I love my pocketbook colour three. The extra screensize is very much appreciated for comics

Yeah Japan is awful for that and the tourists have only gotten worse with their behaviour over time. I did the main spots of Kyoto once, biggest mistake of my trip.

If you avoid the popular spots entirely then its usually pretty easy to find places that are more authentic. But its been a few years since I last went, its a very tough holiday for me as I am coeliac and the Japanese just do not take gluten allergies seriously (they had something like three people in five years diagnosed in total) so I have to self cater the entire trip.

Toss up between saying BVI a year after Irma, it was so quiet and empty. We spent the day on the beach at Bitter End (its absolutely amazing now its reopened) and if you know that beach its never empty except we had it to ourselves. Went to a bar in Little Bay and just spent the day hanging out with the owner, only ones there, told to help ourselves to beer from the fridge and had dinner with them. BVI is never that quiet during main season, its usually busy to packed.

Other one is Antigua during COVID, quiet beyond belief. Restaurants only allowed to do take out, so they would bring you the meals to your boat. Had a BBQ of the best steak and lobster on the main beach at Barbuda cooked just for us. Last night they opened up restaurants for dine in, only customers at this fancy Mexican fusion restaurant on the beach. They were so happy to have people back, ended up sharing the head chefs bottle of (very expensive) wine as we chatted at the end of the meal.

Most of my favorite holiday stories are when we have gone somewhere and its empty of tourists and just pretty quiet overall.

If you really insensitive to lactose then yeah its going to be very painful, milk is in just about everything baked or with most sauces that isn’t stamped vegan. At least most reputable places will take it seriously and have a proper allergen book.

I am Coeliac, and its like me going to Japan, just about everything has wheat added to it. Soy sauce? Gluten. Miso? Gluten. Whats annoying is that traditional Japanese recipes for Miso and Soy do not use wheat, it was added later after the American occupation. You can buy both soy and miso gluten free outside of Japan very easily, but in Japan, even though they made by Japanese companies? Ha good luck.

The worst part is that nobody in Japan takes it seriously as there been like two people in the last five years who were diagnosed with a gluten intolerance let alone Coeliac, so even if you take a Japanese speaker along and they explain it politely to the chef, you still get gluten.

It reads like she didn’t check ahead of booking, if you have some sort of allergy, she she appears to, its essential to check ahead.

It also reads like excluding tax, they paid about £600 for flights, transfers, hotel and all inclusive, each. I am not surprised that the food and drink would be closer to the budget end for that price.

My mother did the slitty eyed gesture and said that there were too many chi*ks here, in the car part for a large asian grocery store in the local chinatown that she had chosen to go to, to buy asian food. Yes other people heard and saw what she did, including asians. This was more than twenty years ago so not linked to the current rise of more overt racism.

This gets a lot easier if you have somewhere reliable and preferably free to stay when you need to start working again. Even if you have paid off your own place or been given a place for free you have bills to pay on it. I guess you can rent it out while you are away, but that seems less than ideal to me as how do you keep it maintained if you aren’t in the country? It just ends up being another cost.

I would have loved to have done this but the housing situation has always put me off.

Watching UK 70s TV now is wild. Prime time sitcoms using camp gay sterotypes as a punchline in themselves, black characters being called Chalkie or similar. These had regular repeats throughout the 80s on the main TV channels. Hell, known ephebophilie and bigot, Jim Davidson, had a prime time game show till 2002 and would regularly do his Chalkie character on it.

Late 90s/early 2000s UK TV was still pretty homophobic and racist, see Little Britain for yellow and brown face combined with racial stereotypes, big name comedians of the time like Frank Skinner making homophobic jokes.

Early 2000s in the UK was aggressively misogynistic, mostly in the printed press, absolutely rabid.

Obviously these issues haven’t been solved, but at least its unacceptable for mainstream TV in the UK to pedal this shit.

Have you tried adding blueberries to it, they are an anti oxident

Buying less and buying for life as a priority when choosing purchases. It’s had a knock on effect thst I try to buy bespoke from small artisans as they tend to be higher quality and it supports small businesses rather than megacorps.

It used to be printers but I switched to a Brother laser printer about five years ago and its been trouble free while having reasonable print costs. You can even force it to print on empty for a bit longer, although you shouldn’t push any laser printer too far on empty as you can wreck them.

Toasters are my big gripe. Its been proven that they have massively reduced costs at the expense of longevity and toasting efficiency from what we had decades ago. I have an expensive toaster (from Sage), and I have still had to replace micro switches on the buttons. While it does a better job of even browning than a cheap toaster its still far from the level I expect.

I would buy one of those expensive Japanese toasters or a commercial toaster oven but I do not want that much counter top taken up by it. I would rather just cook my toast in a cast iron pan now, far better finish.

So, in principle, I agree, but it doesn’t help with proxying, or for example, one I saw this week of someone using AI voice assistant to answer questions. Or people copying and pasting from online groups.

Their shitty software monitors all the connected devices, running processes, and webcam. That’s still needed for open book.

Does it have online exams? Pearsons shitty anti cheat stuff they use for proctoring is windows and mac only.

Having seen how much people cheat including using someone else using screensharing to proxy the exam for you I cannot blame them for wanting to do this, but I do blame them for not wanting to support Linux properly.

This has influenced my entire idea of spending money:

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

Lost went on far too long and they backed themselves into a corner by saying that the big secret was what nobody had guessed, but this was right around the Internet getting popular to talk about tv shows, so everything good had already been suggested. If it had been me, I would have just picked the best one and gone with that…

Back before Mesh and Roaming between APs was a thing I used to adjust the transmit power on my three DDWRT APs so that they didnt overlap fully to force roaming between them. I did this mostly because I didnt want too many devices on the same AP as a lot of devices back then would be stubbonly sticky to the first AP they found and APs could handle a lot less loading that they do now so it was far more important to spread devices out across the APs.

Now I still have three APs but they all WiFi 6 as are the main devices that use it so I do not bother micro managing it as WiFi 6 is much better at congestion and Roaming. I would rather have more range than worry about it, I have good coverage from the back of my garden to the front of my drive, its not essential that I have that but it is very very useful at times.

5Ghz penetrates a lot less than 2.4Ghz so that does not cause as much problems if left at 100%. 2.4Ghz can be a pain for others but I cannot wait to turn that off at some point in the future anyway.

Mine does, you can change it per band too:

Yes but only occasionally. I have them mapped as space cadet shift keys so left shift key is ( on tap and shift on hold, right shift key is ) on tap and shift on hold.

I use ( a lot but my ide normally adds the ) for me so I don’t need it as much for that.

Also, I use left shift for most capitals as I rarely gpt further than ; on the right side of the keyboard.

Smaller keyboards I have shift on hold of A and L as I don’t have dedicated shift keys kn those.

Money and time no object? I would do a tour of the Pacific islands on a 110 Wally sailboat complete with crew so I get to do the fun stuff like helming and none of the boring stuff I don’t feel like doing that day. Would hit at a minimum Galapagos, Tahiti, Fiji, New Caledonia and on down to the Sundays in Australia. Would take about 6 months although I could spend a lifetime there.

If I was time limited to two weeks? Sailing in the Bahamas in a Outreamer cat, these are as large as I can safely handle with my partner and its a lot lot shallower than the Wally so I get to explore far more of the Bahamas. Shorter holidays I want less flight time, so direct like this is perfect.

Coffee making gear, so hand grinder, tiny scales, and either a tricked out picopresso or an aeropress or my wave dripper. I pick based on what sort of coffee beans I am expecting to be able to pick up where I go.