The Taco Bell app works just fine on Android without granting location permissions. I can say this from experience. The “added value” to Taco Bell, as for most any I suspect, is that they can send me push notifications to steer me toward their stores when I’m feeling hungry. But you know what? I can turn those off too.

I’m not arguing in Google’s favor and also think this is stupid, but the location tracking wouldn’t really help because it doesn’t tell the device where the other caller is located. I live in a single-party consent state, but if I call someone in a two-party state and record the call, that’s still illegal.

LOL, actually I’ve never been. My family went to PCB every summer when I was a kid, and I spent a couple summers in middle school taking some classes in Hattiesburg with a brief visit to Biloxi on the way back, but it was less about the beaches than the casinos for my parents and epic arcades for me.

Odd that you wouldn’t mention the central gimmick of Willy’s Wonderland, that Cage, while starring and absolutely central, has no lines.

Birmingham, within the city limits, is a lovely place, apart from all the gun violence, but I mean I think like all places it’s focused within certain areas. But, to be fair, those are the areas where you can find a 4,000 ft² house for under $350K. I just bought a house in the Crestwood South neighborhood for $350K,…

This is really too vague to be useful. I actually just bought a house for exactly $350,000 in Birmingham (#2 for most space in the list above). We closed at New Year’s. It was 2,222 ft², and we were lucky to find it. Everything else we looked at was smaller and cost more. This one was only in our price range because…

There are a number of ill-advised suggestions here, and in most of them, it makes much more sense to use isopropyl alcohol.

Dang, friend. I can relate exactly to what you’re describing, with the only variances being the dates, duration, and the specifics of your father’s hip surgery (mine had a heart attack and double bypass, but also I have siblings and don’t live in another state).

As someone who has been obsessed with technology since around the time I left diapers (in an era of square-cornered game controllers, VHS tapes, and dial-tuned, wood-grain-clad, floor-standing TVs), I really have little trouble disconnecting on vacation. But, like many of us now, I’ve attained a status of unique…

I thought the Apple TV app on other devices was just for accessing Apple TV+ content, rather than providing the full Apple TV interface with integrated content from other services. But I’ve never been an Apple TV user or Apple TV+ subscriber, so that was pure assumption.

It was an odd way to put it, but I think the distinction here is that Plex is platform agnostic, and it runs on basically everything. Although their apps on some Smart TVs are woefully out-of-date, they do a pretty impressive job maintaining those too. I can hardly blame them for not getting the latest features…

I feel you on the Assassin’s Creed games, but I’m wondering if you’ve actually played the Horizon games. Wandering off in random directions and discovering interesting encounters and geography is like 90% of the game for me. Just a few days ago I accidentally wandered into a place where I triggered a main story…

Oh man, I didn’t even think about objects on the far side of the central mass. Or rather, I think I was imagining that we must be so distant from center that bodies on the far side would be outside of the visible universe. But honestly I have no idea how much of the universe humanity is capable of observing from earth…

Yeah, that was an almost spit-take for me, followed by acceptance, and sadness. But I work at a science center where upper management has declined to show IMAX movies because they used the word “evolution.”

This seems like a good place to share a pet hypothesis because it looks like there are some smart folks here who could point out its fatal flaw, which I’d like to find, if it exists. I’m not an astro-physicist, just am armchair scientist who hasn’t been able to float my idea past the right people to either have it…

Thanks! I don’t think I’ve hit that section yet, so that explains it. I had started doing them in early February and got fairly far along in the free online version (with an uploaded W2) but it wasn’t coming up there, and I figured I needed to buy the full version. But when I started over with software and got to the…

Does anyone here know which (if any) tax prep software can cover disaster losses? I’ve read the rules a bit and I believe I should be able to deduct all losses that weren’t reimbursed by insurance, which actually exceeds my family’s income for the year. But I couldn’t find a place for it on the free online version of…

The central conceit of this article is inherently flawed. If you’re older and you text like an old, the young’uns you’re texting know you and can interpret your communications through that lens.

I’ve always heard this too (eye contact and face proximity), but I think it depends on the dog, the person, and their relationship. I didn’t grow up with dogs but my wife did and we’re a dog (and cat) family now.

Before I even start, I’m expecting: Rudy, Rudy, Rudy, Rudy, Rudy