I lived in a town with only IGA and Piggly-Wiggly. (And Dollar General, of course). IGA was the best. I really appreciate what they were doing. It appears to still exist.

https://www.iga.com/about

I love the saccharin/cyclamate combo, but it's actually illegal in the USA. I use ZeroCal from Brazil. If you ever see it in a market in the USA, enjoy the tiny act of civil disobedience.

Saccharin was almost made illegal in the USA, until Teddy Roosevelt stepped in. He liked it in his tea.

The soda industry generally prefers aspartame/acesulfame potassium, as it has the right aftertaste profile to replace sugar.

Cyclamate is used in some parts of Europe (like Germany) together with aspartame and acesulfame-K. I find the cyclamate smoothens the somewhat bitter aftertaste.

Cyclamate is banned in the US based on a flawed 1969 study that supposedly showed it to be carcinogenic. It's legal in most of the world, including the EU.

Yep, one of those places where the US thinks it's bad and millions of people elsewhere are just fine.

It is actually about a 0.125mm projection, not the size of the chip. But more about steering lasers, which is really what they wanted to do.

Something like, "We have only good intentions! It's not like we're selling penis pills!"

It's good practice because sometimes I don't feel like hitting the Spam button but I still want to black-hole the marketing e-mails. If you are also sending transaction e-mails through that address, then I have to decide whether to bother keeping you as a sender.

I'm a little impressed with Google. Recently the assistant started understanding when I speak Portuguese or when my wife switches to it in a text message. I hadn't had that experience before, the assistants would pick one language and mispronounce the other.

Alexa has an experimental bilingual mode but it's nerfed by its general failure to understand well.

This is a pet peeve of mine that makes it so annoying to communicate with friends and family who live in other countries.

A lot of times you realize that talking shop made much of your connection, or continuing the in-jokes from work. When you're out of the loop, it's no longer the same.

A model M requires so much force a cockatiel can walk on it and not press a key. Most tactile keyboards use a little less force.

I find linear switches make my hands hurt because they don't have a clear activation point and I end up pressing too hard. Cherry MX Brown switches and equivalent are a sweet spot for me. I also liked the lost-to-history white ALPS switches on the Apple Extended Keyboard II

"if you put a fashion label on a medical device, people will pay twenty times what it costs to make."

And, if you take that label off, they'll pay even more. It's great work.

That would have been the love hotel/pachinko era, no?