Microwaving the Pop Tarts is your first mistake: they should be toasted!

I’d heard the name, but just assumed it was one of those weird old west names. I had no idea it was named after a radio show!

It did take forever. Rotary phones work by sending clicks down the phone line that automation equipment listens to. If clicks came too fast the equipment wouldn’t understand it correctly. This was one of the big improvements the touch tone phone brought: it was much faster to dial. Instead of clicks each button generated a tone at a specific frequency and the automated switching equipment could interpret it much faster. At least some of the early phones had a switch to make them send clicks instead, in case the local phone company didn’t support tones yet.

Makes me feel positive about Crucial’s support, though

No, do it sequentially. To dial 515-2400 you put your finger in the 5, drag it to the stop, then release. Next put your finger in the 1, drag it to the stop, then release. Next put your finger in the 5, drag it to the stop, then release. Next put your finger in the 2, drag it to the stop, then release. Next put your finger in the 4, drag it to the stop, then release. Next put your finger in the 0, drag it to the stop, then release. Finally put your finger in the 0 again, drag it to the stop, then release.

GOG is pretty good because of this. I check in there if I’m considering buying something on Steam. There might still be compelling reasons to buy on Steam, like I bought Parkitect on Steam because a review on GOG specifically called out how the mods really only work well on Steam, but I’m at least checking first and maybe Wishlisting the game on GOG. I have fairly reasonable trust in Valve while Gabe is running it, but I feel like I can have longer trust in keeping copies of installers myself.

I think in the US I’ve heard ETF/ACH transaction fees are usually around $2.50? It might be possible to have that apply across a batch, though, as in if you submit 10 payments to 10 different people as a single transaction it’s still just $2.50, or 25¢ per person. I’m only getting this from hearing accountants complain at companies I’ve worked with, so I don’t understand the details. But I’ve seen it pretty common with companies doing payouts to want to see a minimum amount before they actually send the payment, otherwise it’s not worth doing.

I will have to check this out on my computer; there were some legitimately good Flash games over the years. Hello Worlds! is one and I see it listed on this website.

They can bring some nice benefits like remote starting in cold (or hot) climates, but there needs to be much better design to minimize the exploitability of these systems.

I haven’t seen one of these in a long time

I have off-and-on searched for alternative software for personal blogs that can be self-hosted and it doesn’t seem like there are many options anymore. The only ones I’ve seen are WriteFreely and FlatPress. Are there any other options you’re aware of?

I was an early adopter of Firefox 20+ years ago. It started going downhill more than 15 years ago and I bailed to Chrome when that launched. It really was better than Firefox at the time. Then Chrome got worse and I wound up back on Firefox, not because Firefox had gotten better in that time but because everything else had gotten worse than Firefox in the intervening time. Also, if going from 48% market share in 2009 to a barely relevant <5% in 2024 doesn’t count as a downfall I’m not sure what does.

This process has been underway since the project switched their focus from the Mozilla Suite to Firefox. Early Firefox was lightweight with limited features and the idea that you would add your own as extensions for the features you wanted. Then it started gaining traction and the Mozilla developers started forcing features in that should’ve been extensions. It’s been downhill ever since!

I guess how new are you talking? I think this said it was based on the 2019 release, but I haven’t heard much about recent releases. Winamp 2 was the classic one most people remember. Winamp 3 was a rewrite that was supposed to be better under the hood but a lot of people didn’t like it, mainly for the new interface it seemed. They jumped to Winamp 5 (2+3) to restore much of the old interface while keeping the capabilities of 3. I never had issues with 5 and continued to use it through Windows 7. Haven’t used Windows much since then so I don’t know how it runs now. There have been very rare point updates since AOL took over and later sold it, mostly bugfixes.

Are you sure this isn’t a scam?

You can certainly be paid in cash legally. Finding an employer willing to do that, though, might be challenging. It would probably have to be retail or another business that regularly deals in cash.

I like the sound of this for a device, but couldn’t it be more for these new ARM laptops?

I don’t usually install major Apple OS updates on launch; there seem to be major bugs often enough that I try to wait until the first bugfix release.

I haven’t finished the book, but The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics is also a good read on the subject.

I counted backwards once and figured out I was conceived the same month as my parents’ anniversary. I thought I might’ve been the result of their anniversary trip to Jamaica, and for some reason that made me uncomfortable knowing that. A few years later they were talking about the trip and that they didn’t know my mom was pregnant at the time. So thinking more it made sense that I was actually probably from a week or two beforehand, but then that means mom was drinking while pregnant because she didn’t know (although I’m assuming that early doesn’t have much impact).