They’ve rendered my Google smart speaker mostly useless except as a glorified hands free on/off switch for lights and tv. I used to be able to add items to my shopping list on Bring via voice command, and then suddenly one day it stopped working because they got rid of the tool that enabled that function (I’m not using their shitty lists app instead). I also found out that a tracking app that I use for noting down baby feeding times and diapers used to have voice command functionality until, you guessed it, Google axed that feature. It worked perfectly well before, I’m guessing they didn’t want to pay people to maintain it.

I mean, it provides more protection, not immunity. I got boosted in October but I was pregnant and thus immunocompromised. I got it in November but none of the rest of the family did… We hadn’t been leaving the house for anything but groceries and even that was enough. My daughter was born at the tail end of symptoms so here’s hoping she got a good dose of antibodies to protect her until she’s old enough to be vaccinated herself.

It stopped working. They figured out a way around it 😢 Fortunately I found a cracked version of the premium APK so now I get ad free and unlimited hearts without paying a dime (I didn’t necessarily care about the unlimited hearts but the ads were fucking obnoxious). I might still look into another system though because they keep reshuffling the format, and I don’t feel like I’m progressing.

It’s not “ruined” but my 3 week old daughter has been particularly cranky today, she refuses to go to sleep despite multiple feeding sessions, diaper changes, and attempts at burping. I’m already tired because I took most of last night’s shifts, so I’m glad we’re not leaving the house. It’s a bit of a bummer because I usually love everything about Christmas (the music, the lights, the food, the presents) and we are pretty much missing all of that this year. I can’t wait to make up for it in future years though!

To play the devil’s advocate… Water shouldn’t be free, because that’s how it gets taken for granted. While I absolutely agree that there is a human right to water, it’s a shared resource that is becoming increasingly unpredictable due to weather and water quality. I live in a state that was hit hard by drought multiple times over the past decade and we’re always reactionary in addressing the problem at the time, rather than trying to establish efficient water use in the long term.

Water rate structures are an important tool for ensuring that people use water efficiently. Things are slowly changing for the better in terms of infrastructure, but not fast enough to match existing issues. So the demand side needs to be addressed as well as the supply side. Having a rate structure that gets increasingly expensive on a per unit basis for wasteful households is the gold standard (although of course it’s difficult to implement without enough data, which is why creating a robust rate structure is a balancing act that can take a few years of study).

(Of course there are other elephants in the room, like the inherent racism in the water rights system and the fact that agriculture uses way too much of it…)

Another possible explanation I heard involved the tech sector, which made massive profits at the beginning of COVID and then took a dive afterwards when people started venturing out of the house and using their services less. It’s not the only factor in the revenue loss, of course, but I bet it was a not-insignificant chunk of change.

When we moved into this house, the prior owners had a hookup to AT&T that was max 50 mbps for $50/month. We kept getting told that At&T fiber was coming “soon” to the area, but the truth is that we live in a neighborhood with a lot of old people who don’t need/know about fiber and there was no incentive for them to bring it to our street (the biggest kick in the balls was that it was available a couple blocks away). So we got a Comcast hookup that has served us well for a couple of years, for $75 a month (my only gripe of course being that we never got the speed we paid for). Well, they just upped the price by $5 a month and fiber has finally arrived in the form of Fidium, so we’re saying good riddance to Comcast as well.

This is probably the first time ever that I’ve had more than 1 viable option available to me, and the competition is probably why Comcast was cheaper for us than for my parents living in a Comcast only area. We have no brand loyalty, we’ll switch service the minute we get a better deal. But these companies are able to maintain their shitty practices because most people don’t have options.

Automakers also just aren’t making enough small EVs, and we can’t afford/don’t want a bigger one. We want a small, efficient about-town car that we can use for doing groceries and going downtown. We both work mostly from home, and the only reason we were even considering another car is because we have a kid on the way and might sometimes need 2 cars to split between errands and kid duties. We’ll just stick to our current, fully paid off car for now and wait either until the prices for new cars drop or the battery technology improves so I feel better about buying a used EV.

I’ve noticed this! It’s been impossible to find in most stores. I got lucky at Smart and Final.

I use Copy Me That because it’s easy to quickly save recipes from the phone without having to do any formatting, but I’ve now run into an issue of having too many recipes that I’ve never actually made lol.

I think I might try to use one of the other methods mentioned here to collate my tried and true recipes into a digital cookbook and continue to use the app for archiving things to try.

I actually grew up on a good version of tuna casserole. We never used the condensed soup or potato sticks, we made a bechamel and topped the dish with parmesan and breadcrumbs. My parents did some weird things when trying to use up leftovers, but I will give them credit for refusing to use the canned/premade versions of a lot of things.

One issue in particular that took a minute to figure out with docker, if you need the containers to talk to eachother, you have to be aware that certain types of docker network connections will not automatically see the other containers, even if both containers are connected to your home network.

Yup, this is exactly the issue I haven’t been able to figure out. For some reason, the files I download in Sonarr are associated with a user group that Plex isn’t a part of, so Plex can’t see the files (and I’ve tried adding Plex to that group and it still doesn’t work, argh). I know you can specify a UID and other specifics when you initialize a container, but inside the container itself that doesn’t seem to apply, it sets its own user parameters. I’m about ready to throw in the towel and just run the software on my machine itself with a VPN, because then at least everything will be able to talk to each other.

Can you freeze what you don’t eat? I have similar issues because it’s hard to cook for one without having to then eat the leftovers for a week…

I’ve been doodling around with Plex and sonarr in a Docker setup on my Linux box, but I’ve run into some issues that I can’t figure out. Any good resources to recommend for creating the optimal setup?