why does new york have a paywall around half of new england?
Given I'm a navigation nerd, I sometimes do map study. One thing that's amazing to me is how the entire southern half of New England, that being Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, is literally paywalled by New York.
How?
The Hudson River, that's how.
To get into Connecticut or Massachusetts from New York, you have to cross over a Hudson River bridge. This lumps in Rhode Island as well, since that's directly adjacent to the east of Connecticut.
I was experimenting with route calculations on my Garmin DriveSmart 76, and notice that on a route coming up into New England from the southwest, a toll road was used even though I specifically instructed the DriveSmart to avoid toll roads. The toll road in question was the Bear Mountain Bridge.
Error on the part of the DriveSmart? No. The DriveSmart will sometimes use a toll road if the alternative toll-free route is something so out of the way and adds so much time that it won't offer it. Fair enough.
This of course led me down a rabbit hole trying to figure out if there was any way to get into CT or MA from NY without paying a NY toll.
Nope.
Here are the bridges from south to north that "ride alongside" New England. Most of these have tolls for eastbound traffic only, which of course is the required direction to get to Connecticut or Massachusetts.
- Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge a.k.a. Tappan Zee Bridge, toll.
- Bear Mountain Bridge, toll.
- Newburgh-Beacon Bridge, toll.
- Mid-Hudson Bridge, toll.
- Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge, toll.
- Rip Van Winkle Bridge, toll.
- Castleton Bridge, toll.
It is not until the Dunn Memorial Bridge where you finally get to something that's toll-free.
Where are you in relation to New England at that point? You're in Albany NY, which is due west of frickin' Adams Massachusetts at the extreme northwest corner of that state. Adams is where Mount Greylock is. Holy crap.
This means you have to go into Massachusetts using slow roads until you pick up I-91, then head south through basically the entire north-south length of MA, and then you're finally in Connecticut, starting in Enfield. Again, holy crap.
Yeah, it's no wonder the Garmin didn't offer that route as an alternative to taking Bear Mountain Bridge. Were you to look at the route on a map, the toll-free way more or less results in this giant horseshoe where you have to go north to go south just to get around New York Hudson River bridge toll roads.
New England is a giant spaghetti tangled mess of roads in cities and pretty much anywhere off-interstate. A ton of those roads used to originally be horse trails many moons ago, after all. And if you want the free way to New England, you have to deal with that mess. You're going to have to take one of those achingly slow twisty turny roads until you finally get to I-91. No way around it.
Ridiculous.
the coffee water conditioning experiment
I do not know if this qualifies me as a coffee snob or not, but I do grind my own beans and use a very specific amount of water to brew a mug's worth with. The coffee I use is not any highfalutin stuff by any means. All I use is Community whole bean Breakfast Blend. The coffee maker I use is a cheap drip coffee maker thing from Walmart. I don't even know who made the coffee maker as it has no branding on it. Very not-fancy.
Over the years I've learned the water used matters a lot. Never use distilled water because that causes the coffee grounds to swell, and results in nearly tasteless coffee. Bad idea.
Professional coffee brewers use conditioned water, which is a fancy way of saying water with a specific amount of mineral content in it.
The cheap way to get water like this is to either:
- Buy a gallon jug labeled "Spring Water" at the grocery store.
- Use tap water.
- Boil tap water for 10 minutes first, then brew.
- Filter tap water first, then brew.
I decided to try an experiment with the last option, filtering, just to see what would happen.
What I did was throw a filter in the coffee maker, then ran tap water through it into the carafe.
After that, I put coffee grounds in the filter, then used the same water and ran it through the coffee maker again. Doing this is effectively using double-filtered water.
The end result?
The coffee tasted a little bit darker, and the aftertaste notably improved.
Aftertaste is a big deal with coffee, as it should have some bitterness to it. Not a whack-you-over-the-head bitterness. Just a nice little note left behind. I definitely got that with double-filtering.
Will I brew coffee this way from now on? Maybe. I'll have to brew a few more mug's worth to see if that improved aftertaste is consistent.
i reset my phone
I can totally understand why some would choose to buy a new phone instead of reset an old one, as the process of setting up a phone after a reset is seriously annoying.
My phone was long overdue for a reset due to all the crap I had installed/uninstalled over time. Yes, there are "cleaner" utility apps, but they all suck. A reset is the only true way to "clean" a phone...
..except not really.
Setting up a phone involves what used to be called decrapifying. When you bought a PC back in the early-to-mid 2000s, the OS was Windows XP. While the OS was fine, whoever made the computer loaded it up with a metric ton of junk software. Useless antivirus "suites", trialware galore, a bunch of garbage plugins in the browser that sometimes just outright hijacked it, and all sorts of other ridiculous trash. It took the better half of a day to get rid of it all.
The phone is the same thing. True, it's a physically smaller computer with different software, but in the end, it's the same metric ton of junk, now in a mobile flavor.
Yes, this means the phone had to be cleaned twice. The reset cleaned out all the residual crap left behind. After reset, the default OS install reinstalled all the stock garbage that had to be deleted manually.
After dealing with that heapin' helpin' of horseshit, the phone was almost ready to use. Now I'm at the point where I can install and configure stuff. First, import the text messages, photos, and videos. After that, install the small set of apps I use, then configure that stuff. And then, finally, hours later, the phone can be used normally.
The reasons I can get away with using an older smartphone are the same reasons I can get away with using older desktop computers. I know how to get rid of the crap that makes it slow, and I purposely use things that are fast.
When I go to launch my camera app, it's near-instant. The time it takes from when the phone goes in my hand to when I take a photo or start recording a video is under 3 seconds. Not an exaggeration. When I search my text messages, search results are literally instant as I'm typing out the search phrase, regardless of message age.
The only thing slightly slower on my phone is the web browser, but I still don't wait too long since I have everything I need as local bookmarks. Browser loads, bookmarks are there, tap what I want, done. At that point it's just the network I wait for while the site is loading. Even then, the wait is minimal there since I only use sites I know load quick on mobile.
I am so not-in-target-market on mobile that it's not even funny
In this order, I use my phone for texting, recording videos, and taking photos. Way down the line after that are a few open source casual games, the browser with some bookmarked sites that get viewed once in a great while, and a backup navigation app that basically never gets used. Also throw in there that I sometimes but rarely use the calculator and alarm clock apps...
...and that's it.
That "doomscrolling" stuff people do? I don't do any of that. That's a train I completely missed, not that I ever wanted to get on it.
The closest thing to doomscrolling I sometimes do is read old forum posts that go back five years or more. I find it interesting to see what people used to yap about years ago and how so much of it is totally irrelevant now. It's especially interesting if the thread is over a decade old, particularly from around the early 2010s. And when I do read stuff like that, it's never on the phone, so... does it count as doomscrolling if you're reading things on a PC and using a computer mouse wheel for the scrolling part? Probably not.
Whatever is marketed to doomscrollers (which counts for a ton of product) is stuff I'll never see, and that's why I'm very not-in-target-market on mobile.
It still works
I have a phone where the model had its launch year in early 2016. Yes, really. That's not when my phone was physically manufactured, but it was made not too far away from that date either.
The mobile OS version is so old that it won't run most modern apps.
I had to recently take a can of compressed air and blow out the headphone jack, speaker grill and microphone holes because of stuff collected in there. This stuff was mostly little bits of fabric from the phone being in my jeans pocket.
Surprisingly, no corrosion on the USB port. However, it's not shiny anymore and definitely tarnished.
I can get about 3 to 4 days of use before the battery needs a charge. More specifically, my type of use. A doomscroller, assuming their apps would even run on my phone, which they wouldn't, would run the battery down in probably 3 hours. Maybe fewer.
The screen has slight burn-in near the top, only seen when solid white color is shown. I can deal with it.
No 5G on my phone. 4GLTE only.
It still works, and I'll continue using this phone as long as I can.
better to eat the cost with memory cards
I read elsewhere someone complaining about the price of memory cards, and thought to myself okay, it can't be that bad...
I was wrong. It is that bad.
Since I have a bunch of old Garmins, I have a pile of 16GB and 32GB microSD memory cards. Just for kicks, I looked up what a 32GB micro SD card costs currently. For name brand, like a SanDisk or Samsung, yeah, it's up there. Grossly overpriced? Sort of.
Where people get screwed the most are for 512GB cards. Those should be selling for $25 less than they do now, but instead rose in price a bit. Again, this is sort of overpriced.
What I find funny is that were I to sell them right now, the pile of used 16GB and 32GB cards I have is worth at least $150+ since they are all highly recognizable name brand. No, I'm not selling, but it's just interesting that in reality, these cards are maybe worth $2 to $5 a pop in lightly used condition, but sell for $12 to even as much as $20+ each at the moment. Yes, even with the low data storage capacity. And for the 512GB cards I have? Easy $75+ each, again for highly recognized name brand in lightly used condition. I'm not selling those either.
I'm not hoarding these cards for selling later since I do actually use them.
Is buying a used memory card safe?
No, because it's a total minefield for how long it will actually work. I'll explain that more in a minute.
I have some vintage Garmins from the mid-2000s that are hardware locked to recognizing SD spec memory cards only, meaning original spec SD 8MB to 2GB capacity. These mid-2000s Garmins originally came with a 128MB card for map data storage.
At one point I said okay, I'm going to upgrade these vintage screens to the maximum storage they could support, 2GB. Off to eBay I go to look for new-old-stock 2GB microSD cards since they had been out of production for years. I searched and searched all over the place, but nope, none available. That being the situation, I had to buy used cards since there was no other option. Found a seller in Canada that had a giant pile of Lexar brand cards. Since that brand made decent stuff back in the day, I bought a couple of 2GB cards for something like $8 shipped. I was irked I even had to spend that much because they basically should be next to free, but whatever, bought them.
Thankfully, those two cards had contacts that weren't crinkled and were able to be both read and written to. I got lucky. And this is where I talk about what a minefield used memory cards are.
Every flash memory card effectively has a charge, and at some point that charge will wear out.
There is one and only one warning sign a memory card is on its last leg, and that's when you can't write data to it. You copy a file over, then try to read the file, and nope, didn't take. You can read other files off the card, but can't write anything new to it.
Right there and then is when you copy all files off that card, confirm the backup is good, then take scissors, cut the card into pieces and toss it in the trash.
And no, there is no reliable way to test flash memory other than by attempting a file write to see if it takes.
I've had this happen twice with USB sticks. One was a really old 512MB (yes, MB) SanDisk cruzer micro. One day I go to write a few small files to it, and while it appeared to copy, it didn't. Copying existing files from the stick worked, but nothing could be written, so it was toast. Trashed it. The other was even worse. It was a 32GB stick where the flashing of OS installation files wrecked it so bad that it wouldn't even recognize when plugged in afterward. Thankfully, there was nothing important on it, and in the trash it went.
With used flash memory, you have absolutely no idea how much it has been used. Was it used a little? A lot? Just for big files or only little files (which does affect longevity)? You don't know and never will.
For that pair of 2GB cards I bought a while back, what I thought was okay, these cards were probably used in a digital camera, and probably only for photos and not video. That's not too many file writes, so... screw it, I'm buying them. It wasn't like I had any other options. Again, I got lucky with the ones I received.
Would I ever buy used flash memory again? No way, because I know the risks. Any used card 8GB or greater was either used in a phone and/or to record video with and is wrecked out of the gate.
watch influencers are idiots
Because I just bought a new watch, of course I had to dive down the rabbit hole of watch influencer videos just to see what's up.
Heh, yeah. About that. Kinda comical.
Before diving deeper there, here a few truths when it comes to watches.
The overwhelming majority of people who actually wear a watch are either going to have one of the following on their wrist: In smartwatch space, it's either made by Apple or made by Garmin. In the fitness space, it's all Fitbit. In the traditional digital watch space, Casio or Timex. In the traditional analog watch space, Invicta, Movado or Citizen.
I'll explain the traditional analog brands a little more.
Invicta and Movado both have dedicated stores in many midsize to larger shopping malls.
Citizen is also found in the mall, but also somewhere else most people don't think about unless it's pointed out to them, the casino gift shop. If for example you visit one of those large Native American run casinos and visit the gift shop area, chances are you'll see a Citizen watch display case in there. And those will be the nicest (if not the only) watches in the shop.
Ultimately, the watches that get sold most is where the foot traffic is. Casio, Timex, Apple, and Garmin are all at Walmart. Invicta, Movado and sometimes Seiko are at the mall. Citizen is also at the mall and in some casinos.
For luxury brands, same thing, except people only know one name for a luxury watch, Rolex. That's it. And just like "lesser" brands, yeah they have storefronts too. I don't have to travel far to find an official Rolex authorized dealer with that familiar green ROLEX signage on the storefront.
The only other luxury brand that some guys who know a tiny bit about luxury watches would recognize would be TAG Heuer. And again, the fact some guys know that brand even exists is because it's accessible where there is foot traffic. Maybe not so much with freestanding boutiques but rather luxury jewelers.
Where online influencing is concerned, internet does not have any real influence in the watch space and arguably never has.
Using myself as an example, I stopped consuming internet watch content for a while. Probably almost a year. I start watching watch videos again, and come to find out Casio released a watch with a real deal automatic movement in it, the Edifice EFK. Is this a new model? Well, technically yes for this year, but it's been out for over 6 months. My point is I had no idea at all this watch even existed until literally now because I had stopped consuming internet watch content prior.
For the curious, the Edifice EFK is... fine. Priced right, to be sure, because it's Casio. Built right, because again, Casio. I think it's best said that if it were the choice between the EFK and the Tissot PRX automatic (not the quartz one), yeah, Casio all day just for price alone. I'm not dumping $500+ more for the Tissot because "Swiss". To hell with that.
I guarantee you're going to have the same reaction to the EFK I had, as in, "Meh, it's okay." But as far as the watch influencers are concerned, it was OH MY GOD HUGE NEWS, CASIO HAS AN AUTOMATIC when that watch came out. No, not huge news. Yeah, I obviously like Casio, but the truth is that I can still get a Seiko automatic all day for south of $200 and it's decent for what it is. So if I gotta-gotta have a new automatic movement watch, I'd just get a Seiko and call it a day.
Or, if I were willing to dump a little more cash to have "the good watch", Seiko Presage, any model. Well, almost any, as I'd have to get a model that would fit my smaller wrist, but you get the point. A Seiko Presage is absolutely and totally a-okay for a fancy schmancy looking thing that genuinely looks, feels and operates like a luxury watch should without the luxury price tag. That's a watch to wear to the office, the golf course or whatever. And it's guaranteed what's on your wrist will look better compared to everybody else you know because Presage does that minimalist luxury style 100% correct.
You won't hear those watch influencers talking about Seiko Presage, however. Not a peep. And that's really telling, because what they try and hock instead are all these worthless microbrands selling a watch for over a grand that's tacky, boring, or both. And as always, the influencer says the Microbrand Whatever watch is Best Thing Ever. Yeah, sure pal. Sure.
Another thing watch influencers never talk about is the return policy.
With just about all microbrand return policies, if you have to send a watch back for a refund, you get stuck eating the shipping cost almost every time along with import taxes and/or duties every time.
And the straps... ugh.
Once I bought a specific strap because so many watch influencers said they were oh-so awesome, and I bought direct from the company since the the price was good. Okay, fine. For the strap I got, yeah, decent enough quality, but definitely not some life-changing experience. What soured me? A barrage of marketing emails right after purchase. That company immediately started blasting me with messages in email and it took me something like two weeks to finally get them to stop.
That was the first and last time I bought a strap direct from a company. I bought that strap because I fell for the online hype like an idiot. These days I'll just get a strap from Amazon or eBay. Strapcode still has some of the best replacement bracelets out there, and plenty of those super comfortable stretch straps are out there too, most of which are totally unbranded. Fine, whatever. They work. I don't need branding on my frickin' watch strap.
Then there's the whole thing about analog.
As I've said before, I don't even like analog watches. Yes, I own a few, but don't wear any of them. Okay, that's not true. I own two that I genuinely like, but only because they're ana-digi. Two Casio AQ230 models. One in stainless steel with black dial, and the other a gold with linen dial. The black dial one has a slightly wonky bottom left button, but still works. Very small watch, but elegant, super lightweight, super comfortable to wear. Great little guy.
As for my all-analog watches, nope, they never get worn. Out of what I have, only two are worth keeping, and I should throw the others out.
I do have to remind myself when watching watch influencer videos that I do not like analog watches. Yeah, those influencers make that microbrand analog look all sorts of sexy with lighting and close-up angles and whatnot.. but I know I'd never get along with it. Not now, not ever.
Influencers will, of course, shill the analog timepieces most because microbrands don't do digital. This means whatever microbrand watch you get will be one of Fifty Flavors of Seiko NH35 Movement. One microbrand will be Flavor #37. Another will be Flavor #49. Whatever, doesn't matter, all the same movement. Some microbrands even make "time-only" watches where the date complication is actually still there but not present on the dial at all because it was cheaper to build that way. L-A-Z-Y.
If it's all Seiko NH35 anyway, um... just get the Seiko for under $200 instead of the same thing in a microbrand for over a grand? If I actually liked analog, which I don't, that's what I'd get.
So yeah, watch influencers. Still as stupid as ever.