Gardenia flowers. Not the terrible candle or soap scents that try and fail to imitate it, but the actual live flowers.

Ubiquiti is a pretty good answer, but the airMax line is better for this sort of thing than UniFi. A pair of Nanobeams would be perfect, and standalone without need of an additional controller.

I’ve already been creating a unique email address for nearly every service, for many years. That probably complicates something like Incogni, which is a good point, thanks. It’s also amusing and telling when the phishing emails start coming into equifax@mydomain (true story).

This is a very helpful anecdote, thanks!

Yes! Read a book out loud, preferably to your kids, recording each chapter as a file. Then use m4b-tool to combine all the chapter files into a full audiobook.

They have updated it so that you don’t need to use your phone number as the identifier you share with other people so that they can message you. You can now give out a username and your new contact will not be able to learn your phone number.

As for Signal itself knowing what your phone number is, I don’t see that as much of a problem, because they intentionally don’t know anything useful about you. They publish redacted subpoenas and their responses so you can see just how little data they can provide. They don’t know who your contacts are so there’s no social graph to be drawn.

Signal is actually trying very diligently to pioneer a novel financial model for a sustaining long term. Here’s a lemmy post from a few month ago about a Wired interview with Signal Foundation’s president covering it in some depth (and a current archive link to the article). They seem to be one of the few actually good entities left in a world of surveillance capitalism and pervasive domestic government espionage.

Whether they succeed or not in the long term is certainly still unclear, but I expect they have many years of financial runway remaining.

It’s about the exact combination of extensions you have installed, along with all of the other info that a nosy website can obtain from you (installed fonts, User Agent string including exact version numbers, etc). It doesn’t come down to any one particular piece of info, but every bit adds to the overall picture. Here is a good overview and their main page runs an active test on your browser.

https://flagsforgood.com/pages/about-us

Second this, including buying from Costco. I don’t love the Lorex interface, but they’ve been around for a long time and can’t really compete on the modem Ring-style features so they’re now advertising the privacy benefits of their local storage.

PoE (Power over Ethernet) cameras are the way to go, connecting the camera wires directly to the NVR box, which doesn’t itself need to be connected to your network. The NVR box has a hard drive and an HDMI port. If you do optionally connect it to the network (but just don’t), then their app will facilitate connecting to your box either locally or over the internet so that you can stream your video directly from your hard drive, not their cloud.

If you want it protected against power outages, you just put the NVR on a UPS and you’re done.

Of course, if a burglar finds your NVR and takes it, then all of your footage is gone.

It sure says gal there but based on your annual chart and common billing in the US I’m guessing the actual billing unit is 1 HCF, which is 100 cubic feet or 748 gallons. You could call and ask your utility company to be sure.

Why have you never been able to do it? I set up a full mail system years ago on a Xen/Linux VPS with stuff like Postfix, maildrop, Courier IMAP, a custom set of MySQL tables for aliases and such, and at one point migrated my TLS from CACert to LetsEncrypt. I enjoyed some aspects of the huge pain in the ass that all of that was, and having it work nicely was great. Spinning up a new email alias was easy and free, so I created a new one for damn near every site I interacted with, which later turned into a form of lock in having to continue running my server.

The continual server maintenance was a pain in the ass, requiring me to remember in substantial detail how it all worked so that I could appropriately integrate new things I had to learn like SPF and DMARC. I’m glad to have had some detailed sysadmin experience, but I was so glad in the end to finally migrate away from all that and just pay Fastmail instead.

I still have nearly the same flexibility with Fastmail and my custom domains, but they’re the ones that need to do all the maintenance. I can’t scale across unlimited domains for the same zero marginal cost, but I can make it work for a reasonable price with a few domains and scale arbitrarily within that. I’m sure there are other hosts out there that do a similarly good job, and Fastmail hasn’t been without its own troubles, but it’s been a net win for me.

I don’t recommend running your own server. I won’t do it again. I do recommend building an army of custom aliases all at your own custom domain(s).

Leaders at Allied Universal, which provides security services for 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies, said their phones were “ringing off the hook” on Wednesday with potential clients. Allied covers a wide spectrum of services — including stationing guards outside offices, chauffeuring executives, surveilling their homes and tracking their families.

Protecting a chief executive full time costs roughly $250,000 a year, said Glen Kucera, who runs Allied’s enhanced protection services.

NYT article

You can get tiny rubber hands that each go onto one of your fingers. There are lots of vendors that sell these on Amazon, and presumably many other places. Different skin colors exist.

I’ve also seen even tininer ones that you can put on the first set of hands, so maybe you can find those as well.

Also interesting is the language they used in the email they sent me after I requested account/data deletion:

We received your request to permanently delete your 23andMe account and Personal Information. The following apply when you submit your deletion request:

• If you chose to consent to 23andMe Research by agreeing to an applicable 23andMe Research consent document, any Research involving your Genetic Information or Self-Reported Information that has already been performed or published prior to our receipt of your request will not be reversed, undone, or withdrawn.
• Any samples for which you gave consent to be stored (biobanked) will be discarded.
• 23andMe and the contracted genotyping laboratory will retain your Genetic Information, date of birth, and sex as required for compliance with legal obligations, pursuant to the federal Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments of 1988 and California laboratory regulations.
• 23andMe will retain limited information related to your deletion request, such as your email address and Account Deletion Request Identifier, as necessary to fulfill your request, for the establishment, exercise or defense of legal claims, and as otherwise permitted or required by applicable law.

The first bullet point makes sense - you agreed and they already published something, so too bad. The second bullet is doing the right thing. But those third and fourth bullets sound like they don’t really have to delete anything, and they’ll keep a bunch of data even if you ask them to trash it. I asked them to trash it anyway.

Liquid gels are absolutely faster acting than compressed powder. I buy both generic naproxen pills and name brand Aleve liquid gels so that I have two different available delivery mechanisms (and unit prices) for the same active ingredient, and I choose which to take (or to give my dependents) based on the circumstances at the time of use.

Finish in a day isn’t a great requirement to put alongside “best ever”, as others have already covered. That aside, check out The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. You’ll be surprised by how fun it is to learn about medieval technology development and stone cathedral building techniques when it’s all wrapped up in a gripping narrative.

I got some that were nicely finished bamboo but they didn’t have enough of a sharp edge at the business end to really give a good scratch like the ones from my youth. Fortunately that was easily rectified with a couple seconds on a belt sander.

Dorfman cotton outback hat. It’s an awesome brim for sun protection and staying comfortable. Other than that, 3/4 MIPS bike helmet.

It’s also what the phone number club card has been about for the past few decades. I still type in the public phone number for my local store every time (after noticing that’s what the clerk used one time when I was “having trouble” entering my number on the pin pad). Grocery app on my phone? Hell no.