I had a Duet and two Radios for whole-house streaming and alarms, and it never quite worked as promised. They would be great for months and months. But server updates would occasionally introduce incompatibilities with whatever version of OS X I’d been running at the time, alarms would break, networking would come and…

It isn’t wasted. It’s preheating. 100% necessary. (Unless you keep preheating once it’s heated. Then you’re wasting energy.)

Pizza stones can interfere with the flow of heat in an oven. I have a fairly standard, generic Kenmore range/oven and the stone works great for pizzas but ruins pies, cakes, and every other regular baked good. I thought the stone was helping to stabilize the oven and left it in there, thinking it was another issue,…

If you haven’t had enough time to play with your cat lately, an automated cat toy still isn’t you playing with your cat...

I'm sorry, but your troll account is depleted. Please come back another time.

What on earth are you talking about? If you've ever watched TV, have you noticed these things called "commercials"?

I subscribed to Netflix when I cut the cord a couple of years ago. But recently I realized that Netflix doesn't want me to watch movies anymore. It makes them hard to find and its recommendation engine is weird. It's just another network at this point. And the point of cord cutting was that I didn't want to pay to…

I appreciate you letting me know that. I do keep screen sharing on to run the Mac Mini headless, but I’ll just fire it up when I need immediate control. Since you seem to know your way around this problem, might I ask — considering that BitDefender and ClamXAV found nothing, is there likely to be anything installed on…

Metra North gets you to O’Hare the way a... well, I’ve got nothin’, because it doesn’t. I mean, there’s an O’Hare stop, but doing that in perfect weather is a good way to ruin the start of your trip, so don’t do it in cold weather either. I think O’Hare has runways closer than that stop.

Looking at this from the other side, in the last couple of days, friends reported getting spam with my name and email address on it and my ISP confirmed heavy email traffic from me. At one point I turned on my TV and switched it to the Mac Mini input and the cursor was moving around. But antivirus apps (ClamXAV and…

I agree with many of the other commenters: Do one service, get it right, have all the preferences and options we need to customize it to our liking, and use a premium tier to keep ads away. I kind of appreciate the idea of YouTube Music, since so many people upload zillions of tracks with all those “I AM NOT TRYING TO…

Glad someone mentioned Cost vs. Value. As a member of its audience I've watched it become considerably more comprehensive over the last decade or so, in the number of projects, the scale of the projects, and the regions involved. There's no such thing as definitive because every project is different, but I think it…

Worked for Thoreau.

I cut the cord a few years ago because ... I’m going to say it ... TV just isn’t that important. Not even caring about whether it’s good, it just isn’t that important. I mean, I was a Tivo early adopter back in ‘00, so when I want to see something, I really want to see it. But either I want to see it or I don’t. (I…

I’m currently reading Caitlyn Doughty’s Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, about her career at a crematorium, and she confirms much of what Jorgenson says here. And there are lots of cute anecdotes; she's a good storyteller. A fun read now that the nights are getting longer.

Fair enough, but what if I’m lazy?

When you lick an envelope, you lick everyone who that envelope has licked. #safetyfirst

Ah. I appreciate the clarification. (Kenji is still welcome to come over and make my pizzas, but I'll lose the attitude when he does.)

Well-drained diced tomatoes work really well on pizzas. Sorry, Kenji, but until you start coming over and making my pizzas, I’m going to make them the way I like them.

I have long hair, so I tied my bandanna around my forehead, put on an old jam band T-shirt, and (I was kind of proud of this little touch) on the way to the party, I stopped at a neighborhood grocery and bought a small box of mushrooms.