Walking my grandkid to/from school, it absolutely floors me how many dangerous drivers there are around kids.

In a matter of maybe 10 minutes, I've witnessed:

• at least a dozen cars illegal parked. It's not the parking that bothers me, but the fact that these cars are often parked on turns or just before intersections, making it impossible for other drivers to see small kids.
• Several people not stopping at stop signs, including at the exit of the school parking lot.
• One car, who completely blew through a stop sign at the front of the school, made a left turn and nearly hit a guy walking his kid. The driver didn't even slow down.
• Super fucking huge pickup trucks parked in the school parking lot, but their long ass hangs well over the sidewalk near the kindergarden area, leaving very little space to use the sidewalk.
• Speeding. Obviously, you have to have speeding in school zones, right?

This happens every day, during drop off and pick up. I was told that bylaw were “cracking down”, but no, they aren't. If they were, our municipality would generate $5000 in fines each and every day at every school.

The other day, I rode my bike past another school as kids were getting out. Not only was their massive parking lot completely full, but they had blocked the bike trail (WITH PYLONS) to make space for more cars. Then as I entered onto the road, cars were illegally parked along the road and on a bridge for a like 100m. Making it extremely difficult and dangerous to cross because they blocked visibility for me and other drivers on the road.

I asked the cross guard if these students all lived out of town, requiring every parent to drive them home; he obviously didn't get my joke.

Seriously, fuck cars. All of them!

In my persistence to fit Linux in my life, I'm curious if some "must have" Windows software will work better if I just ran a Windows VM within Linux.

None of the software I need to work is needed to work continuously. They are basically programs that I fire up when needed, for a few minutes, then exited.

Wine will install them, but not run them, so I'm hoping a VM is the answer as I'm not interested in dual-booting to run a few Windows programs occasionally.

Also, "identical" has a different meaning here.

There's a special place in hell for the monster who dreamed up this captcha!

Another win for older tech?

When I want something cheap, I usually hit Aliexpress (website). As I was looking at the Aliexpress app page on the Google Play Store to check its privacy details, TEMU came up as a recommended app.

Now, my wife has used TEMU in the past, but since she often can't find her way around things, I downplayed her negative experience as "user error". That said, I went to the TEMU website and started looking around.

I found something that was a reasonable price, but then get this message saying I could get this item free through the app... sigh. OK. I sign up with my usual fake/random credentials and add this "free" item to my cart.

A spinning prize wheel comes up. Hey, I can get THREE free items now! Sweet. I spend the next 3 hours looking for stuff I can actually use, doom-scrolling through everything from women's underwear to t-shirts with assault rifle print. Literally something for everyone. LOL

Then I select my third "free" item, and another spinning prize wheel comes up. "100% off the next $35". Ok.

I didn't need more stuff, but hey, 100% off sounds like more free stuff!

I spend another hour looking, keeping an eye on the amount "saved" (apparently $600+, for stuff that is sold on Aliexpress for maybe $25).

When I finally get to check out, I get another spinning prize wheel. "100% off $100"!! Goddamn, I'm on a roll here. How do these guys make any money?!!

More time looking... I must have spent well over 4 hours on their app. Time to check out.

$67? Huh? What about 100% off and all that nonsense? Enter your phone number*

• You must agree to get promotional texts, or you can't check out... hmm, maybe my wife wasn't wrong.

In any case, there was no way to actually get anything "free". I deleted the app, deleted my account, and will never touch this scam ever again.

Do people actually end up getting anything from Temu? I thought AliExpress was bad, but the experience is 1000x better.

Ok, so here's my problem.

I own quite a few padded shorts, ranging from $30 - $250 (bibs), and they feel great for the first 2-3 hours, then I get really uncomfortable in them. Not pain, but quite uncomfortable.

I was able to ride 200km wearing only compression shorts with no padding, but I think I got lucky.

Regular shorts/underwear always have issues because of the seams, so they aren't viable.

I heard that triathlon shorts are lightly padded, so they may offer a nice in-between.

Does anyone wear them? How do they compare to traditional cycling shorts?

Amazon Prime Days ran on July 16th and 17th (at least here, in Canada).

This price jump happened a day before and ended two days later, but this item was "on sale" during those two Prime Days.

I've been seeing this scam far too often, especially with food items. Why isn't this illegal yet?

I'll start by saying that I really love Tube Archivist. It works flawlessly in doing what it does (archiving YouTube videos), and the UI and UX are great.

However, no matter what browser I use (Edge, FF, Opera, Samsung mobile, FF mobile, etc...), I run into issues where the video will play, but the interface freezes... I can't do anything on the screen until I refresh.

I don't have it set to any strange codecs, so videos are in vp9. But I also tried a few different codecs to see if the quality/size could be better optimized, and had the same issues with freezing UI then.

If I run the videos through Jellyfin, they work fine. It's only through the TA web interface where things lock up.

Is this normal? Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get this working better?

I'm seeing fake roads everywhere, and the map looks like a spider's web.

It's like this on every website that displays the cycleOSM layer: the official cycleOSM site, Openstreetmap, brouter, etc.

This has been bothering me long enough that I figured I'd check to see if anyone else is having the same issue, and more importantly, if there's a fix.

Some websites, like Google Earth or various weather radar sites get so slow that they are unusable in Firefox.

When I load the same sites in Edge, it's blazing fast, as I'd expect.

Even Librewolf chugs on these sites.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

ADDITIONAL DETAILS: First, thanks for all the input, guys.

I wanted to say that I've tried a fresh FF profile, and the same slowness happens in Google Earth.

I also confirmed that hardware acceleration is enabled.

This problem isn't on all websites. For example, playing www.slowroads.io actually gives a higher framerate on FF than it does on Edge. So it seems to be that certain websites just suck ass.

Some of you have said that Google Earth on FF works perfectly fine... on linux. At least it seems not to be a FF problem. LOL

EDIT: Opera browser is just as smooth as Edge with G Earth.

POSSIBLE SOLUTION?? Ok, so even though I was able to confirm that hardware acceleration was enabled, and the GPU was active while using FF, and the about:support showed that webrender was enabled, I noticed that on about:config the gfx.webrender.all setting was set to false.

So, I enabled it, and tried again. Google Earth seems much smoother (not as good as edge, but better than before), and Tube Archivist no longer seems to freeze while a video is being played.

Could this be the reason for my issues? If so, why was this option set to false by default?

Now that summer is almost here, I'm looking for better ways to protect myself from the sun. I generally dislike sunscreen, but I do wear it while riding.

The helmet visor "Da Brim" (website) caught my attention. Since I wear a huge-ass sombrero-style hat when I'm off the bike, I'm fine with the way Da Brim looks.

For context, some of my summer rides might have me in 8-10+ hours of sun, which isn't good, even with sunscreen on. If Da Brim can make the experience more tolerable, I'm in!

I'm curious to hear from anyone who has one, and what their experience has been.

I've tried a few jellyfin plugins that are supposed to sync metadata and thumbnails from tube archivist, but it's just not working right.

I can see some thumbnails, but then the titles are just random gibberish. Or the titles somewhat work, but no thumbnails.

Any secret I'm missing?

Both are running in docker containers on a synology nas.