isosphere

I like this idea! There might be an increased danger of a battery explosion: it'll be near bright sunlight, away from where people will see it, with an old battery. I wonder if there are battery diagnostics that could provide an early warning?

I'm sure most of us have a fistful of old phones somewhere, the idea of using them for something is appealing.

My guess is their terminal got messed up with a mess of control characters in the output of a command. If true, running tput reset would fix it.

Noticing a lot of similarities with vi! Happy to have had that tour, though I'm not sure I've encountered a system without vi or nano yet.

E: I have since discovered that the default mail program accepts ed commands as described here, such as p$ to print the last mail

the cheeto of damacles swings, and we fear it not

if you have a brokerage account, you may be able to sell USD for your target currency in it. you could do this slowly over time.

if you can't do that, you might be able to buy an ETF that tracks your target country's stock market, but some of these are "currency hedged" and in this case you wouldn't want that. the ETF would have a fee (MER) that is worth looking up. 1% is high.

tl;dr: it sounds like you want to hedge currency risk and there are products for that, but it requires a brokerage account and some decipline, ymmv

i've been too plugged-in to trump news. i've banned myself from my primary source of that unhappy chaos, and will get it from a news outlet instead which is much slower and less ragey

i've gotten into audiobooks again, and that has done a lot to lift my spirits. i've plowed through the lord of the rings and am now listening to the silmarillion. i've found the silmarillion difficult to read, but much more accessible as an audiobook - and it's giving me a deeper appreciation of the lord of the rings

eucatastrophe, where art thou?

if i did two big social things in a week like that i would be pretty burnt out and possibly snippy with people. i'd need a bit of solo time to recharge before i could wear my social mask again

the statement by your friend here looks unkind without context

somehow this was required to switch me from "buy canadian" to "sell american" and i am ashamed it took so long

Same, workspaces are great!

Exhibit A: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/firefox-deletes-promise-to-never-sell-personal-data-asks-users-not-to-panic/

Exhibit B: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/firefox/

When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.

I don't agree to this as written; and I am not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt given Exhibit A. I think an argument could be made that selling my data to advertisers would help me "experience" and "interact" with online content. Perhaps it would be a difficult argument, perhaps not. I think skepticism is warranted.

Firefox has struggled to find a profitable business model outside of Google paying to be the default search engine, and it looks like these changes are a pivot to address this. I don't think it will be good for users.

It's still Firefox, so it's the same. I installed uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, no different there.

I’m trying https://zen-browser.app/ now. It’s an open source fork of Firefox. The UI is much changed: vertical tabs and workspaces. It was a bit of a shock, but it’s growing on me.