I was looking for sandals and found these. They’re flip flops with a built in bottle opener, I suppose to make them more…cool? Gadget-y? But it’s on the sole of the shoe.
Someone really didn’t think this design through.
Update: There are some replies at Wandering Shop from people who’ve worn or used these. Apparently there’s another variation with a built-in flask.
GPS navigation options we need:
If I’m trying to get somewhere other than home after work, I’ll use GPS to get an idea of the time remaining and the fastest route. Since I’d rather avoid the freeway during rush hour, it keeps trying to send me on these zigzag paths through residential neighborhoods to avoid backed-up arteries or just avoid busy intersections. I used to follow those routes, but after a while I started noticing other cars ahead of me that were clearly doing the same thing. It’s not just one car being added to that lumpy narrow road with lots of driveways, stop signs, kids on bikes and people taking out the trash. It’s a lot of cars. And of course we’re following the same apps drawing from the same data, so we’re all taking the same side streets, not spread out among all of them.
If there’s a big difference, that’s one thing, but for two or three minutes? What’s the point?
Of course the navigation app seems so testy when I decline to be part of the problem, and it has to keep recalculating…
“I would have done the same” should never be the end of your thought process, but the start of it.
The last time I set up a new computer, I was surprised to find that installing a password manager has become a critical part of getting the system ready to use.
It used to be that you could pick a few unique passwords for critical services like your primary email and banking sites, and reuse some passwords for less important sites, and maybe remember them all. But when so much of what we do happens online in so many places with so many different levels of security (and visibility), the attack surface is huge. Add in how many criminals and others are trying to break into those sites, and it’s no longer safe to reuse passwords.
Why?
If one site gets hacked, and you use the same password at another site, someone will try it just to see if it works.
The only way to protect against that is to use a different password on every site. And unless your online activity is very narrow, chances are you can only memorize a few of them. You can stretch it out with mnemonics like XKCD’s passphrase scheme, but eventually you’re going to have to record them somewhere. Putting it in a text file or spreadsheet is bad, because anything that gets onto your system can read it, but password managers are designed to encrypt them.
You still have to protect the master password on that file, but now you don’t need to worry that when someone finds your old MySpace password, they’ll start buying stuff on one of your shopping accounts, or hijack your Twitter as part of a harassment campaign, or use your email account to send malware to all your friends.
LastPass is a popular one. It’s cloud-based, which makes it convenient to use on multiple devices, but you do have to trust them. If you’d rather not trust your passwords to someone else’s computer, you can go with an offline manager like KeePass, which stores everything locally on your system in an encrypted file.
Update June 2024: I really don’t recommend LastPass these days, so if you’re looking for a fully-online service, I’d suggest looking at alternatives like Bitwarden. I still use a local KeePass vault, synced over an entirely separate cloud account that only ever sees the encrypted form, and use the KeePassXC and KeePass2Android apps and browser extensions on desktops and my phone.
Social media is a mess these days. Most of us follow too many people and organizations to keep up, so we need some way of narrowing it down…but the tools are typically built into each service, which has different priorities about what it wants you to see than you do. As they say, if you’re not paying, you’re the product.
I realized this is why I still prefer Flickr to Instagram: I’m still in control when I browse Flickr. With Instagram, the best I can do is pick from one firehose or another. Flickr has its issues, but I can find stuff there, and the timeline isn’t re-ordered to suit someone else’s priorities.
Ironically, I post more often on Instagram than on Flickr. Because I like Flickr more, I feel like I should take my time & curate my photos better. But I also end up posting many at a time on Flickr, and single photos on Instagram. I don’t feel like I’m spamming if I post twenty pictures to Flickr, but I do if I post that many* to Instagram.
I mentioned this on Mastodon, and my brother remarked that Flickr feels more like “adding to a collection,” while other sites are more “shoveling things at my friends/followers.” That’s true of most social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, even Mastodon are all about now. Going back to look at someone’s history feels like an accident. Or stalking.
On Facebook, it would be really weird to go through someone’s old posts and comment on them. On Flickr, that’s totally normal. If Twitter is like shouting into the void, hoping someone will hear you, Flickr is like building a gallery and hoping someone will visit. When someone finally does,** they’ll see it, and look around. But that scream on Twitter is already fading on the wind.
Especially if Twitter thinks your friends would be more interested in seeing a sponsored post instead.
*Instagram does let you post multi-photo stacks, but the stack only ever appears as a unit. Only the cover photo appears in timelines or searches, and the whole stack shares one description and one set of tags. Flickr lets you group photos into albums however you want, and people (including you) can find any individual photo and go from there to the rest of the album.
**Not that Flickr isn’t subject to the siren call of now either, but the long tail still exists there.
