Admiral Patrick

I’m surprisingly level-headed for being a walking knot of anxiety.

Ask me anything.

Special skills include: Knowing all the “na na na nah nah nah na” parts of the Three’s Company theme.

I also develop Tesseract UI for Lemmy/Sublinks

Avatar by @SatyrSack@feddit.org

  • 15 Posts
  • 190 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • 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.


  • $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.



  • 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





  • I’ve had pretty good experience with Nextcloud’s instant upload. The only time I’ve had it shit the bed was ages ago when it would occasionally get stuck on a conflict, but that hasn’t happened in a long time. Pretty much all of my image folders (camera/DCIM, Screenshots, Downloads) get synced. The only annoying thing was when apps would suddenly change where they download to and I’d have to reconfigure yet another sync folder, but I can’t really fault NC for that.

    Mine is set to upload and keep a local copy and only do a one way sync (phone to NC). Not sure if that causes less issues than a 2 way sync or deleting the local copy after upload?



  • Pretty much same as you listed, actually, but with a few additions:

    Upvote:

    • Mark reply as read as long as it’s not something under the no-vote/downvote criteria
    • Pity (i.e. if I don’t think a post/comment deserves the downvotes it’s getting)
    • I’ll usually give posts to the communities I mod an upvote b/c I appreciate the contribution

    No-Vote:

    • Something I disagree with but doesn’t merit a downvote
    • A post I don’t like that is in a community I’m not subscribed to (i.e. when browsing /all)

    Downvote:

    • Violates the community rule where it’s posted
    • Is part of some bandwagon nonsense (e.g. the moths that have polluted the feed in the last several days, beans, etc)
    • Absolutist statements/positions, especially ones that paint the world in overly broad strokes.


  • Yeah, some are. It’s just unfortunate that you frequently have to pre-order, fund a kickstarter, or roll the dice with some unknown Chinese brand that may or may not ever see a software update/3rd party ROM support. That, or they’re more expensive because of the smaller production runs.

    I really like the PlanetCom ones, but they’re a bit pricey and have some quirks that would probably make them not a good fit for me as a daily driver. Not sure I’d want to pay those prices for a secondary device.

    I did order a Minimal Phone the other day (July batch), so hopefully should have that toward the end of July/early August.

    Until then, I’ll keep using my Cat S22 Flip which I have grown to actually love.