Chargers have the wattage ratings printed directly on them. And the rating will simply be the maximum that the charger can provide. Wattage is pulled, not pushed. So if you plug your phone into an oversized charger, the phone will only draw what it needs.

Just grab the highest wattage you see, and the phone will pull what it needs.

I’m downvoting specifically because you took the time to return to your comment and ping users with a mention, just to complain about downvotes.

Those are typically paid by weight. Several spammers have gotten envelopes full of gravel because of me.

This is called the corporate carpet bomb. And yes, it is often very effective because the upper management doesn’t like being bugged by small things like this. So they’ll often acquiesce just to get you to go away. And it usually only takes one upper manager to bother. Even if nine of them ignore you, the tenth will tell their underlings “hey, what’s the problem here? Why am I being CC’ed? Just fix whatever it is so I can stop getting emails about it.”

Need a phone charger? Walk into any hotel, say you stayed here a while ago, and accidentally left your phone charger in your room. You’re finally back in town, and decided to swing by to see if they have a lost-and-found box. 99% of the time, they’ll just pull out a cardboard box full of chargers and let you pick one. No questions asked, no follow-up, no verification. They get left behind in hotel rooms all the time, so the hotel’s lost-and-found is almost always full of them.

I used to freelance, and used this all the time when I was between gigs and just needed to chill for a few hours. If I had taken the train downtown and didn’t have my car charger, I’d just find whatever hotel was closest after my gig, and stop there. They’d let me grab a charger, and I’d pop over to a cafe to sit and watch TV/YouTube on my phone for a while. And then when it was time to leave for my next gig, I’d just leave the charger at the cafe for someone else to find later. I didn’t worry about keeping track of them, because I never intended to hold onto them in the first place. My car charging cable is from a hotel. My bedside charging cable is from a hotel. My desk charging cable is from a hotel. I haven’t actually purchased a USB-C cable in literal years.

Vector is amazing for things that potentially need to be resized. I do a lot of scale drawings for work, and I never know if it’s going to be printed on something as small as letter size paper, or blown all the way up to something like a plotter blueprint size print. And working in vector means the gigantic plotter print isn’t blurry, because the drawing isn’t comprised of individual pixels that blur when you zoom them in or out.

It also means I can get extremely fine detail on something that may normally only be tiny on a page. For instance, maybe I have a 50’x50’ room, and I have a small 4 inch object to place in it. On the regular letter paper size, that will basically just be a dot. But I can zoom waaaay in for a detailed image of that object if needed.

Probably USB. Since phones have a USB input, they can take things like USB mic interfaces. Get a 4-input interface, and there ya go.

Depending on the app’s permissions, it may even be able to take inputs from other apps, like Discord for call audio, or whatever app you’re streaming your music on.

How many negative days are logged on your free trial?

Yup. Got my lifetime PlexPass on sale like a decade ago, and it has easily paid for itself a hundred times over. I also run Jellyfin because I prefer the UI, but the security vulnerabilities (and lack of a native TV app on my mother-in-law’s TV) mean it isn’t really suitable for external access. So it’s Plex for the friends and family, and Jellyfin for me. Luckily, they both happily run side-by-side.

AirDrop isn’t open to everyone by default, and hasn’t been for several years now. The default is to only accept AirDrop requests from known contacts. You can manually turn on “From Anyone” mode, but it will automatically revert back to “Contacts Only” after 10 minutes.

Apple was supposedly bullied into making that change during the pandemic, because protestors were using AirDrop to circumvent government censorship during the lockdowns and protests. Because AirDrop works directly between devices, so no amount of internet censorship will block it.

It’s both. Governments have started subpoenaing the push notification servers for data, instead of targeting individual devices. That little pop-in that says who the message was from, and maybe a little bit of the body of the text? Yeah, the push notification server handled that, and the government has access to that server. So any notification you see on your screen, you can be pretty positive that the government has also seen.

But this is about the notification data being stored in a part of the phone that isn’t encrypted. Signal is (or at least claims to be) E2E encrypted, so it shouldn’t be possible for a warrant to get access to the messages in the app. But since the phone is storing those notifications in a separate area (which isn’t encrypted), the warrant was able to read them.

The point is that there are two different attack vectors, and you should harden your device against both.

I work in live theatre, so my perspective is a little skewed. The last one I went to see (instead of working) was The Drowsy Chaperone, a musical within a play.

The concept is that an old (slightly odd, but very welcoming) man is inviting the audience into his house, to listen to an old vinyl broadway recording in his living room. Sort of like a Mr. Rogers Neighborhood episode. As he (and the audience) listens to the record, his imagination blooms and his house transforms into the set for the musical. So the characters in the musical are dancing and singing around his house, while he sits in his armchair (or putters around his room, making tea, serving finger sandwiches, etc) and breaks the fourth wall to add commentary.

It’s a comedy wrapped around a tragedy. The musical is very bright and cheery, but the old man clearly has some eccentricities that begin to show through the cracks as the show progresses. It’s an interesting commentary on the “circus” part of bread and circus, as it explores things like escapism, agoraphobia, and OCD as the man’s happy facade slowly crumbles while the musical progresses (and gets interrupted a few times, which is extremely triggering for him). It becomes clear that he’s only able to maintain his happy public persona for a little while.

As for the last show I actually saw, it was a traditional Indian dance show. I work a lot of those, because traditional Indian dance has a sort of test for their dancers. It’s not a perfect comparison, but many people compare it to a black belt test in karate. Since every dancer has to go through it, there are a lot of them.

Yes. Pets’ worlds are typically extremely small. They only experience what you allow them to. For an indoor cat, that’s basically just the inside of your house, and whatever they can see outside the windows. Dogs are only marginally better, because they get walks and time outside. Why would I essentially restrict them to the inside of my house, and then restrict them even further by disallowing them from sleeping where they want?

My cat is sleeping on my knees as I type this in bed. The dogs can also sleep wherever they want; one prefers his crate (the door stays open so he can come and go) and the other usually prefers the couch or his bed. They’ll sometimes curl up on the bed, but it’s usually during the day when my partner and I aren’t already there.

My coworker (A) had a stroke a few months ago. She is still recovering, but is back at work and doing well. Another coworker (B) casually complimented her cardigan, and then said “hey I think it’s inside-out though?” Coworker A started to take the cardigan off, before coworker B said “April fools” and grinned, expecting a laugh.

Now here’s where the real funny part happened: Coworker A played dumb. She was like “wait what is that? April fools? What does that mean? I don’t know, did I forget it because of the stroke? Is my cardigan actually inside out? Rehab said I was good to dress myself again, but maybe not.” It went on like that while coworker B was desperately backpedaling, trying to both apologize and explain the concept of April fools. She 100% believed that coworker A had forgotten what April fools was because of the stroke.

Then coworker A got a shiteating grin, and went “April fools. I know what it is, I just wanted to play the uno reverse.” Coworker B was absolutely stunned, because she had been in full blown “oh god I just played a prank on a stroke survivor and now I’m the bad guy” spiraling.

No, a machine won’t even contact the pihole if it finds the address in its hosts file. Hosts is step 0 for DNS, so if it finds something there it doesn’t even bother with contacting an external server (like a pihole).

Yeah, rallying against SSL is a weird way to go about it. SSL is one of the biggest and most meaningful changes to come about as a result of the Snowden leaks. The leaks were literally what prompted http to shift towards https instead, because it shined a bright spotlight on how insecure http truly is.

In the short term, it made self-hosting more difficult. But nowadays, with things like nginx and Let’s Encrypt, enabling SSL on your self-hosted site is as simple as selecting a few drop-down boxes, pasting an API key, and automating a cert refresh.

The true “has the potential to gatekeep the entire internet” existential threat is when a company like Meta or Google becomes the authority for things like ID verification or SSO.

Yeah, the lockdown was enlightening. I lived alone through the entire two year shutdown. I still saw coworkers (because I was working for the government and forced to come into the office) but that was the entire extent of my in-person socialization. And I was perfectly content with that. I’d hop on Discord with some friends after work, and would socialize all night long. On the weekends, if I was playing a single player game, I could easily go two and a half days (Friday evening into Monday morning) without saying a single word.

But extroverts lost their goddamned minds. Half of them were power-walking in the overcrowded local park, even though they had never visited the park before. They just wanted an excuse to leave the house. The other half were ripping their houses down to the studs and completely rebuilding the interiors… Because they never spent any time at home until that point, and suddenly small annoyances about their living areas built up to major complaints. Half of them were rallying against masks, just because conservatives were promising a return to normalcy.

FWIW, some become firefighters because they enjoy lighting things on fire. The correlation between firefighters and arsonists is very strong. But even then, nobody (except maybe some cops) has ever seen firefighters roll up to a scene and thought “well my day just got worse.”

I mean, if I was at a bar and trying to relax, I’d consider kicking out whichever cunt decided to put on something stressful like that. Imagine going to a yoga class and insisting that they change their binaural tone background soundscape to death metal instead. If I want to watch the news, I’ll tune into it. I get enough doom and gloom in my daily life, I don’t need it shoved in my face when I’m trying to relax.

This is the big distinction. I think the Harry Potter films are fantastic movies. Not from a critical standpoint, but simply from a “they’re nostalgic and fun to watch, and the music is nice” standpoint.

…Which is why I pirate them. Fuck JKR, she isn’t getting a cent from me.