I love little local things like this. Punxsatawney’s Groundhog Day celebration is probably the most well-known, but anything where local people were just like “heh, that’d be fun, let’s try it” is so cool to me.

Let’s just say this happens a lot in my house.

I need to get on that, I guess.

125% agreed. I was responding only to “If it’s clogged, you’d know beforehand when you look in the bowl.” I think there’s potentially an engineering solution–a fluid dynamics engineering solution–but definitely not an app.

Oh, absolutely. I was responding only to “If it’s clogged, you’d know beforehand when you look in the bowl.”

An app for a toilet is a stupid idea, full stop.

They can still have both. A foot pedal for those who want it, a standard handle for those who don’t or can’t. In fact, retrofitting existing handle-flush toilets to add foot pedals could make a lot of sense.

Yeah, not to mention, adding any sort of electronic components to the thing would be dicey at best. A lot of bathrooms don’t even have power outlets anywhere near the toilet.

I’d prefer some sort of pressure-activated valve or something, but this is an engineering challenge that’s beyond my meager skills.

I have a wifi-enabled garage door opener whose manufacturer discontinued the Google Home connection for so that you have to use their app and see their Amazon or Walmart ads. I also have a wifi-enabled alarm system whose manufacturer apparently doesn’t care about Matter integration or whatever. So leaving the house in my car requires the use of two different apps (three if I also need to turn off lights).

In actuality I just use the physical buttons. But there was a time that I had a beautiful dream of getting a smart lock and setting my house up to lock the doors, close the garage door, and arm the alarm when I pushed a button in the car–and, more importantly, undo all of those things in reverse when I got home.

Toilets can appear to have flushed fully, but still have…material…stuck in the U-bend that hasn’t completely evacuated the toilet. A subsequent flush won’t work, even though the water in the bowl is clean.

Ask me how I know.

That said, this could almost certainly be better-solved in other ways. Maybe by preventing the tank from refilling if there’s still something in the u-bend (then you’d know it needed attention because there’d be no water in it)?

Toilets can appear to have flushed fully, but still have…material…stuck in the U-bend that hasn’t completely evacuated the toilet. A subsequent flush won’t work, even though the water in the bowl is clean.

Ask me how I know.

more sanitary

Foot pedal flush really needs to become a thing.

Hmm. That doesn’t very neatly explain the ones that pop up in places where it’s impossible to die.

I also just jumped onto Linux gaming on Mint. Mine is a slightly underpowered laptop, but so far it can run everything in my Steam library (which is a bit dated at this point) with no problem at all.

Look at moneybags over here being able to afford eggs.

Voice to text -> AI expansion -> Character Encoding -> Character Decoding -> AI summarization -> Text to voice

We should’ve just stuck with voice calls.

Indeed. Any company can claim to own anything. The question is whether or not it’s lucrative enough to do so.

Any energy source is going to be able to have a price tag and a logo slapped on it as long as energy generation requires infrastructure and capitalism is a thing. Wind, solar, and tidal are great; we desperately need more of them as part of our energy strategy. But they can also have a price tag and a logo. In fact, home solar has become quite a lucrative…well, not exactly scam, but “bad deal” in my area.

And fusion will have to be here, too, to fill the gaps that wind, solar, and tidal leave; at least for now. There’s no “forever” answer here, only some that’ll last longer than others.

Cool. I can’t wait for my immunocompromised friend to die of a preventable disease that we had eradicated in the US until this year.

He doesn’t deserve “cooler.” How about the Secretary of Infection?

That’s just how bad people who don’t pay their workers are.