Will have to look into that, thanks.

One of my key implementation requirements, however, will be resiliency, which means simplicity will be a core feature. The more “moving parts”, the easier it will be to break.

flip phone

Almost all such phones are actually smart phones in a flip phone Edgar Suit. Especially if it has maps or YouTube or any kind of an App Store. I see a crapton of flip phones that run Android, which has all sorts of Google spyware piggybacking along.

I think there may be only two or three dumb flip phones or feature flip phones left on the market, and IIRC two are locked to specific networks.

If you want a bona-fide dumb phone, you might be limited to something like the rotary un-smartphone.

or toaster can’t do its basic job offline

pats my 1962 Sunbeam Radiant Toaster

Obligatory Red Dwarf toaster scene

Go for older laser printers. They’re bulletproof, cheap on toner, free of DRM, and even if they only come with an LPT port you can always build your own print server that gives you all the bells and whistles like AirPrint.

About 3-4 years ago I took a bit of a dive into the firmware of IoT devices. The utter lack of security and the amount of information being hoovered up to the mothership made me swear to never build anything “smart” into the renovations of my current home. Sure, there will be automation. There will be CCTV. There will be solar with battery backup for essentials. There will be conveniences of all kinds. But virtually all will be air gapped, incapable of remote rooting, and under my full control.

Hell, even my laser printers are HP models over two decades old - an HP 4050DTN and an HP 5000DTN - that are totally devoid of any DRM or “smart features” and can trivially take generic overstuffed cartridges that can do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage.

plants grown from seed don’t bear the same fruit

Temperate-zone seed fruit like apples and pears rarely look, taste, and feel like their genetic parents.

Temperate-zone stone fruit, on the other hand - think peaches, apricots, cherries, etc. - are quite different. You plant one of those seeds, and it will bear fruit that is (usually) indistinguishable from the parent tree that the seed came from.

Now, Apple and pear trees are grafted for both cloning of the fruiting section as well as good rootstock. But most stone fruit grafting has cloning only as a secondary consideration - they are grafted mostly to be joined onto well-proven, high-quality rootstock that can produce lots of sap and confer resistance to certain diseases.

Source: am orchardist.

I haven’t touched Gillette since they decided to disparage their primary customer base, then doubled down on that insult. I’ve even gone so far as to divest myself of many P&G products, since a parent company is ultimately responsible for the bigoted and sexist attitudes used by subsidiaries.

Most of the bullshit American hegemony really started to ramp up after the fall of the USSR when the US found itself unchecked.

Every single U.S. president since WWII - except for maybe Carter, who had his hand forced - is fully deserving of being brought up for war crimes. American imperialism never really intensified after 1991, it just stepped out from the shadows and became more overt.

since I’ve always lived in a democratic superpower. Though it’s flawed and not the greatest, it sure as Hell would beat growing up in an authoritarian superpower.

Hold onto that thought for the next four years. I suspect this statement is going to age like milk before the next “election”.

For such an invasive piece of code (it seems to drop into my system with every major Windows Update), this would be a hilarious message to see.

“This is my life-bill” - sounds exactly like a literal translation out of Mandarin…

I have an apostrophe

Scottish/Irish?

some companies see it as a SQL injection hack and sanitize it.

Which kind of apostrophe?

A straight apostrophe, fine - that can and does get used in valid SQL injection attacks. I would be disgusted at any input form that didn’t sanitize that.

But a curly apostrophe? Nothing should be filtering a curly apostrophe, as it has no function or use within SQL. So if you learn how to bring that up in alt codes (Windows, specifically), Key combos (Mac) or dead keys (Linux), as well as direct Unicode codes for most any Win/Mac/*Nix platform, you should be golden.

Unless the developer of that input form was a complete moron and made extra-tight validation.

Plus, knowing the inputs for a lot of extended UTF-8 characters not found on a normal keyboard is also a wee bit of a typing superpower.

A woman’s cycle varies between 15 and 45 days, averaging 28.1 days, but with a standard deviation of 3.95 days. That’s a hell of a lot of variability from one woman to the next. And the same variability can be experienced by a large minority of women from one period to the next, and among nearly all women across the course of their fertile years.

On the other hand, the moon’s cycle (as seen from Earth) takes 27 days, 7 hours, and 43 minutes to pass through all of its phases. And it does so like clockwork, century after century.

Of the two, I am finding the second to have a much stronger likelihood of being the reasoning behind the notches.

Strange how gender-bigotry style historical revisionism and gender exceptionalism seems to get a wholly uncritical and credulous pass when it’s not done by a man.