u/Scawwotish_owl88

Half the apps in this category say "free plan available" and then lock everything useful behind a paywall. Verified what's actually free before including any of these.

1. Habitica. Fully free and functional. Gamified habit tracker with social challenges and RPG mechanics. Community features included at no cost.
2. Streaks. iOS only, free core features. Minimal daily logging with clean design. No paywalls on the basic habit tracking.
3. WIP app. Free social habit tracking app where daily photo check-ins build a public consistency record for a community of people taking their habits seriously. Full community features included in the free plan.
4. Habitify. Free tier with a limited number of simultaneous habits. Clean interface, streak tracking included. Some features require upgrading.
5. Done. Flexible scheduling on the free plan. Handles habits that don't happen at the same time every day without requiring an upgrade.

The Fair Housing Act protects emotional support animal owners by requiring covered housing providers to make reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities, and ESA accommodation falls under this framework when a licensed mental health professional confirms the animal is therapeutically necessary. Landlords cannot charge pet fees, enforce breed or weight restrictions, or deny the accommodation based on a no pet policy once valid documentation has been provided.

Where landlord authority ends is a question a lot of tenants do not fully understand. Housing providers can verify that the ESA letter is from a licensed provider and that it contains the required legal elements, but they cannot demand medical records, question the diagnosis, require a particular format for the letter, or add conditions beyond what FHA mandates. The accommodation process is supposed to be interactive and cooperative but landlords often treat it as an interrogation designed to discourage the request.

The narrow exceptions to FHA coverage include the Mrs. Murphy exemption which applies to owner occupied buildings with four or fewer units. Senior communities operating under HOPA exemptions still have to comply with disability accommodation requirements because HOPA only exempts familial status protections, it does not reduce or eliminate disability rights under FHA at all. ESA accommodation rights exist completely independently of HOPA.

Putting together the open class action lawsuits with 2026 deadlines that I'm aware of, most of these are things that affect regular consumers and the filing process is simpler than most people assume

Deadline august 11, PHH Mortgage Kickbacks (Munoz v. PHH Corp) - phh allegedly took illegal kickbacks related to private mortgage insurance on loans originated between 2007 and 2009, if you had a phh mortgage during that period with pmi you could get $875 per qualifying loan, fixed payout not dependent on number of claims filed, no proof of purchase needed.

Deadline may 23, Mitsubishi Airbag Control Units ($8.5 million fund) - 2013 to 2017 lancer models and 2013 outlander, airbag control units allegedly defective and could fail during collisions, up to $250 per vehicle.

Deadline may 31, Toyota Camry HVAC (California) - 2014 and 2015 camry XV50 owners in california who paid for HVAC or charcoal filter repairs after may 2024, reimbursement up to $100, narrow eligibility but straightforward to file.

Deadline may 18, Discover Card Merchant Misclassification - for merchants and businesses that accepted discover between 2007 and 2023, some consumer cards were misclassified as commercial cards resulting in higher interchange fees, payout depends on transaction volume.

Verify by august 18, Tinder Age Discrimination ($60.5 million settlement) - tinder charged users over 29 higher prices for tinder plus and tinder gold in california, if you paid for either subscription in california after march 2015 and were over 29 you may be eligible, payout varies based on total amount spent.

Last time I did a similar post there was a lot of question about this, so for anyone who wants to stay on top of class action lawsuits, I use settlemate cause it flags them based on purchase history and I also check topclassactions for browsing the full list jic

Thinking about making the switch and trying to figure out if this is something i can do with my current provider or if it means starting over somewhere new.

Curious how people navigated this practically. Did your provider handle it smoothly or was it a hassle? Did you have to go back to a starting dose or did they let you titrate based on where you were with sema?

Also curious which providers seem to handle this kind of transition better vs ones that made it complicated.

Gas generators make sense until they don't. Noise at 2am, carbon monoxide if you run them inside or too close to a window, fuel runs during a storm when every station has a line. If you're prepping for anything longer than a few hours, the math starts looking different pretty fast.

Here's how I'd rank the main options right now for indoor-viable, no-fume backup.

• Worksport COR, runs on swappable battery packs so when one dies you just pop in another instead of waiting on a recharge cycle. No gas, no fumes, completely silent. For multi-day outages that swap mechanic matters more than most spec numbers.
• EcoFlow DELTA 2, probably the most well-known in this category. Around 1kWh, charges fast with solar if you have panels, and the app integration is genuinely useful. Weak point is that once it's dead you're waiting 80 minutes on AC or hours on solar. Fine for a single overnight, less ideal for a 3-day event.
• Jackery 1000 v2, lighter and honestly pretty solid for its size. Good port selection. Same problem though, fixed internal battery means once it's depleted you're either recharging or you're done. The 1000Wh ceiling also makes running anything power-hungry for extended periods rough.
• Bluetti AC180, hits a sweet spot on capacity and output, handles a fridge no problem, and the build quality feels premium. But again single battery, and the recharge time on solar alone is long enough to be annoying if the sun isn't cooperating.

None of these are whole-home solutions but for keeping the essentials running without fuel logistics or exhaust concerns, they're all worth looking at. COR and DELTA 2 would be my top two depending on whether continuous runtime or fast recharge matters more to you.

I tracked reply rates between platforms around 7 months at decent volume (around 800 cold outreach contacts total). The differences were bigger than I expected and not always in the direction the marketing pages suggest

Not a perfect study ofc but consistent patterns showed up so I wanted the share here if anyone would be interested

Direct email through scraped contact info: highest reply rate (around 18-22% depending on niche). The cold work of finding the email is the cost but the inbox is less crowded than instagram dm.

Upfluence outreach (around 14-17% in our testing): the personalization tokens that pull from creator post history made the messages feel less templated, which probably explains the lift over generic sequences. Creatoriq has comparable infrastructure at a different price tier.

Instagram DM cold outreach: middle of the pack (around 8-12%). Worse for established creators, better for emerging ones still actively checking dms

Modash for outreach: similar reply rates to direct email when you're building targeted lists. The export and email elsewhere flow adds friction but the list quality is high.

Aspire sequenced outreach (around 11-14% in our testing). The CRM layer matters more for follow up than initial reply but the templates are solid.

Outreach ran through upfluence sat around 14-17% across the same period and the personalization tokens that pull from creator post history made the messages feel less templated which probably explains the lift over generic sequences. Creatoriq has comparable infrastructure at a different price tier.

Linkedin dm for creators with b2b alignment: surprisingly high (around 20%) but the audience overlap is narrow.

Generic mass outreach tools without creator specific data: under 5% reply rate consistently, don't even bother

The takeaway most platforms downplay: list quality matters way more than channel. A targeted list of 50 creators sent through any half decent tool will outperform a 500 creator blast through the most sophisticated platform.

Amazon killing comixology still makes me angry bc I had a whole digital library built up over years and now its all rotting in the kindle app where the reading experience is terrible and the organization is nonexistent. I need somewhere else to read comics online that isnt kindle, preferably something where I can actually buy issues to own and not just rent through a subscription. What are you guys using these days?

We used hooked on phonics with my older two kids about six years ago and it was fine. Not amazing but fine. My youngest is 4 and I pulled it out again thinking we'd just do the same thing. Except the app version is completely different from what I remember and honestly it's not working for her. The pacing feels off, the interactive elements are clunky, and she loses interest about five minutes in. The video segments are okay but the practice portions don't hold her attention at all.

I'm looking for a hooked on phonics alternative that follows a similar structure. By that I mean systematic phonics, sequential lessons, builds from letter sounds to blending to words in a logical progression. I don't need bells and whistles, I just need solid instruction in a format a 4 year old will tolerate.

Things that matter to me based on going through this twice already. Parent involvement (she's not ready to do anything solo on a screen). Short lessons (15-20 minutes max). Actual phonics not just letter recognition games pretending to be phonics. And ideally something that's digital because I am so done with physical manipulatives and flashcards at this point in my homeschool career.

Thanks in advance:)

Miami Beach hotels are genuinely difficult to evaluate because the price-to-experience ratio varies enormously and the same hotel can feel very different depending on what you're expecting. The shelborne comes up as one of the historic South Beach properties that's been updated without losing its character, but "historic with updates" can mean a lot of things in practice. For people who've actually stayed there recently, how are the rooms in terms of actual condition and noise insulation, and is the pool and beach access actually worth it or does it not deliver in practice because of crowd situations?

I teach seventh grade ELA and I want to talk about something that's been sitting with me since last semester because I think it's more common than people realize.

I had a student who is genuinely one of the strongest thinkers in my class, reads voraciously, verbal contributions to discussion are always the most layered and interesting in the room, and his written work was consistently underdeveloped in a way that didn't match anything else I knew about him.

in November I pulled him aside for a quick check-in because the gap between his verbal contributions and his written work wasn't adding up. when I asked him about it he said something that stuck with me, that he always knew what he wanted to say but by the time he got it typed out he'd already lost half of it. the keyboard was slowing him down enough that he'd lose the thread entirely and just settle for whatever shorter version he could get out in time.

The problem wasn't his writing, the problem was the interface between his thinking and the page.

We started doing fifteen minutes of keyboarding practice three times a week using typing .com, structured rather than game-based because I needed accuracy data not engagement scores, his WPM went from twenty-two to forty-one over the semester, and more importantly his written work in the second semester was noticeably more complex, longer sentences, more subordinate clauses, ideas he'd been leaving on the table started appearing on the page.

I'm not saying typing instruction is ELA instruction, I'm saying that for some students the keyboard is a bottleneck that compresses their written expression below their actual thinking level, and addressing the bottleneck changed what I could see from him.

Mavis Beacon and KeyBlaze come up in these conversations sometimes as older alternatives, they're functional but the teacher-facing reporting is limited compared to what's currently available, I needed per-student accuracy data over time and both of those required more manual tracking than I had bandwidth for.

The comparison most people run when evaluating 3pl ecommerce fulfillment is pick and pack rate vs delivery speed, and those two numbers on their own are genuinely misleading.

A brand doing $2M in annual revenue that sources from China is probably carrying 90 days of inventory in transit or in a warehouse at any given time. That's roughly $500K of working capital sitting idle, and it doesn't appear anywhere on a 3PL quote document. Neither does the $3 to $8 per unit ocean freight cost, customs brokerage, port fees, or receiving. The headline rate is maybe 30% of the real cost.

Going origin-based flips the structure. Per order air freight is higher than domestic ground. But ocean freight disappears, receiving fees disappear, long-term storage mostly disappears, and the 60 to 90 day capital lockup compresses to 48 hours. The working capital freed up from that alone changes the unit economics more than any pick and pack rate comparison.

I keep seeing brands make this decision based on a price sheet and then being confused about why margins aren't improving. What does this comparison look like for others running it? Does the math shift much by product category?

Most subscription gifts fail for the same reason. The recipient didn't ask for it, doesn't build a habit around it, and quietly lets it lapse when the gifted period ends or passes it back to you to cancel because they feel bad doing it themselves.

The question that determines whether it works: does this replace something they already do or introduce something they'd never choose on their own?

Replace something they do: probably redundant. They already have a solution for that problem even if it's imperfect. A meal kit subscription for someone who already cooks doesn't fix anything, it just adds friction.

Introduce something new: much higher ceiling. If the subscription puts them in contact with something they'd never have found or chosen, the habit can form around the discovery itself. That's the mechanism that keeps people subscribed past the gifted period.

For example, I got vinyl moon for my partner last year, $34 a month, sends a curated record with ten different artists monthly. He'd never have subscribed himself because he didn't know it existed and wasn't sure he needed it. Two months in he was looking forward to it. That's the introduce category working correctly.

The replace category almost always fails. The introduce category has a real shot if the product is good.

Everyone assumes musicians want more tools. Another plugin, new headphones, a better interface. But the ones making interesting stuff usually aren't starved for gear, they're starved for input.

You stop listening for pleasure pretty fast when listening becomes work. That passive absorbed way of taking in music just disappears.

Best gifts I've seen given to working musicians are the ones that force them back into being a listener. Concert tickets outside your genre or something curated by someone else's taste. Anything where you hear music you didn't choose.

What's the best non gear gift you've given or received as a musician?

An anthropic API key at $0.003/token for haiku can clock $100+ in a few hours if someone's running it for their own tasks. You find out when the bill arrives or when abuse detection catches it, not before. Most people who set up openclaw for the first time don't think about this until they've already handed the key to a managed host without understanding what that means.

Standard managed hosting means your key goes into an environment variable on the host's infrastructure. The host runs the container, and their systems have access to the environment the container runs in.

TEE architecture is the distinction I would take into account: clawdi deploys openclaw inside Intel TDX trusted execution environments, where API keys are injected directly into a hardware-encrypted enclave that neither the host nor their infrastructure can access. The key is isolated at the chip level, not the software level.

Rotate keys periodically regardless of hosting model, set hard spending caps at the API provider before deployment, and watch your usage dashboard. TEE solves the hosting layer exposure. It doesn't solve every exposure vector.

Every monthly subscription for an aging parent on fixed income gets evaluated against everything else in the budget and the safety conversation has a different texture when money is genuinely tight. The question of what a safety system costs per month is easy to answer but the question of whether it's worth it relative to everything else is harder and more personal. How did families make this call, specifically when the parent's income is limited and every line item is scrutinized? Was there a way to think about it that made the decision clearer?

groundluxe and a couple of other brands keep coming up in sleep improvement discussions and the earthing/grounding concept is interesting enough that I want to evaluate it seriously rather than just dismiss it. The proposed mechanism is plausible enough to not be obviously nonsense, but the research is thin and a lot of what you find online is coming from people who are already sold on it. For people who've used a grounding mat consistently for at least a month, did you notice any measurable change in sleep quality, or was it more of a "felt nice to believe it was doing something" situation?

I have three kids in high school and the laundry situation in this house is genuinely a full-time job that nobody is getting paid for. Between sports uniforms that need to be clean by specific days, regular clothes that multiply overnight, and whatever ends up on the floor that I find when I'm vacuuming, I was doing laundry constantly between work and somehow still always behind.

Started using a laundry delivery service a few months ago and I want to be clear that this is not an exaggeration: it changed my week. The volume gets handled, it comes back folded, and I stopped spending mental energy tracking whose gear needs to be clean by when. I genuinely did not realize how much of my brain that was taking up until it was gone. Working full time and trying to keep up with three teenagers' worth of clothing was a fight I was losing every single Sunday night.

The Fujifilm recipe community has produced incredible documentation for X series bodies. But what happens when someone tries applying those fujifilm recipes outside the Fujifilm ecosystem entirely?

Is the recipe culture too specific to transfer or is there a universal language underneath it?