smokey_the_bear

I bought my daughter a shirt I saw in a Facebook ad, from Chalk & Stone. The shirt arrived and is great.

I do know how to load arbitrary PDFs onto the kindle, you can do it now with a specific email address that's assigned to each kindle. It's allow-listed for coming from your amazon email address though.

I was not able to extract the PDF from the online textbook. I think I had something that would have worked to just get the content, but I'd have had to stitch all the chapters back together, and if the page numbers didn't match the original book it would have been a hassle for my daughter.

I could not figure out a way to extract a pdf of the textbook to send to her kindle. I would have liked that solution, since she has one of the large format kindles.

My 11 year old daughter uses the open dyslexic font in her kindle. She has dyslexia, and also had to do some vision therapy when she was younger. She thinks she is able to read for longer with fewer headaches. She specifically has trouble tracking line to line.

She finds it very challenging to read her school textbooks, which are provided online on her Chromebook with a bad screen. I bought her paper versions of the same books.

In the US, I usually show up about an hour before. A little less if I'm traveling alone, but holiday are a disaster at American airports.

Once, I showed up two hours before a flight a few days after Christmas. I had a lapchild, so we needed to check in with a person and not use the kiosks.

We stood in line for 90 minutes, then stood in the security line for 30 minutes and missed our flight. They couldn't rebook my family for a week. We rented a minivan and drove 1800 miles, without our luggage.

We pack lunch for our three kids because the free lunch at school is low quality and they don't like it.

I'm not claiming it's an overwhelming amount of work, and if we just packed sandwiches it would be easier, but it's easily 30 minutes a day of food prep and cleaning lunch boxes.

My middle schooler can't eat whole apples because of trauma to one of his front teeth. The fruit with school lunch every single day is a whole apple, and he isn't allowed to bring a knife to school to cut it.

I have an M2 Max now, and it's incredible. But it still can't handle running xcode's Instruments. I'd upgrade if the M4s could run the leaks tool seamlessly, but I doubt any computer could.

I wouldn't mind paying to sit next to my kids so much if the middle seats were free to select, so I just had to pay for the aisle or window. It seems like blatant greed, and also encourages the behavior of selecting the aisle/window and planning to swap if someone sits in the middle, which complicates boarding and possibly stops other families from sitting together.

Yesterday, I flew with my 11 year old on Southwest. Our first flight was three hours late, we missed our connection and were in the last boarding group on the new flight, which took off at 10:30 pm. He's sat alone before and it's fine, but our bags weren't organized in way to make that easy, and on the late flight they turn off all the lights and it just seems a little strange to sit between strangers in the dark for hours. He was also changing timezones and landed at what felt like 3 am to him.

It just seemed like an unnecessary stressor after a long day of travel for a relatively young person.

Mathacademy.com will curate an adaptive course for 4th grade math thru college

I have the cheapest kaiser plan available, with a 10k deductible. It is 1900/month for my family.

The California academy of sciences membership was cheaper for one visit for a family of 5.

My obgyn didn’t remember me when I went in pregnant for the third time. I’d seen her at least 20 times in the previous 5 years.

We had kaiser for years, and it was fine. I was able to receive care for pregnancy, stitches, vaccinations, etc with little hassle and mostly reasonable billing.

Then we moved. Omg, I can’t even get appointments to get a rash looked at, or a sinus issue, or vaccinations. And most of those are pediatric issues! My son minorly broke his arm, and didn’t even need a cast and I got thousands of dollars in bills from four different companies.

My university had versions of courses that engineering majors were not allowed to take. Chem 160 for most students, chem 167 for engineers, chem 177 for chemistry majors.

We did. It’s a private school and they sweep everything under the rug. The other parents know she’s not a great teacher, but she was making an example of my kid in particular.

My son had a cartoonishly mean 4th grade teacher this year. Saccharine sweet to the parents, but berated my son daily. We pulled him out of the school over winter break, and he is so much happier already. He wakes up with a smile on his face again.

I just found two weeks of emails from my kids new teacher in my spam folder.

Esri does not provide free access to their tile sets for offline caching.

I have a directory with a restricted hosts file and an empty one, and two aliases that just copy one of them to /etc

I can turn it off whenever I want with one commandline, but it’s enough to keep me from falling into the rabbit hole accidentally

I don’t like getting Knickknacks, but my favorite kitchen accessories make good gifts for many people. Instant read thermometers, silicone oven mits, etc

I just went to cancel my daughter's literati subscription because the books aren't a good fit right now. I was going to keep my son's, but they made me do an online chat to cancel, so I canceled both.

I mean, I have two kids. One never touches her iPad. The other would do nothing but ipad if we let him. Kids are different.

Our support and marketing teams wont switch to Google Docs from quip because they hate Google Docs organization. But the engineers hate quip.

Fwiw, I attended a nearly identical recruiting event at Microsoft for women and minorities.

I recommend fertility friend, from their privacy policy

“ FertilityFriend.com is fully funded by its VIP service fees and has been so since we started. It does not rely on any type of data trading for any of its funding or any other purpose. In other words, you are not the product. Clear and straightforward, our charting service is what we sell and nothing else.”

They also have a more data driven approach to fertility than most other sources.

I mean, six years old isn't exceptionally old for a TV, so it's not great to hear what a pain it is. My parents had the same TV in the living room for over 20 years. My current TV is a Vizio from 2012 and there is nothing wrong with it.

I bought a book on ebay because it was backordered on Amazon. I was pissed when it arrived two months later in an Amazon box.

eh, I had an AirBnB in Houston, TX in the summer with no AC. We left before the first night, and AirBnB wouldn't even give me my money back, much less a suitable place to stay.

They aren't an honest company, they're just burning through goodwill.

Airbnb treated a lot of customers pretty terribly this year, and I wonder how much that will haunt them in the future.

I tried to stay at an AirBnB in Houston in the summer with broken AC. I left before the first night, and AirBnB wouldn't refund a single dollar. Not the cleaning fee, not their fee, and not the two nights fees.

I've biked a lot, and been into different styles of bikes over the years.

Hands down, the best and friendliest service I ever received was buying my first road bike from Sports Basement (in Sunnyvale).

Buying my xtracycle from a hip Berkeley independent bike store was probably the worst service.