It’s also possible that the method of communication is just changing. I’ve found that often I have more trouble communicating in written form than conversationally, and I wonder if that’s because of zoom and video essays, not to mention shorts / TickTok becoming more prevalent. I’ve also had my writing degrade just because I don’t have a place or reason to exercise it as much. So what I’m writing is perhaps less comprehensible because it’s more like a stream of consciousness.
Or more likely it’s both - people don’t do long form or even “hard” reading anymore, and so find more complex text incomprehensible.
I agree with you wrt a UFO. However, yes, people have 1080p on a cellphone, but unless the UFO is about 15-30 feet in front of you, the longer lenses on cellphones are mixed quality at best still. So if someone is pointing a recent “100x” phone at a UFO in the sky, the footage still isn’t going to be very clear / good. It’s also difficult to track these “UFOs”, probably because of all sorts of interesting optical and atmospheric events even making them unidentified. But even trying to “zoom in” on a commercial plane from miles away to the extent you could make out much detail is not exactly easy, and there it’s usually going in a at least in theory predictable flight path, and moving “slowly” - just the distance giving such a tiny FOV from the camera …
Oh, I have a pressure sealed rice cooker, but it’s the top of the line Zojuroshi and is more like $600. It’s also not fast, takes like an hour, but the rice is divine. Sadly, I rarely cook rice. I got it for my sister, who lived in China for a while and used to eat rice all the time, but then moved into a tiny house and gave it back to me… I can’t really bear to throw it out - but I only use it if I’m making a huge amount of rice randomly.
I think it is smaller capacity, has a “fryer basket” and maybe hence can concentrate the power more effectively on the small space so is faster? IDK, the NuWave used to be sold as an air-fryer too, but I’ve never air-fried in a “real one” so I can’t personally compare. I just find that the much larger “Oven” and throw everything in the dishwasher is way more useful for way more foods and types of cooking (like if I want to bake a potato etc).
Though I haven’t actually found good bluetooth headphones for sub $100. My favorite so far were the Senheiser PXC550 (I think thats it). But mine have gotten chewed by a dog :(. I liked the audio quality, didn’t love the touch controls, but the cheap headphones I’ve gotten to replace them just sound awful.
I know people like air fryers, but I personally would recommend a NuWave. I know As Seen On TV, but it can be an air fryer from what I can tell, but is also just a really easy to use convection oven that’s reasonably cheap (though it is over $100), and everything that is going to be touched by food or it’s drippings can go in the dishwasher!
The phone flashlight is barely adequate for some uses, but like a lot of stuff on a phone has some serious compromises. YMMV if that matters to you. For me, I find it’s really hard to hold a phone when I need a flashlight and hit where I need the light, whereas a more traditional flashlight doesn’t take up an entire hand exactly - you can grip it with like 2 fingers or in your teeth, or under your arm etc. Hard to describe but try it without getting the phone to thing you’re trying to turn the flashlight off. (I might suck at using smartphones though).
But worst than that, it’s got a really short throw and isn’t that bright. It might be me just getting older, but I’ve found a “real flashlight” like a “real camera” makes a world of difference. I have some cheap Anker one I got as a gift which is like 10 times brighter and throws probably 100 times as far as my smartphone. I have to imagine new “high end” ones are much better.
I also recently got a “improved phone light” off of tech dirt and I probably overpaid, look on Temu to save money. But it clips to my SAK, or keys, it’s a lot brighter, it has a fold out stand and a magnet and is pretty tiny.
Again - if you don’t ever curse out your phone as a flashlight, then you don’t need any of this, but if you regularly do (or just want to save your phones battery for something other than being a flashlight) - check some of these out.
I was going to say, a Swiss Army Knife. Lifechanging. I use it quite a lot. It’s small for men’s pockets, and you can get smaller ones too (mine is a cybertool, so on the middle-large size of SAKs). I also have a SwissTool that’s huge and just tool porn and fun to use as a fidget device, but way too big for me to EDC, and way overkill for what I’d end up needing it for. Also the SwissTool is over $100. The Cybertool was at $99, and there’s plenty of less specialized SAKs going down to like $30.
The problem is just we have to use the sites. There’s no real choice ( we have some of this for work too). I’m not losing my job or impacting my medical care for a browser war. If I can fool the site with an extension or something, then if I know that I’ll do it. But this idea that you can just avoid browsers when you need a website is not really true. I will say - I very rarely see these problems compared to back in the day. But I have contacted tech support and they just say use the working browser. I can’t report a bug, they don’t even understand why I’m being a PITA.
Never used Chrome, and strongly suggest to other people not to use Chrome. However, I’ve not had the hate for chromium browsers (so far, the killing of extensions might drive me away) - I’ve really enjoyed Vivaldi for a lot more features and having the engine that works on websites (yes this sucks). My mom OTOH is a Firefox person, and I just had to help her get onto her insurance website - she had tech support on the phone, and Firefox just would not let her set a password and just kept looping and using up the reset link. Finally I tried in Vivaldi (Chromium) and it worked first try. Of course, I’ve had the same experience in the opposite direction. So I have to keep using both.
Also, Vivaldi anyway has a much better UI IMHO for what I want than Firefox does, and is faster. As an IT person, I much prefer semantic versioning which Vivaldi also has.
Anyway, at this point Chromium is like IE was - you can’t not have access to your health insurance website, and they don’t apparently test in Firefox so it doesn’t work. You can’t drop your provider cause you don’t pick it, your work does. The upshot of Chromium is that there are rebuilds and it runs on other platforms than Windows - so… there’s that at least.
Honestly, I’d like to see someone fork Chromium and keep web extensions etc, but no one wants to write a browser engine anymore - even Vivaldi, which was the old Opera team that wrote 2 browser engines over the history of the browser through v12 - can’t afford to make their own engine. What I don’t get is why so many browser makers have chosen chromium vs gecko - almost no one wraps gecko in the last 10 years. (Maybe Firefox is different now? I know it in some ways started getting crappy wrt extensions back in v28? whenever Pale Moon forked.)
Interesting - I never thought of that, mostly because the overhead is kind of insane (and I don’t actually think bitcoin is anonymous, but in this case good enough). I was thinking for your average person, they’re going to pull out a credit card or debit card which is a hard ID. Certainly more than if they browse to startpage.com for instance.
I suppose a newer supertelephoto lens for my camera. I don’t use it enough to actively look for it, but if someone got me an RF 100-500 as a present I wouldn’t say no. Or even a EF Tamron 150-600 G2.
A side by side ATV kind of thingy for going out on the trails in our woods.