thurstylark

@thurstylark@lemm.ee

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Life saving hurricane info locked behind a paywall⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  To be fair, free broadcast tv and radio is still a thing, and they are an integral part of the US’s disaster alert system. With the right equipment (read: basic cheap radio available almost everywhere), you can still listen to weather information (both general and severe) directly from the horse’s mouth 24/7 for free.

  In a disaster situation, these services will still stand because they require less infrastructure per person reached than is required to deliver high-speed internet to the same number of people.

  These services still exist, and will continue to, but the knowledge of them has atrophyed from disuse. They won’t go away, they’ve just been replaced in general usage because of the convenience that the internet provides us.

  TL;DR: Get you a weather radio, get free weather for the life of the equipment. Even if it’s not your daily driver, get one anyways, because you’ll be able to hear the most relevant info in the worst situation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you set up wake up alarm and not miss it ?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  1. Set even more alarms. Annoy yourself into being awake. Identify when you want to be awake, and start your first alarms at that time. Increase frequency as you approach the time you need to be awake. Make your wake up time harder to ignore.

  2. Involve multiple senses. Sound alone isn’t doing it? Add sight, touch, taste, or smell to your alarm regimen. There are several products that can do these kinds of things. For example, I have Home Assistant turn on my room lights to full when my phone alarm goes off, and I could easily add a diffuser, or a vibrator under my mattress. Bonus points if it takes multiple steps to reset your alarm. Which leads me to…

  3. Increase alarm reset difficulty. The more you have to conciously engage your brain to reset your room to sleep mode, the harder it will be for your brain to automate the snooze button. Put your phone across the room, use an app that continues to scream until you scan a QR code in another room or solve math problems, make a deal with your partner that they get to spray you with cold water unless you correctly answer these riddles three, anything. Make it difficult for your brain to remain in sleep mode when your alarm goes off.

  4. Enlist the humans in your life to help. Ask, cajole, or haggle with your parent, partner, sibling, roommate, friend, or whoever else you’ve got available to help you wake up. Be it pleasurable reward or punishing annoyance, whatever they can do that is hard to ignore and can get you going will be better than one phone screaming into the void.

  5. #4 part 2: Involve medical professionals. Sleep is a process that involves your body, and when your body isn’t working as you expect, you take it to the Body Shop. If nothing is working, talk to your doctor about your struggles with waking up when you want. They can help you narrow down the root cause and supply treatment if necessary. This treatment can range from sleep hygene coaching, to OTC medication recommendations, to prescription medication addition or adjustments, or even doing a whole-ass inpatient sleep study to figure out what’s going on. If nothing else is working, present your problem to a licensed Professional Human Animal Mechanic.

  6. Don’t give up. This is a problem that can be addressed. It may take adjustments to your life that are unusual or unpleasant, but remember that, just like exercise, you are trading one unsustainable unpleasantness (i.e.: employment problems due to chronic tardiness), for another sustainable unpleasantness (i.e.: going to bed earlier, or changing your sleep environment)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨People on Tik Tok peddling these scams⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You can even find radioactive shit sold on Amazon as health products. So radioactive, that it can incur the wrath of federal agencies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tumblr followers⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I see we have a volunteer

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Walmart's use of digital price tags signal the future of retail shopping, but consumers are worried⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the main concern is that this is a step towards normalizing extremely frequent price changes, a la Uber surge pricing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Knife vs. Gun Control?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The arbitrarity of some states’ knife laws is also a problem. I don’t remember which state (OK pre ~2015 law updates perhaps?), but I read about one that had few carry restrictions below a certain blade size (somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 inches, IIRC), and if you’re caught carrying one over the limit, you basically have to give a specific purpose for having it. Assuming your case goes to trial, this means it’s more or less up to the judge to determine if your use was valid, which is juuuuuuuussst flexible enough to persecute the “right” people. (assuming I’m remembering correctly that this was in Oklahoma, that would be Native Americans)

  Switching gears; Some More News had a pretty comprehensive video about moral panics, which also includes some history on switchblades in particular, for those interested.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Every company should be owned by its employees⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, this is prime !techtakes@awful.systems material right here

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Congressman Gaetz: "Robots should not be subject to Free Speech" (I'm Not a Robot)⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  See: Weird Al’s polka medleys.

  He’s got years of this under his belt. His whole career is based on this.

  I think There I Ruined It is going to be fine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨To bad we never did give electoral reform a try before The Fall⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Is it common? That depends on your context. Since your particular context includes an internet connection, literacy, and living in a situation with the means to reserve space for a child that isn’t home full-time, I feel pretty confident in my estimation that it’s probably not common.

  Is it harmful? No. Honestly, I think it’s pretty sweet. My only advice is to not let it stray into forbidden territory, but you seem to already have a pretty good grasp of where the line is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are diabetic test strips made of?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think this might be a “yes, but no” kind of thing.

  Yes, these are test strips. Yes, they change color to indicate a reading. Yes, they use chemical reactions to cause that color change.

  AFAIK: No, these aren’t for testing blood. No, these don’t seem to be for consumption by an electronic meter. And no, I don’t think this is what OP was asking about.

  Like, there’s probably some good info, but not for this thread specifically :P

  Source: Pulling it straight out of my ass, but it is informed by my limited experience with medical test equipment, and much less limited experience with electronics.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are business cards still a thing?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, random NFC tags, I can understand. But, isn’t advising someone to avoid QR codes obsolete by now? It was a pretty worthwhile attack vector at one point, but nowadays most phones will ask “Do you want to <handle> <contents in full>?” before actually doing anything with it…

  Although, now that I think about it, it is best practice to advise to the lowest common denominator… Sometimes I overestimate users’ ability to avoid doing stupid things…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fragmented thinking is a bigger threat to flow state than interruptions⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  laughs in neurodivergent

  Mmhmm… Mmhmm! I know some of these words!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I wish to give this many fucks⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  DIDYOUPUTYORNAYMEINTHEGOBLETOFIYAH

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do we have to do the health insurance company's job for them?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They get paid when the least amount of people they insure use their services. They’re not incentivized to help those they’ve insured. The less they have to pay out to providers, the better the executive bonuses. Thus, they are diligent in collecting premiums, but can just sit on their hands when it comes to paying out.

  The more the system denies and delays a claim, the fewer insured people are willing or able to put themselves through the bureaucracy gauntlet, the fewer pay outs.

  They’re not in the business of insurance, they’re in the business of making money from the business of insurance. It’s over-complicated on purpose.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's Not About The Nail⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Protip for those of us that have trouble with telling the difference:

  Do you want a solution, or support?

  If you struggle with this enough that your partner has taken issue with it, this will show that you’re trying, and that you want to help, even if you don’t know what to do. Can’t express how much this has helped me.

  And if the response you get is something along the lines of “You should just know!” Run.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please help!⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Or is in central Arkansas…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is the 'rise of retail theft' problem in America overblown?⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  And if you see someone shoplift food/formula then no, the absolute fuck you didn’t.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨He thought it was a sausage on a stick..⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Me want plant corndog delight

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why aren't motherboards mostly USB-C by now? (2021)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  There are multiple decades worth of electronics and accessories that were built with USB-A that are still perfectly usable and up to date. Removing that option would require buying and keeping track of several adapters to use things that were perfectly usable one generation ago, but now are not, or replacing them with USB-C versions, which is costly and unnecessary.

  Speaking as someone with IT experience, both of those issues mean the idea is a non-starter from a user perspective. From an IT support perspective, it’s a non-starter because nobody wants to deal with users bitching and moaning about having to update to a new standard any sooner than is absolutely necessary.

  Thus: this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Welcome to the internet...⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a song by Bo Burnham from his Netflix special “Inside”, so it’s good enough for them to stream :P

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨America's Toxic Food System | Some More News⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  He’s also got to be some non-zero percentage of cream corn at this point, right?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a way I can force my garage open from the outside?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  As far as I’m concerned, not knowing the difference falls under the “not qualified” part of my earlier statement.

  You happen to know what you’ve got, and what you’re doing? Go for it. More power to you.

  Any shadow of doubt? Put the tools down, get someone who knows what they’re doing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a way I can force my garage open from the outside?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Also worth mentioning: if you fuck up the door trying to get into it,

  #DO NOT ATTEMPT TO FIX A GARAGE DOOR YOURSELF!

  Light percussive maintenance to bend a panel back into shape is one thing, but never ever try to take one apart if you aren’t qualified. There are dangerous springs under tension that can and will kill you.

  Get a professional