Interesting fig phenomenon I noticed today: after rinsing a ripe fig with water, pressing it slightly on the sides made it emit a sort of buzzing sound out of the little hole at the tip. Each time I pressed (lightly) again, the buzzing would start, and each time I let up it would stop.

It almost seemed like there might be an insect inside, complaining about being pressed. But it seemed more likely that pressing on the fig made it expel air, which made the noise. It was surprising how long it kept doing it, though. I'd have thought all the air would have been expelled much sooner. Maybe it was sucking air back in each time I released the pressure. After repeated light pressing on all sides, probably squishing the fruit too much, the sound finally died down. Upon cutting it open, it was a normal fig inside; no insect.

I've never noticed other figs to do that. I tested a few other figs after that one, and a few had similar sounds, but quieter and much shorter lived.

In my spice cabinet was a jar of garam masala which my brother left here 15 years ago. Other than perhaps once (after which I wrote "spicy sweet" on the jar), I never used it because it's too spicy hot for me. It smells good like Christmas spices, but on the rare occasions when I want something to be spicy hot, I don't want it to taste like cinnamon and cloves. I realized that while browsing the spices recently, so I put the jar on my counter, intending to finally get rid of it.

A few days ago I was looking for something to pep up my meal. It occurred to me that spicy ketchup would go well on it. I didn't have any. But I had ketchup, and that jar was still on the counter. So I mixed garam masala powder into ketchup, and ta-da, spicy ketchup! It tasted just like the Maya Kaimal ketchup I remembered.

The jar went back into my spice cabinet, as now there's something I can use it for in the future.

Last night I cooked yellow squash. I finished late, and it was still warm outside so I couldn't open the windows to air out the cooking smells from the house.

Today I opened all the windows to air it out. With the A/C off, the temperature got up to 88 inside, but felt nice to me with the fans on. So I left the windows open all day.

As the windows were open, I washed a load of items with mildew and other stains along with 2 bleach tablets in the washer. (My use of chlorine bleach is seldom enough that liquid bleach usually degrades before I can use the bottle up. Tablets don't have that problem.) The windows being open prevents the bleach smell from bothering me.

As the windows were open, I also baked some things from the freezer in the oven. It seemed a good idea as the heat and baking smells could dissipate out through the windows, without making the A/C use more energy (since it wasn't on).

Coincidentally, part of the reason I wanted to use up some of the things in the freezer is because there's always the slight worry that if the power goes out for a long time, the food will melt and go bad. The strong storm we had on June 25 only made my power flicker a few times (although it ripped some siding off my soffits), but my mom's power was out for 11 hours. Before that, my power was out for 2 hours from a storm on June 14.

This evening, several hours after the baking, my refrigerator started beeping and showing the Too-High-Temperature warning icon. Uh-oh. I hadn't had the door open more than usual, and I hadn't put any hot food inside it. I wasn't sure if it could be due to the house temperature being higher than usual. This isn't the first time I've had the windows open in warm weather, but it's the first time the refrigerator had a problem with it. I closed the windows and turned the A/C back on. I took the grate off the bottom of the fridge and checked the coils. I vacuumed some dust out, but they didn't look too bad. I took the back panel off the fridge to check back there. The fan was still running. The compressor was very hot. The finger I touched it with didn't get burned, but it was hot enough to make me jerk my finger back.

The fridge kept giving the high temp warning for over an hour, but then it finally stopped. That's a relief.

I wonder if that was a sign of the refrigerator being too old to handle a warm house, or if new refrigerators would have the same problem. The fridge is 41 years old. 88 degrees inside really doesn't seem that high to me. I suspect that in the old days, people got refrigerators before they got air conditioners.

My mom got a phishing (or malware) email made to appear like it was sent from Amazon:

Your Prime membership is renewing on Thu, June 26, 2025. However, we noticed that your default payment method for your membership is no longer valid.

To avoid losing your benefits, we'll try charging other active payment methods associated with your Amazon account. If we can't process the charge for your membership fee, your Prime benefits will be suspended.

Thank you,
Amazon Customer Service

The rest of the email looks like a normal Amazon email (although I don't have a real one to compare against). There are several obvious indications that the email is fake: an empty subject line, a non-amazon sender email even though it is shown as name "prime@amazon.com", and it only including an email address, not a name, in the "To" section and greeting.

The link provided in the email for updating her payment information is what I find curious. It is in this format:
https://mobile.mail.yahoo.com/apps/affiliateRouter?brandUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fgoogleads.g.doubleclick.net%2Fpcs%2Fclick%3F
followed by a bunch of characters and some other parameters at the end.

I asked MS Copilot about the URL and it provided the following details.

The base domain is mobile.mail.yahoo.com, which is a real Yahoo domain. But the key is in the query parameters — especially brandUrl and adurl.

The brandUrl parameter encodes a redirect to a Google Ads click tracker (googleads.g.doubleclick.net), which itself contains another redirect via adurl=... to a suspicious final destination: ....

This kind of multi-layered redirect is a classic phishing tactic. It uses trusted domains as intermediaries to:

Evade spam filters and security scanners.
Trick users into thinking the link is safe.
Obfuscate the final destination, which may host malware or a credential-harvesting page.

Everything after the ? is a query string made up of key=value pairs separated by &.

brandUrl: This is a URL-encoded link to a Google Ads click tracker (googleads.g.doubleclick.net). It contains its own nested parameters like xai, sai, sig, and adurl, which are used for ad tracking and redirection.

appName=YMailNorrin: Likely identifies the Yahoo Mail app variant or interface being used.

partner=1: Could indicate a specific affiliate or partner ID — possibly used for tracking referral traffic.

locale=1: Might refer to a language or region setting, though 1 is a bit ambiguous.

buckets=6oDiyy...: This is probably a session or experiment bucket ID — used for A/B testing or feature rollout tracking.

fbs_aeid=[gw_fbsaeid]: This is a Facebook Ads tracking parameter — possibly spoofed or copied to mimic legitimate ad traffic.

adurl (appears twice): This is the final redirect destination — in this case, a suspicious .pe domain. That’s the real payload of the phishing attempt.

This URL is a layered redirect trap:
Starts with a legit Yahoo domain.
Redirects through Google Ads infrastructure.
Ends at a potentially malicious .pe domain.

The below statement (bolded by me) about composite cans was added in 2021, between July and October, per the internet archive.

Richland County, SC - Recycling

Cardboard, Chipboard, & Cereal Boxes
Corrugated cardboard is accepted for recycling - cut or fold so the cardboard fits into the roll cart. Flatten boxes and place them in your recycling roll cart. Spiral Wound Composite Cans (i.e. canned potato chips, nuts, raisins, coffee, etc.) are accepted for recycling. Wax or plastic coated cardboard is NOT accepted. Chipboard boxes such as cereal boxes must be clean and dry and only have stored dry, non-refrigerated foods. Pizza boxes are recyclable- the pizza is not! So make sure the pizza box is free of ALL food debris (and the extra cheese)

I'm surprised they accept the composite cans now, as the cardboard part usually has a film of metal and/or plastic foil attached. I've been in the habit of separating the metal from the rest, and peeling the foil off the cardboard when possible.

For "cardboard cans", the Recycling Wizard says to "Please put metal and plastic lids in garbage."

Per the above guidelines, I suppose I'm doing a bad thing when I put paperboard boxes from refrigerated and frozen items in the recycling bin. But they are clean boxes; the food contents usually are in plastic bags inside the boxes. And the cardboard tears the same easily as non-refrigerated boxes. So I have a hard time convincing myself that there's any difference; they don't *seem* to have a plastic coating.

[Trying to convince myself...]

Per this video from a different jurisdiction: Why Aren't Frozen Food Boxes
Recyclable?, "Frozen food boxes are sprayed with a polycoat to protect from freezer burn."

It makes sense that the cardboard would be coated. If the coating is thin enough, it probably doesn't inhibit you from being able to tear it. But wait, what about refrigerated (non-frozen) boxes? Would they be coated too? You don't get freezer burn in the refrigerator. But I think many things sold in the refrigerated section are kept frozen in transit and storage. So, maybe.

Per that video, the reason why gable-top cartons are an exception and are accepted is because the manufacturers buy them back to recycle them themselves. I hadn't heard of that before. In that case, I'm doing a bad thing by tearing open the cartons to more easily rinse and flatten them. Doing that makes them less distinguishable from other flattened paperboard, for purposes of separating them out.

For gable-top cartons, our waste wizard says "Empty and open to air dry. Discard caps in garbage." So I suppose it's still ok to break open the top part for purposes of cleaning them and tearing off the part with the plastic spout. Although maybe even that is wrong, because doing that makes the cartons more crushable, and then they are less distinguishable again.

I wish the wizard and guidelines had way more details. (The wizard doesn't even clearly say that some items are recyclable even when the guidelines do; but that's a separate issue.)

TO DO: Next time I am discarding a frozen box, tear a piece off and soak it in water, and do the same with a piece torn off a cereal box for comparison.

Update, 2025/07/06:
I soaked small pieces from two frozen food boxes and one non-refrigerated food box. One of the frozen food boxes had a thin layer of plastic on it. The other two boxes didn't have plastic, as far as I could tell.

I have a memory from the 1980s of a certain semi-public restroom (like in restaurants, but this was a building with a big meeting room where one of my aunt's clubs had meetings and events) in Germany. The building itself was probably built in the preceding decades.

The soap dispenser was metal with a small crank-handle that you would turn. Inside must have been a block of bar soap. Turning the crank would grate off flakes of soap into your other waiting hand. I think the soap was pink.

The hand towel was a long length of fabric which presumably was rolled up at the top and bottom inside the device it was dispensed from. You would only see a section of the fabric at a time. To get a fresh part of the towel you would either pull on the fabric, or perhaps turn a knob on the side; I don't recall exactly. This would cause the fabric to unroll from the top and get rolled up into the bottom of the unit.

The towel was mostly white like the one in this photo, but I think it had colored stripes on both vertical edges instead of in the center.

This video shows the inside of a similar device:
Continuous Cloth Roll Towel Machine

The soap device was like this one:
GRUNELLA® -Seifenmühle
Soap for cranking

That wasn't the only restroom I encountered those devices in; they were common back then in many places. Similar devices can still be bought nowadays, and for your own bathroom too, from what I see.

While shopping for bed slats (not for me), I found a set on the Kohl's website that says it is made "right here" in the USA from Canadian wood. But while checking out that brand's website, Continental Sleep, I belatedly realized the wording and grammar on their pages isn't quite right. So now I wonder, is the "Made in USA" claim a lie? Or do Chinese companies have factories in the U.S. making that kind of stuff? I could have sworn I saw that "Made in the USA" claim on one of their website pages too (for only that one product, which made it seem all the more dubious), but am not finding it anymore.

I looked up info on the company but found nothing other than a reference to "Continental Sleep Holdings", which was likely a different company, on a Wikipedia page about "Sleepeezee".

The reviews on the ContinentalSleep website seem fake too, with similar grammar and wording issues; not the kind Americans would make.

It's a bit surprising they haven't used an LLM to fix the grammar on their webpages. Once Chinese companies get better at doing that, there won't even be that tell to give them away.

On both my work and personal laptops (Windows 10 and 11), I have noticed that the file context menu in Windows Explorer now includes an "Ask Copilot" option.

I have privacy and security concerns about that. If I accidentally select this option, will the file or its contents potentially be uploaded to the web somewhere? Will Microsoft use the contents of the file for other purposes? I didn't find clear answers on that. If I wanted Copilot to analyze a file, I would prefer to select the file thru other means. I don't need extra items in my context menu; mine is already lengthy due to other custom entries (which I actually use on a frequent basis) that I've added to it. So I will edit my registry to remove the entry from the menu.

Windows 11: Microsoft is adding Ask Copilot to right-click menu, how to remove it

Windows 11’s Copilot in Context Menus: Benefits, Concerns, and How to Remove It

Another typo which I sort of like.
Democracy gone crazy.