WTF-Beta

Here’s an earlier thread about the Nokbox. Includes sample pages.

https://wtf.coffee-room.com/topic/2009/nokbox/7?_=1791548255155

Nope, though it is available here.

We got one of those goofy "we've installed X in your neighborhood" letters a few days ago. It was for a company called Base Power. Was curious to see what their business model entails.

Base Power launched today across the Chicagoland area, bringing homeowners in ComEd’s service area a new way to lower electricity supply costs while adding whole-home backup power.

Base installs a battery in every participating home and uses the battery to reduce the cost to serve customers during peak-demand times when the grid is most stressed and power supply is increasingly scarce. In its offering to ComEd customers, Base members will get their energy supply at rates at least 25% below ComEd’s default supply rate. The battery also provides backup power for essential household equipment, including sump pumps, during outages like those many experienced during recent severe storms which left +400k without power.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260624437919/en/Base-Power-Launches-in-Chicagoland-as-Electricity-Costs-Surge-Cutting-Customers-Supply-Bills-25-Below-ComEds-Fixed-Rate

Here's an article that goes into detail how it works:

https://epicelectrical.com/what-is-base-power/

We're not super interested (we have a manual transfer switch and portable generator) but I'm wondering what our resident Sparky experts think....@steve-miller @big_al ? Thoughts?

@Bernard Congrats! We updated our estate planning docs some months ago after years of putting it off. Now we're in the process of documenting our financial lives so that our successor trustees can take over if the need arises. Starting to fill up our Nokbox. I picked one up during a sale at a huge discount off their regular prices. It seems to be well thought out.

I officially give up.

@ShiroKuro said:

but it is most definitely an aesthetic take

No one I know goes to McDonald's for the food, coffee, or atmosphere.

We have a friend who goes to McDonald's every day for a gathering with a bunch of buddies. Every day at 10 and they're there till noon. During COVID they would sit outside on the benches.

In the olden days, it would have been a group of women and it would have been called a "coffee klatch".

It's all about the people.

I'm beginning to think that no one read the article....

C'mon guys, all together now: "GET OFF MY LAWN!!"

So it's 1980. People meet in person, right? At school, at work, at church? If you had told me back then that I would have a bunch of online friends whom I've never met and that I've been part of the group for nearly 20 years, I would have thought you were crazy. And that some of us would meet and marry, having first met online? Fantasy world!

For a bunch of a different reasons, you couldn't drag me to a shopping mall, a Taylor Swift concert, or a Star Trek convention, but clearly a lot of people find those venues inviting, and I think that's great. They've found their comfy places to land, to be with people who share their interests. Costco nerds are just another flavor of that.

This thread has gotten into what we like/don't like about Costco and the bigger point that's being missed is recognizing that we human beings continue to find new ways to connect with each other. Costco is just one example. Not a terribly important one, but just another way. And it may not be yours.

It's not that complicated.

On a typical Tuesday, NOAA biologists were deep into their standard routine—analyzing data on sharks and studying fish populations. Then, staff heard an unmistakable tapping sound at the building's glass entryway. Standing on the stoop was a brown pelican, repeatedly rapping its beak against the door.

https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/knocking-help-pelicans-unlikely-rescue

Guess you guys aren't doing what the people who were profiled in the article are doing!

How ProPublica figured it out.

https://www.propublica.org/article/donald-trump-jr-wedding-umar-kremlev-reporting

Uptick in registration requests recently, at least five or six a day.

Something seemed a little too slick about the site. There are interesting discussions on reddit about these kinds of operations. Apparently some of them may be total scams, and others aren't entirely truthful about the story.

And there is a separate shipping fee to get your bottles. Not sure about tariffs, but I'm guessing yes.

Bottom line: Caveat emptor.

They have some pretty cool products in the UK. The deli platters look way more interesting than ours.

https://services.costco.co.uk/deli/

And look at this Hot Buy!

https://www.costco.co.uk/Appliances/Cooling-Air-Treatment-Heating/Tado-Wireless-Smart-Thermostat-Multi-Room-Starter-Kit-2x-Smart-Thermostatic-Radiator-Valves/p/589511

@Rontuner said:

Melrose Park

My hometown!

Much as I love Costco, I was sad to see the Kiddieland that was on the site demolished to make way for the warehouse.

Thank a Republican voter!

Gas prices going up quickly around here. I bought gas at Costco for $4.39 early in the week and it's up to $4.89 today, up 20 cents since yesterday.

@AndyD said:

the crush of the unwashed hoards

We go to a warehouse that is five minutes from our house, but there are a couple of others within 15 minutes or so that we go to occasionally because they do carry different products than our store does. Each warehouse has its own personality.

The one in the town where rich people live is our least favorite. The members and the employees all seem to have the same sour attitude and it's pretty unpleasant to shop there. People fight over parking spaces and the employees look haggard and are rude to customers.

There's another one in a middle class suburb where there are a lot of Indians and Pakistanis, and where we can get a wider variety of the food products from those countries. It's insanely busy but everyone is really nice.

The third one is in an area that is multi-ethnic, with lots of Southeast Asians and that is near a suburb that has a large Jewish population. They have the best selection of foods I'm not likely to see anywhere else. The place is crazy busy, too, and has the feeling of a market. But in a fun way.

Bottom line: The rich people are entitled snobs and make everyone else miserable.

Eric Topol does a deep dive on the new improved Apple Watch.

On September 9th, Apple announced it was revamping its Apple Watch Health Sensing System, rolling out a Readiness score (0 to 10), and increasing the frequency of heart rate variability (HRV) outputs 24-fold. This can be viewed as upping its competition with various other consumer wearable sensors. These “readiness scores” as a composite of multiple metrics, with heart rate variability (HRV) being front and center for most. The majority of Americans are now using wearable sensors, which equates to well over 100 million adults. HRV and Readiness scores are increasingly being marketed as a measurement of autonomic nervous system health, a digital marker for future disease, a clock for biological age, and a holistic metric to promote healthspan and even longevity. (Apple also introduced a new longevity tab and “Health Age”.) None of this has been proven. In this edition of Ground Truths I am going to review what we know about heart rate variability and readiness scores.

https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-big-holes-in-wearable-heart-rate?publication_id=587835&post_id=215540121&isFreemail=true&r=1v8sh2&triedRedirect=true

My takeaway: No Apple Watch or other wearable for me. And I'll still eat my ice cream.

Never heard of it, but I poked around and see there are a bunch of places that are doing the same thing.

I wonder if you have to pay a tariff on the oil they send you!

@Mik Made me think of Retro Bistro!

Apparently I follow all the rules re eating steak frites, despite not being raised in France....