As someone with deep roots in the sciences, and good access to the latest data and evidence surrounding anthropogenic climate change, I seriously doubt that there will be much civilization left by the time I shuffle off this mortal coil. All indications used to point towards widespread economic, societal, and ecological collapse in the latter half of this century, well past my effective lifespan, but recent (and strong!) evidence has moved that up considerably to not much past 2035. So no, I am not worried in the least about “burdening” anyone with my collection. I seriously doubt that there will be anyone left who will care. The few who remain will be too obsessed with surviving another day to give two shits about books. I just want to live long enough to read most of them in relative comfort.

My mother

…WAT…

or sees a visible map of time in their head

Like how a day or a year is like a rollercoaster, coming down in the first half to rise back up in the second? It’s like a really odd sine wave for me.

eating hamburgers and hot dogs with flatware instead of on buns.

That sounds so German. I know the bun-less burgers as “frickadellen”, my own parents (both German immigrants who met each other over here) used to make them fairly frequently.

My goodness, I am so much like you.

I’ve been using a book tracker app since the iPhone 4s (2011) just to keep track of what I buy - I don’t track anything else - because even way back then I had trouble remembering if I had a book or if I had just browsed it elsewhere.

In 2018, various functions (search, sort, stats, etc.) took a permanent dirt nap just as I was nearing the 3K number of entries. And these are just the books I own.

The size of the DB backup file has nearly doubled since then.

Now granted, a number of books I get need to go straight into storage before I can even read them, as I have not yet built my library. It’s already gone through several redesigns to stay ahead of the size of my collection, and right now I’m looking at movable library storage stacks - the kind that roll on miniature railway tracks and have wheel-like dogs at their ends that a person turns to easily move them back and forth (opening and closing an access corridor between the stacks for access to the books). I’m hoping to eventually have almost half a linear kilometre of shelving in my library once it’s built.

I cannot imagine the horror of being even semi-illiterate, much less fully illiterate. I absolutely love reading.

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.

“This argument didn’t go down well.”

🤣🤣🤣 LMAO

What an awesome punchline, should have been on its own line for more impact.