Darkoshi

This page lets you export your Amazon order history as a CSV (comma-separated values) spreadsheet file:
https://www.amazon.com/b2b/reports

The top of the page states:
"Order History Reports will be unavailable after March 20, 2023"

However, I was just now still able to generate a spreadsheet of all* my orders. So if you have ordered from Amazon in the past and want a simple way to get a list like that for your records, do it now while you still can.
The earliest start date that can be entered is 01/01/2006.

*As I started using Amazon long before 2006, it doesn't actually include *all* orders.
Digital orders are also not included.
Some of the orders listed don't include a description of what was in the order, but most do.

Buying MP3s on Amazon is such a hassle now that they no longer have the MP3 cart, and you have to purchase each item as a separate step, and with multiple payment transactions. I only buy digital music on Amazon now when I can't find it via other purchase mediums.

After buying and downloading a certain number of items, their site also ends up giving an error message about having reached the download limit (which Amazon Customer Help says is a glitch), and that I need to download any further items from my Music Library. Going through the webpage menus and links, I couldn't find any download links on the Music Library pages.

For future reference, this is the page that has the download links:
https://music.amazon.com/recently/purchased

Some time back, I started saving off all the details when ordering things online, such as the product page URL, product description, unit price, and so on. The order emails that are sent don't always include all the details. Amazon's order emails don't even list what's been ordered.

Today I wanted to check the price of something I'd bought on Amazon in 2015, and I was surprised that I didn't have my usual detailed info on that order. That was obviously before I started doing the above.

So I went into my Amazon account. Their Orders page is nice in that it shows images of everything you've bought. I thought I'd go through the pages for each year, and save off the text to a file in case I need it for future reference again.

About halfway through doing that, I noticed that for orders with more than 5 items, you have to navigate to another page to get all the item details. Then I started wondering if there was a way to export ALL my Amazon order history at once.

There is!
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201983330

Well, mostly anyway. The Orders page shows orders of mine going back to 2002. The Report page only lets me select date ranges from 2006 onward. And it only seems to work from 2007 onward. (Selecting from 2006, the report generation always fails.)

Note to self: Don't buy Kroger store-brand potato chips anymore. They're not salty enough. And two bags (both probably bought at the same time) had oil leaking out the seam like the seam hadn't been sealed shut well enough.

I'm considering going shopping tonight, even though it's already getting late. Because I'm out of corn chips, and snacks are getting scarce. I've been missing having cookies, though the stores don't have ones I much like, so going shopping won't really help with that. I ought to go back to my place and bake some chocolate chip cookies.

I've still got 3 carrots, a pear, and a bag of Food Lion potato chips (not opened yet, so their saltiness is unknown). Some cake and peanuts. Snack bars. Other nuts. Chocolate. It ought to be enough. I hate being out of corn chips though. I should just deal with it and eat all the other snacks up. Completely. I can live without corn chips. Heck, I've got a shaker of salt.

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I was at my mom's place for the rental bed delivery, since she had to be at work at that time. The mattress turned out to be one of those foam ones, a "bed in a box". Ashley Furniture brand. Both it and the bed-frame were definitely new items; that was very apparent from the packaging. I checked Amazon, and the same bed-frame is on sale there for $150, and the very same mattress for $439.

So the $150 which my mom is paying for the first month is about a quarter of the actual price, or maybe even more if the wholesale price is less than what Amazon sells it for. Still, it seems that if RentACenter allows it to be rented for a single month, that they'd still lose money on it? Unless they take advantage of a free-returns deal from the manufacturer.

Maybe RaC makes it hard to return items, requiring them to be in pristine condition. Maybe most people end up keeping the items for multiple months even if they didn't originally plan to (which I suspect might end up happening with my mom).

My mom didn't ask whether RaC will pick the items up for free, or if she'll have to pay for that. We certainly won't be able to fit it back into the box that it came in. For that matter, it won't even fit into the plastic cover it came in, due to mattress's foam expansion, so how could one cover it to keep it clean in transport? In the mattress encasement that I ordered, perhaps?

While browsing Amazon, I found that they even sell "bed in a box" mattresses with innersprings!

While at my mom's house, I wore my surgical face mask for a good 3 hours straight, and it didn't bother me much. Even though it was about 90 degrees in the house to begin with, and even with the A/C turned on, only got down to 87 by the time I left. It's good to know I can do that when necessary. Besides setting up the bed frame and mattress for her, I also fixed a problem with her printer. That turned out being a known issue with a Windows update, for which another special Windows update was required.

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There are several topics in this post for which none of my existing tags are very good matches.
Rentals. Mask-wearing. Mattresses.

I got my taxes done.

I made a pie with a chocolate filling. It's somewhat gooey, not what I was expecting from the photo on the box. But it's actually good, even though it also tastes oddly like it contains grape syrup mixed in with the chocolate. Based on the ingredients list, I can't imagine why. It contains alkalized cocoa, and the link I posted before indicates that the non-alkalized sort is the kind that's more likely to taste "fruity".

I also made some Waldmeister Goetterspeise which is a German jello with a unique flavor not found in the U.S. My aunt used to make it for me as a kid (with vanilla sauce on top!), and I still like it. The flavor isn't as intense as I remembered though.

I trimmed my hair a bit. It was tickling the back of my neck too much a few days ago. My torso gets itchy sometimes. When I scratch, the skin gets pinkish red, and small itchy bumps, widely scattered, appear. When I stop scratching, it goes away. I haven't figured out a cause. It's been happening for a few years now. (Of course, having written "torso" there, now a few spots on my arms and legs started itching.)

I'm over my cold, but still have a lot of phlegm. That always used to be the one of the worst parts of a cold, the weeks and weeks of snot that would only slowly diminish back to normal levels. So I did neti today for the first time in possibly 5 years. I stopped using neti around then, after reading warnings against doing neti with unsterile tap water. Well, I used tap water today, like I used to. Anything else is too much trouble. But after reading the warnings again, I may forgo the whole thing for another 5 years.

I used LJSec to delete my old protected posts from LJ, as that was something that had been on my to-do list for a while. There may not be much point in having done it, but at least it is off my list now. First, I did another import of all entries & comments from LJ over to DW, as well as a few backups of both my LJ and DW (with LJArchive), to make sure I wouldn't lose anything. The only problem with LJArchive is that imported comments don't show up with the user's LJ name like it does on the Dreamwidth pages, but rather with a generic ext_#### ID. If I have time someday, I'd like to see if I can update the utility to fix that.

A few weeks ago, I cancelled my Netflix subscription, as I was using it so rarely. Qiao has another Netflix account anyway, which I can use when I want to. He also has an Amazon Prime account for watching videos.

Last week at work, I was able to find the cause of another problem, and fix it. Well, I probably fixed more than one problem, but the last one is the one I remember. It gives me such a rush, a good feeling, being able to discover what obscure thing is making the code not work right and how to fix it, when I still don't even understand what half of the rest of the code is meant to do. I was thinking, I've been working on this same general code base, though it has undergone many transfigurations, for the past 22 years. I could spend my whole *life* working on it, and I still wouldn't understand it all, especially because it is constantly being changed. That made me think for a moment that maybe I should leave this job, just so that *whole life* part wouldn't come true. Eh. But whatever, this code or some other code, what difference. Hmm. Coming up on the end of the quarter. Wonder if they will have layoffs.

This is the 2nd time in 2 days where I've clicked a link that went to Amazon, and been prompted with one of these messages:
Enter the characters you see below

Sorry, we just need to make sure you're not a robot. For best results, please make sure your browser is accepting cookies."

And it's starting to make me wonder, why is Amazon discriminating against robots? If a robot wants to shop on Amazon, shouldn't it be allowed to, just like everyone else, without no extra proficiency tests??? Maybe I should go somewhere else where robots like me are welcome. I'm just joking by the way.

On Tuesday, I surpassed 10,000 steps in a single day for the first time since I started tracking my walking. At 11:45pm, the pedometer showed 9900. Naturally, I decided I had to do at least another 100 before midnight arrived.

The sky was very beautiful while driving home this evening. Awesome layers of clouds and light that make you want to look up rather than down at the street. The sun was setting, orange.

The wisteria/kudzu smells lovely.

Azaleas in full bloom. I still have some azalea photos from a year ago that I never posted. Still haven't finished going through all of last year's photos.

I have some photos of the cute budding fig leaves from a week or 2 ago... Now the leaves are already full size. Last year, I took photos of the young fig leaves too. I'm sure I'll get to them eventually.

I ordered 7 small items from Amazon last night. Button batteries and a couple other items which I've had trouble finding in physical stores. Already got shipment notifications on 5, and USPS tracking emails on 2 of them. California and New Jersey. Interesting to think that around the country, stuff is moving just for me.

When ordering Amazon Marketplace items, the credit card charge may randomly show up from either "AMAZON MKTPLACE PMTS" or "Amazon Payments". Because of that, it's no longer convenient to use Shop-Safe credit card numbers (which for security purposes allow purchases from only a single seller) for those purchases. Half the payments have been getting declined, and I've had to submit them again using a different credit card number. The weird thing is that when Amazon resubmits the ones that were originally charged to "Amazon Payments", the 2nd time they actually charge them to "AMAZON MKTPLACE PMTS".

Amazon has the whole first season of Transparent watchable for free (today only), so I wanted to watch some more episodes.

I again spent over an hour unsuccessfully trying to get the video to play full-screen on the TV over the HDMI cable (like I do for YouTube and Netflix videos).

Using Flash, the video is so jerky that I don't want to watch it.
Using Silverlight, the video doesn't even start - it does some kind of looping/buffering thing.

I cleared all application data from Silverlight. I uninstalled and reinstalled Silverlight. I disabled hardware acceleration in both Firefox and Silverlight. I tried using IE and Chrome. The problems persisted. I was able to get a few short clips to play ok... but they weren't full screen, so maybe that is why they worked.

Anyway, back to admitting failure and watching it on the laptop screen.

...

Geez, even playing it on the laptop, the sound stutters somewhat.

Oh good lord, maybe all I had to do all along was click the button to turn off HD? ... ::sigh:: No, even then it's still jerky on the TV.

I wanted to watch the pilot of Amazon's "Transparent" series which has gotten such good reviews.

First I tried playing it in Firefox, via HDMI cable to the big TV. It started loading and then seemed to go into some kind of loop - showing a split second of something, and then going back to the round circle "loading" icon, and then repeating.

Then I tried playing it in IE. At first it seemed to work, but then it did the looping thing again. So then I tried playing it on the laptop without using the HDMI cable. It still didn't work... or did it? I don't remember. I was irked at it not working on the TV.

Then, based on something mentioned on this page, I changed the Amazon Instant Video settings to use Flash rather than Silverlight.

Using Flash, the video played successfully on the TV, but it was very jerky. (I don't have these issues with Netflix streaming video. This isn't giving me a good impression of Amazon's service.)

So then I decided to just watch it on the laptop. That went pretty well until about 3/4ths of the way through the video, when it stopped and showed the "Connecting" icon for over 10 minutes. I had to log out and back in for it to work again.

..

Only the pilot is free to watch. It looks like the other episodes are only available through Amazon Prime - it looks like you can't pay to watch them individually without Prime. Is that right?

In February of this year, I posted about a song I was trying to find for purchase. At the time, Amazon did not have it available as an MP3 on the U.S. site. I found it on the U.K. Amazon site, on one of a series of "Disco Discharge" CDs. Then I found the same CD on the U.S. site too. At the time, I considered buying the CD. I made a note of it on my "maybe sometime later" list.

Fast-forward to November. Now, the CD that I had found before is no longer even listed on the U.K. site. It is still listed on the U.S. site, but from only 3 sellers, each of whom is asking over $100 for it. I didn't like the CD enough to pay that much for it.

However, now the song is also available on the U.S. site in MP3 format, in several versions. There's even a remix!