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I'm not telling you how to feel, but if you reacted differently to the shootings of the United Healthcare CEO and Charlie Kirk, you might want to investigate that discrepancy.

Reviewers on the Play Store note that tracker apps that are specific to the kind of event – such as health- specific loggers – often have needless complexity, and often some weird ideas about graphic design. They praise this app for its clean, elegant look and simple, effective functionality.

In addition to its obvious applicability to episodic health conditions, it strikes me as potentially extremely useful in one of the trickier parts of prepping: figuring out one's burn rate of resources. I think I might trial it to help me figure out how often I should expect to have to buy a fresh bale of toilet paper and how long the big bottle of ibuprofen will last me.

I don't know who needs to know about this, but:

I just discovered the Android app "Periodically". It's described as an "event logger". It's for keeping track of when a recurring thing has happened, and figuring out what the average time is between occurrences. You just keep it updated each time the event happens, and it will do the math for you to figure out the frequency, and even give you a notification when it predicts the event is likely to happen again. If you're tracking more than one thing, it will try to suss out correlations for you.

I mention because twenty five years ago or so, I needed exactly this functionality and could not find any application that would do what I needed, so I wrote a thing for myself, and since then a lot of people I've mentioned it to have wondered where they can get one like it. Mine was Mac/Palm Pilot, so not of much use to most people, especially these days.

Lo, somebody seems to have realized the need for this functionality, and brought it to the market. So I thought I'd mention.

Now, in this day and age, a lot of people, especially in the US, are concerned with security. Especially if they're tracking something to do with their health. This app is not specific to health, so nothing about it immediately reveals that it is storing health information on casual inspection; you could use some sort of other term for whatever health condition it is you are actually tracking. So, for instance, If you were tracking how often your migraines happened, you could call that "new box of cereal".

This app defaults to local-only data storage on your Android device, and the developer claims that it only collects "app activity" for analytics, and shares nothing with third parties. It outputs CSV and has an option to back up to Google Drive.

I haven't tried it myself, but it has a rating of 4.6 stars out of five on the Play Store.

@uastronomer Yes, but that's not also true of the other places cotton grows.

Edit, also my admittedly weak understanding of Nile agriculture was that the floods brought river *silt* across the arable land, which made it fertile, but then receded, not providing huge amounts of water after, i.e. irrigation was still very necessary.

Hey, I just had a convo that reminded me of a question I have.

I keep seeing people claim that cotton is bad for the environment because of how much water it consumes, and hemp and linen are to be preferred for that reason.

That's super eyebrow-raising because I know that cotton, famously, grows in arid places like Egypt, Spain, and Tamil Nadu, while both hemp and flax (from which we get linen) were staple crops in northern and central Europe, and as such are much, much more demanding of moisture.

Furthermore, unlike cotton, hemp and linen are what is known as mast fibers, and cannot be liberated from the stalks in which they grow without extensive processing, which uses a lot of water.

Does somebody have a study about this somewhere? Because, boy, is that a surprising claim if you know anything about textile production. I mean, it could be true, chemical engineers keep coming up with interesting new industrial processes, maybe modern cotton is way thirstier than I thought – everything I know on this topic is approximately 500 to a thousand years out of date.

Absent actual evidence, this sure sounds like a lot of people got exposed to some sort of anti-cotton propaganda and just kind of assumed that it didn't also apply, only more so, to other familiar botanical fibers.

(I don't know the first thing about bamboo fiber production, but given that it didn't exist prior 1600 CE, or to my knowledge prior 2000 CE when I largely checked out of textile geekery, I assume the only way to get textile fibers out of bamboo are with some horrendous chemical process, same as rayon, which is made from trees.)

@mattsheffield Thank you for this.

Re "deportation abundance" and the interesting proposition that the *real* problem with Trump's handling of immigration being the lack of state capacity to execute it, I am reminded of an old joke:

"A priest, a lawyer and an engineer are to be executed by guillotine.

The priest puts his head on the block, the rope is pulled but nothing happens. He claims he has been saved by divine intervention and is released.

The lawyer puts his head on the block, but again, nothing happens, he claims he can't be executed twice for the same crime and is set free.

The engineer places his head under the guillotine. He looks up at the release mechanism and says:

'Wait a minute, I see your problem...'"

@benlockwood You have no idea how disappointed I am this didn't turn out to be some innovative way to use old physical media to frustrate state data surveillance.

"Boston Municipal Court Judge Elijah Adlow held an inquest into the explosion. His report blamed the blast on a leak from a gas main and found no one criminally responsible for the disaster." - W

Gas mains: they just leak sometimes. Blow up buildings. You know how it is. Whaddya gonna do?

Huh. So in 1966, on a bitterly cold January evening, an 11-story hotel blew up in downtown Boston, taking out a neighboring 8-story hotel and a couple other businesses, killing 9 and injuring 50+, and everyone was like, "Probably a gas leak, eh, it was the Combat Zone, whatever."

I just discovered that the New York Times has named their online archive "TimesMachine" and I am delighted.

Weird tech question number 2:

There are smart lights you can put in your home that you can change the color of through an app on your phone. Is there such a thing as a smart light (any form factor - a lightbulb, a fake candle, Christmas garland lights, anything) that you can put in your home that *someone else* can change the color of? Someone you delegate that authority to who is not local to you? Someone who could have authority over individual smart lights in/on hundreds of different people's homes?

The controlling app doesn't have to be a smart phone. Could be a website.

Hey, weird tech question number 1:

Is there an extant app (I am asking about both Android and iOS) where you can set it to monitor a website - say an RSS feed, but monitoring a static page is fine - and if that certain page changes, it sets off a loud alarm on the device?

It would need to poll the page at least every 10 min; every 5 would be better.