Passwords. We assume a hard to guess and everchanging password will be hard to crack, but the whole point of machines is that it can be pinpointed with utmost accuracy, and everytime someone tells you to use special phrases in passwords, they’re also inadvertently saying “hey thieves, here is what to look out for, happy guessing”. They’re supposed to be more like speakeasies.
I remember long ago, when I was active as Dabran2 on Neopets, there was a vault with nine dropdown menus that you had to guess the combination to on the moon Kreludor. It was simpler and far more effective. To this day, I couldn’t tell you what’s on the other side (or I’d have to annihilate you and feed your remains to the turmaculus, assuming you believe I made it to the other side).
Passwords, as in user chosen secrets used to prove identity, are a really bad idea in general. Turns out, people are crappy at coming up with stuff that is hard to guess. They are also crappy at remembering things that are hard to guess. That’s why every website these days wants to SMS you a code or makes you use an Authenticator.
Thankfully people are catching on, and secure passwordless sign in is gaining ground rapidly.
I’m surprised no place uses IP addresses anymore to authenticate (I was around when Postopia did or whatever that candy themed game place was). Many IP-ban when it comes to identifying rulebreakers, you’d think they’d IP-authenticate too.
Carrier grade NAT. For instance, on our local mobile phone network, thousands of handsets will have the same public IP address.
Imagine if your roommate could just get into all your accounts?
I know that’s untactical, but I mean as long as IP bans are already a thing…
All major services do risk based authentication these days. I’m fairly certain network address factors into the risk calculations.
Yeah knew a guy that used to work at a place where they had him change his password every 2 months or so kinda stupid. Entropy is really all you need to check. Also by special phrases do you mean
saltingpeppering your passwords?What do you mean?
The peppering passwords? That’s where you add a special word or phrase in all of your passwords but not in your password manager. It’s usually done in case your password manager becomes compromised thats why I got a bit confused with your statement, haha
Yes, or a general way of putting it anyways.
Salting and peppering isn’t something you do; it’s something the site does prior to hashing your password and storing the hash.
Hitachi Magic Wand.
The ceiling fan: it changes directions with a switch, clockwise for winter, counterclockwise for everything else. Also opening those glass Doña María mole sauce jars: gotta flip it upside down on a paper towel and pry where the lid indicates, then flip it rightside up and twist
Edit here’s a vid that I learned from for the mole sauce. pipedbot do your thing pls
Why on earth is it designed this way though?
No clue but god it’s a pain or at least it was
Oh god, please for the love of god use a spoon and not a knife tip, though
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=VliJZhEqWzc I’m a robot, beepboop
Based robot
For years there was the “Phantom”, a notorious criminal, haunting all of Europe. DNA testing revealed that it was a female and her crimes ranging from petty theft to murder were seemingly unrelated to each other. That each of them were done in different countries didn’t make solving the case any easier.
But eventually they did solve it. They found the woman working in a cotton swab factory. Turned out many police departments were using the wrong type of swabs. So there seem to be more than one way to incorrectly use cotton swabs.
I was curious if this was real, and it is! http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7966641.stm
Case file do an episode on it. Well, she appears in an episode in chasing that killer
The hell was she doing on the factory line to get her DNA on all the swabs?
Existing. People shed DNA all over. Most of the dust in your house is human skin and hair (or that of your pets). Non-sterile swabs are probably just packed with bare hands, by someone in their regular clothing.
Right, but there would be many people packing swabs in the plant. Unless she has psoriasis, the amount of skin she sheds at one time wouldn’t contaminate all of the swabs she touched with her hands, much less all of the swabs in the factory.
Sweaty hands while sorting the cotton fibres would do it.
Not even close. Sweat barely contains any DNA, and while theoretically a person could sweat enough to leave behind enough dna to be identified, it hasn’t ever happened and would require copious amounts of concentrated sweat. Her hands would have to be constantly dripping with sweat, and this happened several times in several countries between 2001 and 2008. Maybe sweaty hands could contaminate one or two cotton swabs, but all of them over the course of several years? No.
I did not realise sweat contained so little dna!
Probably packing them with her bare hands.
She was shoving each and every swab up her ass. Her ass swabs she called them. In conversations it gave her the upper hand. Check your bathroom, inside? Her ass swabs. Something in your ear had been up her ass!
Is she married to the “ass pennies” guy?
What was she doing? Just creating the best alibi ever.
Criminal mastermind.
Probably not all the swabs. Maybe just packaging. That way her DNA would’ve only gone to some swabs and thus making it take longer to find the error.
That makes me think the based an episode of CSI:NY after this. An almost identical plot.
Now that’s some serious incompetence there, and it’s sad that it took so many cases to figure it out.
MOVIE IDEA!! imagine a movie that takes you all over Europe following a killer and thief . Stumping the best cops. I’m thinking sort of following a cops career looking for this person until it ruins his family and life. Like destroys him slowly until he has nothing left . Kills himself. Through out the movie is close up shots of all the times cotton swabs were used in testing DNA. Randomly scattered. Ending shot of some factory . Camera flies in to assembly line. Two women side by side packing cartons. One look over and says. ‘‘You’ll end up in the office if they catch you without gloves again’’.
Doctor Mike says not to do it, but I have been for years. This started when I got a wax ball that impacted against my eardrum and made me functionally deaf on one side until I could get into an urgent doctor’s appointment. The very next day, the same thing happened on the other side. I knew what was up for the second time and was able to get something from the pharmacy to handle it myself.
As best I can tell, there are two dangers:
- Mechanical damage, perhaps caused by accidental means
- Leaving bits of cotton behind that can then become infected
For me, I am fine taking this risk and plan to continue doing so daily.
Mechanical damage would require a major freak accident or you to be an idiot about it.
The real issue (according to my doctor, who has a lot more patience than most doctors and actually educated my stubborn ass on this) isn’t just the cotton residue you mentioned (though that is very much a factor) but also the fact that for every [small unit of measurement] of wax the QTip pulls OUT, it is also pushing IN about [small unit of measurement] of it.
This can mean infections, as you mentioned. As you push foreign content AND the wax (which is itself full of trapped bacteria) closer to your sensitive bits. It can also accelerate blockages depending on the consistency of your wax. If you have that issue that your ears get wax blockage periodically, q-tips ensure it happens even faster.
the tea bag was originally just a cheesecloth bag containing a loose leaf tea sample, and you were supposed to remove the tea from the bag
That might’ve been the case originally, but it’s definitely not today.
lol we know
What?? I’ve been cutting my teabags open all these years! So much wasted time and effort…
Meanwhile modern teabags leach microplastics into your tea when used.
Stick to old fashioned paper tea bags and you are fine. Don’t use those pyramid shaped silky ones.
Just get a small teapot and don’t worry about it. Loose leaf tea isn’t any more expensive and allows you to control how strong you are making things.
The silky pyramid bags are the worst. Paper bags should be ok, unfortunately a lot of bags that appear to be paper might not be, or might be mostly paper with some plastic threads holding it all together. Almost impossible to tell just by looking at it.
Like PG Tips?
Don’t buy brands that use plastic. Paper or loose leaf all the way.
Well, my youngest child saw me opening a can recently and yelled “THAT’S how you use it?!” They had apparently been holding it horizontally and thinking the can opener sucked.
I haven’t seen a can that needs an opener in decades. I don’t even think I have an opener.
Do you not buy canned goods? Most everything we get needs an opener: veggies, beans, tomato paste/sauce, basically nothing has a pull tab.
All my cans have pull tabs. I just checked: tomato, chickpeas, beans…
Not one can without a pull tab.
That’s so weird to me; whereabouts are you from? I’m in California and just looked through my cans and maybe 10% of them have pull tabs. Apparently we have the jank can tech here haha
Having to use a can opener is really a North American thing. The rest of the world moved past that long ago.
can open
Hah yeah that feels right…
Hah yeah that feels right…
I’m in the Netherlands. I thought globalized supply chains would keep our canned produce in sync, but apparently I thought wrong!
I wonder if it’s some weird patent issue.
It’s certainly to do with the fact that nobody wants to pay for new machinery when the old ones still work. As things break, I should think that we’ll see more items use pull tabs. FWIW Europe is way ahead of North America on this.
Big Can Opener is keeping the US down apparently! Really interesting to find these differences, have a great day and a nice time opening your more convenient cans!
How old are they? If they are 4 that’s cute, if they are 24 I’m concerned for their safety.
Teenager. I think the one in their culinary class in school must have worked horizontal, or perhaps people in tiktok videos and they were somehow managing to use mine that way, painfully slowly. I didn’t know there even were horizontal can openers until I saw them trying to open a can. Mine is an ancient OXO one that still works great. Vertically.
In their defense, some models of horizontally held can openers look very similar to the vertical ones and it takes me a few attempts until I figure out I’m holding it wrong… No can opener I’ve used worked by suction though
They most certainly learned to use one of those top-cutting types rather then the vertical cutters. Completely different tool and I can see how that would be confusing.
I never use them to clean my earsz I use them to masturbate my ears. Nothing so good as a good ear scratching
Toilet paper in your ahole.
I’m confused, are you suggesting. an adventurous finger tip to keep things really clean or shoving a bunch up there?
Like inside? Shirley toilet paper is safe to use on the outside.
Pretty sure all TP is safe to use on the outside, not just the stuff made by Shirley
Surely you can’t be serious!
I swear every time my spouse tries to use wd40 I have a stroke. We have several kinds of specific lubes for different situations ffs, all in the same easy to access bin, stop trying to use wd40 as a catch all super lube that’s not how it works.
People don’t send letters much anymore but please don’t lick the envelopes. Just dip a finger in water. Just as easy, less germy, and doesn’t cause a lingering chemical taste.
Nobody seems to understand how to use dental dams. Look it up, stay safe people.
So… being one of those spouses who uses wd40 on everything. Do you have link to some easily understandable info on when to use the right lubricant?
One easy rule of thumb is if you’re looking to lubricate something WD40 is never the correct choice. It’s not a lubricant, it’s for cleaning/breaking shit loose.
Wd40 is good for preventing rust, and helping to get things that are seized moving again. If you want to lubricate a door hinge, something like 3 in 1 oil is a good choice.
Yeah it has uses but specifically people seem to use it as a catch all which is where the misuse comes in. I’ve used it to unfuck rusty screws before it is great at that
Mechanical stuff you’re looking at grease, oil, penetrating, or dry. I found this with a quick search for more info. Personally I’ve found white lithium grease to be the best general purpose one for my needs (squeaky hinges, drawer wheels) but it can be pretty messy if used in the wrong spots. For most fast moving things with fine parts (like a bike chain) I really like wax lubes but they can get gummy sometimes so silicone works well too.
For sex I prefer water based because it is easier on toys and doesn’t make me fear for my life when trying to wash off in the shower after. It isn’t usually as long lasting as silicone based but it can be ‘revived’ with some water or other fluids. Anal I prefer oil based (shout out to Boy Butter because the name and logo are ridiculous but it works amazingly) but it also damages condoms so like if you’re not using an insertable go for the protection and silicone combo. For oral I’ll concede that wd40 actually has a use case here.
Thank you for that… thorough explanation. You really know your lubes :)
Ive never used wd 40 during sex before. I’m sure it’ll be a surefire way to get an insurance covered vasectomy, also known as testicular cancer.
Simple. WD40 for most things, WD40 silicone for vinyl windows. Grease for bike chains.
My soul 😭
Not OP, but not really. The real issue is that WD-40 is kinda like duck tape. It definitely has its uses, and hoo boy are there a lot, but it’s too much power too fast, and corrupts young engineers and repair people into using it as a “fix all tool.”
Sewing machine oil is a wonderful penatrating oil. This is what you use on tools inside the house that mostly just get a bit dusty.
WD-40 does contain some oils and can be used as a penatrating oil, but it’s mainly a cleanser. You shouldn’t leave it on anything that will be damaged by cleansing solutions, so motherboards, plastic in general.
For a general use oil, for hinges and things, I will clean with WD-40, and then once I have cleaned it I wipe it down with 3 in 1 penetrating oil, for things like door hinges, or sewing machine oil for more delicate tools.
Edit: I had not seen the flowchart below when I wrote this comment, but it illustrates my first point beautifully
Upvote for correct use of “duck tape” 😁
Thank you, I’ll try to remember this next time something squeaks around the house :)
But those envelopes are tasty…
It’s so sad stamps don’t need to be licked anymore.
Nothing beats a licked envelope followed by a stamp chaser.
Do you let out an airy ‘aaah, yep’ and slap the envelope onto the table, too? I just kinda want to see someone exasperated and hunched over a USPS counter being like ‘another!’ as they pull letters out one at a time and the register worker hands them just a single envelope and stamp each time.
I guess I could see them being tasty if you’ve got the palette of an 80 year old smoker who grew up eating poverty suspended in aspic.
Lol, that’s me!
Wd40 isn’t lube at all, it’s a solvent. Though the wd40 brand does make a whole lot of lubricants too.
Yea, it’s called Water Displacement formula 40. A penetrating oil mixed with stuff. Not nearly as goid as grease
Grease isn’t always the right thing either. For plastic-on-metal, you definitely don’t want grease.
Didn’t know that. Turns out some lubricants cause plastic to swell or harden and crack. Recommended to use silicone or special lubricants. https://readingplastic.com/choosing-the-right-lubricant-for-plastic-parts/
Casually suggest using WD40 as lube for the next sexy time. When they say “what,” you can say “why not? You use it for everything else.” Maybe it’ll click.
Of course, this advice may negatively impact this, and possibly several future potential sexy times, but it’s a small sacrifice if it keeps people from using god damned WD40 as a fucking lube.
Greetings from my wife. She wanted me to send you this picture:
Having grown up with Red Green I’m team duct tape 100% but I’ll die on my WD40 hill
Duck*
Both have been used at different times so the words are effectively interchangeable. However I’d also like to point out that in my example specifically duct tape is the proper word to use as that’s how it is used in Red Green:
I had to look up dental dams, TIL.
I knew what they were but I am still not understanding the connection to WD40.
Glad to spread the word! They’re an important piece of PPE that a lot of people overlook
Burns the ding dong
For real, those envelopes chemicals are no joke
a kitchen sink is not a storage place. wd-40 is not a lubricant. sex is not a weapon.
You should extrapolate on these. especially the Kitchen sink one.
“Do your fucking dishes,” is my guess.
My guess is they don’t want the little people in their house to leave dishes in the sink. Leave dirty dishes on the counter so the sink can still be used and filled to wash dishes.
You’re telling me not to clean my ears with swabs??? I’m sorry, but I will swear forever that they are intended for the ears. The only issue is that the makers don’t want to get sued if anyone hurts themselves. I mean, c’mon, the Japanese use both ends of these in their ears! You want me to start doing that?
I’ve been cleaning my ears with an “ear syringe” for years. Just squirt some warm water from the faucet in there and you can hear again. Works great and is reusable. They are like 10 bucks at your local drug store.
I don’t like having water stuck in my ear.
Pro tip if this happens, add more water.
Sometimes I need a couple of more passes to unclog my ear. If I do it once and there is water stuck in my ears, it means I need to do it again. If I do it a few more times so my ear is unclogged, water will no longer be stuck in my ears.
If your ears are clogged so severely that water alone won’t help, use something like Debrox or hydrogen peroxide first to loosen your wax plug. Leave it in there for a few minutes to let the wax soften. Then follow it up with mechanical disruption from water in the ear syringe.
If your ears are too clogged so that even that doesn’t work, your clog is probably so severe that you need to see an ear, nose, and throat doctor.
Water only gets stuck in your ear if you have wax built up in your ear canal. Regular washing of your ear with warm water (and nothing else!) keeps the wax build-up under control and water will just pour out of your ear canal as soon as you level your head.
I actually got advised by my doctor to use vegetable oil for my daughter’s clogged ear. A drop of oil and some massaging for 20 seconds three times a day did the the trick. Took a few days, but the clog was eventually dissolved.
I’ve been doing this for a long time now too. So much better than anything else I’ve tried and you’d have to do something incredibly fucky to injure yourself.
They were specifically created for cleaning ears. First line of the wikipedia history.. The reason Q-Tip says not to use them in ears is plausible deniability. They know they mostly get used to cleaning ears. But it’s incredibly easy to puncture your eardrum doing that. In order to stop people from suing them for using their product in its main use case and hurting themselves, they simply specifically instruct against using it that way. While that is a wholly ridiculous falsehood, without it they’d have probably been sued so much that no one would make them. And then I wouldn’t be able to clean my ears.
This seems to be largely an American phenomenon, that people sue the maker of a product for themselves failing to use the product correctly, no? Or at least I can’t remember a single instance outside America where either someone sued the producer for using a product incorrectly or the producer pre-emtpively puts warnings on for ridiculous stuff to not get sued if people try these things.
Either way, good to know that cotton swabs were primarily made indeed to clean ears. I don’t use them for that, but it always weirded me out when they came in those pastelle color packages with openings like tissues, perfect for a bathroom, but someone said “Yo, don’t use them for your ears! They were made for swabbing grease off motor chains.”
Not a lot of products have to do that. The one people bandy about is McDonalds adding “Caution: Coffee Is Hot” to their stuff, but the actual coffee spill lawsuit was over coffee hot enough to cause 3rd degree burns. Few things need cautions against their intended use.
Q-Tips / cotton swabs are an almost uniquely bad tool. It’s incredibly easy to rupture your ear drums. There’s no actual health benefit to swabbing your ears – it just feels good your ears get itchy. A safer tool could be made, but it’d be more expensive, more involved to use, and there’s probably several but I can’t be bothered to find out, and neither can you. They make a product that they know is inherently dangerous to use and has no specific benefit. So it has a warning against doing it. Same as cigarette packs have a warning that they cause cancer, even though everyone buying them knows that and smokes them anyway.
Better ear cleaning tools exist. They are little plastic scoops. I used to use a bent paperclip. Basically anything you can put into the ear canal and then pull/scoop/scrape earwax out is far better than a qtip, which only compacts wax into clumps. The one good use case for the qtip is drying. They can absorb water well inside the ear canal and belly button. I personally use them on my navel after showering since I have an “innie”
You can get soft silicone ear pickers with a built in camera now so you can see what you’re scooping.
I’m going crazy this goddamn thread.
Don’t shove things into your orifices. Wash your ears maybe with the help of your wet fingers under the shower. If you got fat fingers or tiny ears, maybe use cotton swabs etc on the other most area of the ear canal to clean away excess.
Your ear is self cleaning. Dont stick anything in it.
Like do people stuff cotton up their urethra to dry it after peeing? Leave your holes alone.
Don’t shove things into your orifices
Don’t tell me how to live my life.
I work in a call center where I wear headphones for 8 hours. I also game online and wear headphones at home for an hour or two each day. I am a very oily person. My ears DO NOT self-clean, as you say, given my situation. I use a peroxide ear drop every few weeks to cut down the buildup nowadays, then flush with an ear syringe. You can’t make generalizations. People should get to know their bodies and stay healthy. If I do not do these things I just described, by the way, I start to lose hearing after a few months.
See, you’re describing washing them. Good.
In ears also dont stop your ears from self cleaning, just means the final stretch has to be washed out i guess. As you do. Dont shove paperclips in there.
And consider over/onear headphones maybe.
People should get to know their bodies and stay healthy. If I do not do these things I just described, by the way, I start to lose hearing after a few months.
Yes they do, through education and medical advice. Not by sticking things into their holes.
If you got crazy buildup despite washing, you need to speak with a doctor too.
Yep, somehow America wound up doing thing that way, where instead of regulating preemptively, lawsuits are expected to do a lot of what regulatory bodies do in other countries. It’s an awful system and rarely benefits those that have been caused harm, especially when there are limits on punitive damages that are supposed to encourage corporations to not be shitbags. Individuals don’t have the resources to sue companies, either, so at best one occasionally gets a check for $2.14 for being part of a class that won a class action lawsuit.
Most Japanese people have dry earwax: http://drypharmacist.com/types-of-earwax.html
Obviously this is cleaned differently compared to wet earwax.
No, I clean my ears with warm water. I dry them with cotton swabs.
Q-tips were very clearly designed to clean ears. They just have to cover their ass now, and tell people it’s not safe. (I do not personally have very gooey ear wax and don’t use them much at all)
As someone with wax issues in the ears, no, q-tips suck at cleaning ears. You’ll end up pushing the wax into your eardrum and causing the impacted wax that you were trying to avoid in the first place. That’s why I use those tiny screwdrivers. /shrug
Ah, much less risky, I’m sure.
I see people put fqdns into search engines all the time.
Stop searching for things like “espn.com”, just put it in the address bar.
what do you do about googles ‘omnibar’? its the most infuriating combination of address and search boxes, and there is absolutely no way to turn it off.
oh yeah, one way: firefox.
its still triggers me to this day as the last straw for me and google
omnibox is one of the biggest QOL improvements browsers ever got IMO. Frees up screen real estate and is very intuitive. If you don’t want to navigate to your domain-like search string just add a space and a comma or something similar.
the most infuriating combination of address and search boxes
From a UX perspective, those are both ways to start a navigation to a new page, and it’s almost always clear from context which is intended (is the string formatted as a URL? Treat it as such. Otherwise, treat it as a search string). The only hiccup is when actually searching for strings that look like a URL (no whitespace, includes periods), but that happens rarely enough that I’m perfectly happy to manually go to a search engine for those cases. Otherwise, Cmd+L-“type my thoughts”-Enter works smoothly for me in both cases (on Firefox for personal laptop, or Chrome for work one).
What are the issues that you experience with this combined flow?
Firefox has omnibox and it’s not as easy to turn off as you think. The immediately available settings do some things like add the “search” box back but the “URL” box still functions as the omnibox. Have to play around with about:config and even then I haven’t figured out how to change it turn back time to the before times.
Settings -> Search -> Add search bar in toolbar?
Yes that is the setting to turn on the “search bar” but it doesn’t revert omnibar to only URLs.
I have never had firefox mistake a url for a search, though.
I have plenty of times, which is why I went hunting for a way to disable it.
huh. did you remember to feed the fox all the cookies websites give you? that normally keeps her happy.
Begrudgingly yes.
I’m out of ideas. Best to bury your computer in the back yard.
the worst for this is any browser for Android tv. most of the reason I’m using a browser on the Android TV is because I’m doing something sketchy that’s going to have a weird URL ending, so pretty much 100% of the time it interprets my URLs as searches
My old boss would type google.com into the chrome search box (not the address bar) then click the link for Google, and search for Gmail.com.
My wife works full time remote and had to have IT take over her computer and she watched him type google into the search bar.
Would you believe that there is some browser malware that breaks this and makes you actually have to go to a Google search to get to a website?
