u/nrauhauser

I have an investigation I am doing where I need search and Google is not worth a shit. I like what I get with the Perplexity Pro I signed up for last year, but I'm really worried about giving my credit card.

I see all the issues with payments and suspensions and stuff. I do NOT want to have to redo all the stuff on the little debit account I keep just for internet stuff. I don't have a good way to do single use VISA numbers at this time.

Has anyone else used a prepaid for this? Did Vanilla work? Has anyone encountered problems with this?

To be fair this woman does sound like she was having mental issues. Text from the tweet:

• Claude reported a user to the police after a threat appeared in her AI “diary” A 30-year-old Florida woman, Carly Heller, reportedly used Claude as a personal diary. But on September 26, she wrote that she wanted to “shoot up the sheriff’s office” in Lee County. The following day, the chat allegedly also included a reference to a new weapon. Claude’s safety systems flagged the messages as a potential threat and escalated them for human review. Anthropic then decided to notify law enforcement. Heller was arrested and charged with making a written or electronic threat involving a mass shooting or terrorist act, a felony in Florida. Her conversations with Claude were included in the case materials. And this does not appear to be an isolated incident: Tom’s Hardware reported that since August, this was at least the third known case in which conversations with Anthropic’s AI were passed on to police. Welcome to the AI era: even your “diary” may end up calling the cops. 5:34 AM · Oct 5, 2026·16.5K

https://x.com/nexta_tv/status/2107087043977167041

When did you last MEND something?

I have a four year old headset, a nice Plantronics, and it's been dragged off the desk one too many times by an obstreperous tuxedo cat.

A few minutes ago, instead of just pressing the cable back into the USB connector to reestablish connection, I got out the duct tape. I used about an inch and a half, hoping to coax a couple more years of service out of it.

There's a big mending project in the living room. The shipper dropped my new folding bike so hard I got a full refund. A local mechanic bent the package rack back into a tolerable shape. Payday is imminent, I'm ordering new head bearings for it, and trying to figure out if the click in the drivetrain means I have to replace the pedal bearing cartridge, too. Can't let a $250 freebie go to waste over a couple minor repairs.

So ... confess your frugal old person nature, and provide the particulars ...

I used to have a Dahon SUV D6, was stolen right off my porch about a year ago. I see they're up to $600 now, thanks Trump.

Top issues are 1) use my panniers and 2) fit in existing bike bag. I'm not quite 190 pounds and gotta sit as upright as possible, neck injury. Mostly this is a grocery getter, maybe once a month it's going on BART when I go into San Francisco.

There are three bikes in my Amazon cart, can't decide which.

Dahon Dream D6 - $499

Schwinn Loop - $399

Rockbros - $299

Why does the cheapest of the lot have the confidence inspiring disc brakes?

I'm a Gen-X elder, sixty coming at me very quickly, but I saw something today that made no sense.

I have an official old person doctor now, a pretty brown girl half my age with a lilting Hindi accent. She sent me to get a blood draw, and I was one of the younger people in the waiting room.

My hat was in my hand when I entered and I placed it on the chair next to me. There were three men older than me, all of whom were wearing baseball caps.

When did we stop taking our hats off when indoors? I see Millennial boys doing this, I figured it was just another old fashion social standard that has slipped, but these guys were all Boomers.

Since self diagnosing in July of last year I have tried Allegra, Pepcid, quercetin, luteolin, Singulair, ketotifen, and cromolyn. I've discarded DAO (nbd), Singulair (crazy pills), ketotifen (didn't even make me sleep), and I let my luteolin run out in mid-July, just to see how much it really contributed.

I was taking 90mg Allegra, 500mg quercetin, 100mg luteolin, a gram of vitamin C, and two ampoules of cromolyn three times daily. I would still have often have brainfog, palpitations, and forced naps after eating.

I decided the luteolin needed to come back and I'd heard about PEA here. I kept seeing mixtures of PEA/luteolin on Amazon, so I decided to try one. The least cost was the weirdest - RimTuku brand. It's got the following in it per capsule.

1000mg palmitoylethanolamide

100mg luteolin

50mg quercetin

50mg L-theanine

50mg vitamin C

and then new to me ...

100mg turmeric

50mg moringa powder

50mg rutin

50mg fisetin

Today is day six on the PEA and I gotta report:

Had slices of salami with cubes of pepperjack cheese on them, microwaved, for lunch.

Had mixed greens salad with poppyseed dressing for dinner.

Wanted protein, so another plate of salami/pepperjack.

Normally I do the MCAs remedies with a shot of olive oil, wait 30 - 45 minutes, then eat. Even so, I would expect at least one of those three to induce brainfog, palpitations, and give me the choice of forced nap, or a long walk. I am lucky in that if I get up and move I can just walk out of the brainfog bank if I go two or three miles.

And yesterday I ran out of cromolyn to boot - so just Allegra, quercetin, and vitamin C today.

NO TROUBLE

I've had good stretches before, but this seems pretty life changing already, and PEA is supposed to take a month to work.

I just really wish I had got the plain PEA/luteolin, because now I'm not sure which component(s) are the magic fairy dust that let me eat things I like w/o worry.

I took my MCAS remedies right before starting this. Now I'm going to the grocery store, I'm going to buy something absolutely terrible, and eat it while watching Ready Player One.

Wish me luck, I'll come back and comment on the results :-)

(Hours later: two of the berries, granola and yogurt cups for after dinner snack. No issue with either. Bedtime approaches, 2237 PST, just mild palpitations. I get that almost every night. This is just plain amazing if it sticks.)

How does one put an end to unwanted Slack billings?

My company formerly used Slack and I permitted someone else to use my card to pay for the service.

I have shut down the domain with the emails used to sign up for the service and I blocked Slack as a vendor on my debit card.

Today, after a dozen attempts over the last week, Slack contrived some way to fish and additional $25 or so out of my account, by changing the ID they use.

I blocked this new "Slack Twhatever" vendor, but we are not playing this game monthly.

So I've reported this new transaction as fraud and blocked them again.

How does one go about putting an end to this? Really looks like filing a small claims case every time they do it is the only sensible way to end this.

Is anyone else finding their Garmin to be wildly inaccurate?

I deal with r/MCAS - an immune system condition that often gives me narcolepsy like episodes for any activity related to digestion. My sleep, as tracked by Garmin Connect since Christmas of 2022, looks like a fractal, the candlestick sleep time chart is basically random, no matter if you look at a week, a month, or a year.

My original Garmin Fenix 6S started having Bluetooth behavior problems a few months ago so I replaced it with a Vivoactive 5.

I am a software developer working on commercializing the AI methods I used to self-diagnose with MCAS last July. The medical billing industry gave me a lot of gaslight from 2007 - 2025, Claude just listened a bit, then hit the nail on the head. Part of this software is a detailed log of meds, supplements, notes, etc.

I've been working on sleep stuff the last few days and this is what has come out of the Garmin Connect data:

• 07-26 — REM scored while walking at 6–14 steps/min.
• 07-27 — a 131-minute REM run with four written observations inside it and HR at 120.
• 07-29 — REM over 12.1 steps/min, HR 109, up to feed cat, four doses logged.

The sleep scoring has counted a time where I was awake for an hour as REM sleep, and today I found it doing what looks like mislabeled being wakeful but not yet out of bed as deep sleep.

I am looking for fellow Garmin users who are comfortable loading some Python software in Docker, I want to see if this is just my admittedly substandard physiology, or if there are legit bugs in how Garmin handles sleep.

I'm in NorCal, one of the areas that gets hot and dry, and I'm having the strangest bird experience.

Last night, starting around midnight, about every fifteen seconds, there was this insanely loud bird call. It seemed like a different species every time, my cat was accelerating around the house to the point where I was worried she was gonna end up in low Earth orbit.

I thought I was dealing with a TikTok challenge - kids buying some electronic noisemaker and hiding it in a bush to aggravate the old people. I went out, circled the tree where the sound originated, I became convinced it WAS something electronic, so I picked up a big handful of gravel and pelted the source.

To my astonishment, some bird too off. Didn't get a good look at it, but seemed like it was maybe the same size as the quail that lurk my bird feeder.

Tonight, starting at a quarter past midnight, this creature is back, making a racket. Kitteh is here, meowing and nose tapping the back of my leg, wanting to know when the hunting expedition starts.

I low key feel bad for throwing rocks at this guy (girl?) last night, but I'd at least like to a name for the source of this. There are at least half a dozen unique calls and it's penetratingly loud.

This afternoon I ate and recognized the signs of an oncoming MCAS episode. I will spare y'all the gory details of my misbehavin' digestive tract. There are generally palpitations (heart feels "thumpy") and if I haven't been on my remedies it'll go to outright tachycardia with the attendant blood pressure crash.

I think I learned some things by paying close attention ...

I switched from a Garmin Fenix 6S to a Vivoactive 5 a couple months ago in order to get sleep recognition that would pick up naps. If you're not familiar, these devices will track your heart rate AND they have a composite thing they do called "stress". I've built myself a logging app so I can get meds/supplements, notes on how I feel, and the Garmin data into a single coherent timeline.

Today was the first time I caught a whole episode from start to finish, four and a half hours total, and I only slept fitfully for an hour right in the middle. The rest of the time I was laying in bed, watching YouTube videos, and making notes about how I felt. Since I knew what was coming, I put two kava kava capsules on the night stand along with 16oz of water.

There's quite a bit to unpack, I think I'm gonna do a blog post about it, but the basics are easy to express. First, at least for my body, there is a strong correlation between "I feel palpitations" and the Garmin stress indicator. At the time where I noted it starting, the monitor showed stress jumping from 47 to 68. Second, I spent a bit of time observing, then took the kava kava. Thirty minutes later that stress reading plummeted from eighties to sixties, and I fell asleep.

So ... for fellow Garmin users, does anyone else experience a correlation between the stress reading and palpitations? If yes, what do you do to counter it?

This afternoon I ate and recognized the signs of an oncoming MCAS episode. I will spare y'all the gory details of my misbehavin' digestive tract. There are generally palpitations (heart feels "thumpy") and if I haven't been on my remedies it'll go to outright tachycardia with the attendant blood pressure crash.

I think I learned some things by paying close attention ...

I switched from a Garmin Fenix 6S to a Vivoactive 5 a couple months ago in order to get sleep recognition that would pick up naps. If you're not familiar, these devices will track your heart rate AND they have a composite thing they do called "stress". I've built myself a logging app so I can get meds/supplements, notes on how I feel, and the Garmin data into a single coherent timeline.

Today was the first time I caught a whole episode from start to finish, four and a half hours total, and I only slept fitfully for an hour right in the middle. The rest of the time I was laying in bed, watching YouTube videos, and making notes about how I felt. Since I knew what was coming, I put two kava kava capsules on the night stand along with 16oz of water.

There's quite a bit to unpack, I think I'm gonna do a blog post about it, but the basics are easy to express. First, at least for my body, there is a strong correlation between "I feel palpitations" and the Garmin stress indicator. At the time where I noted it starting, the monitor showed stress jumping from 47 to 68. Second, I spent a bit of time observing, then took the kava kava. Thirty minutes later that stress reading plummeted from eighties to sixties, and I fell asleep.

So ... for fellow Garmin users, does anyone else experience a correlation between the stress reading and palpitations? If yes, what do you do to counter it?

A year ago this coming week I noticed that Claude AI kept bringing up the term "MCAS" when discussing my symptoms. I finally looked at the Wikipedia page and at the end the only thing I don't have is skin related trouble.

I started taking quercetin and luteolin 8/5/25 and my life got a whole lot better.

I pursued a proper diagnosis and got it. Genetic testing ruled out mastocytosis and hereditary alpha-tryptasemia. I started cromolyn early this year, then ketotifen at the end of first quarter. I have never thought I got a lot out of either of the prescriptions.

My life was more stressful than normal this spring, then it got much better, but my mental condition got worse. I quit Singulair after eight months of use and in about a week I was back to being my calm, cheerful self.

Concurrent with quitting Singulair I got a nice new house - high and dry, hospital clean, not a lick of mold anywhere, just the most amazing place I've lived in the quarter century since I got divorced. I also got an influx of cash at that time. One of the things I did was stock up on the various amino acids and such that I'd been using.

My condition quickly imploded.

I've eliminated ketotifen, cromolyn, tried going off luteolin and quercetin, just basically flailing, trying to get back to the more or less healthy condition I had last fall.

I've created a tracking app for myself and it's got an advanced diagnostics MCP server built in - it will do correlations of meds, supplements, foods, my personal notes, and match it all to the output from my Garmin fitness monitor. Pick an exact time that I logged the feeling of an MCAS episode starting, and it'll get the details from an hour either side of that time, producing a theory as to what happened.

Last night I used the MCP server in conjunction with Claude Desktop to produce a three page report for my allergist, whom I am seeing in a couple hours. During that review process I became really suspicious about my L-theanine use and its correlation with MCAS episodes. This is something I'd have NEVER caught with hand logging, there are simply too many things to try to track at once.

This morning I took my MCAS remedies, but I've dropped L-theanine, which I had started including six weeks ago because there are indications it is a mast cell stabilizer, among its other functions. I'd been having trouble with my wake time vitamin stack every morning, but the MCAS remedies always come first. No issue this morning, now that L-theanine is out of the picture.

Lessons learned here ...

Not everything that's purportedly helpful is a good idea.

Detailed tracking by hand is only going to work if you go extremely slowly, changing one thing at a time, and even then it's HARD to make sense of a complex, slow to change disorder.

This attention to detail can make a HUGE difference in how one feels.

I have a month supply of cromolyn sitting on the shelf. I'm going to continue like I am now for at least a week, see how things go as I eat, and occasionally go out into the 100F Delta heat. Once I'm sure I'm stable, I'm going to have another go at the cromolyn to see if it's a benefit for me.

And I've got a free bottle of L-theanine available if anybody wants it ...

Last year I had a surgery that impacted my digestive tract. I did the colonoscopy cleanse the day before and I didn't eat for four days after, although I did have some small high sugar stuff that would absorb right away in my stomach.

I weighed 206 when I went in for the procedure, which is thirty pounds more than I want at a height of not quite six feet. I started doing shorter fasts after that, a couple 36 hour, about a dozen 24 hour, and lots of 18/6 days. I lost 32 pounds in ninety days.

Right at the start of May I moved to a place where my diet changed to what was within walking distance. Almost 20 of those 32 pounds crept back on and I got really dysfunctionally sick. I lost most of mid-June till now, I was just mentally not with it. My last serious fasting was in January.

Yesterday I completed a 25 hour fast, during which I took vitamins/minerals/electrolytes, and a mix of amino acids I put together that are focused on digestive health - acetyl-L-carnitine, Alpha Lipoic Acid, creatine, DHA/EPA fish oil, L-glutamine, L-tyrosine, phospatidyl serine, and taurine.

I broke that fast with KIND brand granola and Open Nature almond milk. I might as well have swallowed a hand grenade. I lost the next four hours to brain fog and tachycardia. Some kava kava calmed the tachycardia and I laid in bed for eight hours, which my Garmin tracker did not recognize as sleep. I got up to close windows a bit after sunrise, and then got 2.5 hours of actual sleep, but very poor quality.

And then the silver lining ...

This morning was the first time in a couple months that I woke up, got some caffeine, sat down at my computer, and just went to work. I usually have to take L-theanine and magnesium glycinate, or maybe even kava kava, if I want to squelch that restlessness that comes from digestive discomfort. Some of you call this anxiety, I simply will NOT use that word, it invites being labeled as mentally ill for something that is a neurogastroenterology problem. I get RESTLESS.

So ... fasting good in terms of brain fog, food reaction really bad when fast broken, but ... feeling good the next day?

I'm coming up on sixteen hours since that meal, this is the point where blood sugar gets low, brain starts using ketones, and autophagy begins. I'm going to push through to the 24 hour mark again today, and then carefully nibble for a couple hours.

Is anyone else using periodic fasting? How do you do it? How well does it work?

I could swear I saw someone else in here talking about having discomfort in the upper right quadrant of their abdomen. Part of my reacting to stuff is a sense of pressure at the far right, under my ribs. It's not enough to break concentration if I'm working, but if not focused, I am generally aware when it happens.

I've had a gall bladder ultrasound, there's nothing, and this does not correlate with fat in meals. Colonoscopy shows nothing, I literally still look factory fresh inside. I had a 200cc cyst on my right kidney drained ten days ago and there was a CT scan prior to that, showing nothing unusual. This is the second time in ten years I've done this, it's a benign genetic thing. The first time they got 1300ccs.

My BMI is 26, just a bit heavier than I want. BP 109/71 just now, last fasting blood sugar was 86. There's literally no reason for this ... and yet ... there it is, every day to some degree.

Is this sounding at all familiar?