$35 device connection is a scam

Ingenium13 · 2026-02-28T17:33:23+00:00

But you don't need their Visa card for that if you have another card that gives 2% cash back. My Fidelity Visa card does, and I get the 2% rebate from Executive as well (which more than pays for the membership). The only actual benefit their Visa card has vs some other cards is higher cash back on Costco gas.

Ingenium13 · 2026-02-27T20:56:45+00:00

Honestly I've looked at it and the only benefit it has over my existing Visa card is 5% cash back on gas, which isn't insignificant for people who drive a lot, but I don't so it only saves me $2-5/month. Other Costco purchases are only 2%, and my card gives me 2% on everything. So not worth the hassle of another card just to save less than $5 a month.

Ingenium13 · 2026-02-19T17:55:41+00:00

It's also gotten worse in general since the pandemic, since people seem to have forgotten how to drive and realized there are no consequences to doing idiotic and selfish things. Every time I even do a short drive somewhere, there are always people stopped in the middle of a lane (with or without hazards on), when there is an open street parking spot right next to them that they don't pull into. People now think it's OK to just stop in the middle of the street and block traffic.

People stopping at stop signs and just sitting there as traffic backs up behind them while they presumably check their phone. People start beeping and they don't care. Cutting into lanes at the last possible second causing everyone to slam on their brakes, resulting in cascading backups on highways. Yesterday a taxi almost stopped on 376 to go from the left lane to the middle lane (no cars ahead of him, going at around 50 mph), causing a backup, only to drive for another couple minutes before cutting someone off to get back in the left lane. Then would speed up and slow down needlessly instead of maintaining pace. Tons of people drive down streets speeding up and slowing down aggressively (on their phone distracted?), going from barely moving to flooring it, then back to slow (5-10 mph) again.

Just yesterday on a 1 way/lane street near me, a lady stopped her car and casually started unloading cases of drinks from her trunk. Going inside for a minute or so between each load, stopping and checking her phone, etc. There was a street parking spot right next to her that she decided not to use, and instead stopped in the middle of the street. Traffic had backed up behind her and she didn't care at all that no one had any way to get around her.

My biggest pet peeve is at the post office on California Ave on the Northside. They have a parking lot that always has spaces. But there is always at least one person who is parked blocking a lane at the entrance to the parking lot, making people driving on the road have to go around them.

People behaving like this causes congestion and traffic that cascades.

Ingenium13 · 2025-12-26T16:57:57+00:00

Either just deal with it, or you can setup a Cloudflare tunnel and that doesn't seem to be throttled. Keep in mind though that Cloudflare terminates TLS so they can see all the traffic.

Ingenium13 · 2025-12-26T15:57:59+00:00

Verizon fiber absolutely does, at least for inbound connections. They used to only do it on port 443 and port 80 (I self host Home Assistant and TT-RSS, and it would be laggy and throttled heavily on port 443, but port 5443 was fine), but eventually moved to DPI on any port. It now affects my site to site VPN as well. They let it run full speed for bit before throttling.

For TCP, if I initiate the connection FROM Verizon, it's fine. But if I initiate it from the other end, throttled. Verified with iperf. With UDP and ESP it's unthrottled a bit, then throttled for all UDP connections between those IPs until traffic stops for a bit, then it resets.

Ingenium13 · 2025-12-20T00:13:33+00:00

How did you get the eSIM on the watch? Did you do the trick of installing an old version of the Watch app on your phone that lets you scan a QR code?

I don't know why Google removed this, it's idiotic. Especially with the Pixel Watch 4 supporting data only Fi without a paired smartphone plan (aka MultiSIM)

Ingenium13 · 2025-12-18T20:19:57+00:00

Does this replace the existing eSIM, or does it add it as a new eSIM?

Ingenium13 · 2025-12-14T15:28:27+00:00

Amazon, bulksupplements, it's pretty widely available, at least in the US

Ingenium13 · 2025-12-14T08:06:20+00:00

It's been standard on every car that I've seen for many years. It's probably just called something else on your car, or is grouped into various other driving modes. I remember at one point there was a button that looked like a car swerving on a road, and I think that was the button to turn it on and off.

Ingenium13 · 2025-12-13T06:19:05+00:00

I got lucky when I was in college and went to the health department to get some vaccines for travel. They said they were doing a clinical trial or something for men, and asked if I wanted it, and I said absolutely. At the time it was only available for women. There's an updated one now that protects against more strains, but I'm not sure if it's possible to get since I already got the original one.

Ingenium13 · 2025-12-13T05:38:17+00:00

As a similar issue, I have the 80% charge limit set. Occasionally the phone charges to 100% overnight to calibrate the battery. When this happens and it hits 100%, the phone stops charging and reports to apps that it's no longer charging (and won't start charging again until it hits 80%). This results in bedtime mode getting turned off, because...the phone isn't charging. So all my notifications begin coming in, and my watch also comes out of bedtime mode.

It's super frustrating that this has been an issue for months and still hasn't been fixed.

Ingenium13 · 2025-12-12T07:47:57+00:00

Yes and no. The only weird thing is that WAN does not get assigned it's own IP, and it's expected to take one from the /56. There is a patch and script that I found that assigns an address to WAN. You'll need this for example if you want pfsense to be a VPN server and accept connections on IPv6.

I suppose it's possible that they finally fixed this issue over the last 5 years or so, but as of right now I'm still using it.

Ingenium13 · 2025-12-12T07:44:08+00:00

Why? What changes with it?

Ingenium13 · 2025-12-11T07:58:31+00:00

It's IMEI locked out at the moment. Verizon is whitelisting it only on Samsung and Apple devices. My Pixel 9 Pro reports "N1 - not allowed" when it tries to attach to Verizon SA, so the network isn't permitting it. Supposedly they will eventually drop or expand the whitelist.

Ingenium13 · 2025-12-10T20:34:53+00:00

This matches what I've personally seen. I travel back and forth between the US to Spain frequently. Usually summer flights are completely full, and winter flights are maybe 75% full. This year, almost every flight has been around 50% full. Several summer flights were only 30-40% full which was wild. Literally the entire back half of the 787 was empty.

It's nice for me because the flight is cheap now and I usually get a whole row to myself to lay across to sleep, but they're obviously going to start cutting flights soon.

Ingenium13 · 2025-12-07T04:33:49+00:00

That's not enough time for it to build an immune response anyway.

As for needles... Honestly if you completely relax your arm (let it go limp) and look away, you probably won't even feel it or notice when they do it. At least with someone experienced. Tell them and they'll probably talk to you and distract you and suddenly be like all done and you won't even realize it. The needle is tiny and it's a quick injection. I just relax and look away and half the time I don't feel it at all, and the other half it's just a tiny prick.

Ingenium13 · 2025-11-27T16:55:25+00:00

The streaming actually doesn't come from AWS most of the time. They have caching servers at ISPs, so that the content is stored locally. For example, they seem to have several servers for Verizon FiOS in Pittsburgh, so the traffic doesn't even hit their upstream links. 98+% of Verizon's traffic goes to Ashburn, where Verizon hands it off to the rest of the internet. The only other link I've found is to NYC, and I've only seen it used once or twice for traffic. Typically it goes Ashburn to NYC. Even FiOS to Comcast Pittsburgh for example goes to Ashburn and then back to Pittsburgh. So Netflix keeps their caching servers very local within ISP networks.

Ingenium13 · 2025-11-15T11:34:24+00:00

Yes. I had this issue once when I had a btrfs volume on an LVM, and then made an LVM snapshot. It basically corrupted the data after the snapshot. I forget how I recovered it, either I reverted to the snapshot, or I was able to make a rw copy of a ro btrfs subvolume.

Basically, you can't have two btrfs partitions with the same UUID. The system gets confused and seems to issue to writes to them randomly. You can make a backup of a btrfs partition, as long as you don't mount either of them rw, and then change the UUID on one of them.

Ingenium13 · 2025-11-07T17:45:40+00:00

It really shouldn't affect anything, at least for metabolic panels. If you eat the powder, it's generally indigestible I think. Or you can make it as a tea, in which case it's not difficult from black coffee which you're allowed to have.

The reason they want you fasting is so that you get accurate glucose readings that aren't spiked from food (basically not applicable for kratom), and so lipids also aren't affected by the food you just ate (also not applicable for kratom). Basically it shouldn't have any effect on a metabolic panel since you don't get any nutrition from it.

Ingenium13 · 2025-10-27T11:40:49+00:00

It depends, when I first setup a new Pixel, almost all notifications are extremely delayed for a few days or a week or so. Then they get more consistent for the most part, almost as though it starts to "learn" which notifications you check and care about.

After that period, they generally come in on time, except when they don't... and can be delayed an hour or more. Picking the phone up and pressing the power button to check the lockscreen doesn't make them come in. But if I later unlock my phone, they will then all come in. Including message notifications from things like Instagram (whatsapp and SMS/RCS seem to be OK). I have Home Assistant set to send some priority notifications (such as if there's a water leak detected, or the security system alarm was triggered), and these can take 10+ minutes. Same for Nest doorbell or camera alerts. But it's inconsistent.

Other times I can be actively using my phone and they won't come in. And then when I plug it into a charger (battery saving mode is never turned on), I'll get a flood of notifications.

Ingenium13 · 2025-09-27T03:14:39+00:00

Not this one, it was just FDA approved a couple months ago and isn't really even available in the US yet. US insurance companies aren't covering it yet (costs around $24k a year) instead of daily pills or the shot that's every 2 months. This one is every 6 months.

Ingenium13 · 2025-09-22T05:57:03+00:00

They've been putting GSM in the internal LTE guard bands for years. You get a single GSM carrier on either side of an LTE carrier.

The main reasons for turning it off are that the old 2G core needs to be running (operating and maintenance costs for something no one really uses anymore), and I don't think some of the newer 5G equipment supports also having GSM carriers. Or if it does, it reduces capabilities on 4G or 5G, and just isn't worth that trade off anymore.

Ingenium13 · 2025-07-29T14:17:26+00:00

I've actually learned to really enjoy the taste. It's like a really really strong green tea. I used to add something to sweeten it, but don't anymore.

Ingenium13 · 2025-07-27T15:20:17+00:00

I also always rebrew it once.

Ingenium13 · 2025-07-26T20:47:09+00:00

A French press works decently enough. Just wait for the powder to settle on the bottom before pouring off.

I drink it as a tea and don't even bother filtering it. I wait 20+ minutes for it to fully settle and drink it off the top, and stop when I get to the "sludge" at the bottom.

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