I recently started Postcrossing. 5 sent, with 2 traveling to Russia and China (from the US, it's been ~40+ days, I figured those 2 would take a while, but we will see if they get delivered!)
So far I've gotten 2 from Taiwan, and 1 from Germany and Belgium.
I'm excited to find my next stash of cards to send out! It really is such a wholesome activity.
I've been sending postcards to a list of ~15 local friend and family for the last couple years. I travel a lot for work so have a lot to send. I get so few responses, only 2 people have ever replied, and one of those was some random person I met on Discord. I really wish more people would send mail. My mom will occasionally text me to say she liked the card, but she never seems to get the hint that I'd super appreciate a physical response even if it's some scribbles on notebook paper in an envelope. I teared up a little bit when I got my first postcrossing card.
I get all my 2FA through SMS or a Yubikey. It took a bit of wrangling from corporate IT, but it was "Get my yubikey or SMS working or buy me a company phone and pay for service that I won't use for anything else"
I never really did a lot of banking on my phone before, but it really wasn't that hard to let that go. I'd say the biggest hangup is not having Venmo or something for splitting bills with friends, yard-sales, etc, but I've started carrying some amount of cash again for those instances and it's worked out alright.
Been daily driving a dumbphone since 2023. Yes it takes a bit of work, but it's so SO worth it.
I would have had no idea if it weren't for this post. It isn't displayed or acknowledged ANYWHERE on any page, through 3 or 4 pages of "Are you SURE you want to delete your account? You could pay us $5 per month in a different way to pay for 1TB of 'cold storage' instead? How does that sound?"
Only once you get to the final page of account deletion does it give you a single link that says "Request data download" or something.
I had gone through a whole process probably 2 years ago now to "recover" my account that I lost the original email and forgot the password. I eventually got into the account before they paywalled it, and procrastinated downloading everything because I couldn't find a good way to do it in bulk.
Interestingly, you can request the download, and then just NOT delete your account, which is what I plan on doing out of spite. My 81MB of ~600 cringe avatar edits from Gaiaonline circa 2007 will forever take up that tiny space on their servers as they hope and pray that one day I might toss them $5.
I saw the "Get $50 off!" and thought "Oh cool, maybe I could get this for $150!" then checked the actual page and saw $499... absolutely not.
Also the whole store page just feels off. The weird mix of "beige" and furtiger-aero-esque imagery is confusing, and my gut hunch is that there's some AI images here. I understand they're trying to appeal to 2 different nostalgias, but it just doesn't mix. And for something allegedly releasing at the end of this month, there's a disappointing lack of images of actual devices.
The "founders edition" being gold plated just seems kinda tone deaf? There was recently a different controversial gold phone that I am immediately thinking about and I don't think that connection should really exist. $140 more for gold plating?
And their feature comparison down at the bottom has the Lightphone 3 with red X's for "swappable battery and back cover" and "blocks social media", which are definitely both features of the LP3? Unless you want to be pedantic and say that the LP3 doesn't block social media because you can modify it in an unauthorized way to allow installing Android apps, but I'd be willing to bet you'll be able to do the same with this Commodore phone) And they add an extra $40 to the MSRP to the other devices to account for the "value" of the headphones included with the commodore phone? And on that note, what's the line "*Earphones sold separately – price includes $40 headset comparable to Light Phone III & Callback" mean? Why's the LP3 in that line? It doesn't include headphones. (I'm just picking on this in particular because I own a LP3 and have direct experience with it)
I saw the original post first and thought it looked fishy so wanted to see what the comments looked like. My muscle memory for immediately clicking the last link on the right under the post to check out the comments just hid the post, and I figured nothing of value was lost and moved on (to this post which was right underneath it).
This is only tangentially related to early high-quality materials, but since I'm already strolling down memory lane: My dad used to work as an after-hours maintenance tech at a graphic imaging company. For several years my mom worked days and my dad worked nights. Occasionally, my brother and I would get to go to work with either parent to give the other a break from watching us every day.
Going to work with dad was fun. Somehow he determined we wouldn't be able to do any harm, and let us sit at some of the editing stations (Macintosh Quadras of some type, iirc) and mess around in Photoshop (I think version 5.0 or 6.0?). Of course we got to digging through the files. One of them had a couple folders of some pin-up photoshoots. Incredibly high-resolution scans displayed proudly on a 20" Applevision CRT rivaling the size of our home television. Photos that would have taken an hour to download over the web if you could even find a place hosting them. We were too young to really appreciate it, but thinking back, that's an experience I'd be willing to bet none of my peers had.
There was also a folder of promotional monster truck material and some photoshoots from car shows. We were definitely more interested in those.
Sitting in that warm cramped room surrounded by 8 workstations with TENS of gigabytes of spinning rust will forever be a core memory. I miss the old HDD sound.
I actually had to go check to make sure the DC did originally have a modem before posting. I've been dabbling in Dreamcast modding the last couple of years, and the only network adapter that came to mind was the broadband one which, colored my childhood memories a bit. I remember there being a very specific reason we couldn't get the DC online, and "not having a long enough ethernet cable" definitely wasn't it.
It's funny that this was my first thought, too. I am sure game console browsers were an entry point for whole generations of kids.
Mine WOULD have been through the Dreamcast, but because my parents were early adopters of Broadband internet, we never had a dial-up connection to hook the modem up to.
I did a bit of curious searching on the family PC, but one time I forgot to wipe the history, and the game was up. The first thing with a web browser that was "mine" was the PSP in high school, and I even had a special second memory card (512MB) that I would save things to that I'd take it out and hide it in a crevice in my bedframe when I was done.
That hit me, too, specifically thinking about my current gas/electricity provider. I have not heard one single piece of positive feedback from the public, and there's only ever problems. I feel like that's a pretty universal experience here. Even outside the scope of websites, it holds so very true.
Personal anecdote: Recently they were updating everyone to "smart meters" on the gas lines. They needed me to be home so they could enter my apartment and bleed the gas out of the line by turning on the stove prior to replacing the meter. I played phone tag with them for 6 months, setting up countless appointments, and nobody ever showed up, the meter remains un-upgraded. At the same time, I have received weekly phone calls and monthly physical letters stating that if I don't upgrade the meter, my gas will be shut off.
I just moved, so the new tenant will have to deal with it now.
I am notoriously "bad" at texting. My phone's on silent almost 95% of the time, I don't even have a smartphone so the only way to get to me wirelessly is to call or text.
I got really into sending mail last year, specifically postcards.
I have a list of ~10 people I would consider "close", immediate family and good friends, and 5 or 6 more tertiary contacts. I travel fairly frequently, so I had plenty of opportunities for sending postcards. I send cards for obscure holidays just because. The physical process of hand-writing messages is so therapeutic for me. I've probably sent ~250 postcards in the last year and a half.
I have received... 3 physical responses. It has been extremely disappointing, but I continue to send mail because I enjoy the process of writing the cards, and the knowledge that people probably appreciate the mail makes me feel good, so at least I get a little out of it myself.
My mom will occasionally text to say she liked the postcard, but has never bothered to send one back to me.
I would be delighted if more people chose to communicate slowly.
I think also to a degree, even if someone knows those other water use figures, it's easy to see an intrinsic value to the community from those sources. Many people do not see much value in pushing AI to such a degree where all this new compute is required, and others see a negative impact from this activity. It's much easier to argue against something you feel is wrong or bad than something that is arguably crucial for day-to-day life like electricity and staple crops.
I somehow hadn't even considered Bluetooth as an option when I read the headline, I immediately thought about INFILTRATING via audio, which also sounds insanely cool, but I couldn't possibly wrap my head around how an audio circuit would have to be set up and connected back to the cpu to pull that off.
Exfiltrating via audio also brings to mind one of those devices I really wanted to build ~20 years ago that can listen to the inside of a room by bouncing a laser beam off a window. Van pulls up in front of your house, pushes malicious code via bluetooth to speaker, which starts shrieking data it stole from the host that's then picked up by the vibrations it emparts on a window by a laser beam. Boom, crypto wallet stolen, or something... you could probably put that in a movie.
I have always preferred some kind of physical calculator for doing calculations. I never need to do excruciatingly complex math, but I have a cherished TI-34 from the early 90's that I have dragged through college and 3 jobs. Full scientific calculator function with 0 batteries, it runs just on its tiny solar panel and the soul-sucking fluorescent office lighting, which is the one feature that keeps me clung to this particular model.
"You can just make it type words, what's the risk in that?"
Makes you wonder what other peripheral companies out there are also operating with seemingly no security team. There must be other vulnerabilities like this just waiting to be discovered.
My brother was awoken one morning at 2am because some neighborhood kids connected to his bluetooth speaker and blasted fart sounds on loop at max volume, and that's literally only the absolute tippy top of the malicious bluetooth use iceberg.
I really like these. I went through a phase a couple years ago where I got really into cooking new fancy recipes, and having to scroll around on recipe pages, or try and read my own chicken scratch notes or understand the context I was trying to imply when I wrote the notes weeks ago was a struggle.
Having everything more or less right there in front of your face seems really nice.
And I don't know why, but "Beans (green)" is really tickling my funny bone.
I had to sit through a ~45 minute meeting once where an electrician and his boss sat and presented literal chat screenshots to justify their positions opposing or agreeing with a repair I requested.
I had specified some high-temperature electrical components to repair a broken part of a high-temperature circuit, placed the PO, received the parts, and gave them to one of our electricians with a work order. I did the research myself sans AI, read data sheets, investigated alternative materials, etc.
The electrician asked chatgpt "Will PEEK shrink tubing survive 400*F?" because apparently he doesn't trust me, and chatGPT told him no. He complained to his boss who immediately asked chatGPT the same question, and it told him yes it was fine.
Squarely within the top 3 most exhausting meetings of my career.
So far I've gotten 2 from Taiwan, and 1 from Germany and Belgium.
I'm excited to find my next stash of cards to send out! It really is such a wholesome activity.
I've been sending postcards to a list of ~15 local friend and family for the last couple years. I travel a lot for work so have a lot to send. I get so few responses, only 2 people have ever replied, and one of those was some random person I met on Discord. I really wish more people would send mail. My mom will occasionally text me to say she liked the card, but she never seems to get the hint that I'd super appreciate a physical response even if it's some scribbles on notebook paper in an envelope. I teared up a little bit when I got my first postcrossing card.