Indeed. The biggest donations my family makes every year are to food banks. I live in San Jose CA, one of the richest areas of the country. My local food bank, Second Harvest serves one in five people in their service areas - that’s over 500,000 people each month. And that is in one of the very wealthiest communities in the country.
Many years ago before my father died he was working on a startup idea for a closed loop water cooling system for factories. It’s complex and he was a the engineer not I but it makes me curious when I read all these reports of the extreme water usage of many data centers for cooling (often at times of year when other uses of municipal water are high as well) and it makes me wonder why I don’t see anyone trying closed loop system that wouldn’t need to draw (or discharge) much water?
So had an email this morning from one of my favorite bookstores anywheee. Seemed possibly ominous “A message from …”
But as a reminder of why they are an amazing bookstore - it was to announce the formation and recogniation of the booksellers union with the support of the management and board of directors of the bookstore (which is itself a non-profit and former co-op)
So congrats to the Seminary Co-op Booksellers Union) and I’m a proud former co-op member (http://semcoop.com)
What tool(s) do other GMs or game designers/writers use to make the first draft of a new adventure? Especially for your prep to run it for a group for the first time?
(I’m about to shift from mostly running published adventures to likely largely running homebrew with occasional published content) for my 5e group that are all now level 10 (and functionally stronger than a typical 5 pc group)
Considering using Scrivener but open to other (MacOS compatible) suggestions
examples of "I don't think they actual test apps at Google anymore"
YouTube (iOS app) - if you have screen rotation turned off - still rotates a video if you play it and push the full screen - and then there is no way to return to the main navigation (i.e. if you had done a search) just options for their next suggested video
Gmail - I was browsing past the first 50 messages, new message came in, it was displayed on my screen as message 51, then as message 1 when I returned in all messages view
I'm absolutely convinced that the folks building gmail don't think anyone actually wants to use the All messages view as they break it all the time (and force you into other views when you first open gmail in a new browser tab) but I don't want the view that hides messages - I signed up for the messages, I want to see them and choose which to read when - frequently stuff gmail filters out of my inbox (not due to my numerous rules to do that) are actually messages with time sensitive contents
Business advice (and yes based on real experiences). Do not send a bill to a non-verified email address. If you do send one - don’t send it from a no-reply address.
Because, inevitably you will send a bill to the wrong person who will be annoyed and will not pay your bill all while the actual customer won’t pay it because you haven’t emailed them at their actual address.
And no most strangers aren’t going to call a phone number of a business they have no relationship with just to fix this
Every week. Emails from businesses in states I do not live in sent to strangers who think my email address is theirs. With no easy way for me to correct this. When it comes from an actual human I reply and inform them of the mistake. But I don’t call up random businesses to try to explain the situation.
Again this happens 3-5x a week. (With bills and the like) and multiple times a day with just random mailing lists.
Periodic reminder that no one owes you a follow or connection on social media (if they do it implies an employer/employee relationship and don’t expect them to connect with their personal accounts)
I don’t personally encounter this too often but I see it all the time - people taking being unfollowed (or blocked) personally. But we should all remember that everyone has more going on than their public persona shows and the reasons for unfollowing may not be what your active imagination imagines
Does anyone have a site that lists software by categories (both open and closed source and for all sizes of businesses and personal use) that are from companies and organizations that are run by horrible people
(For example - nothing by anything Oracle now owns would make this list for me)
Think garner quandrant charts for various categories of software but where you can exclude sets of companies (and orgs)
Ideally people can share their exclusion lists and reasoning
Less political reasons than “not owned by a MAGA idiot” might be “do they offer support in every geography my company does business in” or “are their products localized for key languages my employees or customers epeak” or for dev tools/libraries does the license conform to my company’s standards and needs.
But I’ll take “here are good alternatives to Netsuite for a midsized company that doesn’t want to support Ellison”
@Rycaut I've never heard of it so I wonder how many people know ( not that I've heard of everything or anything, but I do read a lot of political news and the like)
I am actively voting for Biden and Harris. Not just against Trump. He has had far more successes than I expected - and far more than the media gives him credit for - and with four more years he and his VP (who as a Californian Jew married to an Indian daughter of immigrants I’m proud to vote for and support) is he and his administration or VP Harris perfect? No. But no one (in or out of politics) is perfect. But they are smart, savvy, experienced and surrounded by actual experts
Could Apple make an iPad like device that wasn’t a full device with all the features but instead only worked when paired with a second device?
Ie a touchscreen with battery, Bluetooth, a few ports and perhaps storage (and minimal compute to run the screen) that then pairs with a laptop or an iPhone or a VisionPro and works as a display and input device?
(Perhaps with either no camera or only a camera for FaceID and videoconferencing)
I’ve long thought that we might eventually see a screen less device that has compute, storage and radios which then pairs with a variety of other devices for full functionality (watch, VisionPro or what comes next after that, screens, controllers etc. it raises various lag and interference and security concerns but also could allow for staggered upgrades as well as entirely new form factors
my LinkedIn Account is old enough to drink in the US.
Which is a bit sad especially since it was so great a site and service in the past and has fallen so far, today it is bigger than ever yet also less useful, and their automation doesn't help.
(I was literally one of the first 1000 users of LinkedIn - but their automated systems don't make any particular note of that)
small feature I'd love gmail to allow - let me set what size email is "too big" to show the full message. Hint I'd set it really really big. I have fiber, Google presumably has really big data centers with really fast pipes. Surely they can manage to show the full message of say the email from a local bookstore chain showing all of their upcoming author signing events without me clicking to open the message in a new tab.
Its been one (of many) frustrations with gmail for many many years
noting a trend on Facebook (and likely on other social media sites) - a ton of posts to random groups (with serious sounding names but unclear who runs them or why) with rehashed versions of memes from years ago which my friends now seem apt to reshare/post as if they are new(ish) stories. And in many cases they seem to be lightly edited from the original versions and the sources of the original meme are almost always obscured or not cited at all. Often paired with AI generated images
give yourself the time to read it. It isn't a few minute read. It is a lengthy, long article (1000's of words), to read the whole thing takes time. It isn't easily summarized in a few short sentences (though I keep seeing that more often than a link to the original article)
The comments on such social media posts are even more obnoxious (for example doubting that he used his $3.5M (in 2014) violin - when the article is very very clear that he did and why.