candles and candy are the only halloween things worth buying
Every year during the fall season, all the Halloween stuff gets put out for sale in the grocery and department stores. The vast majority of what's sold is crap, except for the candy because it tastes better. I explain why that is here.
The other thing that's worth buying are highfalutin candles, if you get the right kind.
A go-to candle that is never cheap but genuinely awesome for Halloween is the Yankee Candle Honey Clementine Scented. The best type to get is the one in a glass jar with top. The candle is orange which is proper for Halloween and autumn, and you can reuse the glass jar after you burn the candle all the way through. Reuse for what? Any number of things. Candy jar, sugar jar, jar for nuts, jar for rice, whatever.
If you just said to yourself, "Screw the candle, I just want the jars!", not a problem. Glass candle jars are widely available. Metal screw-top, cork top, push top, clear glass, frosted glass, and so on. Have at it.
The other types of scented candles that work for Halloween and the autumn season in general are fall colors with sweet or woodsy scents. Yankee Candle rules the roost for this. See Kitchen Spice, Cinnamon Stick, Sparkling Cinnamon, Salted Caramel, Apple Wreath, Sicilian Lemon, Mango Peach Salsa, Balsam & Cedar, and Evergreen Mist. There are many more, but if you stick to one or more of those, you're good for the autumn season.
Candy and candles are always better than plastic crap.
With the candy, it's cheap, eaten quickly and the wrapper thrown away. Not a big deal. Very little waste involved, and the candy is as fresh as it gets for store-bought stuff.
With a candle in a jar (with top), you get to enjoy the scent while the candle is burning, and get a reusable jar afterward.
There's another good thing about jarred candles in that they make excellent gifts. These candles have some cost to them but don't cross into insanely expensive territory. Candles like this also have some fancy flair to them. After all, it comes in thick glass and has actual weight to it. Even the top feels substantial.
I have been gifted candles before and always appreciate it. They're just nice things. And I like nice things. Who doesn't?
why i stopped buying casio watches (for now)
On my wrist as I write this is my trusty Casio WS1600H. I wear it because it has almost every feature I want out of watch. The one thing it's missing is multiple alarms. But it has the countdown timer with auto-repeat (I use that often), great legibility, and is light in weight.
But if I want all the stuff, choices are darned few.
What I want is high legibility, multiple alarms, a display that shows time, month, date and day using three letters (such as THU for Thursday instead of just TH), a decent night light, a countdown timer with auto-repeat, and in a size that fits my smaller wrist.
I own a few Casios that almost get it right. Two of them are the F201WA and MWD100H. Both of these have an identical feature set even though they look very different. Feature-wise, everything is there. Five alarms, countdown timer with auto-repeat, time + month + date + day with 3 letters on display, but...
...the F201WA is a bit dim and the MWD100H doesn't fit my wrist that well. So close. So close.
Previously, I owned a WS1000H and WS1400H. These also share identical features. The WS1000H in particular is outstandingly good for legibility, and both models have all the features I want. So what's the problem? Front-facing buttons. I could not get used to that.
What's left that's available right now?
Two models, the WS1300H and WS1700H. And you guessed it, these both share the same feature set. I might be picking up one of these or both. The WS1300 looks to be the one that has a more legible display.
No front-facing buttons on either model, which is good. But there may be fitment issues. Both have lug-to-lug measurements of over 50mm. But based on my experience, that sometimes doesn't matter because the AE1500 - which is huge at a whopping 54.4mm lug-to-lug - does fit my smaller wrist. The only reason I'm not wearing one is because while it does have a countdown timer, it doesn't have auto-repeat, and I need that.
The WS1300 is a round case and the WS1700 is square, with the WS1700 being the larger of the two cases. In my experience, square digital Casios fit my wrist better. But the WS1700 has a really busy display going on.
Neither shows the day as 3 letters and goes with 2 instead, but I like the WS1300 display better because it's not as cluttered.
This is all the stuff I have to consider these days before even thinking about buying another Casio. It's why I wear the WS1600H now. That watch does not have have multiple alarms on it, but just about everything else checks out.
At this point, I've had enough experience from buying so many Casio digitals over the years that yeah, I get picky. I examine everything, read all the specs, watch YouTube videos on the watch if any exist, and so on. And I also make darned certain I can return the watch if it doesn't work out (which I have had to do several times).
Maybe there will be a WS1300 or WS1700 in my future, because at present, those are the only two I'm considering. I've gone through the entire Casio catalog, and if I make the buy, it will be one or the other. Or maybe both.
And if I do get either or both, I'll be sure to write about it here.
if my email ever broke, i'd switch to a day planner
Email. As in messaging on the internet that predates the web browser itself. Before there was browsing, there was messaging. Why? Because it's just text, and that's the smallest, simplest data you can transfer.
I use email to organize my life, so I get all sorts of super nerdy when it comes to using it exactly the way I want. Very recently, I just did a major switch in how I use it.
And by the way, yes, I really do mean it when I say that if email wasn't an option for me, I'd switch to a day planner. Or to be more accurate, a day planner with sticky note tabs for whenever I need to make minor corrections or place a higher importance on certain tasks by using bright colored tabs.
The very specific way I've been using email for years is with the Mozilla Thunderbird mail client with the Send Later add-on. That client with that add-on is the free way to have scheduled email, which is something I use a lot. Send Later allows one-time and repeating scheduled emails (weekly, monthly, biannual, annual, whatever). Brilliant software.
HOWEVER... my Thunderbird setup was best described as Frankenstein's Monster that's been beaten repeatedly. Years ago, I had to stop at Thunderbird version 52.9.1 and stay there because of other add-ons I used that were unsupported or just outright broke with any newer version of the software. Yeah, it worked, but it wasn't exactly an ideal setup.
There is an emoji bug with Thunderbird 52 in Linux where anything emoji blows up to giant size. It is a known problem with that version software that will NEVER BE FIXED. Why? It was fixed with version 60 and beyond, so nobody bothered fixing 52. That means if running 52, you're screwed. And I had to keep running 52 just to continue using the add-ons I liked that broke in 60 and beyond. The only "fix" for 52 is to disable the Noto Color emoji font...
...but then that can break other programs that use that font. This is the kind of crap you deal with when running old software. I didn't have the emoji problem in Thunderbird back when I was running Windows 10, but instead had other stuff that would sometimes break. In either OS, I just couldn't win.
Send Later was the only reason I kept using Thunderbird, but I finally found a way to get scheduled email without Thunderbird + Send Later. Three ways, actually.
First way: KDE's KMail using the Send Later Agent plugin, which does work. However, I didn't like the client all that much.
Second and third way: Sylpheed as my mail client, and a combination of mutt, at and cron jobs to do scheduled emails as a background process.
If I want to schedule an email and bcc myself on it (I prefer that over using a "Sent" folder), that's done like this in Terminal:
at 3pm tomorrow (enter)
echo "Message body here" | mutt -s "Subject here" -b somedude@example.com (enter, CTRL+D, enter)
...and that's it. The mail will go out at 3pm the next day. I can get more fancy with it by specifying a very specific date+time if I want to, such as 12am Jan 1 2025 or whatever.
Cron jobs are used if I need a specific email to repeat itself. If there's a reminder I need every week, it would be something like this in crontab:
0 12 * * 2 echo "Take out trash" | mutt -s "Take out trash" my-email-address@domain.tld
That job would send an email to me every Tuesday at noon. The way cron jobs work is that the first 5 characters are * * * * *, which from right-to-left are weekday, month, day, hour, minute. Sun-Sat is 0-7, so Tuesday is 2. Month and day don't need to be set, so those stay as asterisks. 12 is hour 12, 0 is the 0 minute, and that means 12:00pm.
Both the subject line and body of message is just "Take out trash", because that's all I need to see.
Yes, I go through all this crap just to have reliable scheduled emails.
Sylpheed is a GUI mail client that's just "barely-GUI", which is just fine. Very lightweight, very quick. Mutt is only used to send scheduled emails. And I had to learn at and make cron jobs that actually work...
...but it works, and I was finally able to dump old Thunderbird 52 that never worked correctly in Windows nor Linux with the add-ons I was using.
Why Sylpheed?
Other than it being very light, it has baked in regex filtering that works exactly as it's supposed to. Thunderbird TO THIS DAY does not have any native regular expression filtering ability, which is all sorts of stupid. Believe me, if you know regex, then you understand how valuable that is to sort emails on arrival.
Another thing Sylpheed has baked in is the ability minimize AND HIDE to tray.
On minimize, a little mail icon just sits there next to the clock, and changes whenever a new email is in the inbox. That seemingly very simple thing is for some reason IMPOSSIBLE on nearly all other mail clients. Thunderbird, depending on version, can be made to do this with add-ons. I had that working a certain way in Windows and a different way in Linux. Both were annoying to set up, but in Sylpheed it's dirt simple. No add-ons necessary because it just has it with a couple of checkboxes and it works. The tray icon is there with no space wasted in the taskbar. Brilliant.
Yeah, this is all some seriously nerdy crap, but that's what I had to do just to get my email working how I like.
But again, if it ever gets to a point where I can't schedule emails, that's when I go to the department store and buy a day planner and sticky note tabs.
do not eat department store food. ever.
Department stores are where you buy things like cleaning supplies, clothes, laundry detergent and so on. It should never be a place where you buy prepared food.
I first have to explain what "prepared food" actually is. It may sound obvious, but it actually isn't.
There are two types of prepared food in a department store.
The first kind is what's known as a hot bar. This is a small freestanding thing usually placed fairly close to the checkout lanes. In the hot bar is ready-to-eat hot food, such as fried chicken, egg rolls, and so on.
The second kind is a dedicated area where you walk up and order your hot food directly. Walk up, someone takes your order, you pay, you sit and wait while it's prepared, get the food when it's ready, eat.
I made the mistake of ordering food from the second kind recently. I was invited to go this place, so I said sure, I'll give it a try as it wasn't some major national food chain brand. My thought was that since it was atypical of what I'd normally see in a department store, maybe the food would be decent.
Nope.
What I ordered was some pastry/pocket thing. What I got was trash that was put in a microwave for 2 minutes. After literally two bites, I noped right out of that and tossed it in the trash. I would have been better off if I had bought a small sleeve of peanuts instead.
This was a loud reminder of why I don't eat department store food. Regardless of whether it's major brand or not, if it's made in the department store, it sucks.
Sad but true: Most restaurants do the same damned thing.
I've lived long enough to where I can tell instantly if food served to me was actually cooked or just microwaved.
Make no mistake, microwaving is not cooking. "Food" designed to be microwaved regardless of what it is all has a very recognizable look, non-scent and blandness to it. Or at least recognizable to me. The colors aren't natural and obviously fake, barely any scent or no scent exists, and flavor is nonexistent.
It's that last one that really messes with my head. I see this "food", bite into it and literally taste nothing. It's just hot texture, as if I were eating hot soft styrofoam. It may look like pizza, chicken, a roll or whatever it is, but once in the mouth there's just nothing going on at all other than a hot nothing.
Remember that movie Demolition Man? There's a scene in that flick that still sticks out in my mind to this day. It's the "rat burger" scene.
John Spartan (lead character) lives in a world where the regular population eats nothing but ultra-processed fake food. At one point he's in the underground where the dregs of society live and away from all the fake stuff. He smells food nearby and finds somebody making burgers for sale. He orders one, receives it and starts wolfing it down because it tastes so good. Then he finds out what the burger is made of. Rat meat. He keeps eating it anyway because it's actual real meat that was cooked.
Well, guess what. We're really not that far off from that reality now. In the year the movie was released (1993) it was laughable and unthinkable to live off fake food, so much to the point where you'd genuinely enjoy a burger made from rat meat just because it was real.
We're not at the point of frying rats just to get real cooked meat, but we absolutely ARE at the point where the overwhelming majority of places that "cook" hot food are just reheating fake garbage in a microwave.
Get cooking tools and cook at home.
Finding any place that actually cooks real food is becoming increasingly difficult. This being true, you're just better off cooking for yourself.
Got pots and pans? Get some butter or oil, chop an onion and fry it up. Or boil some water and make rice or potatoes or whatever. Want to get fancy? Use a steamer basket.
And speaking of steaming, get a steam pot. Steam your potatoes, steam your asparagus, steam your green beans, steam whatever. It works and it's good.
Is your tap water garbage? Boil for 10 minutes first before using. Or distill it first, then boil. Anything you cook with it will taste better. Thank me later.
All bread in the store is awful because it's full of preservative trash. Learn how to bake bread yourself. You've got an oven. Use it.
Need better meat? You'll have to do some research to find that, but chances are you'll be able to find a farm or farmers market relatively close so you can get the good stuff.
Trust me, it's worth it. Learn how to cook and don't eat the fake garbage. Life is too short to eat pseudo-food trash.
big vs. small casio digital watch legibility comparison
I own a bunch of Casio digital watches. Something I've always found amazing is the size of a Casio digital watch does not dictate how legible it is... at least most of the time.
What works for something good and legible for a digital depends on a few factors.
Digital segment crispness, thickness and spacing
The digital segments have to be crisp but not too crisp nor too soft. Decent thickness and spacing of segments need to also be there so you can read the time easily.
LCD panel color
The panel has to be light gray. All other colors take away legibility.
Design flaws?
This is identifying anything in the design of the watch which takes away from legibility.
Comparing 4 Casio digital watches I own
Casio W218H, Casio MWD100H, Casio WS1600H, Casio F-91W.
All of these look like they have the same legibility. They don't.
The most legible is the W218H by a country mile, followed by WS1600H, F-91W and then MWD100H.
Yes, this means the biggest of the 4 has the worst legibility. Why? It has a slightly yellowed LCD panel, and the case insert middle bar (where it says "FIVE ALARMS" in the middle of the display) casts a shadow. None of the others have that.
That middle bar is a design flaw. In bright daylight viewing, the cast shadow of that bar is so bad that I have to rotate myself away from the sun just to read the time.
The W218H is best because its digits are large, spaced wide, and the panel is completely uncluttered. That's as good as it gets.
The WS1600H is very close to the W218H in legibility, but the digits are slightly thinner.
With the F-91W, it has top tier daylight legibility, but it's night legibility where it fails miserably. The night light on the F-91W is garbage, whereas the light on the W218H is amazingly good and isn't restricted to a 1.5 or 3 second afterglow. You can hold down the light button for as long as you want and it will keep shining.
Big size for legibility only matters when the bigness is in the right place
Here's an example of three big digital watches from Casio: Casio AE1500WH, Casio WS1500H and Casio WS1700H.
The WS1700H and WS1500H in reality are only about as legible as the WS1600H seen above. You don't get more legibility with the larger case size. You get other features such as tide graph, moon phase and fishing timer, but no real appreciable legibility advantage.
Only the AE1500 has its bigness in the right place. The time display is huge, and date display is also fairly big. When you want a genuinely large time and date display from a big watch, AE1500 is the only way to go.