I was reading your post and I briefly thought you were trying to say it IS expensive, not that it is not. And I was like is this guy on crack, cubing is cheap as chips.

Anywho, glad to see I was wrong. I learned cubing at the same time as my buddies kids did, and while I never got faster than I think a minute and a half? They are well under a minute now, it’s crazy.

I still cube occasionally, but mostly just to fidget while watching TV 🤷‍♂️ Also so I don’t forget how to do it.

This is where I’m at too. I was literally just talking to my friend about this last night.

We both know of several people who feel very strongly that the pandemic is still in full swing. They won’t go out of their house without a mask, they get their groceries delivered, they won’t come to any social events for fear of getting sick, and they only work from home. They’ve basically trapped themselves in their house, out of fear.

In my opinion, which is only an opinion, I think these people have an undiagnosed mental illness. Some sort of excess anxiety that was triggered by the events of lockdown and the early pandemic, and now they are unable to reset back to normal.

I don’t mean that in a bad way or a rude way, I’m legitimately concerned for these people and don’t know how to help.

For your average Joe, COVID is just a reality we live with. I don’t want to get it, but I can’t afford to lock myself down, nor do I think it would be healthy for me mentally if I did.

Nah, totally easy and safe if you have a little experience tinkering with stuff like that.

The fact that he came up with the idea in the first place tells me he’s halfway there. I think he’ll be fine with a little care.

On top of that I’ll sometimes put them entirely to sleep when I’m not using them. You get zero background privileges. I don’t need you running in the background updating crap, when I only need to use you a few times a year.

Bluetooth has a general lag of several milliseconds, tens of milliseconds probably, for me. But it’s close enough to not bug me when watching videos. And I never have cutouts, not unless I walk very far away. Just tonight at work I was using my pixel buds, left my phone on the desk, walked to the bathroom probably 40 or 50 feet away and through at least 3 walls, didn’t miss a beat 🤷‍♂️

My old BT headphones back in the day couldn’t go 20 feet across the room line of sight.

BT has definitely gotten way better in recent years.

Bidet master race.

Got myself one with heated seat, heated water (tankless water heater, not a connection to a hot water tap that takes ages to warm up), and even a hot air dryer thing that I only really use in the winter.

Cost a hundred bucks, best hundred bucks I’ve ever spent, I’ll never go back.

Cold water ones are good too, more practical even, but the water gets cold here in the winter, make your brown eye blue lol

Some people like tinkering. Big Clive has a series of videos on Dubai led bulbs. The government mandates that the bulbs be extra efficient and last extra long, so they are built with more filaments driven at a lower current. They run cooler and last longer. You can do a similar thing with American bulbs if you’re handy with a soldering iron.

Honestly, with how poor many of these things are mass produced, opening them up yourself is practically a personal form of quality control. Whether you modify it or not I bet it’s less likely to die prematurely or burn your house down than those of a regular person who doesn’t open them 🤷‍♂️

Eh it works just fine 🤷‍♂️

I was with you until the minute late thing. That’s crap. Grace period?

Not that I try to be late, I’m 99% early. But I’d be ticked to lose an hour because of couple minutes late on a bad morning. Though I guess some people may need that painful motivation to not abuse the system.

I’d have to check my logs, but it was something like spring or early summer. Honestly though the solar cycle has a much larger effect on propagation, and right now we’re near solar maximum so things are really hopping. At the beginning of COVID we were just starting to come out of solar minimum.

I haven’t been super active lately, so I can’t comment on how often you’d be able to make contact. But with some coordination it’s definitely doable. Especially if you get some decent metal in the air.

You still have US citizenship? You might be able to do your testing in the USA over zoom and use a reciprocal license, though I haven’t looked deeply into it.

I had a similar but very different experience. At the beginning of COVID my buddy and I got our ham radio licenses.

One of my earliest contacts was a guy in Japan, over 6000 miles away! Nothing between us but some wire strung up in a tree, and a couple of radios. Using the ionosphere to bounce our signals around the world.

So. Stinking. Awesome.

I’ve been hooked ever since.

It’s funny because it’s almost the opposite of your story, you were using the amazing new technology and infrastructure to make the trip. These days we take that very infrastructure for granted.

It’s fun to try doing it with as little infrastructure as possible!

As I understand it, there’s a range of sizes that are problematic, from small to micro to nano and beyond.

The problem is the more plastic we make, and the smaller it starts, the easier it is for it to get worn down into smaller and smaller bits that become more problematic for us.

One of the problems with all the macro plastics in the ocean is that that as they get churned up and baked in the UV from the sun, smaller and smaller bits break off and become part of the… Everything.

Micro plastics are so prevalent that they can’t even do proper studies on how harmful it might be to us, because there are no control groups that have no plastics inside their bodies to compare against. Even babies in the womb have plastic in them. You have plastic in you right now, almost a 100% guarantee.

There’s probably more to it than that even, but that’s my understanding of it.

It’s not IN an environment, it’s been towed OUTSIDE the ENVIRONMENT