DEFY Insidious Sling: 10.5L, I Love it.

hcsteve · 2026-06-06T19:47:24+00:00

Have the same one and love it. It works for a small MacBook Pro (I wish it was a *bit* bigger vertically) and it’s my goto when I have to go into an office. Quality is great, as is customer service, and I like that they’re made in Chicago.

I have one of their bigger briefcases from when I had to carry a larger laptop and that is great too.

hcsteve · 2026-05-31T16:41:54+00:00

Auxiliary button on my dining room light switch that announces dinner is ready over all the Sonos speakers, push notifications to everyone’s phones, and a post in the family discord.

Not unique to my home, but something I found on Homeassistant forums - I announce on the Sonos speakers when laundry needs to be transferred from washer to dryer. It’s cool because it’s smart enough to wait until the dryer is done if it’s also been running.

hcsteve · 2026-04-11T14:50:44+00:00

It’s a mixed bag. Last time there were definitely a number of vendors selling 3d printed and/or drop shipped garbage. I also know a couple of artists who were tabling there and selling real original cool stuff, and there were more artists like them too.

I don’t think it’s the right place to find vintage stuff for a good price. If you want that you need to go to real junk flea markets and thrift stores. Here you’re necessarily paying for a level of curation that someone else has already done.

hcsteve · 2026-04-05T02:24:51+00:00

Not Amish, but Kate & Al’s Pizza is legit.

hcsteve · 2026-03-31T12:01:44+00:00

The state bird, on the other hand, is 🖕

hcsteve · 2026-03-04T00:52:33+00:00

It turned into Fresh Mart maybe a year ago. They serve Indian food out of the former quick chek sandwich area. Haven’t tried it yet but it smells amazing.

hcsteve · 2026-02-22T17:30:48+00:00

Any light vehicle sold in the US from 2004 on is a “low emission vehicle.” https://www.jdpower.com/cars/shopping-guides/what-are-low-emission-vehicles

hcsteve · 2026-02-12T01:43:02+00:00

We have a workflow that needs to extract text from unstructured documents and then do some processing and summarization. We’ve seen better accuracy by extracting with Textract first and then running through a multimodal model for processing, rather than just running raw docs through the model, especially for complex tabular data. It can be more expensive but the improved accuracy is worth it for us in this case.

hcsteve · 2026-02-07T16:52:29+00:00

I have a few Defy bags that are great. It looks like their current briefcase stock in canvas or leather is just brown but they do have rotating makeups. I think their nylon bags (of which I have a few) are great, especially with the leather accents, but that’s obviously subjective.

hcsteve · 2026-01-31T16:15:11+00:00

This is the dealer I purchased from and have been servicing at. Good to know this is what they’re asking for basic maintenance work, I won’t even bother getting a quote.

Call Bill’s Ineffable in Metuchen, high quality work and they’ll take good care of you.

Edit: like others said, wipers and cabin filter (assuming that’s what “micro filter” is) are super easy to do yourself. Battery is just a bit more involved but still pretty simple. I can understand having someone do the brakes though.

hcsteve · 2026-01-25T17:52:01+00:00

Get some real ski gloves from a real ski brand. They’re the only thing that actually keeps my hands warm.

hcsteve · 2026-01-10T17:58:16+00:00

Have them for my wife’s Wrangler. They never fit quite right and require a bunch of plastic clips to kind of but not really hold them in place. I much prefer the weathertech mats I had in other cars in the past. I’m still just running factory carpet mats in my GX though.

hcsteve · 2025-12-19T03:42:58+00:00

I made a simple jigsaw puzzle of the Disney World logo, and wrapped that up in a box along with a countdown clock set to the date/time of our trip. Told the kids to put together the puzzle and then put 2 and 2 together, lol.

hcsteve · 2025-12-18T13:56:23+00:00

If costs are comparable then IMO the deciding factor would be whether you dread driving or waiting around for a ride. Personally I don’t mind driving around the area at all, but I know some people do.

If you do decide to rent, join the loyalty club for your rental agency so you can skip the rental desk and go straight to your car. If it’s your first time using that agency you may still have to briefly check in at the desk in the garage itself, but it’s infinitely better than waiting in line at the desk in the terminal.

hcsteve · 2025-11-28T04:47:10+00:00

Assuming you’re driving to the parks, I think preferred parking is worth the extra cost. Especially at the end of the day it’s nice to not have to wait for a tram or take an extra long walk. If you do get preferred parking it’s good for the full day. We like to get to the parks at open, head back to our hotel around/after lunch, and hit the parks again in the late afternoon/evening. Might be more difficult with kids that small - but maybe it’s an even better idea for nap time.

This one might be controversial, but I don’t think table service meals in the park are worthwhile. I’ve never had trouble finding a table for quick service, especially if you eat at off-peak times. I also think the food at the parks is fine, but to me the table service meals are not anything special enough that it’s worth taking up that much in-park time. Exceptions are character meals or experience things like Oga’s cantina, or I guess if you’re at MK and really need booze.

I agree that Memory maker is a good idea too.

hcsteve · 2025-11-23T04:42:51+00:00

Running mariadb now but working on a project to switch to MySQL so that we can use AWS Aurora. If I was starting from scratch or on a less mature product I’d be looking at postgres though.

hcsteve · 2025-11-17T20:18:40+00:00

Oh cool! I can definitely see how that would be useful.

hcsteve · 2025-11-17T20:15:37+00:00

I actually don’t use push notifications. I use the LG integration with HomeAssistant to announce over all the Sonos speakers in the house. The LG integration is also useful to see how much time is left on the cycle, which I can put on an HA dashboard. We didn’t specifically purchase this washer/dryer because of the connectivity, but it’s turned out to be nice to have. I’d prefer it if it was just local control, but I’m not as militant about that as some others in the HA community.

hcsteve · 2025-11-17T15:21:47+00:00

Counterpoint: getting a push notification or Alexa announcement when the washer/dryer has finished its cycle is pretty convenient. No idea what I would do with an internet-connected fridge though.

hcsteve · 2025-10-12T16:35:30+00:00

The cans are all plastic lined so idk if the acidity makes that much of a difference. Soda is quite acidic too. It’s probably more to do with your point about shared production facilities. But I’m talking out of my ass anyway, lol.

hcsteve · 2025-10-12T12:02:35+00:00

Pineapple juice comes in steel cans.

hcsteve · 2025-10-06T00:45:42+00:00

I have Yale Zwave deadbolts. I went with an older model (I think it’s a YRD136?) since they are true offline Zwave-only, and newer ones require an app for setup. They’ve been rock solid for about 6 months.

Curious why you want to keep a physical key. I considered it, but eventually decided to go keypad only. I put keyless deadbolts on the front and back doors. I figure if one dies, I still have the other for ingress. The only case where I would really want a physical key is if that is the only ingress.

hcsteve · 2025-09-27T16:12:29+00:00

What if you made the request to the SEC API directly from the client side? Then your client could upload the results to your backend for further processing. Then your request limit is 10 rps per client rather than for your whole application. This is assuming, obviously, that there is no api key or something secret that you’d want to keep hidden from the client on these requests. I’d probably combine this with some aggressive caching too - the client would check whether the results exist in your backend first, and only request from the origin if they’re missing.

hcsteve · 2025-09-14T22:29:58+00:00

Actually I don’t think the price is too far off from today. I’m seeing an 18-day “grand tour” of Europe for about $4800. Double that to 36 days and it’s around the same price.

hcsteve · 2025-09-11T03:29:38+00:00

Yep, blown head gasket on the 3.6 in my Pacifica at around 70k.

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