NotAnArdvark

Just the other day my dog lost track of his frisbee in the water. It barely floats so it must be hard for him to see. He swam around in circles for a while looking for it. My wife started cheering when he would swim towards it, then go "oh! no. no. no" when he was swimming away from it. He essentially worked out hotter/colder on the spot in order to find his frisbee.

I journal to process thoughts, feelings, and problems, so I often go back to try to help me "figure things out." It's a double-edge sword sort of situation. Like it really lays bare the fact that certain problems I've made zero progress on over the years, but on the other hand, it's helps me realize other places where I've made way more progress than I would have thought.

If you've ever seen the Black Mirror episode where they're able to record their memories and play them back, it can be a little like that. An argument with the wife? I can pull back every. single. time. she's done "that" before. I think that's probably not good.

Anyway, overall, when I come away from reading past journal entries I tend to feel a lot more calm and humble.

"If it's free then you're the product" isn't even true when search engines are ad supported, so stick with the much better free alternatives.

This is exactly what "you're the product" means. Google is selling your presence on their platform to advertisers - you are the product they're selling.

"Batteries == Good" is my takeaway, but if you can be grid-tied I think zero batteries is the most environmentally friendly option. For grid stabilization I imagine even still that that should be left to utility-scaled installations.

Actually, now that I wrote that, this might be true for residential grid-tie vs utility solar too.

They say no one is using these older LTS kernels, but I'm running into them all the time on Android devices. I don't know if the vendors are taking advantage of those updates, but they're definitely choosing the LTS kernels for their BSPs at release time.

A sticking point I encountered - the drop in efficiency as the weather gets colder means you need a unit sized to heat your home on the coldest days you expect to encounter. So you need to buy a heat pump that's larger than you need for 98% of the year just so you don't freeze that other 2%. In addition to higher cost an oversized unit is less efficient because it's cycling more.

So this is where "heating strips" or "backup heating" come in, and then I get we've come full-circle.

My Dad has a cheap laptop he uses just for banking, and he asked me to put Linux on it so he wouldn't have to upgrade to Windows 10. It's not much - for my Dad, or for the greater Linux market share - but it's something!

If there's one lesson my wife has taught me it's that telling someone to "calm down" is a sure fire way to not have them calm down.

Threads for Fairphone often fill up with "it's not going to work if they don't X." Lots of people don't seem to understand that their personal viewpoint can be quite different from other's.

There are people who are aware of the trade-offs of a Fairphone, but still choose to get one.

It's roughly the same size as the Fairphone 4, isn't it? Like 1mm less thick.

Is it just a matter of using a VPN?

Something I worry about, but haven't seen anyone mention yet, is that a long-after-the-fact apology seems a little self-serving. I'm the one who feels bad, so I'm going to bring something up again hoping that I feel better about the situation afterwards.

There are people I didn't treat very well when I was young. When I think about reaching out to apologize I imagine the interaction ending with me feeling better and them feeling shitty again.

Reading this thread, however, it doesn't look like that's how this usually goes. So, maybe I should rethink it.