Those sites will be dead to me :)

QR codes are like the popups of days gone by. With incredibly few exceptions, I refuse to scan them. They are so easy to redirect for nefarious purposes, and you can’t easily inspect the url to know, assuming thats something you even do. Also my phone case covers the camera and it’s a bitch to get open so I’m very choosy with what gets camera time.

I got pulled over in a drunk driving operation while leaving a rural bar. The original reason they gave when pulling me over was lane violation, which I assume means going over the lines?

I was sober, there to check out a local band, then left when it was over. I’m also a very good driver, no accidents, no tickets for moving violations, nor parking violations, in 20 years of driving.

Well, I had a dash cam, but it was hidden from rear view by fuzzy dice. When he got my info and saw that, he realized his pretense for pulling me over in the first place would be challenged (he couldn’t lie about why because they record audio), and entrapment is illegal here, so he didn’t even give me time to dig out my insurance card, and he had to let me off with warnings.

Which is amazing because I didn’t realize, because I hadn’t driven much in the past couple years, that my registration was over a year expired. Oops.

If he hadn’t been a lying shitbag, or I hadn’t had a dashcam that would clearly show I didn’t do what he pulled me over for, that traffic stop wouldn’t have been a waste of time for him and I’d be out some money.

ACAB.

Also, invest in a dash cam, everyone! They are cheap and can save your ass! Everyone should have one because ACAB!

They also completely fuck up your body and are entirely off the table for anyone with disabilities. And I guess anyone who doesn’t want to be disabled at 45. The rate of drug use in the trades due to pain is HUGE.

Trades, like college, are not for everyone, and should not be pushed to everyone as a solution or they won’t be lucrative anymore. Like lawyers in the 90s and IT today, by the time people, en masse, start saying everyone should do it, because it pays super well, enough people are in training, or planning to be, that the next wave to start is likely to be the last to make good money, and the wave after will bring everyone else down as well (arguably good at the moment because getting work done is ridiculously expensive, but not great long term for people in those jobs). I know several young people who are going into either trades or nursing. And that’s great, if that’s what they want to do.

But the thing is, people used to be able to support themselves without college and without trades. Every job used to pay a livable wage, thats literally what minimum wage in the US is supposed to be, the minimum required to live a decent life. Hell, if you go back far enough, like just to the 60s or so, people could work for the summer and spend the rest of the year traveling or going to college, and be totally fine. Now only a small portion of jobs pay anything resembling survivable wages, to say nothing of livable ones.

I had a site I was gunna buy stuff from ask me for a video selfie to “prove” I was over 21.

First if all, I wasn’t buying anything controlled, so thats ridiculous over-reach, and second of all LOL FUCK NO I’m not giving you, some random-ass e-commerce site, my fucking biometric data. That’s absolutely insane.

Needless to say, I blocked that site on my pihole, so it no longer exists to me as an option. Sent them a message letting them know they lost a rather substantial sale from that shit. I’ll do that for absolutely every one, same with ID or whatever else. I could just use the tricks kids use, but that still rewards them for this bullshit with money.

I’ll just stop using the internet if it becomes a thing everywhere. It’s not really worth being on anymore, for the most part, anyway.

You can, but I found that roku forced my apps (specifically plex, the only app I really ever used, which should have needed an update exactly never because my server doesn’t get updated either) to break in such a way that I needed to unblock everything and redownload exactly once every 3 months (I assume to collect your stored data), and that wasn’t worth it to me, so I factory reset it and left it that way, because idgaf. I have enough old computers to have one in every room, so roku gets nothing. They are just dumb tvs now.

Maybe that’s changed, but I’m not risking fucking it up to find out.

Mine haven’t been connected to the internet since about a year before they pushed out that update that forced you to agree to their revised surveillance terms or you could never use it again.

My googleOS TCL never got internet access in the first place. Who needs integrated apps when you have tons of mostly old computers kicking around?

Only one of my trips outside the US was “lavish” and it really wasn’t. It was an all-inclusive week trip in Jamaica, in the middle of hurricane season to save money. It was very affordable. Totally great trip, though!

Other than that I walked across the border into Mexico for lunch (this was before a passport was needed), and went on a week-long camping trip, 2 days of which was in Canada.

My passport is lapsed now though because I can’t leave for more than 2 days without arranging to have someone take care of things for me, which I can’t really afford to do, so why bother.

I get mine fitted Monday. I’ve already got the speaker, but my tinnitus is an entire… octave? above the sound from the recording, incredibly high-pitched static. Tho I use a babbling brook because the other ones are just… very annoying. I don’t really find the speaker helpful, but my audiologist said it was unlikely to do much on its own, so.

I’m really hoping the hearing aids work better. But at least I got obnoxiously colored ones!

Pipelines also cause a resonance hum that some people CAN hear for miles, and it drives them batshit.

Fun story - my house has a hidden room sort of. I’ve known about it since I bought the place like 15 years ago. I plan to convert it into a root cellar/storm shelter/bug out room since its in a very secure part of the basement.

I didn’t know there was a half-size wooden door hidden behind the partly-finished basement drywall (previously a rec room/office), i just knew about the shitty door cut into the side of the stairs. Never had a reason to go inside there with a light prior to that, and its entirely hidden from the existing door. Only found it while preparing the space for my chickens to ride out a brutal cold snap this past winter.

Its jambed on both sides to prevent swing and never had hardware, but I can drill and hang it pretty easily. Then i really will make it a hidden room someone will find randomly someday

Try the Pentatonix cover. Its much better with no baggage.

Oooooooh let it be something class action I can get money for. I have three rokus and a TCL.

Granted, none of them are on my network; the rokus were removed from it when that update came out that would brick the tv if you don’t accept them spying (fortunately roku was blocked on my pihole except occasionally when they wanted to be updated to repair the apps that stopped working every month forcing online connection to syphon data) and the TCL was never allowed on the network in the first place because i learned my lesson…

But I still want money back from them for their anti-consumer choices, because fuck them.

Solar water heaters definitely have the capacity to boil water, if they are made right (use a high temp transfer fluid, vacuum-insulated tubes, proper solar condensers, etc). It’d be difficult to get them to do it on a small scale without a heat pump of some sort in the mix, but even inefficient solar water heater setups need to be installed with a regular water heater after them mostly to down-regulate the temp as they get far far far too hot for practical use directly.

The greenhouse barrels are just for passive radiant heating, but if you use enough of them in the proper places, and insulate well, you can use them to make a passively-heated greenhouse that doesn’t freeze at all, even up in the frigid northern climates (Canada, midwest US, Siberia, etc.)

My point is that if they have less energy density, they aren’t a particularity great choice for EVs, as the increased battery size to get the same capacity makes the whole thing much heavier, requiring even more battery to move it.

I guess for like short range vehicles, it might be fine, but at least around here, thats gunna be a pretty tough sell, because everything is spread out.

It can’t really make EVs safer if its not being used for them due to the drawbacks, is all.

I thought sodium batteries had considerably less energy density than conventional? Is that not a problem anymore? If that hasn’t been solved, I don’t see how this helps make EVs safer.

Consider: graphics cards pricing.

Shit’s not coming back down to reasonable prices any time soon. At least not without major intervention on the part of governments.

Considering the delay some stuff has, I extend it to roughly a week.

As someone who just updated from 17 to whatever it’s on now due to that security vulnerability (and who used android prior to this piece of shit), they are definitely still getting worse.

Autocorrect got substantially worse between versions, to the point that I can’t get a single message without a misspelled word that it doesn’t even try to fix, a misspelling that it corrects to something completely different, or it corrects the right word to something else (I’ve turned it off entirely, it’s now actively worse than nothing…). The ui is unusable for me without accessibility options to remove transparency to get rid the bright glassy nonsense they did and change it to ugly gray boxes (headaches exacerbated by bright stuff in my face, ugly was my only option and that fucking sucks because it worked -and looked- fine before…). They also haven’t bothered to fix the glitch in night mode where touching the text entry field makes it glow bright gray (speculated they used the light mode effect by accident), a problem which has apparently been around since 18 first dropped in ‘24. Some phones, like mine, have a glass backplate they don’t go out of their way tell you is glass, which shatters if you nick the glass tubes around the camera that sticks out a foot… why so much fucking glass? Is it to kill resale value? I bet it is!

Plus all the stuff you said. Also I don’t believe them that they support user privacy. Why would they when they can pretend to and still get the money?

My friend has always been on iOS and updates it whenever updates are out, and didn’t notice the creep of how bad it was, but slamming from 17 up to current was almost as much of a shock as moving to iOS in the first place, as far as reduced usability goes.

As soon as moto drops a graphene compatible device I’m getting one and never looking back.

Didn’t use fertile or follow or falter. Fine folly.

They are doing exactly that for a sometimes hefty markup. I got something like that with a gift receipt, so ultra lazy, looked up the item and it was $11 cheaper. Like that totally defeats the purpose of going elsewhere.

I reported the seller then returned it.