Never hitchhiked myself. Picked up a few over the years.

Last one was a guy from Germany who was walking from a wildlife refuge campground in to town to go to a museum. It was 21 miles to get there so the museum would have likely been closed by the time he got there. It was also forecast to be in the upper 90’s and quite a way before any services would have been available. He may have made it but I doubt he would been feeling too good with the amount of water he had.

Paracord. I use it in the house as well as with my SCUBA diving gear. If you need to tie something it’s tough stuff, fairly cheap, and can be doubled up to deal with heavier loads. With SCUBA gear you can use it to create tethers for just about anything and if you have one of the camera floats that comes with a cheap little keeper strap save yourself some heartache and replace it with paracord.

An assortment of screws, bolts, nuts, and washers. Always worth having around. Some little thing breaks or you can’t find one you dropped maybe the new thing you are putting together was missing one. Bonus tip, buy them at a place that sells by the pound and not the individual item. Atwoods is a place in the US that still does this that I know of but I’m sure there are a few others. Estate sales will also often have a person who will have jars of random stuff for cheap.

Yes. Qwerty. I can also touch type on my tablet using the onscreen keyboard which is helpful when taking notes while learning Spanish.

Oddly enough I’ve had a couple people who like to listen to me typing.

When I took a speed and accuracy test about 25 years ago I was around 35wpm and 95% I’m a lot faster now.

I use it for a couple websites. I’m a geek and can make things work software wise but I’m absolutely not a programmer, I just don’t really grasp a lot of it. Give me some hardware and I can build whatever but I digress. Cloudflare has prevented a bunch of attacks on my sites and the caching function is helping stave off switching to a VPS for now.

It can be a PITA if you don’t have native IPv6 and use Hurricane Electric’s IPv6 tunnel broker. A lot of sites that are hooked into cloudflare and some other similar services pop up captcha’s every visit or just pain don’t function correctly. I’m going to switch to Route64 as an alternative to HE, they only provide a /56 vs a /48 but it’s not like I’m going to need that many /64’s at this point.

I’ll put it this way. I would prefer zero politics. If you allow them I’m gone.

People who want to talk politics can easily create their own place to do so and nothing is preventing them from joining other places that are political discussion havens.

If you are showing that low there is something wrong. 240v is the nominal rating but it should be within about 7% of that and you are closer to 20% off.

About 1/3 will be combined with my wife and her dog who have already passed. Another 1/3 will be combined with my fiancé. These will be scattered in a few different places that are special to us.

The final 1/3 is to be combined with concrete and made into ice cube sized pieces to be taken to different reefs around the world by whomever will take them.

I currently carry a tiny portion of my wife and her dog with me everywhere.

I switched from a Motorola Droid (still miss the slide out keyboard) to the LG G3, V10, V20 (loved the knock code unlock) to a Pixel 3a XL and now a Samsung S21 with my next upgrade to the S26 Ultra.

For me the S26 series checks a lot of boxes, one of the biggest being 7 years of updates while preserving online banking. My S21 still has a lot of life left in it performance wise and bad actors targeting devices is big business. Flagship devices IMHO are at the point where they will be viable for 7 years so upgrading is no longer a game of chasing the latest version. It also helps that my carrier will have the S26 Ultra for around 700 or less cash (the current price for the S25 Ultra is 699 and they often give a 100 dollar discount for preorders) so I’m going to pay about 100 per year or about 27 cents per day for the device over it’s lifetime.

I’m also an amateur photographer/underwater videographer (trying to make a living at it and start funding a non-profit using the income steam) so being able to record high quality B-Roll and get good pictures in the same package is a huge bonus.

I had been leery of using the amoled screens for a long time and after using the S21 and Tab S8+ for a while now I no longer have that concern and my only issue with the S21 was with physical SIM cards not working right if the phone was compressed. With E-SIM’s that is really no longer an issue for me.

I stick with android because I use linux on my desktop and server. I also have apps that are not available on the walled garden and I choose to use things that not only the garden doesn’t allow but neither does Google. I’m also confident I can transfer my 4k video files from my microSD card to my portable HDD with android. Because I have to live out of cases for extended periods while also carrying a ton of equipment I have to maximize portability.

My use case is very unique, so ymmv.

Yes there are things you’ll can do from home. Many of the news outlets have staff writer positions you can get. Basically you get information from multiple sources on a subject and write something about it.

You could write a book. You could sell stuff you have sitting around and eventually buy Amazon return pallets locally (many areas have Facebook marketplace pages so just for this.) You could live stream gaming and see if you build an audience and get some Patreon subscribers. You could do freelance graphic art stuff. You could learn to knit, crochet, or sew and sell stuff you make. You could make yard ornaments or decor, custom footpath pavers, or fountains. You could build dog houses. You could offer to watch security cameras for the neighborhood for a small fee. You could get miniatures and start setting up little scenes that you photograph and offer for sale on Etsy. You could design shirts and offer them for sale online through Etsy.

Having autism doesn’t mean you can’t do anything but sit around. You may need a little help finding a niche or develop some skills but IMHO there are very few cases where a person can’t do anything at all to make a little bit of money.

Lord of the rings series and the hobbit The matrix series The DaVinci Code Series The Librarian Series The Associate Children of the Corn (1983) side note: I drove the road they were on to school every day it’s only a couple miles long and the house the kids were playing in is a bed and breakfast now. Downsizing Escape from Pretoria The Dirty Dozen Black Book Book of Eli Cast Away Dances with Wolves The Fugitive and US Marshals Heartbreak Ridge Jumpin Jack Flash Labyrinth of Lies Mr Baseball Medicine Man The Pursuit of Happiness Pleasantville Quigley Down Under Red Sparrow Runaway - 1984 Saturday Night Fever The Shawshank Redemption The Silence of the Lambs series Striking Distance Tank - 1984 Timeline The Tremmors series U 571 V.I. Warshawski View from the Top Wargames - 1983 Welcome to Marwen The Witches - 2020 Woman of the Hour Zathura – And when you feel up to laughing a little – Breakup Man (also known as Schlusmacher) Blast from the Past 9 to 5 Every which way but loose and Any which way you can The Frighteners Moscow on the Hudson Loverboy Overboard and the remake Overboard The Secret of my Success Can’t Buy Me Love Office Space Real Genius Sex Drive Spaceballs Spies Like Us Summer School - 1987 Wildcats - 1986

And don’t discount some TV series either. OZ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118421 Stargate SG1 and Stargate Atlantis Bates Motel Black Sails Dexter Dollhouse (Watch Epitaph 1 and 2 after the rest of the series or you will be lost) Eureka Frasier Firefly (and the movie Serenity) Halt and Catch Fire Last Man Standing MASH Warehouse 13

If you get done with all that you will probably be healed up but if not I can add more

Plans are already in place. I’m gonna kick back, watch Blast from the Past, and kiss my ass goodbye while I get good and drunk/messed up. It’s the same thing I do during storm season. I’ve started from literal nothing too many times. I refuse to do it again.

Only people at ground zero get that. Everyone else gets radiation poisoning and nuclear winter/starvation unless they built a place that can survive for multiple years.

If you just want to listen check out Broadcastify.

Popcorn with M&M’s.

A multi port charger with a replaceable cord. Went from multiple little power bricks to charge each device or play the swap everything game. Plus I can leave the short cord plugged in at home on the headboard and use another cord while traveling.

A nice fluffy robe with a hood. Get out of the shower when it’s chilly and stay nice and warm.

Buying two identical pairs of shoes at the same time. Got this trick from a roofer. You can wear one pair on one day and the other the next. If a shoe gets wet you just swap to the other pair. Eventually when they start to get worn you will often have one shoe be in worse condition first but still have a pair with a spare in case the other goes bad. Plus swapping the shoes out allows them to fully dry from sweat and keeps foot odor down.

A desk mat. Think mouse pad but large enough for the keyboard too. Never run out of room while gaming and it stays put unlike the tiny little pads.

Life is what happens when you are planning. Pick a direction and start moving forward.

Find something you are passionate about and find a way to trully make a difference. I am investing funds I don’t really have into building a YouTube channel with the goal of using it to fund a non-profit that will support teens and young adults who have survived childhood abuse.

I’ve seen tons of people make a fortune on YouTube and do nothing more than blow the cash on extravagance so I figure why not use it to help a group who truly need it. Connecting people to nature has been proven to be helpful and there are some really good people in the diving community. It can also put them down a path where they can give back to nature and others while also helping themselves. It could easily end up putting them in a career path they never expected or even knew existed.

Learning to dive for me was a huge thing. I was at a point in my life where I was ready to give up. I was mentally, physically, and sexually abused by my family and bullied by my peers. As an adult I have struggled to do much more than exist. In 2019 after my wife passed away I ended up wandering into a dive shop. I broke down while filling out paperwork because of a simple question, married or single.

I still struggle at times but being underwater is when I truly feel at peace. To bring that to someone else and give them something to enjoy at a low time in their life is something I hope will make a lasting impact on their lives and the lives they touch even after I am gone.

Got kicked out of a Catholic preschool because another boy said I couldn’t hurt him and to hit him.

Ended up at another school and was much happier, loved playing with the water table and building things. Was later told I was beyond that level and was sent home.

One of the things I’m planning to setup on an old pixel 3a is a hotspot with a web page basically containing some YouTube channel videos. I travel and figure someone will be bored when there is no internet access and can watch some SCUBA diving videos maybe I will get some subscribers when they are connected again.

I also use old phones and tablets as wall mounted HomeAssistant controllers.

Install something like Fotoo with Syncthing and you have a picture frame that you can have display your favorite memories. Or if you are traveling you can have new pictures upload when charging via Syncthing and someone at home can see the sights while you travel. If you setup a mount and install it on a window with an app that takes pictures on a schedule you can build a time-lapse camera and let it run forever.

Give it to a younger child as a learning tool with different learning apps. Donate it to a school somewhere with less access to technology. I donated an old laptop to a dive shop in Belize with Linux and Kiwix installed along with a copy of Wikipedia and a bunch of other learning information as well as a Python environment and the manual pages and a Rust environment with is manual pages.

Install a camera app that basically turns it into an IP camera and integrate it into your security system (great for apartments) or to monitor a pet or loved one. Or steam the video of your view from your home or work window. Add a battery bank, solar panel and waterproof everything and you have a remote camera you can put anywhere wifi works.

Personally you need to decided what features are important to you. From my understanding anything connected to Meta requires logging into Facebook to use. For me that is a big no not to mention that I’m a linux user.

https://vr-compare.com/ is a decent place to start looking around and get an idea on what you need to look for.

I’ve seen a few things that are interesting but so far nothing has ticked all the boxes to make the purchase happen.