Pickles. They were too strong and sour for me. Now I love 'em.

That’s so neat; I’d never noticed that before. And the walls closing in on the stage adaptation is really clever

“12 Angry Men” (1957) is a personal favorite that I recommend to pretty much everyone. Great messages about questioning assumptions, challenging biases, understanding the limitations of evidence, acknowledging imperfections in the justice system, and the consequences thereof.

The movie is also cinematically interesting to me because it feels “small”. The entire movie just about takes place in one room, and the events of the film transpire over the course of one afternoon.

I found almond milk to be a great substitute a couple of years ago when I was dieting. Particularly the ‘unsweetened, vanilla’ variety from Almond Breeze.

As an added bonus, it also has a much longer shelf life than regular milk.

and connect to it with an iPad that has a Jellyfin client installed?

In my experience, you don’t even need the dedicated Jellyfin client. Just opening it up in a web browser works out of the box, so that’s potentially one less thing to download/install/manage for the clients.

That said, I’ve never tried to access Jellyfin from an iPad/iPhone/Mac so it might not be as seamless as my experiences on Android/Linux based devices. But I imagine they’d be fine; just test it out before you hit the road.

I don’t watch a lot of creepy/spooky stuff, so my recommendations come from a fairly limited breadth. That said, I recommend a few things that many might lump under “kid movies” (I prefer the more accurate label “family entertainment”) since they tend to be perilous and unsettling without being outright violent, gory, or generally miserable.

Coraline (2009) - A young girl, dissatisfied with her home life after moving to a new town, stumbles upon a dark, parallel world. Therein, she finds solace in a parallel version of her mother who is not what she seems.

Paranorman (2012) - A young boy who can speak with the dead learns that a witch who was executed by the townspeople hundreds of years ago will soon return to seek vengeance upon them.

Over the Garden Wall (2014) - A mini-series focusing on two brothers who find themselves inexplicably lost in a forest teeming with fell beasts, witches, undead, and unlikely allies. I watch this one every year around this time. Cozy yet spooky at the same time.

That sucks man. You went the extra mile to be a good host, so you should be proud of that, regardless!

Is it “fair”? I’d say no, but the world isn’t a fair place. Enormous, unscrupulous corporations are to blame for the untenable situation we collectively find ourselves in. And those corporations aren’t going to be rectifying their behavior any time soon unless forced to.

That being said, asking individuals to take steps to reduce climate change isn’t an unreasonable thing in my eyes. Because, until corporations are held accountable, asking individuals is the only thing that can possibly improve the situation. Even though it’s like throwing a cup of water on a forest fire.

The second that Amazon, Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Coke, Pepsi, et al are forced to do their part, I will start throwing my trash out the window again like a proper American. Until then, I’m gonna recycle and encourage my friends and family to do so as well.

“Sons of Texas” reminded me of this tune I enjoyed a while back from Maylene and the Sons of Disaster:

“Step Up (I’m On It)”

The official documentation has some guides on setting it up in a few different ways, although they assume the user is decently familiar with Linux/terminal commands and such. There might be some more beginner-friendly guides out there, though.

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/installation/container/

I switched from Plex to Jellyfin a while back and I’ve been very happy with it.

Depends on the particular device. LDAC has been around for years and supports higher bitrates than mp3s (assuming we’re putting 320kbps mp3s in the “higher quality” category)

Relevant to this idea, I use these apps to let me know when things like the International Space Station, meteor showers, aurorae, etc are visible overhead:

https://spotthestation.nasa.gov/

https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/night/

Would be neat if there were one unified app to track them all and send notifications

AAA’s seem really common in my neck of the woods.

I got a Coast headlamp a couple years back that has a rechargeable battery pack, but can also take regular AAA’s, which is a handy feature if I happen to need an immediate recharge.

I’ve had this same experience on Linux Mint. I’ll run apt update & apt upgrade and, occasionally, if Firefox is one of the things being updated, new tabs and new pages won’t load and will tell me I need to do a system restart to continue browsing.

I always update manually, so it never happens without me initiating the update first. But sometimes I’m like, “Dangit, didn’t realize this update would require a restart to keep using Firefox.”

Yep! These guys are booked solid around the clock. I have to schedule well in advance any time I want to take my car to them, unless I want to camp out and be the first customer when they open at 5am. Worth it, though. They’re good people.

Nah, I just live in a rural area. There’s closer shops to me, but a very honest local business I’ve been going to for years is a bit further away and it’s worth the extra distance for their service. They’re a fantastic shop and they’ve always done great by me.

Adding on to this: the repair shop I take my car to is too far from my house for me to walk or bike back, so I just walk the shops in town while they work on my car (unless they tell me ahead of time it might take more than one day to diagnose+repair, in which case I ask a friend to drive me back home after dropping off the car).

It’s less that they “assume you can leave”, but rather that it isn’t really their problem. They need an uncertain amount of time to work on your car, depending on the issue being repaired, and you can leave if you want to during that window.

If there’s nowhere for you to walk/bike to nearby, you just gotta sit and wait, which I’ve done on a handful of occasions. Just sitting in the lobby and reading some outdated magazines for an hour or two. It’s boring, but what can you do?

I really enjoyed watching this series a while back by Ben Eater:

“Building an 8-bit Breadboard Computer”

It explains a lot of the steps in the rocks-to-computer pipeline in detail. It assumes decent familiarity with electronics fundamentals, though. So maybe not the best starting point.

A $1 backscratcher from a local pharmacy. Makes scratching my own back effortless. 10/10 investment. And way more affordable than the full-time backscratching assistant I was paying all those years.