I finally managed to try pawpaws this year. It was quite nice in Maryland and they’re all over along riverbanks. They had nearly identical taste and texture to the sweetsops available throughout Asia, just with larger seeds. I have no idea why they’re not widely available, the flavor is sweet and mild like most fruits that are popular in the US.
WMATA busses need serious work and there aren’t enough bike lanes for last mile connectivity, but by US standards it’s about as good as it gets outside of NYC.
The busses are the main differentiation between European and US cities in my experience. Only Seattle and SF get close to running a decent bus service.
The generics I’ve tried all work but noticably worse. The quality of the bristles is different and it doesn’t leave the same clean feeling. The price of the genuine replacements is stupid and they keep increasing it, but I’ve given up on finding a good quality generic one and just pay the price. They don’t need replacing that often anyway.
If anyone does know of a good quality C2 compatible replacement please do let me know though.
Thank goodness. I’ve been dreading the renewal process with how spotty usps is at actually delivering mail to my building. I need the visas in it even after I get a new passport as some are valid significantly longer than the passport itself.
Are happy hours and lunch specials not dynamic pricing? It’s just a different way of framing it as a discount rather than surge price, but it’s basically the same idea as far as I’m concerned. I’m happy to vote with my wallet on this, if Wendy’s decides they want dynamic prices then I’ll just go elsewhere. Fast food certainly isn’t an essential.
At the time animated series didn’t have the same quality they do today, I suspect it’s reputation is so good because there’s no subsequent animated series.
Basically, though I tend to use GMX email aliases for these sorts of useless signups. I don’t want some temporary email account to be all that’s needed to get control over my TV should I ever connect it to the internet again.
Many of the cheap TVs with Roku built in require you to set up a Roku account before you can even use the HDMI inputs. After setting up your account you can disconnect it from the internet and use it as a normal TV, but I spent a while trying to get around this block. In the end I had to create a Roku account.
Tasker has a similar companion app, it just doesn’t work with as many things on my Pixel 8 Pro as Macrodroid. The only phone automation I rely on anymore is Wifi hotspot toggling based on connected Bluetooth devices, which Tasker is incapable of now even with the companion app. I really don’t know how Macrodroid does it.
Of the automation apps my preferred UI Automate with its flows. It allows the complexity of Tasker without becoming unreadable as the automations become big. It’s harder to edit and even worse without root than Tasker.
It’s still a cat and mouse game between Google and playintegrityfix/next. If you need to rely on your phone at any time rooting isn’t really an option anymore. I don’t see Google changing to be less hostile toward device automation unfortunately.
We really need a 3rd competitor or better workaround. It would be cool if you could have a virtual Android device inside a rooted device to run apps requiring safetynet. But that’s way way way easier said than done.
It’s not even just banking apps anymore. Tons of libraries just check by default before allowing apps using them to run. I can’t use my local transit agency’s app with root, not can I order a fast food burger.
It barely works for Android 14+ without root. Macrodroid has much better compatibility for whatever reason.
Unfortunately rooting while passing safetynet verification is very hard or impossible lately depending on the device. If apps didn’t unnecessarily check safetynet status this wouldn’t be a problem, but since so many now the rooted phone effectively becomes a brick. I really miss the days of custom ROMs and full device automation without stupid workarounds. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s any going back without app developers getting on board with an alternative to Google-verified security on Android.
Be careful what you wish for. California capped property tax increase since 1978 with prop 13 and most experts say this is a major factor in their insanely expensive housing market. Most people are heavily incentivized to never move to keep their low property tax rate, but this in turn prevents most new development and upzoning while simultaneously leading to the worst sprawl in the nation.
It also starves the state of tax revenue requiring them to levy the tax further for new buyers and seek other income streams like heightened income and sales tax. Policies like this somewhat unintuitively only benefit those who are already well off. Renters and younger people gain no benefit and ultimately pay higher property taxes than those who already are financially established enough to own a property.
A healthy property tax disincentivizes housing as a speculative investment, improving the overall market for people who actually live there. There should certainly be breaks for poverty and financial distress but capping or cutting rates broadly encourages speculation. For a basic human need such high degree of speculation benefits nobody.
The problem is so many services requiring SMS to be that second factor. From what I’ve heard it’s easy enough to steal a sim that if you’re being explicitly targeted it’s basically the same as no second factor. Yet even if using an authenticator app most services require you to still have SMS/phone as another option for the 2FA.
For Authy specifically they’d need to guess your master password and then hijack your phone number, and for users of Authy I suspect their passwords are not easily guessed as it’s already a step above the standard SMS only 2FA most services require.
The US really doesn’t understand that there is simply no competing with these batteries. To try to block the import of them is only going to set our own local industry back in their ability to compete in the global economy. And ironically the BMS systems for CATL are still using American semiconductors, so the US still gets some revenue from their massive expansion.
The most viable competitors to CATL are all in China too. I’d be somewhat supportive of a CATL specific ban due to their notoriously terrible employee working conditions and crazy NDAs/non-competes, but to ban all Chinese batteries in the US would be a huge mistake.
Just ublock origin with default configuration. My complaints aren’t for page loading so much as scrolling. Stutter when scrolling is really annoying to me. Interestingly as mentioned the nightly version fixes this, even when ublock is also installed on it.
My occasional page related complaints are for stuff animating correctly. This is very rare and a minor inconvenience usually, but sometimes stops you from being able to do what you came to accomplish (usually on jank websites, rental car companies for example).
Pretending Firefox mobile is already great is counterproductive to fixing it’s issues. They don’t have extensive development resources particularly for the mobile version so it makes sense it’s worse. But to a non-techie switching to it isn’t a good experience yet. It definitely can be in the future but without at least acknowledging it’s current flaws why would anyone switch who has previously tried switching?
So maybe my experience is unique but websites don’t always test with Firefox now and some simply don’t work with it. I use it anyway out of principle but occasionally I need to open Chrome.
On mobile it’s even worse. Firefox is stuttery on my Pixel 8 Pro and doesn’t handle more than ~20 open tabs well. The nightly version fixes the stutter but crashes all the time (it’s a nightly build after all so this is expected).
Not sure, this was 2 weeks ago. Apparently the season was somewhat earlier than normal this year. The C&O Canal trail is the place to go though.