stealth_cookies

In North America and Europe, tap to pay was implemented prior to smartphones that could scan QR codes being ubiquitous. Most of us have had cards that support NFC payments for longer than we have had a phone that can read QR codes so it made sense for phones to pick up the technology that worked with the terminals businesses already had than try to implement a new system. The QR code thing is primarily a Chinese solution to the payment problem (all other Asian countries I’ve been to have widespread NFC acceptance). Payment cards were never widespread within China the way they are in other places, until AliPay and WeChat Pay became a thing people still primarily used cash for their daily communications. If businesses don’t already have credit card terminals but people have smartphones then the QR code starts to make more sense. One interesting thing about this is that even before North America was widely using NFC payments, people in Hong Kong were using their Octopus transit cards as contactless payment at all kinds of businesses throughout the city. Yet that technology didn’t seems to make it into Mainland China.

“But shareholders expect a new phone every year…” I agree, the changes year after year are so minor at this point that a 2 year cycle is enough. Just look at the S26 that Samsung just announced, they are rightly getting criticised for how little they changed. Heck, they have been using the same image sensors for like 4 years now.

If you have network issues generally best practice is to unplug everything for 30 seconds and then turn the devoces on one by one from where the internet comes into the house and let each connect before moving up the chain. So typically modem then router then computer.

Pretty much, I’ve been working on reducing my dependence on big tech companies by self hosting or using open source where possible. While impossible to do fully, at least if I lose an account things are either backed up or I’m only losing a small amount of my data.

A big problem is that most denim people buy these days is “stretch” which massively reduces durability of the material. It has gotten way too hard to find classic denim in most stores.

I’d love Jellyfin if not for their incredibly infuriating seek behaviour. Why do I have to press play to start the video again?

I work closely with a company that uses Teams and every time I’m in a meeting that they organize I’m constantly shocked at how horrible that software is. Like I thought Google Meet wasn’t great but everything from sharing screens to the audio quality is leaps and bounds better than Teams.