jdeibele

I've been hearing that you have to use an app to get reasonable prices at fast food restaurants anymore.

Yesterday, I tried the Wendy's app. A Dave's single cheeseburger that listed for $6.49 (in the app) had a special offer of $1.00 in the app. I ordered it as an experiment and sure enough, that was the price when I got it in the drive-thru.

McDonald's had deals in their app but they were conditioned on buying more - get X for $1 if you buy Y. That seems like a more sound approach for the restaurant. I appreciated the opportunity to get just one fast food item, though.

I think the app prices are updated daily, perhaps weekly. It's not a reach for them to be updated a lot more frequently with that restaurant's flow.

Plumbing's been mentioned as an issue but I think ventilation would be an even bigger problem. The need to bring in fresh air and exhaust the cafe fumes from cooking, even with induction stoves, wasn't something that was probably planned for at all.

Actually, it looks like Authy will show "twitter:username" in the compact list but doesn't show that (just "username") on the icon view unless I'd manually added them. So it wasn't stripping service names, I hadn't added them.

Still puzzled about why Facebook wasn't transferred.

I have found Authy to be reliable and I like having the TOTP codes on multiple devices. I have a powered-off iPhone at a friend's as one way to access my codes. I don't like the apathy that Twilio has shown it and I don't like the inability to export.

My neighbor the surgeon has one, along with a Porsche Boxster. He seems happy with it but he has a choice of what to drive.

For me, it's too big. I'm charging on a 120V circuit as we slowly move to the new house, which has a 240V EV charger. That works OK for my Chevy Bolt EUV but the Lightning would need a lot more time on the outlet.

There are devices on Amazon that combine two 120V plugs into one "240V" outlet that's supposed to charge faster but I would be concerned about it burning my garage down.

If they were making a Maverick-sized EV truck, I would be a lot more interested than in the Lightning.

A neighbor has a Rivian 1T. That's more the size I'd like, except it's wider than my Honda Odyssey mini-van.

There are definitely trade-offs with an EV right now. My wife was concerned about taking the Bolt into Olympic National Park. I did several hours of research on where to charge and things worked out fine. That still meant there were times where I was watching and waiting for the shared 240V connectors in the park to open up.

I used this and it worked very well. Not perfectly.

Because Authy doesn't have icons for a lot of services, I stored info as twitter:username, google:username, etc. The script dropped about the service name on about 10 of those, just showing the username.

I "imported" the list of QR codes into 2FAS by using my iPhone's camera. Where there wasn't a service, it would say "Service 1", "Service 2", etc.

I then went back through with 2FAS on one device and Authy on another, matching the "Service 1" to "Bubble", for example, because the TOTP codes were the same.

The one service that didn't seem to transfer was Facebook, which I have in Authy but didn't show up in the QR code list.

Several codes in Authy were duplicates, meaning that service:username was the same. 2FAS asked if I wanted to overwrite them. #1, I don't think Authy should allow the same string more than once and #2, again, a simple alphabetization would make maintaining and using Authy more agreeable.

I use iCloud Keychain because I use a Mac, iPad, and iPhone.

I use Authy with Face ID protecting the entire app on my phone. I don't use the Desktop app because it won't use Touch ID, meaning I have to type in a long master password.

I don't see an attack as likely to happen (I own no Bitcoin, not a billionaire, not in charge of anyone else's secrets) but if there was a flaw that let somebody access the passwords on my Mac or iPhone, they'd still need the 2FA codes from my phone. I think that's more likely to happen on the Mac because I do have apps downloaded from somewhere else besides Apple's App Store.

My guess is that most of the people who worked on Authy have fallen by the wayside after the Twilio acquisition. It's annoying every time I have to search the boxes on my phone or the list on my watch: can't we please have alphabetization?

I'm moving from Portland to McMinnville in a couple of months. Price of kwh goes from $.1945/kwh to about $.0720. I've noticed that McMinnville Water & Light doesn't help pay for EV connections, etc. compared to Portland General Electric but at almost 1/3rd the cost, they probably don't need to.

MW&L is community-owned, PGE is traded on the NYSE. They both buy a ton of hydro from the Bonneville Power Administration.

https://findenergy.com/providers/mcminnville-water-and-light... gives an average. Actual per kwh rate is cheaper but there's a $16.10 customer charge to have an account. https://www.mc-power.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/pdf/ra...

https://portlandgeneral.com/about/info/pricing-plans

I've been driving a Chevrolet Bolt EUV since mine was delivered in April, 2023. For the first six weeks, I avoided One-Pedal Driving since I thought it might impair me driving a regular car.

I switched to using OPD and I can't imagine going back. When I was younger, I drove only manual transmission cars and liked the feeling of being integrated with the car that shifting gears gave me. In the US, that's left hand on the wheel, right hand on the gear knob, left foot on the clutch, and right foot on the gas or brake.

At the time, I believed that only people using a manual were "drivers", everybody else was a "steerer". OPD only uses one foot and one or two hands on the wheel but for me, the feeling is somewhat similar to the manual as the car reacts quickly to my right foot.

I use adaptive cruise control a lot, even on city streets. My ICE cars would not let me set cruise control below 25MPH but the Bolt lets me set it at anything I want. That (presumably) gets me around the issue of not being able to coast - on cruise control, the car will coast when it wants, accelerates when it wants, use re-gen when it wants.

We have an Amazon-branded Chase card that gets 2% back on Amazon purchases if you're not a Prime member. There's no annual fee for the card.

If you are a Prime member, it's 5% back. $139 is the annual fee for Prime. $139/3% difference = $4633.33

Somewhat to my surprise, we spent about $3700 on Amazon this past year, meaning $139-$111 or Amazon Prime cost us $28.

I bought a Chevrolet Bolt EUV to replace the Honda Odyssey van I had. I'm consistently pleased with how I'm able to fit into parking spaces that other people cannot. 95% of the time it's just me, 4% it's me and my wife, the rest are when my children are home from college.

I do wish that the Bolt charged faster. My 200 miles (charging up to 80% of the battery capacity) of range in warmer months is now 150 miles but this has been an issue (meaning I had to fast charge to get home) only once so far this winter.

I miss the smoother ride (the van had a much longer wheelbase) of the van over speed bumps, even at slow speeds. But my only interest in a bigger car would be to protect myself in the case of a collision with a Ford Lightning or similarly-sized vehicle.

My daughters take FlixBus up from/down to Corvallis (Oregon State) and Eugene (U of Oregon) and the stop is a couple of blocks north of Union Station, as you say.

I took a different bus to Eugene, The Point, where you buy tickets from Amtrak but the bus is run by a different company. The bus boards right outside Union Station in Portland. The nice thing for me was that I able to show a ticket for that day to the two security guards and was able to use the restroom. I'm not sure I could have talked them into it otherwise. I was dropped off at the Eugene Amtrak station where there weren't any security guards.

I see restroom access as a competitive advantage but The Point only goes up and down I-5 so it's limited in appeal.

https://www.oregon-point.com/

$200/$65.89 = 3 packs of 24 AA batteries

Nest smoke detectors take 6 batteries each https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9297548?hl=en#:....

72 batteries / 6 batteries/device = approximately 12 smoke detectors (could be 9, 10, or 11)

We have 6 First Alert smoke detectors that are connected together but don't use WiFi. There's 1 in each bedroom and a couple left over for key places.

Using 12 smoke detectors is being very careful to cover every space or a big house. Or both.

And itself, as in The Civil War.

There are. And you hardly ever see them. On the rare times I was given a modern dollar coin in change, the cashier usually apologized for giving it to me because most Americans don't want them.

Back in the day, I drove manual transmission cars and said that only people with manual transmissions were "drivers", anyone with an automatic was just a "steerer".

I now drive a Bolt EUV with one pedal driving, meaning that if I lift up on the accelerator pedal, it starts regenerative braking. It's a lot less complicated than using a stick but it's almost as fun.

Driving a regular car without one pedal driving now seems dangerous because the car keeps coasting when I lift my foot off the pedal instead of slowing down.

I also use adaptive cruise control a lot so that the car is speeding up and slowing down as the car in front does. It really reduces the stress of bumper-to-bumper driving.

That's a fun anecdote. I referee high school and youth wrestling and there are several coaches who are paraplegic or quadriplegic because of neck or spinal injuries they got wrestling. I assume there are other injured people who didn't want to have anything to do with the sport after their injury.

In Oregon, there are two metro areas (Portland and Medford) where vehicles must be tested because of air pollution concerns. If you have a pre-2005 vehicle, I'm pretty sure they still use a measuring device to see how many pollutants your car generates. For model year 2005 and later, they hook their computer to your car's OBDII port and ask the car's computer how it's feeling. If the computer says "fine", they pass you and you can renew your registration.

Comparatively recently, they let mechanics and quick change oil places do the test for 2005 and later cars, giving them the option of charging a fee for it.

Oregon doesn't have vehicle safety inspections but it doesn't seem unreasonable that I could go to the official DEQ or DMV locations if I wanted to have my mileage inspected or maybe pay Jiffy Lube a bit extra because they're closer and their hours are more convenient.

The issue with that is that, though, is the same problem with taxes: many (most?) people aren't going to want to come up with the money to pay their mileage bill on the spot. There don't seem to be great answers for that.

Oregon has a pilot program where they put a device in your car and charge your credit card 1.9 cents per mile. https://www.myorego.org I'm sure that's what they'd like to have people do but I don't know how many people want to do that.

I do. I have a Bolt EUV and turn on SuperCruise (hands-off but only on divided freeways) when I can, adaptive cruise control when I can't.

The car handles speeding up and slowing down for me based on what the car in front is doing. I just have to steer. I know that jumping lanes is not going to get me there much sooner but it's hard to resist "competing" to get there first.

I had a similar problem at probably a similar age. Turned out that it was an enlarged prostate. Had surgery and things are much better now. The urologist said he typically saw it with men 10 years older.

One bad side effect was that urine was being held in my kidneys, damaging them. So I'd urge you to get it checked out sooner rather than later.

I've been driving a 2005 Honda Odyssey van for 18 years. It has excellent visibility out the back.

My wife has a 2015 Mazda CX-5. Poor visibility out the back but it has a fair backup camera.

In May, 2018 every car was required to have a backup camera. [0] It feels like car manufacturers don't even consider visibility out the back anymore since they can rely on the camera.

For a while I drove a Jaguar, which had the leaping Jaguar hood ornament. Those were prohibited in Europe and manufacturers moved away from them. [1]

Years ago, I read that hoods were required to be higher (which blocks vision in front of the vehicle) to form a crumple zone. The idea was that a pedestrian would be tossed up in the air, land on the hood, and it would give rather than having the solid engine underneath. [2]

So there are definitely some governmental reasons why manufacturers do what they do. Thicker pillars protect passengers but reduce visibility. Etc. And most customers want bigger cars.

[0] https://www.autoinsurance.org/are-backup-cameras-required-on...

[1] https://magazine.northeast.aaa.com/daily/life/cars-trucks/au....

[2] https://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/12/07/while-other-countries...

I've never heard of armored carp. Googling for it leads to info on Breath of the Wild or Zelda Tears of the Kingdom.

Finally, 35 or 45 entries down I found a reference to an armored catfish. https://a-z-animals.com/animals/armored-catfish/pictures/ I hadn't heard of that, either, but I wonder if that's what you mean.

It seems like large scale renewables are done by a large outside crew that comes in and gets things going as fast as possible.

That might be the only way wind can be done because of the size.

But for solar, it seems like there could be a local crew that installs a row of panels every day. Or week.

Currently the landowner gets rent, the area gets taxes but the locals don’t see much from renewables. Truck in racks and panels a month ahead of when they’re needed. Try agrivoltaics.

The advice for people with special needs seems to be that the family should move to the biggest city they can. The reason is that those schools will have the best access to the relevant educators and the budget for the district will be enormous.

You'd think so but every Democrat voted for it and every Republican didn't.

None of the US social media companies are allowed in China.

It seems appropriate that a Chinese social media company would not be allowed in the US.

Meta and X and Alphabet all would be in favor of that, sure, but that doesn't mean it's unfair.

I now "own" that number and can port it out of Google if I wanted to. That was important to me in case they ever decide to shut down Google Voice.

I don't see how Google makes money on Google Voice, which makes wary of them shutting it down some day.

You can pay $20 to Google to own a number. When we disconnected our landline, I replaced it with a Google Voice number connected to our wireless phone setup. It gets very little use now but is nice for automated calls from the school telling us a kid was late, schools are closed because of snow, etc.

I needed to get from Portland to Eugene. In Oregon, there's a bus service that's paid with some state funding that goes from train station parking lot to train station parking lot. I wanted to use the restroom at Union Station in Portland and the security guard required me to show him that I had a valid ticket to stay in the building.

So it was kind of like what you are suggesting.

5 to 24 months according to this site: https://rav4resource.com/rav4-prime-availability/#:~:text=Ho...

I was looking at plug-in hybrids and ran across a reference to people having to wait 2 years for a RAV4 Prime.

I would have said that Japan was not great for solar but surprisingly (to me) they have almost 20X more solar energy produced than wind.

Renewable sources of electricity would seem to be solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, biomass, and nuclear. According to https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/japan-can-achieve-90... 24% of their energy is renewable today and they're planning on significantly boosting nuclear.

76% of their energy comes from gas and oil from other countries. Toyota and other Japanese manufacturers seemed to focus on their domestic market, meaning hybrids or ICE vehicles instead of EVs. Electric vehicles are becoming drastically more popular in the US and Europe.

Toyota talks about how the battery requirements of 1 EV could be used for a dozen hybrids. And they're right. But it's also besides the point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Japan