Intuit sells tax preparation, bookkeeping, and accounting software to individuals, small businesses, and other organizations. I used Quicken to manage my checking account back in the day, and later used Quickbooks for bookkeeping when I was the head cook and bottle washer of my computer store. I'm now retired into a simpler life and find a spreadsheet to be adequate. Many churches, clubs, and charities use Quickbooks.

MailChimp is a mailing list handler used by a lot of churches, charities, clubs, etc, for newsletters and the like. Small businesses use it for advertising.

Intuit and MailChimp serve the same client base, and have similar needs with regards to customer support, advertising, legal services, etc. A merger makes a lot of sense.

No, it is entirely due to the death of the American Republican Party. The clear result of the release of all that hot air.

When a reporter once asked Ghandi what he thought about western civilization, he answered "I think it would be a good idea."

I claim a certain level of expertise in such matters. :-)

It is not that far from Pennsylvania to the Capitol and what with Covid-19, for some a bit of rioting would have seemed like a fun way to spend a day. Not that a lower level of commitment to the cause excuses any insurrectionist. Those who overtly break the law, and those whose physical presence supports the law breakers, are guilty of crimes. Some were insurrectionists; others were rioters. The courts can sort that out. Stupidity, especially documented stupid acts like bragging on line, is not an excuse.

The use of facial recognition software on the insurrectionists was NOT a case of mass surveillance. It was a properly targeted use. The mob at the Capitol was composed of self-selected individuals who were either committed to insurrection activities or were actively supporting the insurrection. They are all proper suspects in the crime. It is now up to the courts to separate the sheep from the goats and mete out appropriate justice.

Smooshing: It is probably perfectly cromulent, however as far as I know the slithy toves have yet to issue their opinion about that. We probably won't hear from them before brillig.

VW has already captured a huge mind-share with the electric microbus. It won't be on the market for a couple of years but it is already the new darling of middle class USA suburbia.

But the real deal that will propel VW to new heights has not yet been announced, but is clearly inevitable: the Lightning Bug.

I don't see pneumatic tires going away any time soon.

I now ride a "comfort bike"; my years of doing century rides on touring bikes with narrow 100 psi tires are 3 decades in the past. So I know what that is all about; I am just no longer interested in the training involved.

I change the pressures in my tires from 40 psi to 90 psi depending on whether I'm riding that day on pavement, dirt, or gravel. It is a matter of matching the contact surface to the road's condition. I think I also tend to use higher pressures as the season ages and my conditioning improves: a matter of how much easier it becomes to get out of the saddle when hitting rough spots.

I don't see a metallic tire being as adjustable to road conditions as a pneumatic tire is. Maybe a good thing for commuters or on dedicated off road bikes, but not for the vast majority of us who use one bike to do a bit of everything.

Biochar is charcoal, not coal. To be more precise, it is a form of charcoal with a huge surface area: if unfolded, one gram of biochar could cover a tennis court with a very thin membrane.

It is biochar's large surface area folded in a way that provides a vast amount of room for complex microbiomes that makes biochar such a great soil amendment.

Probably the best form of carbon sequestration is granular biochar tilled into the topsoil of farm land. The carbon is removed from circulation for a thousand years or more but increases the fertility of the land. It does so by providing water retention and slow release of fertilizers and other soil amendments.

Biochar is not coal, and is distinct from any other form of carbon. It can be easily produced from the cell walls of fibrous plants by burning in a retort then crushing in a bag with a hammer, but would be impossible to fashion from scratch in the laboratory.

Radio Shack got started in the post WWII years from military surplus electronics. There were a number of similar outlets and Radio Shack was probably not the first, but it was the icon for stores catering to hobbyists building their own radios, hi-fi sound systems, and other gizmos.

There was a transition in the 1980s as the sons and daughters of Radio Shack customers began building their own IBM PC clones, buying hard drives, ram chips, blinken lights, etc, to build their own boxen. The torch was passed from Radio Shack to Frys' Electronics, whose physical presence on the Left Coast was overshadowed by its mail order business to all of North America. There were other players as well, Egg Head comes to mind, but Frys' was the epitome of the breed.

My last major purchase at Frys' was in 2010 when I worked with one of their guys to design my linux box to do fantastic (at the time) CG with Xubuntu (and dabble a bit with digital audio editing). That gave me 10 years of fun times.

But that era is now done. The 1960s was the height of ham radio operators building their own equipment from military surplus parts; the late 1990s was the height of computer nerds building their own boxen from components. Fry's death marks the end of that kind of hobbying.

What comes next? The type of mind that used to frequent Frys' (and Radio Shack before that) I think is now interested in personal 3D printing and CNC machines. I anticipate a lot of computers put to use, but of the Raspberry Pi variety, doing all kinds of menial jobs like custom Roombas to wash and wax your flying car, personalized computerized tooth brushes, physical talking heads for Siri, and so on.

Yep, I used tucows quite a bit from about 1995 to 2005. At first because it was one of the few places to to find useful things, like calculators that did more than basic arithmetic, text editors with regular expressions, etc. Then later because I could trust that anything that had been on the site for a few months was a safe download. By 2008 I had finally fully broken free of Windows and was using Linux and the Debian repositories.

Gosh, ain't Xubuntu wonderful!

Tucows, Gateway cow boxen, SSSD 5.25 in floppies, 40 MB hard drives partitioned 30/10 to fit DOS limits, those were the days. We was the pioneers, catching the arrows with our wood burning computers!

We've come a long way, guys. Now just what are the best Blender practices to create the G-code my 3D printer can digest?

And yet, Deity by another name is Dark Energy.

Or this, said by someone wiser than I... "Quantum Mechanics: the dreams stuff is made of."

Sort of raises these questions: Who is the Dreamer? What is She dreaming?

What is truly laughable is how much of what passes for rational thought these days is predicated upon Pi: a thoroughly irrational number.

HorseCorrectBatteryStable1

HCBS1

AitchSiBeeEss#1

That last is reasonably easy to recall (reconstruct) and is almost always reported as "Strong".

And for low cost - high volume bandwidth, there is still nothing that beats a 1962 Chevy station wagon loaded with reels of IBM 729 magnetic tapes. Assuming you can tolerate the latency.