I’ve used a (LibreOffice) spreadsheet for the past 10 years to track everything I spend–yes, every single thing–it’s not that hard at all. Keep the receipt or make a note of it to enter when you get home. Mine is set up like this:

One tab for each year. Rows are transactions and columns are categories (after the date, payment type, and payee/description), so one transaction row could have amounts entered in multiple columns.

I use only about a dozen broad categories like Food, Utilities (I see no point in separating out each specific utility), Household supplies, Car, Entertainment, etc. Also sales tax and donations columns. Basically whatever you might want to see totals for. Start simple and general, and you can always add another column or two later if needed. Row totals in the final column, column totals at the top.

I also have tabs for: Credit card charges–for reconciling with the bill (and then record the payment on the yearly tab in the appropriate categories); Medical expenses–categories are type Rx/Tx/Ins and how paid HSA/Chkg Acct/Credit card; And finally a Notes tab for entering more detailed info about any unusual/extra costs like auto/house repairs or major purchases.

You could add Budgeting on another tab with budgeted amounts vs actual amounts (grabbed by using formulas pointing to the year tabs), but I don’t need that because my spending and expenses are pretty simple and consistent.

Most people would just put water in the mug (ceramic/microwave-safe of course) that they’re going to make the tea in and microwave it until it boils or bubbles just short of a rolling boil, which takes 2 or 3 minutes, depending on the microwave’s power–you’d learn the time yours takes and set the timer for that. At that point I don’t see the difference between that vs. if you poured it into the cup from the kettle. Either way you now have a cup full of boiling-hot water to steep your tea in. No, it won’t spill over if you don’t fill it all the way up to the brim.

Oh, now I see! You don’t understand that a microwave can boil water, you think it can only warm it up a little. Thank you for clearing up my confusion.

Have some class!

Whenever I hear Europeans accuse Americans of being arrogant, I can only laugh. Feeling superior about something like how you boil water is hilarious.

I use an electric kettle but remember that in the US outlets are 120V, so they take a lot longer to heat water than in countries with 240.

So the microwave isn’t much less efficient than the electric kettle, mainly because some of the energy is heating the mug/container. The least efficient is a stovetop kettle on an electric stove.

But I’m curious, why are Europeans so horrified by the idea of heating water in the microwave? Is it related to power consumption, or is there some other reason?

Isn’t that the time most people would think of testing it on themselves?

Yeah I use the hottest running water and also scrub it with soap to get as much as possible off.

I’ve also used a hair dryer to heat the bites up but you have to be careful not to hold it too close to the skin and burn yourself. I’m very reactive to bug bites and I seem to get a million bites within seconds of going outside.

I’m one of those who gave my bread maker away. The problem was when I was making bread with it, it was so good I’d quickly eat it all up and kept gaining weight, so I stopped using it.

I’ve tried (electrical tape) that but found it is gummy and leaves a sticky mess.

Ooh, good idea! I hate all those lights.

+1 for the Aeropress!

I’m an old lady but I also happen to use linux! You don’t have to be a tech neckbeard for that, just dislike Windows.

Was the U.S. space race a triumph of science — or a moral compromise rooted in Operation Paperclip?

“It looks like you’re trying to launch a spacecraft. Would you like help?”

When your muscles feel tight or tense, or a bit achy, you’ll automatically feel like stretching them.

I think it’s ironic that the alternatives to Android (graphene, calyx) only fully work on Google phones.

Good analogy.

I wouldn’t call it ‘hardcore’ not to use crap like that. I’ve never used Reddit, Twitter instagram or any of that (with one brief exception). Only the Fediverse. Made my mastodon account in 2018 and that’s all I used until I made this Lemmy account last year.

The exception was: back about 15 years or so ago, some people talked me into making a facebook account because they had a group on there. I reluctantly made the account and read their posts for a while but it was just stupid meaningless tripe, so I never posted anything on there and after a while I deleted the account. During that time it was apparently hijacked because I logged on and someone had made a completely weird profile on it. Don’t know how they did it but I changed the password and removed the stuff which seemed to work, that’s when I submitted the deletion request to FB though who knows what happened to it after that.

edit: I should add that I do use Youtube (mainly via Freetube but not always) and I do read reddit posts when I search for things and it comes up as a relevant result.

Early '90’s. At first only the government and universities had access to the internet, before the www/world wide web existed. I went to a university before the general public had access via ISPs (which were just dial-up for a long time), so I could get onto it. At first there were just things like Archie and gopher, and a text email thing (pine, I think it was).

When dial-up became available to the general public, very few people used it at first. I used Compuserve for a while with a 300 baud modem where you could read the text as it slowly came across. But very quickly AOL started up and sent out millions of CDs so more and more people signed up on that–I never used AOL, though. Once I had dial-up at home I used IRC to chat online. That was in the mid 90’s. Good times.

I have a small camera (a little smaller than a phone) that can do photos and videos.

The phone will be powered off before leaving the house and only turned on if absolutely needed to make a call. Hopefully that’s enough for no GPS/cell tower tracking, right? Don’t need to wrap it in foil?

There are so many options. If you’re looking for a free and open source wiki-style setup, a couple I haven’t seen mentioned in the thread yet are Zim Desktop Wiki and Feather wiki (hmm looks like their web certificate is expired at the moment)

Nice!