You Should Know

Dishwashers won't clean these gaskets if they're washed while installed. Oh, and those silicone straws can come out of the dishwasher nasty too.

If you plug a USB drive into Microsoft Windows, in many cases it will try to do things "for you" with the drive. Not a great idea. There could be malware lurking on that USB drive.

There are a couple of things you can do to help mitigate the issue. These tips assume Windows 11.

Turn off Autoplay

• Open Settings. Press Windows + I to open the Settings app.
• Go to Bluetooth & devices. In the left sidebar, click on "Bluetooth & devices."
• Select Autoplay. Scroll down and click on "Autoplay."
• Turn Off Autoplay. You'll see a toggle switch labeled "Use Autoplay for all media and devices." Turn this off.

This will turn it off completely. You can, if you want, make individual settings for different types of devices.

Deny Execute Access (Pro or Enterprise versions of Windows 11)

• Open Group Policy Editor. Press Windows + R, type gpedit.msc, and press Enter.
• Navigate to the Removable Storage Access Policies. Go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Removable Storage Access.
• Modify Policies. You can enable the policy "Removable Disks: Deny execute access" to prevent execution from removable drives.
• Apply and Reboot.

Note, there are some cases where you may want to execute scripts or programs from a removable drive. If that's the case, you may not want to do this, or make a note of it so you can re-enable if needed.

Why you should know? Money.

Both courses and certification selections are offered for free and paid options.

https://www.classcentral.com/subjects

https://www.classcentral.com/subjects?topic=certifications

Autumn is upon us in the northern hemisphere, and parts of the southern ought to still be pretty chilly. If you start getting cold, try tucking in your shirt. If you're wearing long pants and long socks, you can even tuck your pants into your socks, and this one's a big help too.

Why YSK: this one tip can save you a ton of money over your lifetime by lowering the threshold for when you need to put the heat on in your house, and it can make you feel more comfortable in the colder seasons. Wearing thicker clothes and layering helps, but there's only so many layers you can comfortably wear and clothes can only be so thick before you probably don't feel comfortable wearing them inside. If you're out and about, it might not be realistic or convenient to throw on another layer. This has become my first line of defense when I start getting cold. You should feel noticeably warmer within minutes.

Additional tip: if you have two shirts on, you can tuck the overshirt into your pants and the undershirt into your underpants to create a pocket of warm air that's way more insulating than if you tucked them into the same layer.

Edit: I know this is "common sense", but you'd be shocked at how many people either don't know about this or forget to use it.

This is not an anti-Kindle rant. I have purchased (rented?) several Kindle titles myself.

However, YSK that you are only licensing access to the book from Amazon, you don't own it like a physical book.

There have been cases where Amazon deletes a title from all devices. (Ironically, one version of "1984" was one such title).

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html

There have also been cases where a customer violated Amazon's terms of service and lost access to all of their Kindle e-books. Amazon has all the power in this relationship. They can and do change the rules on us lowly peasants from time to time.

Here are the terms of use:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201014950

Note, there are indeed ways to download your books and import them into something like Calibre (and remove the DRM from the books). If you do some web searches (and/or search YouTube) you can probably figure it out.

"Michael Straight, a former jockey paralyzed from the waist down, was left unable to walk for two months after the company behind his $100,000 exoskeleton refused to fix a battery issue. "

“I called [the company] thinking it was no big deal, yet I was told they stopped working on any machine that was 5 years or older,”

Some of the medications include:

• Antidepressants
• Antihistamines
• Stimulants
• Beta blockers
• Diuretics
• ACE inhibitors
• Thyroid medication
• Antipsychotics

Be sure to pay extra attention to any symptoms of heat exhaustion, stay hydrated, and in a cool area indoors when possible during heat waves.

Eating the proper amount is hard. Eating when you have low time, money, mental energy, or education on cooking is even harder.

This book assumes nothing. Do you know how to turn on your stove? You are properly prepared to use this cookbook.

Just want to share it with more folks!

I used sink plungers in toilets pretty much my whole life until i scrolled across a similar diagram one day and discovered the truth.

Why you should know:

Arsenic is a carcinogen and has various other negative health effects; enough to warrant exposure limits in various jurisdictions. A five minute boil-and-discard step before cooking is a simple way to reduce your exposure, especially if you eat a lot of rice.

Details are in the study, linked in the title of this post. Here's a diagram from the abstract:

Already getting sick of seeing 'AI' results at the top of a search when all you want is a link to a site?

I just discovered this article showing a way to not see it (although it doesn't disable it altogether).

TLDR:

• In Chrome open settings menu, choose Search engine on left menu and scroll down to site search
• Click Add button and choose a name (eg Old Google, Google Web or whatever)
• Add a shortcut word (eg web, og, or whatever)
• Add this URL string: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14
• Save that, and now if you search for something and use the shortcut word you set you'll just get proper results, no 'AI' shown
• Or, if you don't want to have to add a shortcut word, you just make that search your default (use the 3 dot menu next to the name you set) and all searches will show that way, no shortcut word needed.

EDIT - meant to add that there are detailed instructions for Edge, Firefox and Safari in the article if you don't use Chrome

Hope that helps someone - I really don't like all that extra nonsense when I just want a link to a site that I know exists!

[Obligatory - "or don't use Chrome/Google...", I know - but people do, so this might be useful]

Why YSK: many countries have issues with weight, such as mine with 74% of US adults being overweight or obese. The global weight loss industry is over $200 billion yearly, with many influencers, pills, and surgeries promising quick results with little effort. These often come with side effects, or don't work long term.

Studies suggest filling yourself with foods low in caloric density and high in fiber, like fruits and vegetables, can help reach and maintain a healthy weight. It's good to have these foods available in our living spaces to make the choice easy. Your taste buds will likely adapt to love them if you're not there yet.

Posting this here as there a few threads popping on the topic

• "Too much US election content on Lemmy?" https://sh.itjust.works/post/23465918
• "This place needs filters" https://lemmy.ml/post/18974148

On the app side, the following allow to filter keywords:

• Voyager
• Connect
• Sync
• Summit
• Mlem
• Boost
• Eternity
• Thunder
• Arctic

On the web interfaces side:

• Tesseract
• Voyager

Feel free to comment with more apps, I'll edit this post later.

For all the links: https://www.lemmyapps.com/

Why YSK: Locking your credit with the main 3 places is not enough.

https://innovis.com/ have grown enough to require locking as providers are using them as a single check source.

There's also https://www.chexsystems.com/ which many banks use for opening checking accounts. They're unique because they handle accounts that don't show up in a credit report.

I’ve seen several people claim that their state’s vote for the US presidential election doesn’t matter because their district is gerrymandered, which does not matter for most states.

Most states use the state’s popular vote to determine who the entire state’s electoral college votes go to. No matter how gerrymandered your district is*, every individual vote matters for assigning the electoral vote. [ETA: Nearly] Every single district in a state could go red but the state goes blue for president because of the popular vote.

*Maine and Nebraska are the notable differences who allot individual electors based on the popular vote within their congressional districts and the overall popular vote. ~~It’s possible there are other exceptions and I’m sure commenters will happily point them out.~~

Edit: added strikethrough to my last statement because now I have confirmed it.

Of the 50 states, all but two award all of their presidential electors to the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote in the state (Maine and Nebraska each award two of their electors to the candidate who wins a plurality of the statewide vote; the remaining electors are allocated to the winners of the plurality vote in the states' congressional districts). (source)

Link: https://www.vote.org/am-i-registered-to-vote/

Warning: you will get texted so use your disposal number.

With all the news about citizens discovering their voter status has been lapsed, and new rules for being a voter, everyone should check.

But also, sometimes you forget. I have new neighbors who finished moving a month ago, and when I asked if they changed their mailing address and checked their voting status, we discovered they weren't.

Owncast is a free and open source live video and web chat server for use with existing popular broadcasting software.

Basically it's Twitch, or any streaming platform such as YouTube Gaming or whatever it's called now, that you can run on your own hardware. Control your platform and your content where you make the rules as to what you can/can't do.

There's a growing community and you can find folks streaming all kinds of things in the directory:

https://directory.owncast.online/

I know some folks think it's not possible to run something like that as it'd require tons of PC resources, but I've run an Owncast Stream with 70+ active open connections to the server on a $8/month VPS.

The install can be as simple as a VPS that will spin up an Owncast instance for you, or as "difficult" as pulling the Owncast script and running it and it just automatically sets everything up. It's probably the easiest software installation I've done in a long time and I've been in IT for 15 years.

I also run the [email protected] community so if anyone has any questions please don't hesitate to poke me there or Matrix or come check out a stream, I'm usually hanging out on someone's stream somewhere. :-D Or don't hesitate to ping me on any one of the platforms in my bio.

Why YSK is because this is where my ultra detailed intuitive perspective shines and I can tell you how to generate revenue on demand using eBay the old school way that still works.

This was a reply to someone a few days ago about how to sell a large gaming collection. That post was deleted, but this info was popular, so here it is as a post that will stay up.

I ran high end bicycle consignment on eBay professionally. It was a side thing when I was a Buyer for a bike shop chain, and what I did part time for nearly 2 years after disability. In total I sold $139k on that account.

You must be established on eBay in the first place. You need an account with at least 60-100 feedback first. Make purchases to get some of that, sell a few low value (to you) items at a really good deal for others and across different categories. You're trying to show that you are a real person and imply your country of origin. Ship everything you sell the same day that payment clears, and get a receipt from the logistics handler every time.

When you package any item, take a picture of the item in the box, and keep a scale on your packaging table to take a picture of the boxed item with the weight on camera after sealing the box. You are going to have 5-10% of customers that are scammers. This combo will save you from their scams. You can use the imaged weight and shipping weight from the logistics carrier receipt to dispute the photo of empty packaging scam.

Shipping insurance is a complete waste of money. The most expensive thing I sold was a $14,900 Felt IA FRD without the Zipp wheels for $9600 on eBay after 1 season of use. That was a major outlier. Most bikes were $1k-$3k, but I was dealing with some pricey stuff that represented substantial risk. I had to deal with major issues a few times despite using better shipping practices than anyone else I have ever encountered. If you own the merch, you own the risk. I didn't have that luxury. I developed the strategy of finding the advertised cost of the cheapest insurance option I had available and I paid this amount of the sale into my insurance account separately. That account went negative once near the beginning, but stayed about even with incidental drains occasionally. The hassle and time it takes to go in circles with the third party shipping insurance companies is the intentional obfuscation built into their scam. You will be able to recover any lost amount simply by working a minimum wage job for the same amount of time it will take you to get money out of these scammers. You could probably panhandle the amount quicker than the amount of time you will spend trying to get them to pay.

It will be nearly impossible for you to keep track of all of the fees and costs of eBay. I tracked everything as fees; taxes, logistics, insurance, supplies, everything. In could not close monthly books until 3-4 months after the sale. The total cost to actually sell items was 39% of the total sale as of April of 2017 with an account in perfect standing ~98% of the time. The lowest I ever got was 37% in a month and never topped 40%.

When you post items, have them boxed in advance and post the last picture of the item boxed. Add a unique number to this box, have it in the picture, and add it in the description of the item so that you know what is in each box to match with the purchase. Don't count on your descriptions or listing. Don't package whatever sold in the last few days after the listing is ended. You WILL screw this up and send the wrong things to the wrong people or forget something no matter how diligent you try to be. It is much better to have a label that prints and includes the listing details with the unique number matching the box; like today I sold: "K4R3N," "IAN123," and "JK1337," and must match these values to boxes that say the same. Like, if you are selling video games, do not do: Brombus Brzezinski bought Final Fantasy VII Special Edition (6/10), Bambi Blowater bought Final Fantasy VIII Special Remastered Edition (7/10), and Blumbus Bluewaters bought Final Fantasy VII (7/10). If you package what sells after the fact, you'll be slow and when problems with logistics happen your delay is only going to make the problems much worse. It does not matter that you have x days to ship items in the system or described in your listing. Ship it the same day that payment clears as a point of pride. When you have real problems, that is the only time to use your shipping window. This is the only way you can keep an account in prefect shape long term.

The price others list items at is a joke. Ignore this nonsense and only look at the sold history for items in the last 60 days. If you can provide better information and images than anyone else in this sold history, you are likely worth 10-15% more than the rest. Keeping a listing up costs money and is a loss that must be accounted for.

Low demand items without substantial sold history are worth less in this market. Emotional attachment is worthless, sold history is everything.

This is the key to doing well with generating revenue on demand: eBay has the most traffic of customers willing to make purchases on Sunday evenings between 9-11pm Eastern time as this will bridge the entire continental USA so that it is 5-8pm in California. The trick is to list your items with ten day auctions and time your listings so that they end in this time window on Sunday. In other words, you schedule ten day auctions that start Thursday evening in this time slot. Stagger your listings around 10-15 minutes apart so that a person can bid on and watch multiple items. Now, this is where the real hack happens and the details matter. You list these items to start for $0.99 with free shipping if possible, and with no reserve. This is not optional. Your conservative fear and desire to list the starting price higher will kill traffic interest and volume of initial views. The item must have an active sold history for this to work. An active sold history means there is demand. The initial traffic of a real no reserve auction on eBay will max out your visibility priority for suggested and relevant cross posts. This is more powerful of a tool than any other form of promotion. You're going to get a several messages from all the crazy stupid people that want you to take their special offer of $2 to end the item. You love this stupidity because these idiots flock to this kind of fantasy listing in droves and are the reason this trick is so effective in the first place. Be nice to them and they'll view the listing hundreds of times. A few might even go crazy with a sub $5 bidding war, which is even better for the listing visibility. I did this with $1k-$4k bikes all the time. I almost always set the max sold history value for similar items, but I also did detailed listings unlike anyone has ever done before or since with high end bikes on eBay. I documented every scratch, bearing, and part, along with detailed wear descriptions where I was downright negative by typical salesperson standards. I also used my automotive painting background to photograph cosmetic issues before and after I did minor touchups and fixes to really high end stuff. You must think like a skeptical buyer that is afraid of getting scammed when you're creating listings and reassure them in a way that would satisfy yourself. Like prove that your games actually work in pictures, etc. There is only a minor element of sales pitch to tell what the item is and its intended use. The majority of your listing should be about telling the informed buyer every detail they are not even aware of questioning and gives them confidence to take the listing serious.

Only start your no reserve auctions to end on a Sunday that follows the 15th of the month, and only when there is not a holiday or major sporting event in the USA. People pay rent/mortgages on the 1st of the month. The largest pool of people with excess funds to spend a little more or get carried away with bidding are the people on the Sunday after the 15th of any given month. Never list items that are competing with themselves in auctions that are ending on the same night. Make your listings Buy it Now for a good price in the interm then convert these to no reserve auctions when you're ready. Avoid giving any excuses that might indicate the person can procrastinate and get the same thing later or for a better price like mentioning you have more of these, or even listing the same item in another listing with Buy it Now while an auction runs.

Overall, this is how you dominate eBay and get your stuff in front of the most people, most often, and that is how you make sales conversions. No matter what you do, you're going to have overburden that will not sell in any single market. This is why I was the Buyer for a bike shop chain that ran eBay and did swap meets too. Pick a number and and strategy for handling this. Like when you have sold $xx,xxx amount you're giving the rest away to N and quitting. You will never experience a day when the last item sells.

Last thing I didn't mention before, if eBay still has 1:1 images in the primary scrolling feed, absolutely make sure to photograph your leading image to make it as large as possible and fill the entire frame. Use a white infinite background or a low light studio photography setup. The background needs to be either 0x00 white or 0xff black, and the item itself needs to look real like it is not a stock photography image. The other images should be professional looking, but can be more flawed. The lead image should be edited using gimp with filters for contrast and saturation to make the thing pretty.

Why YSK:

You may like these features or find them creepy, but the app doesn't have direct network access.

Android System Intelligence is a system app on Android that is responsible for a whole host of smart features, including Live Caption, Live Translate, Now Playing, Smart Auto-rotate, and more. The app can be disabled or uninstalled at the cost of losing these features.

Personally I don't enjoy having a Google app watching and listening all the time, so it was easy to disable it and ease my anxiety. (This doesn't stop Google from being Google, but it does turn these features on or off, depending on whether they are useful or not)

Why YSK: some very dangerous people and organizations use love bombing as a strategy to manipulate and recruit people. Love bombing is often an early warning sign for a traumatizing relationship, so it's helpful to be able to spot the signs.

What it Is

Essentially, it's when someone showers you with love and attention. It often includes a lot of reassurance that you belong with someone or in a group. It can include gifts, flattery, praise, and it usually includes a lot of excitement about your future together or with a group.

The catch is that the love bomb goes away, and you become devalued after the love bomb. This is usually followed by a "discard phase", where if you try to confront the behavior, you are rejected and made to feel at fault. After you've become upset by this, they will often start the cycle again to keep your loyalty.

There are some really key warning signs to look out for:

1. They give you gifts, especially random gifts
2. They want all of your attention
3. They're desperate for commitment from you
4. You feel pressure to not tell them no
5. They constantly talk about how much they love you, how special you are, etc.
6. You feel flattered but uneasy around them
7. They want to know a lot about you very quickly
8. They emphasize how much better everything is when you are with them

Where can I spot it?

Love bombing is very common in abusive and manipulative relationships. It's also often noticeable in cult recruiting, when members are trained to shower you with love and affection.

What can I do about it?

It can be good to seek help from a mental health professional if you're already hurt from the effects of love bombing. If you're in crisis, consider contacting a local crisis or emergency line.

If you notice signs of love bombing, there are some strategies that often work to keep people safe:

• set firm boundaries early
• stay grounded (i.e., take their praise with a grain of salt)
• ask, "what might they want from this interaction?"
• end a relationship if it's not working
• give as little information out as possible at the start of a relationship
• ask an objective 3rd party how they feel about your relationship with this person or group

More resources

https://health.clevelandclinic.org/love-bombing https://www.choosingtherapy.com/love-bombing/

If you are facing or have recently faced a renoviction by a flipper or merchant housing dealer, you may not understand the reason: greed. I recently went through a renoviction and it took me some time to see the reason why: the commodification of housing.

Better put as how to double your return on idle money by simply evicting the vulnerable and artificially inflating housing costs.

Big shout out to the conservative faction of "god what's you to be richer at any cost" for bolting a moral veneer of piety to this cruel and commandment breaking (#8, #9, & #10) approach.

Almost 3.5 million manuals scanned in.

Pointing this out as I noticed in a few comments that some people where not aware of this tool

Also, you can configure your home instance with the button on the right to access a community being logged in: