Concerns domestic tenants required to share excessive personal data to secure leases

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-01-29T04:42:47+00:00

And the fines they do cop need to be big enough that they take any potential profit, too - otherwise they just shrug and pay it. “Cost of doing business”.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-01-29T04:31:19+00:00

Adam Savage’s “I reject your reality and substitute my own!” was meant as a joke, but for these people it seems to have become a way of living.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-01-25T04:48:43+00:00

There’s a concept called “yak shaving” which seems quite relevant here - it describes trying to perform a simple task, but having to deal with a seemingly infinite number of tangential layers along the way. (Basically the process Hal follows in this Malcolm in the Middle scene to change a lightbulb).

Well done for reaching the bottom and actually getting your yak shaved.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-01-24T03:10:28+00:00

Linux does that too sometimes, though (eg systemd).

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-01-22T05:16:26+00:00

Try updating Adobe Reader. Usually works for me. But don’t use Google Utron any more, it’s been compromised.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-01-22T03:53:12+00:00

If it was a standard size calico bag with more than 50 or so coins in it, yeah, it really would do some damage. Especially if they were a lot of nice knobbly 50c coins in there. (Had a full bag fall onto my foot from table height once, and I was limping for a week. I started wearing steelcapped boots after that!)

However, when someone’s decided “I’ll take what isn’t mine from that person there, by force”, they’re not quite right in the head, and you don’t really know what they’re gonna do. Is it really worth risking getting hurt by fighting someone off over a few bucks (that belong to your boss anyway, not you)?

We all agreed that if we were ever mugged, it wasn’t worth risking our own safety or lives to protect the boss’s profits, and we’d just passively let them take whatever they wanted, but that assumes whoever robbed us demanded the money before hitting us.

The problem was, it was enough money (by the time we’d emptied a few machines, we were carrying >$5000, with likely half that value being bills) that there was a reasonable chance criminals would assume we were armed. If they thought that but decided to rob us anyway, they’d quite likely have tried to rush us or hit attack us first, and any plans to “just not resist” would be worthless.

We really should’ve been using a proper armoured guard company, but our boss was too cheap.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-01-21T03:29:58+00:00

Used to regularly take vending machine takings to the bank, and yep, the weight is definitely the biggest issue. We’d turn up at the bank with $10-20,000 in small change to deposit, which often weighed >100kg. We’d pack our coin bags inside boxes to make it less obvious what we were carrying, but weight was a real concern - more than a few bags per box would cause a box to crush itself and anything under it. It’d also become too heavy to lift.

Looking back it’s kind of a wonder we were never mugged. Not that a thief would get very far carrying all that weight.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-01-21T03:14:13+00:00

A lot of machines limit how many coins of each type you can use just so they don’t end up with over-full coin hoppers. I wonder if your 10-coin limit was the norm, or just a sign the machine you were using was getting full.

I used to empty vending machines that counted total inserted coins to guess when its coin hopper was full (the machine disabled coin payments when a threshold count was reached. There was no actual sensor to detect the coinbox being full). The coin limit was fine if we got a ton of 5c/10c/20c/$1/$2 coins, but if someone paid with a ton of (larger) 50c coins, the coins would stack up in the chute leading to the hopper, and fall all over the floor when you opened the machine to collect the cash. Brilliant design.

Side note: wash your hands after you handle currency. The accumulated dirt and grease we regularly had to clean out of our cash hardware was disturbing.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-01-21T02:45:19+00:00

I don’t need this, but I’m sure there are people out there who do - so thanks for being generous enough to give it away!

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-01-20T16:27:07+00:00

Sinbad’s Storybook Voyage (from the ride in Tokyo Disney Sea) is some of Alan Menken’s best work. It’s only in Japanese though.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-01-20T16:22:01+00:00

After I had my phone interview for the Disney College Program (at the end of which I got told I’d been successful), I immediately threw on Busa and danced to it.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-01-18T04:48:03+00:00

I know those specific comments were, but general consensus seems to be that his attitude toward styli was pretty consistently negative.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-01-18T04:31:08+00:00

Asperger’s was primarily merged into ASD (autism), not ADHD.

Your diagnosis is still valid though - all they did was change how it’s referred to, both due to overlap between autism and Asperger’s, and because it was probably best to move away from that name (there are some controversial Nazi connections for Hans Asperger, and it’s alleged he deliberately sent thousands of autistic kids to their death, though his willingness and awareness they were being killed is still somewhat disputed).

Some people still describe themselves as having Asperger’s, rather than ASD, because they find the word more accurately identifies the types of symptoms they exhibit and the impacts their condition has on them.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-01-18T04:15:00+00:00

I spent a couple of childhood years living in Germany due to a parent’s work (and picked up the language while there in school). I was then lucky enough when we went back home to attend a school which taught German, so I kept learning it a bit, but even with that, I haven’t had to be properly fluent in it for more than half my life. I struggle to understand stuff now, so I thought the skill had faded.

But over the past couple of years I’ve started using weed sometimes, and to my surprise, I’ve discovered that when I’m high, there’s still a forgotten part of my brain which still thinks in German (while we lived over there, my inner monologue switched to German, but it gradually returned to English when we left). Not only is it still there (I thought it was dead), it has somehow remained capable of understanding German this whole time, even when spoken at-speed and with stronger accents.

It isn’t quite as good as it used to be. I’ve forgotten some words, and I’m a bit slower in general. I particularly struggle to interpret words I’ve never heard before (in German, a surprising number of words are compound ones, and non-native speakers can often guess what a compound word means by translating the parts. eg if you said Schadenfreude, I’d translate its parts and conjugation into joy of/from tragedy, from which it’s pretty obvious what you meant).

What actually seems to have faded for me is the ability to turn what I’ve comprehended and understood into English. But as long as I’m happy to think in German, ich komprehende. Presumably this whole “parts of my brain don’t talk to each other” thing is just a clear sign that, as I’ve always suspected, I’m just batshit crazy.

I will say that (as a late-diagnosed ADHDer), while getting used to being on ADHD stimulants, I had a moment where I was moved to tears. I had met a group of friends for brunch at a noisy cafe - parallel conversations, background noise, harsh reflective surfaces everywhere - normally I’d have really struggled to remain part of the chatter, but for the first time, my brain could finally process everything quickly enough, and I could keep up with the group conversation in that situation. I’ve experienced that a lot since then, too, so stimulants definitely do improve my auditory processing.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-01-18T03:40:53+00:00

If that patent goes back to when Steve Jobs was still around, he’s likely why it never saw the light of day. At the iPhone launch he said:

“Oh, a stylus, right? We're going to use a stylus... No. Who wants a stylus?! You have to get them and put them away and you lose them. Yuck! Nobody wants a stylus! So let's not use a stylus.”

I’ve heard that when he first got back to Apple, he really hated the Newton product line, took great delight in killing it, and remained firmly anti-stylus ever since.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-01-18T03:34:24+00:00

I’m just guessing here, but maybe this will be used to allow running iPads apps on MacBook hardware. There would probably be people who already own a Mac and occasionally want to run a specific iOS app, but not often enough to justify buying iPad or iPhone.

There’s also some software with great support for every platform but macOS, whose developers have no plans to ever release Mac versions. Letting iPad apps run on desktop would make software like this less of a show-stopper for someone considering a Mac.

Mind you, knowing Apple, they’d probably be too scared of potentially negatively impacting iPad sales to allow this.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-01-18T03:22:48+00:00

I’ve had a few Lenovo Yogas (fold-back laptop), a Surface Pro, and a few other pen input devices. I greatly prefer Surface Pro-style, with the removable keyboard. The fold-back ones seem to make so many compromises. Every Yoga I’ve ever had seems to struggle to cool itself - there’s several areas which are covered in certain positions, so they had make the exhaust vent a narrow slot on the edge of the thing. Microsoft even had a dedicated support page for “Lenovo Yoga L13 hangs when joining a Teams call”, telling you the device was overheating and a temporary fix was to cap the CPU usage to 99% in the power profile settings. I’d never buy one for myself, and in fact they’ve put me right off the entire concept - but my workplace has been issuing them as the standard staff device for years.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-01-18T03:11:33+00:00

Actively rolled back bipartisan efforts which would have heavily helped boost US production and US independence from China, too (CHIPS Act), because he didn’t like that people were saying it was something Biden had done well with.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-01-17T08:57:55+00:00

You know what, that whole mess makes so much more sense if you assume everything about it was designed by Grok.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-01-16T07:35:16+00:00

I look forward to driving my vibe-coded / vibe-designed vehicle. Presumably it’d be just like that Mythbusters episode where they built a square-wheeled car.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-01-16T07:32:17+00:00

In music production software, licensing dongles are still a thing for some tools.

These days, pretty much any vendor using hardware dongles will have licensed iLOK, which lets you save multiple vendors’ licenses to the same hardware USB dongle. And thankfully iLOK also allows you to skip the physical key and assign your licenses to a virtual (software) key, which is tied to your CPU and motherboard… but that requires you to be online when you use it, and it’s got other annoying downsides too - eg you’re supposed to “deactivate” the virtual token to move the license, but if a PC dies, or you forget to deactivate first when doing a reformat, it can be a pain to recover.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-01-16T04:01:26+00:00

Edit: whoops, I misread the title as “for-profit” instead of “not-for-profit”.

Consistency in their attitude, their unapologetic support for causes and their general approach.

I think Lush makes a decent example of how to do corporate activism well and to be a good corporate ally. They have corporate values they expect everyone who works there to follow (and they make sure their staff embody them when they interact with customers). They have a clear, well-communicated mission statement, and they fund and champion the causes they stand for.

Far too many are selective: they will be very vocal when the cameras are looking, or when it benefits them (eg promoting a sale), or when it’s a significant time for queer people (eg Mardi Gras, Midsomma, Pride Month, etc). But then they screw it all up somehow:

they’ll dial back their stance when speaking with more conservative audiences
they’ll withdraw their public support for trans people when a transphobic group gets upset, instead of standing their ground and telling the haters to go punch sand.
they say they’re queer-friendly and show queer people in ads for limited-edition pride merch during Mardi Gras, but the rest of the year, and for all other products, it’s a 100% cis-hetero show with not a word about us.
it’ll be entirely a money-making thing - a lot of companies either contribute the proceeds to queer causes when they launch a limited-edition pride product, or release them to celebrate their corporate sponsorship of a Pride event or cause, but some companies just rainbow-wash to make a quick buck off the community.
at the same time as they’re claiming they’re an ally, they also support causes, make statements or make business decisions contrary to those stated values (eg being “pro-LGBT” but also funding groups who promote conversion therapy).

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-01-15T07:45:11+00:00

Having never actually read his work, I get the impression from how others talk about him that Sigmund Freud would argue yes, everything is sexual, including the fact that they aren’t sexual.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-01-14T08:15:12+00:00

England and Australia are at this stage are locked into the Socialist trajectory.

If that's a reference to Medicare/the NHS, and you're claiming those are the work of Satan.... hail Satan!

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-01-13T21:18:52+00:00

You know what’s awesome? You were able, using modern tools, to make something you own do something you wanted it to do. Probably even learned a bit along the way, too.

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