Face mask rec

Got a pack of new cloth face masks on Etsy, figured I would give them a shoutout.

The shop is LochNessLocker, they have hundreds of beautiful patterns, the size is adjustable and the fit is great. (There’s a long note with more details about the manufacturing, for anyone with specific concerns.) I ordered 4, they sent me 6 — and they clearly paid attention to my taste in the original order, because the bonus masks were also styles I would’ve picked.

I was wearing this one at work the other day, and a random teenage patron straight-up stopped me to compliment it:

The number of people still masking in public in 2024 is depressingly low — and, look, if all you have is cheap medical masks, I get it. They’re ugly, they’re not reuseable, you wear them once and look like you live in a hospital and then they’re off to pile up in the landfill.

But there are so many nicer options out there! These are comfortable, they look good, they can coordinate with your outfits, you can throw them in the wash and keep wearing them for years. Any time you want to freshen up your anti-viral wardrobe, give this shop a look.

we found him…the booper

Hardcore booping action spotted in the wild

(feat. my halfhearted efforts to brighten up the Void Tortie so she’s visible next to the Fluff)

Exhausted from a long day of boop

shelf space: doubled

Check it out, Cleveland Public Library just released a time-lapse video of the new-shelf-building project that’s been happening on the upper floors for the past several months.

For fun, guess how much new length (in linear feet) this added to our shelf-space capacity…then open the video description and see how close you got.

Yikes To Watch Out For

Just got phoned by a verrrry convincing scammer. (Related to the supermassive data breach reported this week? Seems likely.)

The caller ID was [Bank I Use] Customer Service. Worth noting, I recently put the bill for the Leif & Thorn Volume 6 paperbacks on my [Bank] card, and that’s at least 10x pricier than anything else I’ve bought for a solid year (you know, since the Volume 5 paperbacks). So I answered.

They had the right info when they asked “am I talking to Erin Lastname?” and “Are you still in the Your City, OH area?”

Then said their fraud department had blocked several large attempted transactions in Florida retail stores, and were any of those me? (Definitely not.)

First red flag: I logged in to my account, and the transactions didn’t appear anywhere. Even if it gets blocked, there should be some sort of “Store – $Price (Declined)” record on the card.

Second red flag: sketchy grammar in the text message they sent.

Third red flag: The guy claimed there was a login session in FL, and talked about resetting things, but my login session here in My City didn’t end.

Me: What was the number of the card where the fake transactions were attempted?

Him: Well, it was your cash account.

[Fourth red flag: He should’ve had a more specific answer, in the format of “it was your [debit/credit] card ending in ####.”]

Me: Can you tell me anything to prove that you’re really [Bank]?

Him: [*affable chuckle*] I don’t know what you mean, ma’am. If you look up the number we’re calling from, you’ll see it’s really us. We have a step-by-step process to go through, so if you could just answer the text, then we can proceed…

[Fifth red flag: I reset my password the normal way, through the website. Got a confirmation text, from the exact same number as the time I reset it in 2020. The “give us your username” text was *not* from that number.]

Me: I already confirmed my name and address. You have my phone number. Can you tell me something I haven’t already confirmed for you? What’s the number on any of my accounts? What’s the current balance?

….And then he hung up.

Bullet dodged! But, to his credit, he was persuasive enough to string me along for almost 13 minutes of phone time before I stumped him. Be careful out there, folks.

The phone is dead, long live the phone

My phone has been regularly harassing me for the past month or so to free up more storage space, then eating it right back up again. Not with anything you could easily troubleshoot, either. Last week I deleted the Instagram app — the section of internal storage space labeled “Apps” went down by about 3 GB — and the section labeled “other” went up by almost 3 GB.

(Note that Instagram was already supposed to be running off an SD card! Don’t know why it was squatting on 10% of the main storage space in the first place.)

Welp, last night the thing went mostly-unresponsive. (Had to PM a friend to call out of work on my behalf.) A local tech finally convinced it to reboot, and I finally admitted that I couldn’t keep procrastinating on doing a full wipe-and-reinstall.

Even with a lot of apps/settings backed up and restored automatically, handling the rest took most of the morning.

On the plus side, can’t argue with the results:

Would you look at that. I’m sure the new number for “Apps” is misleadingly small because I haven’t installed/used anything yet, but “System” went down to half its size! Almost 9 GB of cruft wiped clean.

Sure would be nice if the software could figure out how to do that on its own. Or at least have a button I could press for it, instead of hitting “clear cache” half a dozen times every 3 days to free up a few hundred MB, you know?

A lot of apps I just re-downloaded same as I had them before, but I’m trying the nice lightweight Feedly Social Reader as an all-in-one alternative for browsing Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Maybe even more platforms, if those all work out. We’ll see.