Today, I had to stop and figure out what HEIC files are because my spouse uses an iPhone. It turns out they’re basically irrelevant other than being a frustrating patent trap.

I’m getting ready to file another Immigration case to make my spouse’s permanent residence, well, permanent.

As part of this next case, they want photos to show that our marriage continues.

Fine, fine. But my spouse sent them in this strange format called HEIC, which is apparently some bizarre iPhone format, that’s technically one of those “MPEG standards”.

As usual, Apple only takes what computers have done for 20 or 30 years and produces some dumbed down and incompatible version.

This one is nastier than JPEG 2000 or even Microsoft’s JPEG-XR, because it’s based on the HEVC codec, which means there’s several thousand patents.

Probably the entire point of pushing this HEIC format on iPhones and making it the default is to try to cause other people to have to pay money (patent royalties) for software that can actually handle the stupid things.

I’m on Fedora and had to go install a package from RPM Fusion called “libheif” which came with a conversion program called heif-convert, which can turn these into standard image files in the JPEG and PNG formats, which is what Walmart accepts when you have photos done at their One Hour Photo department.

There’s not really much use in information transfer formats that don’t actually open when you send them to have something done, and HEIC on an iPhone is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen in that regard.

Sending photos from your vacation to Walmart to get prints is like, pretty basic, and yet the “amazing iPhone” can’t seem to do what my Kodak EasyShare digital camera from 2003 did, or even my cheap 35 mm cameras in the 1990s where you took them a damned roll of film and walked around the store while they made photos and handed you your negatives back.

In fact, if the iPhone was the only digital camera available, I’d encourage everyone to shout “NYET! The evil stops here!” and go back to film.

Essentially, thanks to Apple, we’re back to the problem that Richard Stallman described in 2000 regarding MP3 or Microsoft Office formats.

People will put the files out there, and then other people who live in the Free World have to figure out some way of dealing with them.

It will be another 11-12 years before HEIC is patent-free, but you don’t have to wait, because AV1F exists now and is more efficient, and is royalty-free.

Unfortunately, Walmart doesn’t accept AV1F either.

So we’re back to JPEG/PNG for mass compatibility, and that’s unlikely to change for some time. The upside is that if people start using AV1F, then Free and Open Source Software operating systems can come with programs that can read the data and then forward it into another file format without making the user jump through hoops.

Also, at least some day we may have something to point at when people ask why we’re using the JPEG format from 1992 and what to use instead. By definition, that will never happen with an MPEG or Microsoft “standard” because they want money, and JPEG is “good enough” and nobody can sue over it anymore because it’s 30 years old, and tragically, software patents in the United States have caused it to become the de facto image format, forever apparently.

I mean, I was opening JPEGs in the 90s on a 486 PC.

I think it’s funny, in a way, that Apple inflicted HEIC on their customers.

If they try to upload their family photos to be printed, it won’t work any better for them in that format than it did for me, and they too will have to figure out some way of turning them into a standard file. So it creates a headache for their own customers.

It really does make you wonder if there actually was a problem that Apple was trying to solve with HEIC, because it’s still a lossy format, which means that to get those small file sizes, it discards image data that it thinks you won’t perceive, but this means that converting it to anything except PNG lossless introduces another generation of loss.

So the best you’ll manage to do is create these enormous PNG files to back up to “future-proof” your iPhone photos and make sure they don’t get any worse than they are today, which is ridiculous.

Cell phone cameras should allow “Save in PNG” format, but it seems that many, hell, maybe even most don’t.

But with my Android phone, at least when it saves to JPEG, it doesn’t HAVE to get worse than that somehow later on when I want to *gasp* print my photos out.

Score another one for Android.

The price of a man’s haircut is $30 plus tax and tip because they have “The Legendary Hot Towel”.

The price of a man’s haircut is $30 plus tip because they have “The Legendary Hot Towel”.

Actual Image from SportsClips.

When I was 11 years old, in 1995, we had a barber. His name was Max.

Max the Barber (not to be confused with Joe the Plumber) cut hair for about $6.

In the $6, he even pulled out a hot towel and then after a couple of minutes of you reading the sports magazine, which he had, while Max went and worked on someone else, he’d come back and do your neckline with a straight razor.

I’ve never seen a corporate franchise salon come at me with a straight razor to get my neckline and sideburns like Max the Barber did. I think straight razors are cool. I guess corporate lawyers don’t.

Which is why I always came out of a Great Clips and still had to go home and use my own shaving razor to really finish the job, after I already paid them.

Great Clips moved in at the local mall in Marion, Indiana (the mall is now empty and rotting away because nobody could afford to shop there due to foreign outsourcing and Walmart) charging about $8 by 1998.

By the time Great Clips, SportsClips, and MasterCuts, and the other chains pushed out the local barbers, they kept increasing the price of a simple man’s haircut, until today where it is over $30.

Granted, some of this is inflation, but $6 in 1995 is $11.50 today, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI.

So if Max was still around, he may charge more, but $30 is still high even in 2022.

There are two of us in this house. Me, and my spouse.

$60 for a haircut each month is $720 goddamned dollars a year plus taxes, tips, and gas. Also, time and trouble of finding one, and then waiting an hour for them to get around to you because you didn’t use an app to check in.

Someone had to pay someone else to write a goddamned app because a simple FIFO buffer and a piece of paper on a clipboard was too easy, I guess.

And in the end, since the app costs them money, it costs you money.

An app on your phone spies on you, which is why everyone wants to litter your phone with apps and turn it into a dumping ground for apps.

You’re being punished for rejecting this by wasting your own time if you don’t use one.

Now, in the era of COVID, you also go in there, pay them the outrageous fee, get spied on by apps, and then literally have someone breathing down your neck who may very well have COVID.

During the brief phase where the government pretended to care about COVID so they could create corporate welfare programs and remind everyone who was in control of our lives, they shut down all of the haircut places around here, so it was either buy a home haircut kit or look like Cousin It from the Addams Family.

At first, we were just buzzing each other’s hair off, because we weren’t going anywhere anyway. It was quick, it was comfortable, etc.

But then COVID dragged on, and I wondered to myself why we were ever spending this much goddamned money on our hair. Even slightly more complicated men’s haircuts than buzzing it all off aren’t that complicated.

But you have to pay for the expenses of the salon, as well as 1,800 hours of the person cutting your hair going to a school that mainly teaches them how to do women’s haircuts (which are more difficult and should cost more).

Then they have to pay the state for a permission slip to cut hair, because it’s practically brain surgery and a bad hair day can literally kill you. /s

Then the state says “Gee, wouldn’t it be a good idea if we also made them take training to recognize domestic abuse or people who are depressed and report that to the police?”.

Oh yes, I forgot to mention that Illinois forces hair stylists to pay to learn how to spot depression and get the cops after you. It’s not just your psychiatrist you can’t have an open discussion with anymore, it’s the person cutting your hair!

In the case of a simple and cheap, functional, man’s haircut, Max the Barber went the way of the dinosaurs, and men are actually up-charged so that women don’t shriek about having to pay for their haircut, which is only about 20 times more complicated.

Let’s call it a “blue tax” (since women can call anything they don’t like the “pink tax”), because if everyone paid based on how complicated their hair was, mine would still be $11, and women would be paying $80 or 90.

It’s the problem of what to charge people, when charging everyone the same, average cost, is easier.

Some cars take longer to do an oil change than mine at the shop I go to, but I have to pay the same $50 for an oil change that anyone else does. (Except foreign cars that take special oil, I guess.)

I just pay it and don’t complain. The last thing I want to do is jack up the Buick and get oil all over myself and risk having 3,700 pounds of car land on me to save $10.

Back in the 90s, this concept in hair of everyone paying for what they used was normal.

Men didn’t go to a “salon”, usually, and since men didn’t go there, they had to charge based on how much work they did considering that women were 95% or more of their clients. I remember my Grandmother complaining because she took my cousins to the Sears hair salon so that they would look good in that year’s Sears family photo. (And for some reason, I still remember the photo from 1990 pretty well even though I don’t know where I’d get a copy of it now.)

She complained that they had the lady cut about 1/4″ of hair off and they billed her $100, in 1990!

The problem of “salons” and charging men more to subsidize women’s haircuts must be a problem that started in big cities, because there was an entire episode of Married With Children about this from the 1980s, where Al Bundy (a man from Chicago) complained that his barber died and the only way to get a haircut was at a “salon”, which is where all the gay men were going, and which gave all a perm and charged him $60.

Al was delighted at the end of the episode that his barber’s dad who was in his 90s was still in business in Cicero, and so Al had a place to get his haircuts.

Unfortunately, at this point, it’s my Wahl haircut kit or bust.

With the price of everything going up, we’ve learned to not only do our own haircuts, but we’ve gotten pretty good at it.

And since we started doing it 25 months ago, we’ve saved over $1,500 so far.

The kit only cost me $50, and it’s a nice kit. It even has non-standard guides that go up in half-size increments.

The thing pays for itself every month.

It doesn’t come with a “legendary” steamed towel, infused with tea tree oil, but it gets the job done.

I think that “Legendary” steamed towel is going to go down in history as my second favorite marketing bullshit after Ricardo Montelbon’s performance in the Chrysler commercial, touting the “Corinthian Leather”.

Facebook had to pay us about $800 because they violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.

Facebook had to pay us about $800 because they violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.

I got a $397 check for my spouse last week and a $397 check for myself this week.

Facebook had been tagging us in our pictures and storing our facial patterns in their facial recognition programs. That turned out to be a big problem for them that cost them nearly $700 million in the resulting class action settlement.

Scumbag corporations have been losing big time due to the BIPA, and they want it repealed. There’s pending lawsuits against at least a dozen major companies, and lots of settlements too.

The only thing corporations understand is losing money. Facebook has already had a lot of fake stock value erased this year.

Facebook blamed the loss mostly on Apple’s alleged new “privacy” functions on the iPhone, even though Facebook already has patents pending on how to avoid those features and track people with iPhones anyway. As long as their apps are even on your phone, you’ve lost already whether you use an Android or an iPhone.

I use a Free and Open Source app called Frost from F-Droid that gives Facebook no significant access to my phone. It’s basically a blinged out webview that tricks Messenger into working. So it’s very likely that Facebook has less access to my Pixel 6 than anything Apple has done to box them in on an iPhone, where all you can use is Facebook’s apps.

Facebook’s financial problems have more to do with laws like the California and Illinois privacy statutes.

The only safe way to operate is to assume that anyone you track could be in Illinois or California, which is why although BIPA is an Illinois law, and Illinois is a state of 12.8 million people, Facebook disabled their tagging and facial recognition everywhere in the world after losing $700 million dollars.

Another source of Zuckerberg’s heartburn is the state of the economy in general. Major stocks of companies with real products are down 30 even 40%, and not even Walmart was spared.

Most of the ads I’ve seen go by on Facebook are from lawyers suing app companies.

Since the economy is so bad right now (Maybe call it the “Don’t Say Recession Recession”?), consumers have to tighten their wallets, and while that may or may not eventually break the hyperinflation (since most of this is due to Biden and Congress throwing around trillions of dollars we don’t have, that came at the expense of your bank account), it means the value of advertising is collapsing.

This is what set off the DotCom Bubble Collapse in the early 2000s.

Eventually, investors get sick of losing money, the hysteria wears off, and reality sets in.

Usually in an environment where the Fed loses its appetite for entertaining that round of mania.

Like what’s starting to unfold now.

The reason why Elon Musk wants Twitter isn’t because he has a plan to turn a profit. His Tesla company is down 41% YTD, you know.

It’s because he wants to be able to say whatever he wants without any censorship, and invite Trump back to scream and yell, but there will still be “content moderation” and spyware tracking the people foolish enough to have accounts there.

I’ve never really understood how a company that lets you post 140 characters from the toilet that disappear into the void quickly has managed to stay in business. Pretty much the only thing on Twitter are influencers, “brands”, and politicians. The 1% can say whatever they want unfiltered.

Do you even want to be on this thing?

I barely even have a presence on Facebook anymore. It’s not generally worth using. You hope other people will hate like your vacation or something and there’s a lot of stress to be fake popular on it.

I tried to tell Roy Schestowitz that he’d be a lot happier and lose nothing if he got off Twitter years ago, but the only reason he left was because they shoved him out the door for criticizing Bill Gates.

Merely criticizing the rich and powerful is enough to get you thrown out.

It is dangerous to have “social media” replace the Web, because then they can throw you out when they don’t like what you say, even if it’s not illegal to say that. And that’s why corporations and the governments want the Web to die. They can spy and censor better that way. It was much harder to do this in bulk when everyone who wanted a blog just got their own Web site.

Google even crawls my blog and I get readers. When you post to Facebook and Twitter, your thoughts just die immediately. It gives the illusion of having spoken, even though nobody is really listening.

I wonder if Elon Musk will let him back in. He is a “free speech absolutist”, or so he says. 😉

Location tracking company selling data on “smartphone” users who visit abortion clinics.

A location tracking company is selling “smartphone” location tracking data on people who visit abortion clinics.

For now, it could be used for all sorts of nasty reasons, but after Roe v. Wade is officially struck down, states such as Texas could, and probably will, buy the data to collect evidence to criminally prosecute women who go to another state for an abortion.

Previously, something like this would have been difficult to prove, but in the age of iPhones and Android phones, all the government has to do in order to short circuit the Fourth Amendment is buy the data like any other parasite or criminal would.

Eventually, people will know that the states are using geolocation data to prosecute abortion seekers, but it will be too late for the first hundreds of women that Republican prosecutors turn into political prisoners.

Since many phones, such as the iPhone, only pretend to be turned off, it’s best to just not have one, or to leave it at home if you go somewhere you wouldn’t want the state to know about.

The government getting into phone records isn’t new. They have a lot of options to get your course location or GPS coordinates. Google and your phone company have both.

People already get caught violating probation and COVID restrictions because their phone leaks so much data. During the COVID restrictions in the US, the federal government was purchasing location data from in-app advertisers to monitor “compliance” with the restrictions without having to explain to a judge on what grounds they wanted a search warrant.

Now iPhones are another tool against women for Republicans that are looking to scalp them for a trophy so they can run for higher office later, while the women are in prison.

To go along with hideous levels of inflation, Walmart gives “Walmart+” to employees instead of a cost of living adjustment.

-/r/Walmart post about DoorDash contracting to deliver Walmart+ orders.

To go along with hideous levels of inflation, Walmart gives “Walmart+” to employees instead of a cost of living adjustment.

The employees at the local Walmart all had to attend a meeting today where it was stated that all Walmart employees get “free” Walmart+, which basically is free delivery of any size order to your house and 5 cents off per gallon of gasoline at Walmart or Murphy gas stations.

I guess it’s not nothing, but Walmart says that the Internal Revenue Code causes the “fair market value” of the Walmart+ subscription to be reported as taxable income.

So congratulations. Instead of a raise you got another way to spend money at Walmart, and you owe the government another $15-20 when you file your taxes next year.

Normally, it’s hard to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I doubt they’d be doing this unless they figured it benefited them more than you.

We’re already so tethered to Walmart at this point, it’s hard to shop anywhere else. Between the discount card (which works on some groceries, but not most) and the 5% back on my Capital One Walmart card for doing online orders, there’s hardly a point to shopping my groceries myself anymore, so I use the store pickup already.

The upside of having Walmart+ is marginal. I already know from Online Grocery Pickup employees talking about it that DoorDash drivers hate Walmart+ (verifiable through this article too) and they complain that they have to put groceries back that they’ve already picked and cancel the customer’s order all the time. Walmart probably pays more to have that happen than if they kicked a few more bucks to the drivers.

Walmart for their part says that a tip after some guy got $4 from them to deliver tons of groceries and a 50 pound bag of dog food up three flights of stairs is “optional”.

I just don’t see myself using it often unless I’m laid up in bed with the flu and absolutely cannot go out and pickup my own groceries, have an order for pickup that does not meet the $35 free pickup minimum and would normally be charged a $5.99 convenience fee (I’m there every day anyway, so this DOES happen), or an at Murphy filling up my gas tank and want to use the 5 cents a gallon off (in addition to my credit card, where gas always has 5% back).

The upside for an ethical person with Walmart+ is low. Ethics dictates a sizeable tip. Most Walmart customers are terrible people who don’t tip well, like the folks who already complain that their food arrived cold from restaurants with DoorDash. So the only ethical thing is tip or don’t use it.

With gas prices through the roof lately, I can’t imagine that Walmart+ isn’t on its last leg already.

If nobody wanted to make $4-5 taking a grocery order when gas cost $3 a gallon, who wants to do it with gas at $4.30 a gallon?

The whole thing is obviously in a death spiral because some manager at Walmart bought into this gig economy bullshit instead of paying a professional delivery driver in a Walmart truck to make the rounds (like Amazon Prime does).

And when we say “gig”, it’s a nice way of saying “slave”. People who work inside the store, for Walmart, make at least $17 an hour without having to drive all over the city not getting tips. They also don’t have to pay the employer share of social taxes at the end of the year.

The “app economy” has created a permanent underclass that cannot afford childcare (leading to Walmart warning that it won’t release orders to people with young children in the car) and do not make the legal minimum wage (which is $15 an hour in my state).

I’ve complained about these apps before, and how it’s dangerous for these “gig workers” from DoorDash to have their kids in the car.

Very recently, in the city I live in, a guy got into a running car and pointed a loaded handgun at a 16 year old in the back seat. A week before that, a guy stole a running vehicle and then ditched it a few miles later with some toddlers in it.

And you know how these app companies are. “We’re just a facilitator! You can’t sue us!”.

This is what comes out of San Francisco, folks. The most illiberal non-progressive system imaginable.

A return to plantations working slaves for subsistence living standards.

MetroMile: Cheap car insurance, but the OBDII dongle doesn’t actually report Check Engine codes.

I use MetroMile for my car insurance.

With what my ex did to ruin my credit, they’re the only car insurance company that isn’t taking it out on me with really sky high insurance premiums for minimum coverage.

But one feature they claim their OBDII dongle can do is detect engine trouble codes and report on them to you.

Earlier this month, my Check Engine Light came on and it turned out it had been storing a pending code for three cylinders misfiring and just not displaying the light yet, and what finally made it come on was the upstream O2 sensor totally failing, which caused the engine to run so poorly that the computer went ahead and turned on the light.

For two days until I could get the car towed down to the shop, I kept waiting on MetroMile’s insurance dashboard to give me the engine codes, but it kept saying nothing to report, and then I noticed in tiny letters that it may not detect everything.

If it can’t detect three cylinders misfiring and a dead oxygen sensor, what will it detect?

And it’s not even the first time this has happened. It also didn’t detect any problems any of the times my ABS warning light was on or when my EGR valve failed.

These are fairly easy and standard codes, and I don’t drive an exotic or rare car. It’s just a 2003 Chevy Impala. I’m wondering what data this thing actually is capable of collecting. It does show my trips and what speed I was traveling on them, which I’m sure that MetroMile was careful to get right because they would be useful in assigning fault in an accident claim. But for Check Engine codes, it seems it doesn’t actually do anything.

I keep MetroMile’s app off my phone because it says it wants precise location access even in the background and the ability to monitor whether you’re using the phone while driving. (Almost certainly so they can increase your premiums later.)

If it’s not even telling you what’s wrong with the car, and you can file claims by calling a toll-free number or on their website with pictures you took on your phone, why use it?

Maybe for roadside claims, but insurers put these in CLUE and use them to raise your rates, so I use AAA instead.

Samsung is the worst phone for privacy in the Android market, and if you try to fix it, they will punish you.

A new report shows that Samsung is the worst Android vendor for invasions of privacy.

Among the problems unique to Samsung is that they’ve foisted Microsoft spyware and Clown Computing that phones home to Microsoft into the stock ROM as system apps.

Also, LineageOS could fix it, if you could get it to run. But Samsung’s “security system” will break your camera for no reason whatsoever if you do, in their newer phones. This isn’t “Oh, the other firmware has no driver.”. It’s Samsung Knox preventing the camera from ever working again.

They used to take Samsung Pay away if you unlocked the bootloader but they must have figured out that the first thing people did when they were allowed to uninstall Samsung Pay was uninstall Samsung Pay.

Nobody wants to be that douche holding up the line at the store with a goddamned phone while the terminal bleeps and buzzes and errors out, unless they have an iPhone.