Darkoshi

The thing* I ordered from India on eBay was simply delivered to my porch yesterday, with no mention of needing to pay any extra fees, hallelujah! The delivery person wore a yellow reflective vest and drove a personal vehicle with no very obvious company markings.

The package does not have a USPS label on it. It has a uniuni label on one side, and a ShipGlobal label on the other side.

Checking the tracking numbers from those labels on the respective websites shows that my item:
2025-09-21: was received at UNI DATA CENTER
2025-09-23: arrived in Delhi, India
2025-09-25: departed Delhi, India
2025-09-27: arrived in the USA; was being inspected by customs
2025-09-30: "Gateway transit in", in New York
and was delivered on from there to me.

So my package made it into the US on 9/27, two days before the De Minimus exemption was removed!
NO, scratch that. (Gosh darn, I keep mixing up August/month 8 with September/month 9!)
I don't know where my package was between the time I ordered it in mid-August and Sept. 21 when uniuni received it. But somehow I got it without having to pay a tariff fee. I suppose the seller ended up paying the extra cost.

Actually... I placed the order on 8/16.
On 8/20 eBay posted an "order update" showing "Tracking number provided" along with an India Post International tracking number. That must have been when the seller ordered a shipping label, before mailing the item.
On 8/22 or 8/25 (per my prior post), IndiaPost stopped accepting shipments for the US. The seller must not have dropped the item off before that cut-off, or if they did, perhaps IndiaPost returned the item to the seller.
The seller must have started looking for another shipping option, and eventually sent it through ShipGlobal.in who must be partnered with uniuni.

I still think it is bad form that the seller never informed me of any of this, and didn't even reply when I messaged them through eBay asking about the status of the shipment. But I'll give them good feedback considering the hassle they must have gone through.

I'm still in the dark about the other item which is showing up in my USPS daily digest emails. It started showing up in the emails back on 2025-08-19 as "Awaiting from sender". Yesterday, I thought that must have been the India package after all. But today I got a new email that the mysterious tracking number item is expected to be delivered by Wednesday.

*an Indian brand of toothpaste

Update:
I bought the toothpaste for $39 (excluding taxes, free shipping). As a point of reference, the eBay seller is now charging $50.70 for the same thing, and that is still the best price I can find. So the tariffs increased the price by $11.70.

The seller posted a reply to a negative review from someone else who didn't receive their order, asking them to kindly wait longer, that the tariffs are causing delays, and that the seller paid the tariff for the order, and that the buyer will not need to pay anything at time of delivery. That seems to confirm my speculation as to what happened with my order.

Errant thought:
Now people can probably use AI agents to determine what items that are available in local stores could be sold online at a profit to people in other locales, taking into account current shipping prices and tariffs and the current online prices being charged by other sellers.

Errant thoughts 2, 3, 4:
Now people can make software to make use of AI agents to determine what items [ditto]...

Then people could buy the software to help them determine what items [ditto]...

Then companies can use said software to direct employees or gig workers in various locales to buy items from local stores, and to mail them ... for making a profit.

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.

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.

This site sells a lot of pretty-looking clothing from India:
https://www.mirraw.com/

I believe most of the styles would be uncomfortable for me or wouldn't meet my other clothing requirements.

But they even have long double pocket shirt suits, which might work... too bad they don't have these in all the pretty colors too:
Pathani suits

This nice multicolor fabric might be nice as a window shear:
Multicolor printed georgette saree with blouse

But the fabric is Georgette. "Originally made from silk, Georgette is made with highly twisted yarns." Hmmm, I don't do silk, and being from India it's likely to still be made from silk even if over here it might tend to be synthetic.

What does "self weaving" mean??
Men's cotton self weaving black colour sleeveless nehru jackets

Dang, ok, so I got carried away here. Now what was I doing? Oh that's right, it was an ad on Youtube; I was looking for videos of the Vermont fireball. (The fireball vids I found were bleh.)

Dang, I have too many tabs open and am still carried away.
I wonder how I'd like palazzo pants that look like a skirt? 39" long though, I'd have to sew them shorter, sigh. Ooh, per one photo it has at least one pocket. I wonder if it has one on each side and how deep they are.
Blue cotton long printed palazzo

..

Let me put a link to this site too, which is fair trade:
Marketplace: Handwork of India
I used to get their catalogs before the internet was a thing; got some gorgeous items from them.

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.)

I ordered some items from Target. The shipping boxes they arrived in are so cute!

You can see the boxes in the top photo on this page:
The hot new product Amazon and Target are obsessing over? Boxes

The small box has pictures of the Target dog playing in a box.
The medium box has pictures of the Target dog driving a delivery truck.
All 4 sides of the box show the same thing from different directions (front of truck, sides of truck, back of truck)!

Does anyone else mix up the website name "Overstock.com" with "Stack Overflow" like I do, and keep thinking "Stock Overflow"?

I'm flabbergasted. While I have an account at StockOverflow.c... oops, Overstock.com, it seems that I've only ever ordered from them ONE SINGLE TIME, way back in 2004!! I mean, how can that possibly be? When I'm shopping online, I find myself on their site fairly often, and I always have that feeling in the back of my mind, that I've ordered from them several times before, and that it's a good site.

Omg. Large decorative toilet seat stickers?!
"Religious Figure on Grunge Backdrop Idol Meditation Boho Holy Print ...for Young Mens"

At first I thought the design was one of those Greek iconographic images of Jesus.

Well, ok. If someone was particularly bored with a plain-looking or ugly toilet, I could see them using some of the other available patterns/prints. But this one? Actually, I think this is the best of the bunch, especially in amusement value.

It was listed in the Amazon search results for "Dance to a Holy Man", an album by The Silencers, which unfortunately isn't available there in MP3 format. I was looking for their original release of Bulletproof Heart. But it's ok, as a live version is available, from their A Night of Electric Silence album.

..

SCORPION Safety Harness w/attached 6ft. Tubular Lanyard on back ... Is it just me, or do those product images have a distinctly BDSM appeal? Look at the bulge on that mannequin! The product reviews suggest no such thing.

Expedia acquired Travelocity. - Jan 2015

Expedia and Orbitz are merging. - Sep 2015

(and I noticed that the above was true, because all 3 sites load JavaScript from Expedia.com.)

Apparently Priceline is still a separate entity. It sounds like Expedia and Priceline are the 2 major travel booking companies left.

This page claims there are 4 main companies (with Expedia, Orbitz, and Travelocity listed separately), so it must be outdated, even though the page says "copyright 2018". But it lists some of their other subsidiary names (Hotwire, TripAdvisor, Hotel.com, etc) too:
Are travel Web sites really different?

Looking up flight prices on the Delta.com website is better than on the above web sites, as you can select "flexible dates", and it will show you a grid of possible departure & return dates, with the prices for each combination of days. That lets you easily see which days are the cheapest to travel on, without having to do multiple searches.

(I'm not planning a trip myself; I was looking up prices for someone else.)

I finally managed to buy that song I wanted from iTunes.

I never want to go through that much trouble to buy a song again, even if, like this one, IAMX's I Come With Knives, I really want to support the artist for making such a wonderful song and video. Maybe, if an MP3 of the song had been available to purchase on the band's website, or on Amazon, it wouldn't have taken me over 4 years to buy it.

The band's website only has the full album available, and only as a CD, not MP3s. Some of the other albums are available as MP3s, but not that one. Likewise, Amazon only has the full album on CD. The MP3 version seems to be a single instead, as it only has 4 songs, of which 3 are different versions of "Unified Field". The only place I found the song I wanted was on iTunes.

The plus of it was that the iTunes price was in GBP, not dollars. So I got to use up some of that GBP balance I still had left over on my PayPal account.

The 2 TV show episodes that I wanted to buy are also priced in GBP, which would have been another plus. But after doing some research, it seems that if I bought them, they'd be in MV4 format, which I'd only be able to play on that desktop computer from inside iTunes. Because of the DRM, I wouldn't be able to play them on my normal laptop (without iTunes), nor even on the TV (no, that computer doesn't have an HDMI port). So I won't be buying them after all. There's only so much I'm willing to put up with. Sure, maybe I could use some software to strip out the DRM from the files in order to play them on my other devices without iTunes, but that would defeat the whole point of buying them legally.