Admiral Patrick

I’m surprisingly level-headed for being a walking knot of anxiety.

Ask me anything.

Special skills include: Knowing all the “na na na nah nah nah na” parts of the Three’s Company theme.

I also develop Tesseract UI for Lemmy/Sublinks

Avatar by @SatyrSack@feddit.org

  • 374 Posts
  • 2.49K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • Because ban evasion is an everyday occurrence here. Someone gets banned for being a jackass, and 9 times out of 10, they come right back with a brand new account and come in hot with inflammatory posts and a chip on their shoulder.

    Or trolls just troll - spin up new accounts over and over and throw out rage bait or whatever their shtick is just to be a dick.

    Combined with the fact that the fediverse’s growth has been a bit stagnant lately, when a bunch of new accounts suddenly pop up, they’re rightly met with suspicion until they’ve established themselves as being here with good intentions.

    Not saying new accounts should be ostracized, but given the context of the current state of the fediverse, being suspicious of them is warranted.


  • Probably power banks. I pretty much only buy Anker these days because I’ve had too many cheap/no-name ones just fail, turn into spicy pillows, flat-out lie about the capacity, and/or, in one case, actually catch on fire.

    One of my Anker power banks was recalled, and they notified me as well as had the replacement to me within 2 days. And the replacement model was actually nicer than the one I had.

    I guess anything, really, that is part of my everyday carry and has a potential to burst into flames is grounds for paying the “premium” price where there’s good quality control and product support.


  • $150 is about normal these days. The pumps will usually have a little sticker somewhere that list the authorization hold amounts.

    Fun fact: The auth holds used to be $1 way back in the day. But when prepaid debit cards came around, people could have a balance of $1 on them, get $50 worth of gas, and the station wouldn’t be able to charge the actual amount (it would decline for NSF with no way to recover it as with a regular debit/credit card). That’s why the hold amounts are between $75 and $150.

    If you want to avoid the authorization hold, you can either pay cash or pre-pay with a cashier; the latter case will charge only what you pay.


  • Does digital payments made cash wallets obsolete?

    Nope.

    Phones crash, apps screw up, Google arbitrarily decides your phone isn’t “secure”, batteries go dead, cell networks are sometimes unavailable (wallet app requires internet), merchant payment networks occasionally go down, etc.

    I don’t use digital wallets since the only options are Apple and their walled garden or Google who uses every transaction to profile you for targeted ads and deems your phone insecure should you do anything that might keep their eyes out of your life. But even using my “old school” debit card, I still feel much more secure always having some cash on hand for emergencies.





  • One particular spite house in Boston: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinny_House_(Boston)#History

    According to local legend, the structure was built as a “spite house” shortly after the Civil War:

    … two brothers inherited land from their deceased father. While one brother was away serving in the military, the other built a large home, leaving the soldier only a shred of property that he felt certain was too tiny to build on. When the soldier returned, he found his inheritance depleted and built the narrow house to spite his brother by blocking the sunlight and ruining his view.

    Another source states:

    Not much is known about the city’s narrowest house. Legend has it that … its unnamed builder erected it to shut off air and light from the home of a hostile neighbor (also nameless) with whom he had a dispute. … Believed to have been built after 1874