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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Main alternative to Amazon that I’ve found is Ebay. Physical retail is fine for regular household stuff but if you need a weird or specialized item, you can’t buy it in person any more. You’re stuck with online. Like I needed some clear heat-shrink tubing recently, and it’s impossible to find retail as far as I can tell. I guess digi-key has it but I was able to find it way more affordably on ebay when shipping is considered. I need an inner tube for my bike in an apparently unusual size and it’s the same thing, have to order it. Bah.










  • 1950s were before my time but later in the same century, FM radio was what we had instead of internet music and streaming. You could call radio stations and request particular songs, or sometimes they would announce that they would play some new album nonstop starting at 7pm, so you would be ready with your cassette deck. Or in general, they’d just play music all day, so you’d always have something to listen to. That’s sort of what people do now anyway, except it’s whatever the youtube algorithm is promoting instead of what the record labels were paying the radio stations to play. TV was never a 24/7 music medium like that. I guess MTV was a thing for a while but that was still different.

    AM radio on the other hand was mostly for news and sports updates, particularly in cars. So the most valuable advertising slots were during “drive time”, i.e. commute hours.



  • General rule is if something in your house breaks and it’s cheaper to buy the tool to fix it than to call a repair person, then buy the tool and fix it yourself. So you do some work but get a tool out of the deal. After a while you have enough tools to fix typical problems.

    My other big epiphany is avoid cordless tools except for a few that get used a lot, like a cordless drill/driver. I use a corded handheld vacuum instead of a cordless one and it’s cheaper, way more powerful, doesn’t need constant recharging, just better all around. Obviously this isn’t a hard rule but consider corded when you can. Remember you can use a portable inverter or similar for lots of this stuff. Like I bought a cordless glue gun early on, a popular tool, but it was a dumb purchase in retrospect. Corded would have been fine.