u/AloneExamination242

My foodie best friend decided to come to town on very short notice, and on a weekend (this coming one) to boot.

The first thing I did of course was fire up OpenTable and Resy, and surprising nobody there were no reservations available at anywhere I want to take them. (There was briefly a slot that appeared at Kasama but then it went poof.)

So I'm here, hat in hand, to see if anyone has any suggestions of their favorite places (pretty much anything except sushi) that hold some space for walk-ins on the weekend, in the standard impossible Cool Creative Buzzy Tier occupied by places like Kasama, Carino, Daises, etc., but, well, not those places in particular because I don't have a time machine lol

TIA

Hi there,

I'm hoping for a sanity check on some home improvements.

I live in an older high-rise building in a major (HCOL) city, where there's a shared laundry room that is driving me nuts: the machines are broken or in use half the time, I feel like I'm chained to the building for a couple hours whenever I do laundry, I have to keep a stupid key card etc.

Because it's an old building with very particular plumbing criteria, I can get it in-unit put in but it'll be very expensive: approximately $30k all in including labor, materials, the actual machines, permitting, etc.. This is from a contractor whom I think is trustworthy; I've gotten a lower estimate from another one but the one with a high estimate actually showed up, took measurements, spoke to the building engineer about requirements, and so forth, so is much more trustworthy.

I'm thinking of pulling the trigger on it. But the dollar figure is giving me cold feet. I'm kind of hoping folks here will either reassure me or explain to me why it's nuts.

FWIW, I have plenty of money and can actually easily afford it (47, single, no debt except a very cheap mortgage, no kids, gross income upwards of 300k annually, net worth north of 1m with plenty---actually too much---cash on hand). So this is really just psychological for me: it feels insane and scary to drop five figures on what amounts to a quality of life improvement. And I assume that I'll recover some amount of the value of the installation back if I ever sell the place---because my neighborhood is full of old buildings, in-unit laundry is pretty rare and desirable.

Thank you!

EDITS:

1. Thank you everyone!

2. To clarify in response to some repeated questions: yes, I own my unit---and the overwhelming majority of the cost will come from carpentry, electrical, and plumbing to meet my HOA's very particular rules about how in-unit laundry has to be installed (for example, it has to be on a particular chunk of the plumbing, which will with my unit's configuration require running plumbing under a hallway, hence tearing up and replacing some flooring, etc.)

3. I've thought about moving to a more modern building, except (a) I have a 2.5% covid-era mortgage that I don't wanna give up, (b) closing costs would be almost as much as the install, and most importantly (c) my current place has an irreplaceable view that I couldn't get in a newer building except at like 100k+ more, plus is walkable to the office.

4. My main alternative use for the money would be throwing into investments.

5. I've thought about hiring a laundry service, but I like to baby my clothes and would go crazy if my favorite stuff came back shrunken or got lost.

Tip for the Chicago folks: the 260 sample sale people are back in Chicago and for once they actually have good discounts. Just hit their Rails sale and got a couple nice shirts for fifty bucks.

Prices top out at 50 bucks for jackets (which are meh, seems like lots of polyester) but got a nice soft flannel-like thing for 20 bucks and a decent short sleeve kind of like a camp shirt for 30. Also lots of pants, shorts, etc all in that 20-30 range, sweatshirts and sweaters I think 35.

By contrast MSRP on most of their shirts is around $150. No way is it worth that, but for this sale I'm happy to take way better than banana republic style and quality for banana republic prices

Curious whether folks around here think it's worth the trouble to grab the CSP for the high bonus. I already have the CSR (and Freedom Unlimited) and don't have a ton of use for the bonus categories (I don't drive much), but OTOH the AF doesn't mean a ton to me. (Actually, I could probably make use of the hotel credit to offset, seems much more useful than the horrible edit nonsense on the CSR.)

On the one hand, my main airline is United and my main hotel is Hyatt, so an extra 100k UR points would never be wrong.

On the other hand, I have a real challenge allocating my spend, because I have a ton of cards with overlapping earning categories. I already have 200k+ UR points, and my stash of other valuable points is all much lower (less than 100k in each of Amex, Capital 1, Bilt; I won't do business with Citi for personal reasons). The cards I have with annual fees right now are (roughly from most expensive to least):

- CSR, mostly used for generic travel; I've considered dropping this with the recent changes but things like the Lyft bonus points, better transfer ratios now, and some of the credits that I manage to use keep it squeaking just over the line

- Amex plat: coupon book card. Not sure if I'm keeping this next year or not, the death of the united travelbank credit loophole (plus the increasing hellishness of centurion lounge crowding) might drop its value below the AF.

- United club card: most of the year only used for united travel; sometimes dump all my generic spend on it toward the end of the year if I need the extra PQP to get over a status hump, I really keep for the lounges.

- Amex gold: used for most groceries (except Whole Foods), restaurants sometimes. considered downgrading but eventually kept because I've been getting good use out of MR points.

- Amazon prime: just used for that big cash back rate on amazon and Whole Foods

- World of Hyatt: used for Hyatt purchases obvs, also sometimes gets generic spend if I want more status points or to try to get to a free night certificate threshold

- Bilt obsidian: used for housing points and a little bit of generic spend/at restaurants

- C1 venture: used for 2x generic spend when I'm not trying to get some other points. I wanted the VX, but for some reason C1 refuses to approve me for it.

Other than that, I carry a bunch of random no AF cards that I've collected over the years, total of 15, the only no AF cards that get any of my spend are the Apple Card for, obvs, apple stuff, and the C1 savor occasionally.,

I assume I'm likely to get approved if I do apply (FICO 800+, income 300k-ish, at 3/24 right now, chase private client, no debt other than a small low-interest covid-era mortgage that I could easily pay off if the interest weren't so low that keeping it is profitable). I don't have any immediate plans to do anything like take out another mortgage that would make the hard pull an issue. Basically if I do get it, I'll probably end up getting the SUB and then sticking it in a sock drawer.

What do y'all think? Worth it or nah?

Thanks!

Hey everyone---can someone help me with a dumb noob question? I have koreader on my Viwoods reader and I'm trying to install fonts by putting them in the koreader/fonts folder in the internal filesystem.

Right now I have a bunch of ttf files saved in my Google Drive, and I was going to copy them over using the Viwoods-bundled file manager into internal storage like I do with epubs. But for some weird reason the file manager doesn't show ttf files.

Going the other way, the Google Drive app from the play store can see the ttf files, but doesn't seem to have a way to save directly to the internal file system (or if there is one, my non-android-user self can't find it). So I seem to be stuck unless there a setting hidden somewhere to let the Viwoods file manager see more file types (?) or maybe just a way to plug it directly into my computer (mac) as an external drive and copy files over (??). Would love to know if anyone else has had success with this!

The title says it all. I had a driver who completed the ride but her app was broken, so she couldn't get the swipe to pick up working. Well after the ride is over, my app is still in pickup mode (it says "driver is here, departs now") and she's dropped us off and is long gone.

I don't want to get screwed with some surprise massive charge if she gets it to work in an hour and it bills me for the whole time (it was originally a $20 ride, last thing I need is for that to turn into a hundred dollar ride or whatever). I would just cancel out the ride from the pickup screen to protect myself, but then I'm afraid that I'd end up screwing the driver out of the fare and I don't want to do that either. So what should I do? It's not like there's anyone who does customer service at Lyft to call...

(Update: she finally got it to work like 15 minutes later, and now the app thinks I'm in the ride despite having been dropped off 15 minutes, lordy, let's see if the stupid thing charges me a wait time fee or accuses me of fraud for having a ride that doesn't match GPS)

For once there appears to be a lot of sizes available on things, which is rare for Uniqlo.

I'm struggling to get links to work right on the reddit app at the moment, so, direct url to the men's on sale: https://www.uniqlo.com/us/en/spl/memorial-day-sale?path=22211%2C%2C%2C

As a dude with big thighs who struggles to find shorts that fit right apart from gym shorts, I really really like the "linen blend easy shorts" https://www.uniqlo.com/us/en/products/E485855-000/00?colorDisplayCode=37&sizeDisplayCode=004

I've had my new aipaper reader a couple of days in, and for others who are considering it, here are some impressions.

For context, I have a small collection of other e-ink devices. Currently have the first gen remarkable (which I hate and never use), a boox go color, a first gen kindle scribe, a previous gen kindle paperwhite signature, and I made my work buy me a boox note max. I've also owned many previous generations of kindle going all the way back to the original ones from like the 00s. I'm not an android guy usually, while I've used an android phone for a couple of months once before, the only more than super short term android use I've ever had has been with other e-ink devices. Other than e-ink stuff I'm squarely in the Apple ecosystem.

TLDR: hardware is great, software appears great but has some usability issues, plastic cover needs to end.

The good:

- the screen is great. I don't particularly mind the lack of a warm front light, my plan is to mostly use this when I'm out and about, and keep the kindle for when I'm in bed. But it's crisp and clear and the contrast is great.

- it's really fast and responsive! I'm not sure how much of this is screen quality or software optimizations but it's absolutely a joy to use. This is especially compared to the boox note max, which I have for reading PDFs, but where I feel like I have to pound on the screen to get it to do anything. But the Viwoods feels even more responsive than my kindles.

- it's so light! Feels weightless.

The bad:

- documentation is almost nonexistent. I've been using Gemini to figure out how to do things. For example, how to turn off the weird little screenshot button overlay that blocks part of the interface (it turns out that the option to do this is buried in the swipe down menu). The next quest is to figure out how to remap the hardware buttons, and, again, I have some info from Gemini that I guess I'll just rely on.

- naming of things is bizarre, for example, files as "learning" --- this exacerbates the lousy documentation problem. (I will say that the documentation on how to activate the play store is good though)

- Also apparently there are multiple different settings apps, the viwoods one and then the android one or something? At least this is what I can discern from switching to the inkOS launcher and seeing that there are two totally different apps named "settings" in there.

- the plastic cover that ships with it is absolute and utter **TRASH**. It is practically impossible to remove. I put it on just to try it out, and it took 20 increasingly panicked minutes to manage to take it off. At one point, I slightly damaged the back of my brand new reader trying to pry the fucking thing off with a butter knife. That cover is the single worst thing about the reader. If you buy one, you should immediately throw the cover out so that you're not tempted to try to use it like I was. I just bought a cheap neoprene sleeve from some random fly by night company on amazon instead, though I'm actively looking for something a little sleeker like a felt sleeve.

Overall:

On the whole, I really like it and am glad I bought it. For me the original choice was between this and the boox palma, mostly for reading while away from home, and I went with this one for the superior combination of features (with boox you either get the palma 2 pro to get LTE but are stuck with a color screen with worse resolution and unnecessary stylus input, or the palma 2---if you can even find it now---with no LTE), better price, and more recent version of android. And it looks like I made the right choice---I've got the kindle app going as well as a bunch of epubs from other sources in there and reading is seamless.

This feels like a really dumb question. But... I just got my new reader, and I'm trying to transfer some files from my computer. I created a viwoods account and then went to my.viwoods.com following the instructions on https://viwoods.com/blogs/paper-tablet/file-sync-and-share-across-devices ... but there's no obvious way on the interface to actually add a file from here. Like there isn't a little plus button, or an upload button, or anything, and dragging files into the middle of the page (from mac finder, using safari) doesn't do anything.

(screenshot deleted because I saw something that looked like a unique number in there on the second look)

Hi there!

So in Bilt 1.0 I was just using it to pay my mom's rent (using the Bilt makes a fake bank account method). And it worked fine. Miraculously, the transition to 2.0 also worked fine, at least insofar as my mom's rent is getting paid and I'm getting points.

Now that they let you do multiple housing payments, I feel like I'm leaving points on the table. So I want to add my own HOA, which is paid to a major national management company (FirstService) through ClickPay. (And maybe eventually my mortgage too? But I'll try the HOA first.)

Because of the many problems people have reported here, however, I'm afraid that I'll jinx myself if I mess with anything and end up with cascading Bilt failures. Especially because my mom and I live on opposite ends of the country, so I wonder if I run smack into some weird fraud detection algo having multiple addresses (even though as I understand it this is totally within the rules... or at least I think so?). Or it just won't work because reasons. And then I'll have a terrible bureaucratic snarl with late payments and such like so many people on here are reporting.

So does anyone have a positive experience with doing this (adding a second housing payment for a different address, preferably through click pay) so that I at least know it worked for someone?

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

My Viwoods reader is about to hit my mailbox on Monday! One of the things I miss from the ancient decade or so ago Kindles was just being able to download books over cellular, so I'm really excited about having a reader with a SIM card in it.

So does anyone have a provider they like in the US? I guess I could just try to get another device add on to my Verizon account, but I'd rather get something separate and cheaper, especially since I don't need unlimited, like 1 gig a month would be fine.

Does anyone have any recs?

Thanks!