike my android phones wireless charging.

The Home Screen is a sticking point as well but mostly just for app arrangement. Otherwise, the widgets are perfectly fine. Better than fine actually because the Home Screen implements the widgets well even if space is limited. I’ve noticed that the apps that I use frequently also have more and better widgets on iOS than on android. I noticed it specifically with TickTick but overall the systems are fairly similar but with less customization of widget size and placement on iOS.

Last comment is that I understand this isn’t for everyone, we all have our own use cases. This isn’t a phone war, just here as reference for those wanting to switch or considering it. If you haven’t used iOS for a sustained period in recent years, understand that your perspective may be out of date because mine certainly was.

Thanks for reading!

TL;DR iOS has its ups and downs but from my perspective, most of what I said in my original post stands as good reasons to buy an Apple device. My main sticking points are repairability, walled garden apps, and initial price. Other than that, I’ve converted to iOS and I don’t miss many features of Android and I suspect that for all but the tech tinkerers, an iPhone is the way to go in the US.

A grand jury in the Southern District of Florida has charged former President Donald Trump with a new count of willful retention of National Defense Information in the case related to his handling of classified documents. The new charge stems from a top-secret presentation Trump waved at aides at his Bedminster, N.J., resort.

A new defendant was also added to the indictment against Trump and his aide Walt Nauta. Carlos de Oliveira, 56, of Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., was added to the obstruction conspiracy charged in the original indictment.

The superseding indictment charges Trump, De Oliveira and Nauta with two new obstruction counts based on allegations that they instructed an unnamed, fourth worker to delete surveillance video footage at Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence last summer "to prevent the footage from being provided to a federal grand jury."

The indictment charged De Oliveira with false statements and representations made in a interview with the FBI on Jan. 13, 2023. He is expected to appear at a federal courthouse in Miami on July 31. His lawyer John Irving declined comment.

Trump faces more than three dozen counts, including more than 30 violations of the Espionage Act, over allegations of withholding documents related to national security. He's also charged, along with Nauta, with making false statements and conspiring to obstruct justice. The trial is set for May 20, 2024. That schedule puts the trial at the tail end of the Republican presidential primary process. Trump is currently the front-runner for the GOP nomination and already may have become the nominee by that time.

"This is nothing more than a continued desperate and flailing attempt by the Biden Crime Family and their Department of Justice to harass President Trump and those around him," the Trump campaign said in a written statement following the new charges.

The White House has consistently denied any involvement or coordination in the special counsel probes of Trump. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith last winter to emphasize the independence of the probe.

I’ve been wanting to jump in on the final fantasy universe for a while now but I’m not sure where to start.

To be clear, I don’t have hundreds of hours to play the whole series. Someone told me that each game tends to be somewhat separate from the series as a whole.

So what is the most recent game in the series that I can start with that is worth it to play and wouldn’t confuse a newcomer?