Volume

Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly with the Giant Amplifier in the opening scene from Back to the Future
I use YouTube for tunes. The ads are annoying and someday I am going to do something about it, but right now I am managing to cope. There is a volume control on YouTube and another one on my Chromebook's control panel. I set both of these sliders to about the halfway point and that seems to work pretty well, especially since YouTube has so far reliably remembered my last volume setting.
    Go over to Facebook and the default volume settings on all the videos posted there is all-the-way-up. If I watch more than one video there (and who watches only one?), and I don't want to have to adjust the volume on every stinking video (and who does?), I have to reduce the volume on the Chromebook control panel (I drop it about one-quarter).
    Why don't I leave the Chromebook setting at one quarter and turn up the YouTube volume control? Because then I have no boost left for videos with low volume, unless I open the control panel again. I suspect this is just one more skirmish in the ongoing Facebook versus Google megawar. Screw Facebook, Google is my friend. No, they didn't pay me to say that, but it never hurts to butter up people who are doing you favors.

Toshiba Chromebook 13.3-inch

    The oddest thing about this is that I am playing all this sound through the Toshiba laptop's speakers, and it doesn't sound half bad. Better than any of the computer speakers I have lying around anyway. I picked this laptop because somebody said the sound was better. At the time I wasn't expecting much, but 'better' is better than 'worse', so I said sure, gimme the one with the 'better' sound. The speakers are on the underside of the machine covered by grills about one inch in diameter. I don't know what kind of voodoo they used to design these speakers, but the resulting sound is pretty good.
    I bought the Chromebook in 2014 for $200. Amazon has one left for $275. Why would the price on something like this go up? Has the dollar depreciated that much? Or did Toshiba not realize how good the sound was on their laptop? Weird.

P.S. I think my Chromebook needs more memory. One of these days I am going to remedy that situation. Meanwhile I haven't had to open the case. Just in case you were thinking of buying one.

Inspired by Dustbury.