This likely applies to all larger commission based purchases but do your large buys near the end of the month.

Why? Commission based jobs generally have bonuses and incentives for their staff to hit specific sales targets for the month. What this means is, near the end of the month you'll have sales staff trying a little harder to close deals and get in those last minute sales. What this means for you is a sales person more willing to negotiate a better deal on your purchase.

This is coming from personal experience as I worked in furniture sales for 6 years (two different stores) and tried it out a couple times myself.

TTL

The default TTL for Android is 64. Default for Linux is 64. Default for Windows is 128.

When a packet passes through the router, its TTL is decreased by 1. So a packet from your phone will have TTL of 64, while one from device on hotspot will get decremented to 63 when passing your phone, acting as a router.

Unless it starts with 65, then gets decremented to 64, the same as with your phone directly.

On Linux you can temporarily change this with

sysctl net.ipv4.ip_default_ttl=65

as root.

If the carrier just checks the TTL, congrats.

I haven't played around with IPv6 hop limit.

HTTP proxy

If that doesn't work, you can try to proxy traffic through the phone. I like to use Tinyproxy in Termux.
The config is pretty simple, and also supports (unencrypted) authentication with username and password.

Another option is an all in one app like TetherFi. It creates WiFi Direct group (without direct internet access), and has a built-in HTTP proxy.

Both ways allow also using your phone's VPN.

The HTTP proxy can be easily configured in Firefox, for example. For Android, there is a pretty cool app called NekoBox which is a proxy client for many different protocols. It uses the VPN interface to pass everything through the proxy, thus giving you full device connectivity on the other device.

TinyProxy: https://tinyproxy.github.io/ (can simply be apt installed in Termux)

Termux: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.termux/ (terminal emulator for Android)

TetherFi: https://github.com/pyamsoft/tetherfi

NekoBox: https://github.com/MatsuriDayo/NekoBoxForAndroid

When you get a new phone or tablet or computer you should charge it to ~80% and then wait until it's below 20% before charging again. This will protect the battery life. Basically leaving your phone charging overnight slowly breaks your battery because it's constantly being stuck on maximum capacity straining the internal structure of the battery.

Keeping your devices on WiFi also helps greatly increase the time before the next change

Not my tip, but one that saved me recently. A six-month-old comment on a 9-year-old Reddit thread.

1. Compress the chair (all the way down), then turn it upside down. Let it sit upside down for 24 hours (the longer the better).
2. The next evening, leave it upside down and expand it (in other words, make it higher WHILE it is STILL upside down).
3. Then (without waiting another 24 hours) compress it (all the way down again), and leave it there for another 24 hours (again the longer the better).

Note that you will need a lot of force to get it back down in step 3.

Problem solved. (You may need to do this again in 2 years). No mess, no oil, no piston replacements or PVC spacers needed. Why does this work - you are forcing the oil back to the top (when its upright) again which allows the internal gasket to get coated with oil. The oil creates the air barrier that keeps the piston from shrinking as you sit on it.

Scrambled To get perfect scrambled eggs regardless of what you like with it, the most important thing is to constantly stir your eggs in a small pot, I add a ton of a lot of butter but you don't have to, stir until the eggs start to thicken and once all the liquid egg is gone its perfect.

Fried Use a stainless steel pan, wait until it starts to smoke or about 2.5 minutes on high heat (Turn on the fan or the smoke detector will go off) then turn it to medium put a decent amount of oil into the pan spread it around and crack your eggs into the pan. Let them cook for about 30 seconds or until the eggs stop sticking, and then flip them over wait about 15 seconds and then remove them from the pan, you'll have a crispy golden brown white with a runny yoke.

Boiled Being a pot of water to a boil, cook 5 minutes for soft (Cooked white runny yoke), 7.5 for medium (molasses consistency) , 10 for hard, then immediately put it in a bowl of ice water to stop the cooking.

Poached Get a pot of water boiling, put a splash of vinegar if you have it, and then crack your egg into a big cooking spoon or ladle, spin the water and drop it in wait till the egg yoke is fully cooked about 3-5 minutes.

Be the star of your next family breakfast.

When you visit Twitter's website your browser is fingerprinted and tracked. Then instead of being able to see the Tweet you're prompted to login or if for some reason you don't get the login prompt you might be shown advertisements which fund Elon Musk's Nazi bar. Using a Tweet viewer solves all three of these problems: you're not being tracked by Twitter, you're not shown a login prompt and lastly no advertisement money going in Elon Musk's pockets.

This should be your routine if you must share a Tweet:

1. Search for the text of the tweet and see if the same person crossposted to another social media platform like Bluesky. If that person did instead prefer a link to Bluesky. Avoiding Twitter all together is the best option.

2. If you cannot find the Tweet on any other platform edit the link to strip it of any tracking parameters. Generally you can remove the part with the question mark and everything after it. Then replace x.com or twitter.com with xcancel.com or nitter.net or another similar Tweet viewer. If you're posting on your website never use Twitter's embed code because that can put Twitter's tracking on your website. Instead consider taking a screenshot and including a link using a Tweet viewer instead of a direct link.

3. You can now safely share that link.

Avoiding linking to Twitter shows empathy because you care that other people can see what you wanted to share and are not inconvenienced with a login prompt.

Step 1: Set your oven to 350° F.

Step 2: Take your bread roll (kaisers are my favorite) and run it under cold water for a few seconds, just enough to coat the outside.

Step 3: Put the roll in the oven and bake it for 5-7 minutes.

Step 4: Take out the roll and let it cool for a minute or two and then enjoy! The inside will be soft and fluffy and the outside should be thin and crispy.

Ever since learning about this I'm never going back.

In case where you have a wisdom tooth in place that sometimes feels like it may have to be removed, sooner or later, then go get it removed. The sooner the better. If for the most of time the tooth doesn't bother you or hurt, it's easy to keep procrastinating and postponing the operation for years or even decades.

Trust me, the healing process is a wholly different beast when you're in your 50's compared to if you were in your 20's or 30's.

I can’t tell you how many times I had ended up with little to no blankets after sleeping 4 four hours. Eventually, spouse and I decided that we would get two full-size blankets for the bed so that we could each have one. This has prevented so many restless nights.

This LPT doesn’t violate the community rule against illegal advice because in this purely hypothetical scenario the law means nothing

Not sure if it's a life pro tip, an ADHD pro tip, or a cat owners' pro tip, but I've forgotten food in the microwave so many times after putting it there to keep my cat out of it, it kinda hurts. I always allow my food to cool some before putting it away, but these days, I use a microwave timer to remind me. It won't shut up unless I go push a button. And while I'm in there, I might as well clean the rest of the kitchen. Since I'm up.

By the way, I woke up to cat barf on my countertop. How's your morning going?

Adding the url parameter "&peek_pws=0" to the end of the url on your google search turns off personalised results

Discoverd it after Google suggested it for a search term that didn't have many results

All those drain cleaners didn't work. Pulling the stopper out and cleaning the gunk off a paper towel worked.

I recommend nitrile gloves. Don't run the tap when you have the lever screw open, water will leak out of there. You can use an old toothbrush to reach down the drain pipe and pull up more gunk. After, I filled the sink up with hot water then drained in one go. Don't know if it sanitizes exactly but I think it helps, cut down on the smell anyway.

We've all been there. Something goes wrong, so you call customer service. What answers is a bizarre, arcane mess of an answering machine where you have to puzzle out exactly how company x categorizes customer issues when all you want is to talk to a human being. Saying "Complaint" cuts through all of that, but you might need to wait on hold for a bit. Just make sure you're nice to the person on the other end.

A couple glugs of olive or sunflower oil into tissues or paper towels makes a great easy firelighter for wood burning stoves etc.

I use an old mixed nuts container.

48% of Americans are magnesium deficient. From googling, the hard to absorb inorganic ones are magnesium oxide and magnesium chloride. The easy to absorb organic salts include magnesium citrate, lactate, aspartate, and glycinate.

I also found when I eat eggs, I crave chocolate less. I think it's the fat content.

(But I expect many just like the sugar.)

This only works by phone. Be nice, but firm. Don’t be satisfied with their first answer – make them escalate you to the retention department. They’re often authorised to give much larger discounts because it’s cheaper for them to retain customers than to recruit new ones.

Everyone loves the simple joy of a donut, but you're just not living life until you've had a hot donut.

Edit: Change this up based on how many you're warming up and how strong your microwave is. It takes a little bit of getting to know the donuts from your local shop and your microwave and how they interact.

This feels like a common courtesy I don't see enough, particularly the second point. In a conversation circle, always try to keep your side vision open to people trying to find their way in. It can be awkward to try and find your own way in so giving them a spot tells them they're included then drop a quick brief on the conversation "We're talking about pineapples on pizza, good or bad" gives them context to jump in immediately.

Get a medium to large metal coffee can, or any old metal can I guess. Make sure it's cleaned out and dry to start with, and is not rusty.

Then get some spray cooking oil and a few scraps of bread. Spray the inside of the can with cooking oil, then drop some bread scraps in there.

Now you have a roach trap, set it near where the roaches are generally at their worst, and they'll crawl out of the walls and into the can to get their munch on, but won't be able to crawl back out.

Check it every couple or few days or so, eventually the roaches will start piling up and most of them that have been in there for a bit will end up dying because they're covered in the cooking oil and apparently can't absorb oxygen.

Take the trap as necessary and either dump it in the toilet and flush them away, or if you have access to a bonfire burn pile, bag the little demons up and burn them. Then clean the can out and reset the trap as necessary.

Even with the worst infestations I've ever seen, this tends to eliminate over 99% of them within about two weeks, if not less.

A few thoughts about the different approaches between my trap vs poison...

If you poison them, then they just go back into your walls and die, further stinking the place up, is more dangerous to people and pets, and honestly isn't even nearly as effective as people would hope.

But roaches are simple and stupid. They're really easy to trap, and why the hell would I want them going back into the walls in the first place? Especially when I can just flush them instead?

This is my approach to fixing peeling shoe sole layers. I cleaned and even Dremeled the inside layers of rubber to help glue adhere, but I was like "How the hell should I apply pressure while glue dries?"...

So I figured I should easily be able to do that with some thumb tacks in the sides of the sole, and temporarily stitch it down with dental floss for a day or two while the glue dries.

Wish me luck, I used silicone glue. Not sure if that's the best glue or not for the purpose, but it's tough and flexible. Of course I did both shoes, just figured it would be more obvious what I did with one shoe showing the initial damage.

Anyways, thumb tacks and dental floss for the win to hold it together while it dries!

Edit: Confirmed, my fix is solid, even holding better than the original factory glue! Haters gonna be haters though, carry on with your downvotes if you want. Just sharing my technique of salvaging shoes for less than $5 of glue and stuff around the house.