Came across one of these in the lobby of a hotel in Québec. My wife pressed the “English” button and got a cute little printout. Figuring this would be a good opportunity to practice my French, I pressed the “Français” button and the machine spit out a story the length of a CVS receipt.

Well, GameStop does have experience running ThinkGeek into the ground.

$500 sounds about right for weekly maid service. That means the base price of the robot not including subscription fees, power, repairs, etc. would get you ~3 years of maid service. If the subscription is an extra $500/mo, that’s more than 6 years of maid service.

If your maid service goes out of business, you just find a new one. What are the odds this company will still be around in 3 years? 6 years? Not a wager I’d be willing to make.

If it makes you happy, go for it. If it doesn’t, skip it.

When I graduated from College, my family appreciated the pomp and circumstance. I won an academic award and my parents were very proud, so I was happy to go along with things. It was an hour or so and it wasn’t any kind of burden. Sometimes it’s important to do things for other people.

When I got married, my wife and I were already well established, so it was a break-even affair and people appreciated the party. We come from different traditions, so we picked the parts we liked and discarded the rest. Nobody left unhappy.

Obviously you’re not a golfer.

Yes!

(woodchuck is from the Algonquin word “wuchak”)

Looks like a groundhog / woodchuck to me. They are a species of marmot.

I found out some friends of mine who moved here from abroad had never had Dubble Bubble, so I bought some and we all had a piece when they came over for Christmas.

You might want to check if there’s someplace nearby that sells biltong. There’s a local butcher shop in my area that makes and sells it and it’s like the jerky you describe from when you were a kid.

Folding Ideas - In Search of a Flat Earth https://youtu.be/JTfhYyTuT44

It was the first Folding Ideas video I watched. The pivot from the technical portion to the social commentary portion is masterful.

I’d recommend watching it on a large screen to get the full impact from the Lake Minnewanka experiment. It is very striking.

The only way to play Factorio wrong is to play in a way where you’re not having fun and the community kinda embodies that spirit. That said, I have seen a lot of things that made me go “hmm…” in the FactoriOhNo subreddit over the years.

I watch Groundhog Day at least twice a year.

For me, I only back up data I can’t replace, which is a small subset of the capacity of my NAS. Personal data like photos, password manager databases, personal documents, etc. get locally encrypted, then synced to a cloud storage provider. I have my encryption keys stored in a location that’s automatically synced to various personal devices and one off-site location maintained by a trusted party. I have the backups and encryption key sync configured to keep n old versions of the files (where the value of n depends on how critical the file is).

Incremental synchronization really keeps the bandwidth and storage costs down and the amount of data I am backing up makes file level backup a very reasonable option.

If I wanted to back up everything, I would set up a second system off-site and run backups over a secure tunnel.

It’s on my list! Just haven’t gotten around to it yet.

To be honest, I recognized the screenshot and know the summary of the movie but I haven’t actually seen it.

The 1983 movie WarGames. This is the computer’s conclusion after simulating every possible outcome of Global Thermonuclear War.

Giant hogweed is pretty gnarly. If your skin comes in contact with its sap, exposure to sunlight will give you severe burns and scarring. The photosensitivity can last for days even after the sap itself has been washed away.

The 12th Amendment explicitly forbids this:

no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States

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It ends with a chop and the protagonist cashes out and walks away. Not exciting from a poker perspective but the protagonist develops as a person between the last bet and the reveal.