Went to Google Play to complain about Hulu. I noticed Google advertising that over 300 reviews had the verbatim quote "watch and movies that you love". It's always confusing that buggy corporate apps have >95% 5 star reviews until you see that the majority are just completely fake, and no one cares or is doing anything about it.

I use ProtonMail as my primary e-mail client. For some reason, I cannot get to ProtonMail to verify an e-mail that I used to register elsewhere. I keep getting the hourglass on Firefox. So I go a try Chrome and it's the same deal.

Of all of the browsers, Microsoft Edge immediately got me there whereas before hand, Firefox didn't have a problem. But it seems like today, it decided to shit the bed as well as Chrome on getting me to a place I regularly log into every day of the week.

I don't get it and it's stupidly frustrating at times. This is applicable for when things you've used for so long just stop working.

One of those two sites is distributing adware. Which of them?

File Converter (FOSS) by Adrien Allard was hosted on file-converter[.]org since a decade. Then someone a few weeks ago snatched that domain and it's now distributing adware. Almost identical design for the page, 100% designed to deceive users to download a different product, as it's called Zamzar.

I was in a rush and I needed to pick up a quick snack that I could eat during class. I chose these Nature Valley bars which said they had ten bars inside. What I failed to notice is the tiny print at the bottom where it says 5 x 2, i.e., 5 packets with two bars.

Lo and behold when I open a pack during a break, I find two bars inside. I didn't want to eat two bars, just one. You can't even just leave the other fucking bar inside because they create so MANY crumbs. How the fuck are you supposed to seal it???

Stupid-ass deceptive printing got the better of me. It's not the end of the world, just mildly infuriating.

"If you don't save your data to someone else's computer then we can't monetize it."

I know they're not explicitly selling SkyDrive or OneDrive or whatever it's called now, but they kinda are.

What's funny is, this file is stored in an encrypted container that does live in the cloud. 😄

Edit: Thanks to user @NoneYa@lemm.ee I now know about F12 in Office applications to bring up the "classic" Save As... dialog. Today I learned!

A year ago I bought my wife a Mazda CX-5 diesel and paid 10K for it. Now I found out that it has an engine defect that will be extremely expensive to repair, so the car is a write-off, at best I can get 2K back.

Please use a personal email. My email is 'mail' @ 'my actual name'. It does not get more personal than that

But you can't use emails starting with mail@, admin@, support@, info@, main@, etc.

Instead they advised me (3 times) to create a personal email on a service like Yahoo, Outlook, Gmail, Orange, etc

I know they're supposed to be good for the environment but... God I hate those caps.

Large grocery stores around here offer cheaper gas if you shop at there store. This can be up to a dollar a gallon off.

Most patients predicted that their worst symptoms when exposed to gluten would be classic lower digestive problems like diarrhea, bloating and cramps. However, none of these occurred during the acute immune responses observed by Anderson’s team. Instead, patients experienced nausea and vomiting. Anderson describes them as, “acute food poisoning symptoms that are early in onset,” and relatively severe.

“For all the years that we’ve known about celiac disease, persons have told us that they had these acute reactions, but many experts in the field dismissed them as being just in the person’s mind,” says Anderson. “Here we are now, a hundred years after celiac disease was discovered, suddenly discovering, yes, the patients were right.”

Nausea and Vomiting Mark Gluten Exposure in Celiac Disease 🙄

(Emphasis mine)

Marijuana is its own special category, but club drugs (which for some reason include date rape drugs), inhalants and steroids are all in a "miscellaneous" category together?

Also, note all the ridiculous drug propaganda lies.

I don't use Reddit anymore, but I wanted to search something that I couldn't find anywhere. This is what I saw. After killing all the other apps, Reddit now is trying to force us to use their own spyware app.

None of what follows is new. I know this stuff happens all the time. And yet somehow this insignificant thing shocked me and it's been gnawing at me for the past few days. And today was the icing on the shit cake.

So my wife ordered a a foot massage machine. $50, typical el-cheapo thing made in China. The thing was shipped to our home out in the boonies in less than 48 hours. Wow!

My wife opened the box, got the device out onto the floor and... she couldn't fit her feet inside. She's not big, but apparently the device was designed for customers in the Shire. Unusable.

So she emailed the distributor who told her to cut the cord, send them a photo proving the destruction and throw it away herself. Not return the device. Not pretend to return the device and the device is thrown away behind her back. No no: this time, the distributor told her in no uncertain terms that it's cheaper for them to let her destroy the thing herself.

And then it hit me: here is a device that was born in China, put together by some underpaid workers in a nondescript factory, designed by someone who didn't give a shit, made out of materials that probably came out of the ground somewhere in Africa and in Saudi Arabia - probably involving child labor at some point or other - put on a boat, shipped halfway around the world, then put into a truck, only to be landfilled here.

It didn't even see a single second of use. This is utterly absurd and completely depressing.

I'm not compatible with that. When I buy something, the thing has value and I want it to have a decently useful life. It's not about ecology or money: it's just basic respect for the resources and the human labor that went into this thing. The value of the object is what it cost the Earth and the people who toiled to make it and ship it to me. When I use my things, I show respect for those who made them and it justifies the use ot the materials they're made of.

But here I was looking at that poor thing across the room, unloved and unlovable, whose sole purpose as an object was to be landfilled without ever seeing any use. It consumed resources and someone worked to make it, yet somehow it never had any value for anybody.

And the most depressing thing about it is, its very existence from Chinese factory to my local landfill is totally absurd and makes no sense at all, yet all the invididual steps that contributed to it being fabricated and ultimately landing on our doorstep were a series of perfectly rational economical decisions: someone found added value in designing and building a shit foot massage machine, my wife found it worth buying sight unseen, someone figured there was money to be made shipping it here, and the distributor decided to outsource its destruction to the customers because it's cheaper than destroying it themselves - let alone shipping it back to Shenzen or wherever. And yet when you string everything together, the net result is senseless waste and production of things that have no inherent worth. How crazy is that eh?

I couldn't throw it away. So I replaced the cord and I gave it to the local Red Cross store yesterday to give to someone in need or sell it for pennies. Today, I passed by the shop on my way to work and saw the damn thing in their garbage container behind the store. In the box. Unopened. I guess it will be going to the landfill after all...

That really put the final damper on my day today...

Sorry if this is the wrong venue, but I really needed to vent.

I dont know why they have to lie about it. At $5/8ft board you'd think I paid for the full 1.5. Edit: I mixed up nominal with actual.

Remember to use ad blockers and DNS filters ladies and gentlemen!

Have no idea what Otto[.]de is, nor do I have any plans to find out. But god damn thats a long as time. Its the equivalent of 9993 years if anyone was wondering...

Source; Cookie of a sketchy free VPN that I'm investigating.

It's something I've seen slowly starting to emerge over the course of the last year or so. Maybe even longer. There's accounts that post stories to designed to shock people into thinking India is a terrible place. Like I get it. India does have issues. And it does have issues with sexual violence as well. But its a shame those conversations seemingly cannot be had without resorting to racism. I hope this site us different.

Especially if you get an entire string of them because somehow you didn't do it right.

A huge post about how to create a Facebook business account without a personal account. The whole thing was filler text and ambiguous sentences like this

https://birdeye.com/blog/how-to-create-a-facebook-business-page-without-a-personal-account/

The internet is dying, but it is being killed!

Remember when the web didn't suck?

What is this? Some sort of 'protect the children because they're totally not using apples and soda cans' bullshit?

Why is this in any way necessary or even useful?

Edit: Just discovered this was about tobacco, making this even stupider since this product isn't for tobacco, it's for cannabis. https://dclcorp.com/blog/news/pact-act-impacts-vape-industry/