I made a decision to give anyone who demands monthly recurring payments from me a dedicated card. Whenever I know I would like to make a payment, I transfer the exact amount. Keeping zero balance at all times. It saved me many times. Most of the big corporations¹ do not care about you; they only care about profits. Countless times, again and again, the same story repeats. I see a company trying to charge me for a subscription I didn’t mean to renew. Thanks to the zero balance, the payment fails. I go to their website and cancel the subscription. They tell me the subscription is cancelled, and at the same time, they continue to attempt to take the money from my account. It got me curious. What I think is happening is that they enrolled you into next month before taking the payment. So if you cancel payment after a failed payment, your cancellation date will not be today; it will be once a month in the future. For these cases, I had to waste technical support time and ask them to stop trying to charge me.

This approach has also saved me when renting electric bicycles. The timer on my bike didn’t work, so I couldn’t stay within my first 20 minutes and went slightly over budget, which increased my bill significantly. Luckily, the extra charge payment has failed. They still trying to charge me to my amusement.

What’s funny there’s even a subscription services to manage your subscriptions. I am not going to mention them; that is just ridiculous.

I don’t like the incline angle in keyboards. I even looked into expensive mechanical options, all of them have an angle. Most of the people used to the angle, even though it’s not ergonomic. I was watching Adam Savages video about The Seneca keyboard. To my delight, it’s zero angle. But it’s $3,600, and you can’t even buy it.

There are a lot of modern wallets out there which look like a sharp rectangle. You should not buy them. I had one of them and I used it for many years. It felt great, so small. I felt smart using it. Then I thought that Apple Wallet and Apple Pay should replace even that small thing. But it didn’t happen. I have noticed that I am losing stuff. Because I don’t have a consistent place to keep cash, stamp cards, coupons, notes, COINS (I never have a point when I need one). I keep putting them in different pockets. It’s not a good system, I can never have them when I need them most. And when I try to find them at home, I can’t even do that. After a decade not having a wallet with me, I realised that I need my big fat wallet back. I need to use George Costanza’s wallet and keep everything there.

One time I had some guests and I gave them my contactless cards to use as a transport tickets. To my shock, none of them were working. I think it happened because I stored them together in a big box at home. I would buy a new wallet which would have isolated compartments for each card, which prevent RFID, magnetic stripes, and NFC from interfering and even damaging each other. But I have not found a wallet like this. Funny, some of them advertise RFID protection, putting isolation outside the wallet, instead of using it inside where it should be.

Watching all these Facebook and Instagram ads, finally I wanted to say it makes me sick to see letters appearing in the middle of an ad. I can’t turn them off, they obscure the view and it’s just ugly. I understand that the only reason people use them is because we mute our phones and big text forces you to read and you end up watching something you don’t even want to watch. This is disgusting.

Pavel Durov (Telegram founder) put a banner for every user which declares that “Internet is dead”. Tapping on the banner reveals this post.

I’m turning 41, but I don’t feel like celebrating.

Our generation is running out of time to save the free Internet built for us by our fathers.

What was once the promise of the free exchange of information is being turned into the ultimate tool of control.

Once-free countries are introducing dystopian measures such as digital IDs (UK), online age checks (Australia), and mass scanning of private messages (EU).

Germany is persecuting anyone who dares to criticize officials on the Internet. The UK is imprisoning thousands for their tweets. France is criminally investigating tech leaders who defend freedom and privacy.

A dark, dystopian world is approaching fast — while we’re asleep. Our generation risks going down in history as the last one that had freedoms — and allowed them to be taken away.

We’ve been fed a lie.

We’ve been made to believe that the greatest fight of our generation is to destroy everything our forefathers left us: tradition, privacy, sovereignty, the free market, and free speech.

By betraying the legacy of our ancestors, we’ve set ourselves on a path toward self-destruction — moral, intellectual, economic, and ultimately biological.

So no, I’m not going to celebrate today. I’m running out of time. We are running out of time.

Blaming the UK and EU for internet freedoms violations while not even mentioning russia (he’s country of origin), China or North Korea. I have no doubts that he’s a voluntary or forced russian propagandist. And judging by his character and long history of hate posting towards Western culture, I think it’s the former.

I was working on a Caffeine++ update and needed to upgrade the internal database. I happened to catch a bug, luckily before the release, where some of my drinks wouldn’t migrate correctly.

We know that to find a match, we can explicitly point to the id property:

.first(where: { $0.id == object.id })

And we also can write this, which complies. And you would think it does the same thing because object on the left and right conform to Identifiable.

.first(where: { $0 == object })

But in my case, only the first, longer option works correctly. Oddly, the shorter version fails only sometimes. I am not sure why.

I don’t have issues with the cast iron stuff, but we have a scratching situation with Le Creuset teflon frying pans. They are not better than any other brand. But paying extra was motivated by the hope of higher safety and a longer life. I think scratches are caused by the dishwasher, but I am not 100% sure. We don’t have enough space in the kitchen, so it’s possible we scratched the surface when storing. And of course, they won’t replace it.

Whenever I see “lifetime guarantee” or even a ”limited warranty”, I try to gather as much information as possible and digitalise the purchase. Because when it comes to claiming the warranty, there’s always resistance. Sometimes they try to confuse us by claiming that warranty only available if you register your item shortly after purchase. And how many people do it? I think it’s just a trick to gather more data on us, and warranty still can be used even without registration. I ending up registering anyway, just in case. The only exception is Apple, I always had good experience in a warranty and even outside warranty situations.