merryocha

I'm an Amazon driver and we heavily rely on GPS for delivering. We don't just use it for navigating, we also make each delivery inside of a geofence, and the delivery location is recorded and used for future routing. When the GPS says you're a block away from where you are, you're unable to make the delivery without contacting support. I've had days where GPS problems wasted a lot of my time, so I imagine it would be expensive if it happened across an entire region. On the other hand, these kinds of disruptions are already factored into the business model and planned for, so saying it cost an industry X amount of dollars is assuming that the industry was planning for ideal conditions in the first place.

I personally use Fossify Gallery to browse my photos and I just manually back up my photos from time to time by plugging my phone into my PC and copying the entire folder into an Archive folder which I keep organized by year and back up in multiple places. It's an oldschool solution to the problem but it works great for me.

I miss the What.CD forums as well. I learned so much there. What.CD felt like attending a conference full of people from all over, full of ideas and willing to put effort into posts. The successor sites are much smaller and less active and it feels more like visiting a bar full of regulars who all know each other. I still love those sites for the music discovery and I still collect music as a hobby but What.CD's forum was the best forum I've ever been on. I wish someone archived it so I could go back and read some of the old threads.

The problem with platforms like YouTube etc is that the audio is transcoded to a lossy format. Repeatedly transcoding the audio from lossy to lossy degrades the quality. Music needs to be preserved in a lossless format like FLAC which keeps all of the original audio information intact.

When I was a kid I used flashcards to memorize the multiplication tables up to 12 and it allowed me to do very rapid mental math from that point on, and I still can to this day. It was useful for math quizzes and tests in school but it's also useful for life in general. Going up to 16 might be even better.

I use the Livio English Dictionary to look up words when I read on my tablet and I noticed one day that it keeps a search history, and I got an idea to make an Anki flashcard collection consisting of all the words I've needed to look up while reading. Despite being an obsessive reader my entire life I still regularly encounter words I'm not 100% certain about. Reading itself has spaced repetition built right in, assuming you quiz yourself and then follow up with a dictionary.

If you're interested in ants (and even if you're not) I highly recommend the book Journey to the Ants by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson.

I don't think I ever tried this one. I think I tried every keyboard on F-Droid but apparently FUTO isn't in the main F-Droid repo. I'm liking it so far. I'm a swipe typer and on most keyboards the swipe functionality is much worse than GBoard but this one seems to work pretty well. I'm going to try it for a while, thanks for the suggestion!

My biggest obstacle to de-Googling is the GBoard keyboard of all things. There's really no good open source alternative that even comes close.

A book in my collection that I love is The Treasury of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a greatest hits collection from Britannica over the years. It has articles written by many famous names like James Maxwell, T.E. Lawrence, Einstein, JFK, Arthur Koestler, and many more. I love how Britannica articles are written by a single expert, giving the articles a bit of bias, humor, and character.

I noticed recently that there are new "AI Widget" and "Chat Widget" EasyList filters in the uBlock Origin Annoyances filter lists. I'm not sure when they were added but they weren't checked by default for me. They definitely help clear some of the clutter.

I knew exactly what this would be before even clicking it. Someone had to make it!

I was in Chile in 2017 for a census operation and the whole country shut down to conduct the census. It was a pretty big deal while I was there (and also a bit inconvenient because everything was closed). There was a lot of talk about how there had been a previous attempt at conducting the census which had ended up being a huge failure and how getting the 2017 census done right was a point of national pride.

I also worked as a canvasser in 2019 and 2020 for the US census and, while we were about as thorough as you could reasonably get, the whole operation made me somewhat skeptical of official statistics in general. 2020 in particular was a bit of a disaster due to the pandemic and when the statistics were published, a bunch of mainstream news outlets published stories about certain areas experiencing "population decline" and all I could think was that those were actually the areas where the census didn't manage to count everyone.

The problem is that it's being used for things it shouldn't be used for. Everyone these days knows that you shouldn't use a microwave to cook a steak, but I'm sure when it was first invented there were many chefs who tried.

I wish more people paid attention to air quality. I'm a delivery driver and air quality has a noticeable effect on my energy levels throughout the day and also my mood. Slightly rainy days are probably my favorite days to work because no one is outside digging up roads and kicking up tire dust with leaf blowers and the rain seems to clean the air a bit.

uBlock Origin can block these if you check the "Annoyances" filter in the filter list. I think it's disabled by default because it has a higher risk of breaking sites, but I never have a problem. I haven't seen a cookie banner in a long time!