Because ban evasion is an everyday occurrence here. Someone gets banned for being a jackass, and 9 times out of 10, they come right back with a brand new account and come in hot with inflammatory posts and a chip on their shoulder.

Or trolls just troll - spin up new accounts over and over and throw out rage bait or whatever their shtick is just to be a dick.

Combined with the fact that the fediverse’s growth has been a bit stagnant lately, when a bunch of new accounts suddenly pop up, they’re rightly met with suspicion until they’ve established themselves as being here with good intentions.

Not saying new accounts should be ostracized, but given the context of the current state of the fediverse, being suspicious of them is warranted.

Probably power banks. I pretty much only buy Anker these days because I’ve had too many cheap/no-name ones just fail, turn into spicy pillows, flat-out lie about the capacity, and/or, in one case, actually catch on fire.

One of my Anker power banks was recalled, and they notified me as well as had the replacement to me within 2 days. And the replacement model was actually nicer than the one I had.

I guess anything, really, that is part of my everyday carry and has a potential to burst into flames is grounds for paying the “premium” price where there’s good quality control and product support.

Sad that “shove it in a drawer until PostmarketOS supports it” wasn’t listed because that’s basically my method. Anything else just gets Linux installed on it and runs some random service.

I heavily embrace the “reuse” step of “reduce, reuse, recycle”

$150 is about normal these days. The pumps will usually have a little sticker somewhere that list the authorization hold amounts.

Fun fact: The auth holds used to be $1 way back in the day. But when prepaid debit cards came around, people could have a balance of $1 on them, get $50 worth of gas, and the station wouldn’t be able to charge the actual amount (it would decline for NSF with no way to recover it as with a regular debit/credit card). That’s why the hold amounts are between $75 and $150.

If you want to avoid the authorization hold, you can either pay cash or pre-pay with a cashier; the latter case will charge only what you pay.

Does digital payments made cash wallets obsolete?

Nope.

Phones crash, apps screw up, Google arbitrarily decides your phone isn’t “secure”, batteries go dead, cell networks are sometimes unavailable (wallet app requires internet), merchant payment networks occasionally go down, etc.

I don’t use digital wallets since the only options are Apple and their walled garden or Google who uses every transaction to profile you for targeted ads and deems your phone insecure should you do anything that might keep their eyes out of your life. But even using my “old school” debit card, I still feel much more secure always having some cash on hand for emergencies.

It’s strange how we’ve moved from mall shopping to online shopping to now AI shopping for us

Well, “we” only did the first move because it was more convenient. The latter is being forced on us.

That’s basically my take. I used Twitter way back in the day before it went to shit, and there were some legit good accounts that could make witty, well thought out takes in 120 characters (which was the point of the platform). The others I followed were either news orgs or security researchers where they just linked to their main platforms proper.

But the way most people use it, ugh!

Any silicon vendors (NVidia, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Realtek, etc) should have open source drivers / firmware. I can’t imagine what, if any, benefits there are to keeping that secret, and it seems logical that sales could/would increase if people were easily able to adapt them for their use cases.

And also the huge reduction in ewaste by being able to keep smartphones up to date or repurpose them without having to spend years painstakingly reverse-engineering binary blobs that only work with ancient kernels.

One particular spite house in Boston: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinny_House_(Boston)#History

According to local legend, the structure was built as a “spite house” shortly after the Civil War:

… two brothers inherited land from their deceased father. While one brother was away serving in the military, the other built a large home, leaving the soldier only a shred of property that he felt certain was too tiny to build on. When the soldier returned, he found his inheritance depleted and built the narrow house to spite his brother by blocking the sunlight and ruining his view.

Another source states:

Not much is known about the city’s narrowest house. Legend has it that … its unnamed builder erected it to shut off air and light from the home of a hostile neighbor (also nameless) with whom he had a dispute. … Believed to have been built after 1874

Sadly never came up.

I generally dislike editorialized headlines (when used as post titles) but this is the exception. Nicely played.

That’s actually closer to real poor than I thought, but I know people who live comfortably on way less. Guess he’s just gonna have to give up the avocado toast until he pulls himself up by his bootstraps.

I’m largely guessing here, but I’d venture he’s just “rich person broke” which is still wealthier than most people will ever be. Again, just a guess.

This piece of shit will appeal all the way to our corrupt SCOTUS and get this nullified. I hate this timeline.

Probably, but that is yet to happen. Until then, join me in just reveling in the headline for a while.

Not sure about Android, but on iOS, when one scans a QR code it shows the web address on the screen that the user then taps on. For the average user, I doubt that they are going to question what the URL is before following through to the website.

Android does the same. The problem is most of those QR codes are encoded short links which tells you nothing about where they’re taking you.

https://short.link/au1034gha could take you to a PDF on the restaurant’s Wordpress site or it could take you to malware or somewhere else you really don’t want to go.

In that case, I blame the people generating the codes for using URL shorteners. My org uses them in flyers for the public, and I always have to chastise them and re-create the QR codes because they run the URL to our website through bit [dot] ly. 😡

I used to work with a guy who was a dead ringer for Bill Bailey both in appearance and personality.

Yeah, same.

I think the worst issue I’ve had was when I was using a chainsaw to cut up a fallen tree. Phone was in my pocket and a chunk of wood somehow made its way into its USB port and was such an absolute perfect fit that I almost never got it out of there lol.

Weird. Other than how it used to choke when there were conflicts (and all uploads stopped until that was fixed) I haven’t had any issues like that. Guess I’m just lucky.

I’ve been using some USB-C cords for 5 or 6 years now and the connectors are still going strong. They’re way more reliable than micro-USB which seemed to wear out after a few months.

Your go-to universal cord can charge your phone, earbuds, vape, notebook, video-converter, beatmachine, microphone, gamepad etc.

This has been life changing in all the best ways. The bonus is that power banks have kept up and most good ones support power delivery, which has been amazing for keeping my laptop powered when I’m working in the field.

I think my biggest gripe is the wildly varying feature sets of both cables and ports. I can understand e-marked cables for different wattages, but all cables should support video and all USB-C ports should at least indicate if it supports video output. I’ve spent way too long troubleshooting docks and portable monitors simply because I accidentally grabbed the wrong cable.