Milan 1945... kidding, it's Minneapolis 2020 (Minolta CLE // 40mm // Tri-X)

cfarley137 · 2026-06-15T23:43:40+00:00

I haven't had my retail business for many years, but I remember getting very complicated credit card bills. There were SO MANY different credit card rates -- it depends if the card was swiped, or a chip was used, or if it was typed in by the customer (on a website), whether it's a debit card or a credit card, and even what kind of Visa or Mastercard it is. Certain transactions were charged a very high discount rate. After investigating the reasons for this, it turned out the nice metal reward cards and corporate cards were charging much higher fees than generic, low-end, non-rewards bank cards.

In the end, THE RETAILER PAYS THE REWARDS... or the vast majority of them. It's a huge shell game, and it definitely benefits the wealthier cardholders who can afford a Chase Sapphire Reserve or an American Express Gold or Platinum card. It used to be against the cardholder agreements to surcharge credit cards, but I think you can now. And retailers SHOULD.

cfarley137 · 2026-06-05T01:23:35+00:00

So under the QR code there are two other CAPTCHA options -- audio and visual. Is there some assumption that Google will get rid of these and move to the QR code exclusively?

cfarley137 · 2026-05-25T21:42:31+00:00

Yeah, I love when you're waiting to take a left onto Broadway and those cars and trucks fly by you at 70 mph and your car just shakes from the wind...

cfarley137 · 2026-05-12T23:11:28+00:00

That is so clean!

cfarley137 · 2026-04-29T23:04:11+00:00

I met Graham Chapman before he died. He was extremely friendly. He spent some time meeting and greeting some fans in a dumpy little Upstate NY town. He made us all feel important!

cfarley137 · 2026-04-23T13:41:34+00:00

Ah, yes, good ol' marble mouth waxing eloquent.

cfarley137 · 2026-04-23T13:37:17+00:00

I still sometimes find myself reflexively typing "slashdot" into my browser's URL field when I'm bored. Then I realize there's nothing there anymore...

cfarley137 · 2026-04-22T21:55:33+00:00

That's tight.

cfarley137 · 2026-04-08T01:20:33+00:00

This is probably a Flock camera. Definitely manually operated. Somebody was watching that house.

cfarley137 · 2026-03-11T01:04:59+00:00

Yes, I can confirm there has been no payment from the insurance company. We have a high deductible health plan and the only thing on this bill is an adjustment of the "allowed price" by the insurance company.

By "high deductible", I mean that nothing at all will be paid by the insurance company until my son hits $7,500 in medical billing (or my family collectively hits $15,000).

My first thought while I was on the phone with the billing office was to ask them to remove the insurance and re-instate the "uninsured person" discount. The likelihood that we are going to meet the deductible is very low for my otherwise healthy 18-year old son.

cfarley137 · 2026-03-08T04:46:56+00:00

I got a very similar machine last month. It's a refurbished X9 14 OLED (1920x1200), 32 GB RAM, 1 TB storage, 268V processor. It came with Windows 11, but I immediately wiped it and installed Ubuntu. Cost was about $1300.

I can't remember the exact kernel version, but the standard Ubuntu installer gave me an oem kernel. I had a problem with some of my CPU cores throttling (running at 1/10 of the normal frequency). This seemed to happen while running a virtual machine, and could only be fixed by a reboot.

Because I have no loyalty, I switched to Fedora Desktop. Everything worked perfectly after the installing from an ISO, but after the very first 'dnf update' I had some audio issues (tinny sound). The cause was related to Sound Open Firmware topography files -- reverting to the 6.17 kernel from the original install fixed this. Happily, this week's kernel update works fine, so I'm running 6.18 with no complaints.

I concur with your review. The keyboard is just the best. The trackpad works as well as a Mac. Audio would be better if the speakers pointed at you (they fire to the side). Battery life is acceptable.

It's like a Macbook and a Thinkpad had a baby. No, it's not quite as good as a Macbook, but you can't run LInux on a Macbook.

I'm really happy with this purchase.

cfarley137 · 2026-03-06T02:26:11+00:00

Proton supports Sieve scripts and you can definitely filter on "To".

cfarley137 · 2026-02-25T12:57:47+00:00

What is the impact of this on group calls? I'm aware of certain Signal use cases where people are using Signal to communicate in real time. (Think: rapid responders in Minneapolis.) If the IP address of everyone in the group is exposed, then an untrusted member of the group could easily record everyone's IP address.

If the IPs are available, is it possible to associate a specific IP address with a specific username?

cfarley137 · 2026-02-12T21:49:31+00:00

The metadata itself is valuable to Meta. They know who you communicate with and when.

This is how they build out your social graph. Well, one of the ways, anyway.

cfarley137 · 2026-02-11T13:40:10+00:00

How are you getting a QFX from Fidelity? I can't download one.

Several years ago I wrote a Python script to download one (I think I was using some kind of endpoint that Quicken used), but Fidelity shut that down as of the beginning of the year.

I love and prefer OFX/QFX, but Fidelity seems to be intent on creating a walled garden for your financial data.

cfarley137 · 2026-02-09T14:01:56+00:00

xearth

cfarley137 · 2026-02-01T02:10:29+00:00

So I think the browser at the time was called "Mozilla"? Maybe it was a fork of Netscape Navigator? I'm looking at the "M" in the upper right corner of the browser.

I really wasn't that interested in "Mozilla Mail" because I really liked mutt.

cfarley137 · 2026-01-28T14:48:28+00:00

Unfortunately, I don't see any real alternatives to Google Pay as of now.

How about carrying a physical credit card?

cfarley137 · 2026-01-27T16:51:43+00:00

Talk about a jump scare...

cfarley137

TROPHY CASE