Somewhat recently, tried to activate a SIM for a guest here in Canada, and while you could fill in anything you want for personal info, the only way to hook up (prepaid) billing was with a Canadian credit card number. Whoops. This was only for a month, so I put in mine and he reimbursed me in cash. Other carriers may still let you buy one-time payment cards for cash at retail; this one didn't.
You get better deals with local carriers if you actually use the potential of eSIM, which is to be able to switch !
Every other carrier in most parts of the world now supply eSIMs that you can sometimes activate from home before your trip
Canada has Lucky Mobile, central Europe has A1 mobile, France and Portugal have Lycamobile, Italy has Windtre, UK has no service,...
Getting a SIM is typically the thing on which you can save 20$ just by asking a local person
The Spectacle Factory recommends, in order, (1) warm water and a microfiber cloth, (2) Zeiss lens wipes, or (3) an ultrasonic bath: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4lJ_5Tg9Ms
They recommend (v=5FUUgO95sb4) against both detergent for the sake of the lens coatings and against sprays which may cause grease to accumulate around the lens rim.
If you're the kind of person who has bought a dozen pairs of cheap Zenni's... the lens coating gets visibly damaged every time I've used hand soap on them. I now just blast them with hot water and wipe dry with a lens cloth. I don't know whether hand soap is a problem for more expensive brands, but it definitely is for Zenni's.
40+ year glasses wearer here who learned this perhaps only 10 years ago, I think this is the correct way. The one annoying part is the difference that the glass coating makes. The water just falls off some of my glasses with barely as much as a light tap. Others length tend to hang onto the water in beads, so I have to actually wait for it to dry (or walk around with water spots, which I also do when impatient...)
I’ve been wearing glasses for just under 30 years, and only last month I decided to actually try and clean my glasses with the tiny microfibres cloth they give you when you buy a pair of glasses rather than throwing it out because it gets annoying in your case because you just use your t-shirt… I’m not a 100% microfibre guy
Does systemd ship with something to upgrade your cron jobs for you? That would be the friendly way. Write your old school cron jobs, and then a script that converts them to do things the systemd way, documenting its steps, i.e. I created this file and this is why. Friendly "I help you do things better" rather than standoffish "your way is obsolete, you need to do it our way". Oh wait. I get it. LLM agents can do exactly that for you can't they. Another way I'm behind the curve.
I have knocked together a systemd service or three based on google copypasta. But generally, for cron jobs, why make it complicated? One line in /etc/crontab and done. I generally call an encapsulation script that sets the right environment variables, uses absolute paths, captures stdout/stderr if required and so on. I just want the simplest possible way to launch that script on a schedule.
A lot of friendships aren't that deep. I've had work colleagues I really liked and even socialized with outside the workplace, and yet, if they left the company or retired... faded away. If it takes real effort to keep up contact, you get a lot more choosy.
COVID also hit pretty bad. Speaking from personal experience, several friends that we saw once or twice a year at informally recurring BBQ/brunch/etc. kind of occasions have faded away as that series was interrupted and never restarted.
And finally... you learn who you are as you age. Friends who seemed cool, who seemed to have the answers... may not be so great from a mature perspective.
Feel the same way about COVID. It damaged the social fabric in ways that have not recovered. I think a lot of people realized that maybe they never really liked socializing as much as they thought they did. I also think it just kind of reset people's expectations around socializing. The other big one to me, that it also unleashed, was inflation. Dining out, sporting events, concerts etc are all way more expensive than they used to be. Places are still busy and games are still packed but the prices are way higher, more evidence of the K shaped economy where only the top stratas are spending. Also, and this is subjective, it feels a bit more performative, as in people are going because it signals they have the means (edit: and the general instagram-ification of our culture.)
The damaged social fabric - for me - didn't consist of spendy stuff. Just backyard BBQ's, pool parties, (hosted) brunch or dinner invitations, that sort of thing. You keep doing it because habit. But then a 2 year interruption because of COVID, habit broken and before you know it you haven't talked to some people for 5 years and now it would be awkward to call them up again...
Restaurants realized they were leaving a lot of money on the table pre-Covid. Post-Covid has seen restaurants raising prices more aggressively, cutting staff, cutting condiments, replacing menus with QR menus, cutting employee and business hours, etc.
The post-Covid real estate/tech/AI /white-collar job/quant boom has led to inflated salaries, wealth inflation and higher prices to match, and then combined with various supply chain shortages and disruptions, e.g. (many tariffs, Israel v Iran v Russia v Ukraine wars and tensions, etc.).
Being "Costco people" is easy. The quality of the product is good, the prices are good, there's little "choice paralysis" and it's all under one roof. But socially, it's like having IKEA art on your walls. You don't want to have the same thing everyone else has; as a host (if you still do that sort of thing) or potluck participant, you have to somehow differentiate yourself. Of course you can cook interesting stuff from ingredients found at Costco, but serving any kind of ready made snacks or meal items from Costco is just lame given that your guests are probably Costco-istas too.
The part he didn't mention is interpolation at the low end "specs are mere suggestions" end of things. I have a backup Android phone - a true "brand X" type of thing, vanilla android, bought at a garage sale. Nice enough phone, but claims a 40MP camera. The merest glance at a picture taken by it shows it has an ordinary-for-its-time 13MP camera in it and the pictures are interpolated to 40MP.
Hopefully the camera doesn't upscale and then downscale again if told so save at its actual native-ish resolution.
The internet was places. Plural. Places like watmath, ucbvax and the like. Real physical computers in places you'd heard of, and the amazing thing was that you could access them from elsewhere.
Maybe I was a special case even then, but I wanted a place of my own. A place running a Unix type operating system and permanently connected to the internet with a fixed IP address, like those places of old. I've actually had this for 25+ years.
Accces to those "places" from a device in your pocket didn't change any of that.
Nowadays it's become the anonymous "cloud". Nobody knows how it works, or where the server is or who runs it.
I grew up on a farm in Germany. Our "little" tractor was the MF135 (3 cylinder engine!). I started driving it for real work at 12 for the simple reason that my grandpa, who was the third driver when the hay was being brought in, had passed away, and someone had to do it.
My dad and a cousin drove the big tractors. Can't remember whether MF55 or MF65, possibly one of each. Thundering monsters being driven flat out, double-clutched gear changes and all. The reason for all the rush is that the weather isn't that reliable in south Germany, and when they hay is dry and ready, it's all hands on deck.
Anyway... years later I visited the old homestead and there they still were, those big... umm. On Youtube you can probably still find a video of one being turned into a riding lawnmower, underslung mowing deck and all. Those tractors belong in the "Old MacDonald had a farm" era. The modern world is different with the base model of those tractors in the article having three times the power of those old ones, and it goes up from there.
Dunno, the store looks cool in just the way you'd expect an AI to do it (sort of a synthetic average of cool stores). But is this amount of merch really going to make a sustainable profit (after the buzz wears off) in such expensive real estate?
My thought is similar and I feel the answer is no chance. How many t-shirts and coffee mugs do you need to sell just to cover break even? Why should a customer return? I suppose it could be interesting to watch the AI adjust from it's original stock to something that will generate sales and profit in this specific location.
Back when I was younger and challenges were mostly mental, I did participate in a group hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon (via the Hermit trail). Yes, the hike back up was tough, but we had two nights' camp out at the bottom, right by the river, in what for us Canadians was pleasant August type climate, while we had started in a bit of snow at the top (late October) and the rest day was beautiful.
During the hike and stay at the bottom we encountered about half a dozen other people. It really was grand.
In Yosemite, all you have to do is outhike the "Reebok hikers" as we called them back then. An hour's serious walk gives you relative solitude.
And in Zion, last time we were there, a couple of us did not do Angels Landing. Instead we went to another spot equally high up where it was peaceful and quiet, and took telephoto pictures of the others on Angels Landing (note: I've been up there and it's awesome, but in that terrain a crowd sounds scary).
You may be referring to the Observation Point hike at Zion. It starts off with a 2k ft high switchback route. But at the end it will put you smack dab in the middle of the canyon higher than Angeles Landing (and a bit safer, less crowded hike). And you still have a stunning view of the canyon and far beyond.
I did Angel's Landing at one point and I'm glad I did but wouldn't do again. Observation point is my favorite but I don't think my old route is open any longer though you can still apparently get up there by another trail.
> In Yosemite, all you have to do is outhike the "Reebok hikers" as we called them back then. An hour's serious walk gives you relative solitude.
You actually don't even need to do this if you park somewhere other than Yosemite Valley. For example, Tenaya Lake is nice and not that far in on Tioga Road.
There's a statistic that floats around which may be apocryphal - something like 90% of visitors to national parks don't get more than a 5-15 minute walk from the parking lot (and some literally never leave the car).
National parks are huge and you can quickly literally get lost forever in them (which is an actual danger, stay on the trails!) if you're willing to walk.
Some of them have very obvious "goals" to see (the geyser, the half-dome) which of course are high traffic, but others are beautiful "all over" and taking the treks is worth it.
reply