$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.

It’s strange how we’ve moved from mall shopping to online shopping to now AI shopping for us

Well, “we” only did the first move because it was more convenient. The latter is being forced on us.

Any silicon vendors (NVidia, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Realtek, etc) should have open source drivers / firmware. I can’t imagine what, if any, benefits there are to keeping that secret, and it seems logical that sales could/would increase if people were easily able to adapt them for their use cases.

And also the huge reduction in ewaste by being able to keep smartphones up to date or repurpose them without having to spend years painstakingly reverse-engineering binary blobs that only work with ancient kernels.

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

Sadly never came up.

I generally dislike editorialized headlines (when used as post titles) but this is the exception. Nicely played.

I used to work with a guy who was a dead ringer for Bill Bailey both in appearance and personality.

Weird. Other than how it used to choke when there were conflicts (and all uploads stopped until that was fixed) I haven’t had any issues like that. Guess I’m just lucky.

I’ve had pretty good experience with Nextcloud’s instant upload. The only time I’ve had it shit the bed was ages ago when it would occasionally get stuck on a conflict, but that hasn’t happened in a long time. Pretty much all of my image folders (camera/DCIM, Screenshots, Downloads) get synced. The only annoying thing was when apps would suddenly change where they download to and I’d have to reconfigure yet another sync folder, but I can’t really fault NC for that.

Mine is set to upload and keep a local copy and only do a one way sync (phone to NC). Not sure if that causes less issues than a 2 way sync or deleting the local copy after upload?

Hard to say. I’m not sure of the delivery radius that’s allowed here and whether rural food deserts would even be eligible or not. I was just mentioning that ordering (non-perishable) groceries online and having them shipped does have a legit and unfortunate use case.

Back when I lived 45 miles minutes from the closest grocery store, I’d order my non-perishables online and they’d usually come via UPS or FedEx.

This isn’t really the demographic they’re catering to but Food Deserts are a sad reality for many in the US. Being able to order staple food and have them delivered (even if it’s not same day) is often less painful than driving 30-50 miles to the closest grocery store.

You are more than welcome to come and harvest them from my lawn / garden lol. Just be sure to take the roots with you too.

I tried a true dumb phone but was breaking out my laptop too much for everyday tasks (dumb phones these days can do hotspot).

The flip phone I have runs Android 11, so I have the bare minimum necessary chat apps, email, GPS maps, and such. The main draw is that those work well enough, but anything more than that is possible but very frustrating. That’s kind of what the Minimal is about: e.g. yeah, you can watch YouTube videos on it, but you won’t want to.

Then, when the detox period is up and you’re fully off the addiction, you can get the standard phone back.

That’s kinda what I did. I used my flip like a true dumb phone for 30 days as a challenge and then un-dumbed it a little bit back to where only my basic needs were met and nothing more. I assumed I’d have rushed back to my old smartphone, but after breaking a bunch of habits, I found I didn’t really want to. Plus, I really missed T9 texting as weird as that sounds lol.

They Might Be Giants - Istanbul (Not Constantinople)

Yeah the marketing for it was lost on me. I already digitally detoxed last year when I switched to the flip phone I’m currently using, so I ignored the sales pitch and just looked at it from the cool hardware perspective and mostly reasonable price.

Credit where it’s due, though: I tried unsuccessfully to just uninstall the time sink apps from my regular smartphone and always ended up just reinstalling them. It took using a device that couldn’t feasibly run those (plus a weaning-off period) for me to fully let go. Seems like that is what the marketing is trying to target.

I honestly don’t think they’d tell me, but I’d also be interested to know. Fingers crossed they have some stock on hand for the occasional replacement.

It does have a physical keyboard, too. Sadly can’t give it much of a review given the circumstances, but it does have a good feel and seems like it would be pleasant to type on.

Yeah, I have a ticket in with support but haven’t heard back yet. I did ask specifically about the turnaround time for a replacement. Hopefully that’s a reasonable amount of time. I definitely don’t want $400+ tied up until the next batch ships in September.