Helpful Hints from joeeze: Don't waste your money on Food -of-the-Month mail order subscription clubs

For many years my family members, knowing how much of a food person I am, subscribed me to all manner of "Cheese/Sausage/Bacon/etc. of the Month clubs: it was an easy way for them to give me something they thought I'd enjoy without having to go through the contortions of trying to find something I'd like.

After about five years of tossing the unopened packages into the trash each month, I finally decided I couldn't remain silent, because they'd keep doing this forever.

What a waste of money!

When I told my peeps they were really angry, as I knew they'd be, but I simply couldn't play my part in the charade any longer.

Of interest: a couple years later they started up again, like I'd come to my senses or else they forgotten.

This time I got on the phone the moment the first installment arrived and reminded them we'd agreed on not giving these to me any more.

After that year the idiocy stopped.

But I digress.

These clubs cost a couple hundred dollars/year for a monthly delivery.

Why are they a waste for anyone who really likes food?

Because the cheese/bacon/sausage/etc. is not the finest,

Companies like Sargento populate these packages with their products: that is not cheese or summer sausage!

It's what's pejoratively called in the business "industrial cheese and meat;" it's made in giant factories on a huge scale, then shipped often in less then ideal packaging such that it arrives in less than subpar condition, usually in vacuum-packed plastic (top) rather than cheese paper.

Same with bacon and sausage and their ilk: no serious food person would touch these products.

You want to give a maven something they've never had nor heard of? 

Order them some Van de Rose bacon.

It's the best bacon you can buy in the U.S.

Be a shining star.

World Freehand Circle Drawing Champion Gives a Demonstration

Alexander Overwijk draws a perfect freehand circle 1 meter in diameter in less than 1 second.

40,478,424 views since it was posted to YouTube on January 9, 2007.

Google Goes Back To The Future

This morning I clicked my Google search bookmark and up came the minimalist, stripped down homepage of yore —including "I'm Feeling Lucky" (above).

Love it.

Then I started sliding the cursor around and up popped a box of options (below)

which includes "Create QR Code for this page" — very interesting!

I clicked on it and followed the instructions and up came this:

I aimed my phone's camera at the QR code and darned if the page didn't immediately appear on my phone (below).

This is no humbug.

So kewl!

Every U.S. Electrical Outlet Explained

Finally.

This time really is different

Every time something big seems to happening when it comes to the world of money and investment and the market, that old saw "This time it's different" is bandied about to justify the hype and huge sums of money being put in.

Up top, a graphic from the Wall Street Journal that seems to form a factual basis for the claim: the sum of the percentages of GDP for the nation's three giant booms over the past 200 years is about equal to that of projected AI spending from now until 2032.

It would appear we're just getting started on this ride, being only a year in.

I wonder what our world will be like in 2032: can't hardly wait!

bookofjoe's Favorite Phone Holder (for when I'm out running)

 

I've been through a zillion different ones over the years, which tells you that none were perfect.

Closest yet is this one from Respected Bro (wonderful name — love it) which arrived a couple days ago and which I've road tested since.

Easy to hold securely and comfortably since you can adjust it to fit your finger/hand size/shape (top).

The winning feature for me is that I can remove and reattach it without any effort (below) so I can still use the phone's MagSafe charging feature, unlike with other minimalist flexible finger-insertion-type holders I've used that require a semi-permanent adhesive attachment which renders MagSafe unusable.

Doubles as a phone stand due to elegant engineering and design.

Orange, White, or Purple: $18.37-$19.59 (phone not included).

Of interest to me: On the box it says the maker is "TSUNAMI LIMITED COMPANY."

Sounds Japanese, right?

Under that company name is this address:

No 02 Do The Chap, Phuoc My Ward, Son Tra District, Da Nang City, Vietnam

Under that address:

Made in China

Things that make me go "Hmmm..."

I mentioned before that I was both surprised and pleased to learn a few months into boj's reincarnation here that 70% of readers do so on their phones.

That's because boj2 looks much better on a phone than on a computer screen, for reasons that are above my TechnoDolt©®™ pay grade.

I spend very little time on my phone.

I'm on my MacBook Pro 95% of the time I'm online, which varies: somewhere between 2 and 10 hours/day.

Something I found interesting happened with this past Tuesday's 8 a.m. post: the YouTube thumbnail that appears on boj on my phone (top), which I selected when I composed the post, is different from the one that appears on my computer (below).

The video was shot with Meta Glasses (you can see both my hands) and then uploaded to YouTube via my phone, during which process I chose the thumbnail that appears on the phone version up top.

For whatever reason, a different thumbnail labeled "Shorts" leads the computer version.

Of course you're hearing this song....

City Roads. No Matter Where You Go... There You Will Be/Are/Were — Maybe All At Once!

"This website renders every single road within a city."

Alas, not all cities: as any fool can plainly see from the image up top, the site resorts to "Retry" mode when it fails to do what it purports to do.

And guess what?

I did just that a few times and kept getting the same error message: "This usually resolves within a few minutes."

So when it didn't, well, too bad for me. 

Hey — I just work here.

And before you get your baggies in a twist, remember: it's free — the way we like it.

Wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?

No — not that one, idiotstick: this one!

BeyondTheMedspeak: "Lioness" Season 3

I'm just the tiniest bit surprised that in "Lioness" Season 3 the principals continued to use Provigil (modafinil) prior to operations to stave off fatigue/sleepiness.

The drug was released in the U.S. in 1998, with fewer and less troubling side effects than amphetamines/caffeine etc. while enhancing alertness and cognition.

Nuvigil (armodafinil) supplanted Provigil the moment it was released in 2007, as it produces less in the way of side effects like the jitteriness and volubility demonstrated by Two Cups (top) after he took 2 pills rather than the standard single 250 mg tablet.

Perhaps time for a new doctor in the room where the script is vetted?

One more thing: if you decide you could benefit from either of these drugs, know that the current retail price of Nuvigil is $42-$44 per tablet.

You'll have to decide whether or not to pony up or de-escalate to the generic version which costs about half that.

A Visit to Simone Giertz's Tiny (630 sqft) Los Angeles Home

Simone Giertz is one of my favorite people and has been since long before she got big around 2016.

Her early videos in the 2010s featured robots she designed to intentionally fail at everyday tasks.

Boring phone call + iPad: TikTok FTW!

Sometimes you’ve got no choice: you're obligated to talk to someone, usually a family member, on the phone.

Up to now I've muted my phone so the oblivious relative can yap to her heart's content about the same old same old while I clean the house and do other things I've been putting off.

I stumbled on a better solution this morning: TikTok on my iPad with the sound turned off.

Now I can get my TikTok fix in without having it distract me from stuff I want to do.

I give TikTok huge UPs for building an irresistible, alluring algorithm.

Full disclosure: I've never made a TikTok (though I have an account): it's all I can do to keep my YouTube channel subscribers happy.

No Stress Tuna Press

Finally.

This stainless steel colander is tricked out with grip wings so you can squeeze every last drop of liquid out of the can.

Set of 3: $11.55 (tuna not included).

Do a couple of your friends a solid [see what I did there?] and give away the two extras.

What's in a Name?

Type in a last name and it will show you where in Great Britain that name has been found.

From the website:

..........................

Our research, carried out at the ESRC Consumer Data Research Centre (GeoDS), is exploring the generational and inter-generational residential movements of family groups across Great Britain, using historic censuses and recent consumer registers. 

The GeoDS holds a number of novel consumer datasets that chart recent movements and changes, including the links between geographical and social mobilty.

..........................

Read "All The Names" here — free, the way we like it.

[via Charles Arthur's nonpareil Overspill]

 

BeyondTheMedspeak: My History of Aspirin & Tylenol Use

Above, all my aspirin and Tylenol purchases from Amazon since September 2021.

Know that my painkiller meds and regimen of choice are and have always been 3 regular aspirin tablets + 2 Tylenol, every 4-6 hours.

No Motrin, no Advil, or any of the newer analgesics.

Reading the fine print I concluded none are as effective and safe as my combo.

The tens of millions of dollars spent by Big Pharma saying the opposite is true will never convince me.

You've read it here before but one more time never hurts: Old ways are the best ways.

Replika

News travels slowly to Podunkville: how else to explain the fact that I.HAD.NO.CLUE that Replika is so popular?

How popular, joe?

According to Wikipedia it became available to the public in November 2017; by January 2018 it had 2 million users; in January 2023 it had 10 million users; in August 2024 the total number of users was 30 million; in 2025 Replika's user base exceeded 40 million people!

Talk about flying under the radar....

25% of its users pay an annual subscription fee; the other 75% get a less full-featured version free.

Considering that latest user number, it's likely that more than a couple peeps reading this are "Replikites."

Can A Knife Be Too Sharp?

Up to last week I'd have said "Of course not." 

What a silly question!

After my Kyocera ceramic paring knife (top) arrived and I used it to slice some cheese — in the process slicing into my thumb not once but twice yet not realizing it for a couple seconds because the blade was so sharp I didn't feel it breaking my skin — I retired it to my knife rack.

Like the packaging (below) says:

                      UNRELENTING SHARPNESS

You can too!

$19.98.

When Albert Einstein Met Jean Piaget

From the March 1957 issue of Scientific American:

Children and Physics

Does a child's first conception of velocity include comprehension of it as a function of distance and time, or is his notion more primitive and intuitive? 

Albert Einstein himself posed this question to me in 1928 when I was demonstrating some experiments on causality to him one day. 

I have since performed a very simple experiment which shows that a child does not think of velocity in terms of the distance-time relation. 

We place before the child two tunnels, one of which is obviously much longer than the other, and then we push a doll through each tunnel with a metal rod in such a way that the dolls arrive at the other end of both tunnels simultaneously. 

We ask the child:




"Is one tunnel longer than the other?"



"Yes, that one."



"Did both dolls go through the tunnels at the same speed, or did one go faster than the other?"



"The same speed."



"Why?"



"Because they arrived at the same time."

Nirvana on the Cusp

Above, a video of Nirvana playing "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in a small club in New Haven, Connecticut on September 26,1991, just two days after "Nevermind" came out.

Below, 40+ minutes from the same show, featuring "Drain You," "Polly," and "Breed."

[via Kottke]

Usenet-Rewind

Search Usenet newsgroup archives: text posts from 1981-present across hundreds of thousands of newsgroups.

From the website: "Usenet-Rewind is a research archive for the newsgroup conversations that predate the modern web — early tech support and software debates, scientific and academic discussion, hobbyist and fan communities, entertainment and news commentary, and firsthand accounts of internet history as it happened on Usenet."

Fair warning: there goes the rest of your life.

bookofjoe's Favorite [New] Thing: Linsoul Wired Headphones

After many years of listenting to music while running using only Apple AirPods and then each successive iteration of AirPods Pro (we're currently on #3 with #4 scheduled to be released any minute), Bluetooth annoyances notwithstanding, a couple weeks ago I decided to take a flutter on a pair of wired headphones.

How that happened: I was reading reviews of the best Bluetooth headphones and a brand name — Linsoul — appeared that I'd never heard of.

I noodled around and found that same company makes wired headphones — the type that require a headphone jack — that cost $24.99, a tenth of the price of AirPods Pro, which will set you back $249  a pair and make you crazy when you lose one in tall grass and can't find it even with the aid of Apple's Find My feature.

I ordered a pair, along with a headphone jack-to-USB-C dongle as the iPhone uses USB-C connectors.

The new earphones are super comfortable and stable, staying exactly where I place them with the aid of an over-the-ear bend of the connecting wires (photo up top).

That's as opposed to AirPods Pro, which always fall out at least once during a run, annoying the heck out of me, even though I've tried each of the five available differently sized rubber in-ear inserts.

But here's the big news, buried: the Linsoul sound is utterly fantastic, WAY better than AirPods: for the first time I'm hearing all the separate instruments clearly — it's so great!

But wait — there's more!

Because the wired headphones are one way traffic only, they don't suffer from a super-annoying feature of AirPods Pro, namely automatically muting the music whenever there's a loud noise or I yell out of fatigue or exhaustion.

I hate that!

It takes 15-20 seconds for the music to resume after one of those shouts.

I mean, I'm shouting because I'm miserable, so not having the music to distract me makes me even more so.

Helpful Hints from joeeze: How to decide whether or not to hire someone BEFORE their interview

Long tip short: watch them park.

If they head into an empty double car slot (spaces for two cars end to end) and park in the more distal spot, they're hired.

If instead they back into a parking spot when they could have headed in as noted above, that spells "loser" — don't waste your time interviewing them.

Not only is it easier to park if you head in, it's much easier — and safer — to exit going forward.

The erstwhile employee from Loserville instead has to back out blindly and risk being hit from the side.

Summing it up: Head in so you don't have to back out.

Walking Men

Artist Maya Barkai assembled a collection of pedestrian traffic signals from around the world: it's called "Walking Men Worldwide."

Look both ways.

More?

Your wish is my demand.

email 4 TechnoDolts©®™

Since forever the email inboxes on my phones and laptops have differed: some emails arrive in one, others in the other, and still others show up in both.

For decades I've read about this problem about in my local Mac Users Group forum.

As a rule, knowledgeable people answer by providing step-by-step instructions to get things straightened out. 

I often laugh, especially when they write stuff like "You'll need to rebuild your mailboxes for each email address."

If I tried to do that I would destroy my perfectly functional (though funky) email reception and never get it back.

These tips and suggestions sometimes advise users to "Open the Terminal."

WHAT!?

All I remember from back in the day is that no TechnoDolt©®™ has any business messing around with the Terminal.

As we always said in the OR (and I guarantee it's still being said there): "Perfect is the enemy of good."

4-Color Pen Throwdown: BIC v ZEBRA

Watching the terrific series "The Shards" on Disney+, I noticed that uberbabe Susan Reynolds, superbly played by Kaia Gerber, was partial to a classic old-timey BIC four-color pen.

The series is set in LA in the early 80s and captures it perfectly: I saw so so many places I knew from my time there during those years.

But I digress.

Out of nostalgia for that BIC pen, which first appeared in 1970, I bought some (3 for $6.64).

In the video up top it's the pen with a blue barrel.

When it arrived I noticed a small hole at the top of the pen above the colored clickers: it's so you can put it around your neck to free your hands when you're not using it. 

I don't recall that feature from back in the day — I wonder whose idea it was and when it appeared.

Even with the assistance of Perplexity Pro I was unable to pin down a date for the change, though the AI did note that when the pen debuted there was a solid plastic ball atop the clickers.

Just for lulz I bought a Japanese iteration made by ZEBRA (grey barrel; $6.61 apiece).

The ZEBRA's all tricked out: in addition to the four colors there's a pencil that's activated by moving the pocket clip — and an eraser!

But wait — there's more!

The ZEBRA has an ergonomically shaped barrel with a soft rubber area where you put your fingers.

Both pens write nicely and have a satisfying feel when you click to a different color.

Bottom line: I prefer the more minimal look of the BIC as well as its lighter weight (10 grams v 15) and lighter price.

There Are Two Types Of People In The World — And I Know How To Tell Them Apart

One type, when dealing with a three-bulb, difficult-to-access ceiling light fixture containing two burned-out bulbs, replaces the two dead ones.

The second type replaces all three — not just the two dead ones but also the one that's working just fine.

Which type am I?

Which type are you?

Which type would you like to be?

I wonder if I should trademark the bookofjoe [Dim] Bulb Personality Test™ or just let anyone who wants it take it and claim they thought it up.

You know the answer to that one.

That's why I like you — you're so smart.