Alternatives to Earth Class Mail

Updated 03-Aug-2025 2019 Update - I simply no longer use remailers. Everything gets shipped directly to Chiang Mai, Thailand whether that be from Ebay, Amazon, or more often, Lazada (the Amazon of Southeast Asia). I pay the extra shipping charges (at least on Amazon, as in many cases the shipping costs are the same on ... Read more

Diapers – Reusable and Disposable

Updated 03-Aug-2025 Disposable diapers are a blight on the planet and the pocketbook of parents everywhere. They are made out of plastic and go into landfills. Soiled diapers are toxic waste but they are hardly ever treated as such. Even when the cost of diapers are around 10 THB (~$0.30 USD), with upwards of 4,000 ... Read more

Email Marketing Automation

Updated 03-Aug-2025 Update 03-JUN-2024 - I'm migrating off most of this (Woocommerce -> Stripe links) the only functionality that seems important is a simple newsletter. The Alo Easymail Newsletter was great but hasn't been updated in 4 years which means it is out of step with the latest PHP / MariaDB used in WordPress these ... Read more

Cookie Laws, Privacy, Do Not Track

Updated 03-Aug-2025 > Google's EU user consent policy > > When using Google products that incorporate this policy, certain disclosures must be given to and consents obtained from end users in the European Union where EU data protection law requires such disclosures and consents. > > For end users in the European Union: > > ... Read more

CLI vs. GUI

Updated 03-Aug-2025 The Command Line Interface (CLI), aka shell, aka command prompt, is a powerful, key, and underlying interface to most operating systems. However, there are huge usability problems. The main issue is one of recognition vs. recall which has to do with human memory. While there are endless comparisons between GUIs and CLIs most ... Read more

Paypal Checkout Options

Updated 03-Aug-2025 > Updated July 2019 - I no longer use Paypal, as it is roughly twice as expensive as Stripe when looking at $100 USD/month in transactions (more than 10% with transaction fees and currency conversion), and without currency conversion it is still 30% more when only looking at transaction fees (usually because of ... Read more

Baby Toothbrushing

Updated 03-Aug-2025 My son at 10.5 months has six teeth, four up and two down. He's had them for a while now. He is very fussy around his mouth, because his mother has consistently forced a washcloth into his mouth to clean his teeth and gums. This means he avoids any cloth around his mouth ... Read more

Rise of the Chat ‘Bots

Updated 23-Aug-2025 In February 2016, I wrote about the Coming of the 'Bots. Now it is September, and indeed there are more on the horizon, as well as a few I missed from 2015. However, bot utility is fairly constrained now and likely into the future, mainly because the mental model is one around artificial ... Read more

Progressive Web Apps

Updated 03-Aug-2025 Apparently Progressive Web Apps are a thing. (Thanks Leon!) Anyone know of any agencies who've developed #ProgressiveWebApps esp. with service workers? We have a work project for you...— Leon Paternoster (@leonpaternoster) September 12, 2016 While the technology was announced (apparently) in 2015, in the March 2016 Google I/O there were many training and ... Read more

Infants and Milk

Updated 03-Aug-2025 There is a public perception of the dangers of cow milk for children under 1 year of age. One reads this caution everywhere. However, the idea that a child from one day (365 days old) to the next (366 days old) can drink milk, and even what that means, is a bit odd. ... Read more

Baby Led Weaning (BLW)

Updated 03-Aug-2025 Baby Led Weaning is essentially letting the baby feed itself as early as possible. This of course requires age-appropriate food, patience, and a lot of clean-up. However, it can have positive effects such as eating a wider variety of food, and at the times of the spoon-feeding strikes around 8-10 months, BLW is ... Read more

Import Adwords to Bing Checklist

Updated 03-Aug-2025 This is a handy checklist since Bing conveniently forgets a few settings, and also doesn't fully support a few features (and so generalizes, naturally). - Currency differential in bids and budgets. Bing treats a number as a number, even when Adwords campaigns in Thai Baht is imported into a US Dollar Bing account. ... Read more

Climate as a Resource

Updated 03-Aug-2025 Ran across an intriguing study that models climate as a (localized) resource and variable impacts on different kinds of tourism. This looks at the Bay of Palma (Majorca) and in particular shows impacts on seasonality. > ... optimal conditions are projected to degrade during the peak visitation period while improving in spring and ... Read more

Search Crawler IP Address Blocks

Updated 03-Aug-2025 Whitelist these CIDR IP blocks to not accidentally lock out or block spiders. These are for the following search engines: - Baidu - Bing - DuckDuck - Facebook - Google - Yahoo - Yandex 100.43.80.0/24 100.43.81.0/24 100.43.85.0/24 100.43.90.0/24 100.43.91.0/24 107.21.1.61 111.13.102.0/24 114.111.95.0/24 115.239.212.0/24 119.63.196.0/24 119.63.199.0/24 122.81.208.0/22 123.125.67.144/29 123.125.67.152/31 123.125.68.0/24 123.125.68.68/30 123.125.68.72/29 123.125.68.80/28 123.125.68.80/30 ... Read more

Baidu Webmaster Tools

Updated 03-Aug-2025 Baidu has decent webmaster tools. There only comes a problem if one does not read or write Chinese. However, Google Translate can do a decent job. Also, it is possible to create a Baidu account using a non-Chinese phone number for verification. Why Register a (non-Chinese) website with Baidu While it is the ... Read more

Amazon UCC128 Barcode

Updated 03-Aug-2025 Updated 24-Nov-2018 Publishing Toolchain/Workflow Notes Syntax for ISBN .eps ./bookland -o 978-0-9822972-7-8.eps 978-0-9822972-7-8 Syntax for Amazon ASIN (effectively a hyphen-less ISBN-10 of the ISBN-13) encode128 0982297270 Take output and use Code128 Font to display The Amazon Barcode > Note for revision: the latest version of encode128 is using different start/stop characters than what ... Read more

Infant prescription incompetence

Updated 03-Aug-2025 My wife, anxious because our baby is sick, was convinced she needed to go to the doctor on the third day of his cold. Note that I had a cold earlier, and his symptoms are the same. A bad cough with lots of phlem. Certainly it is disturbing to see the baby suffer, ... Read more

Next Generation Vehicles

Updated 03-Aug-2025 This page will be updated at ongoing, irregular intervals. Transportation on the Water One of the more interesting personal water craft is the Mokai powered kayak. Painless Mokai aftermarket products to improve the kayak This would be better as an electric watercraft. Not only would it be silent, but likely the maintenance costs ... Read more

Webmin, Virtualmin

Updated 03-Aug-2025 > Note: as of 2017 I no longer use webmin or virtualmin, though I still believe it is much better than Cpanel and other related. This page will not be updated over time with information about Webmin and Virtualmin, and perhaps Usermin, and Cloudmin. Basically Webmin and Virtualmin are similar in functionality to ... Read more

WebP – Web Image Format

Updated 03-Aug-2025 See also discussion of Image Optimization for the Web Note this is a brief note, as WebP is less interesting than originally thought. Yes, this format is out there, and yes, it can in many cases reduce the size of images by a certain amount. However, browser support is not complete (therefore you ... Read more

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