Here are some top secret things to eat and do in Lancaster, PA. And BTW, here is a chart showing how I judge my enjoyment based on how much I need to spend:
1 Coconut Soup at Sukhothai Restaurant on Harrisburg Ave. THE BEST coconut soup EVER!
Coconut Soup at Sukhothai Restaurant
2 Best Thai lunch combo is at Sa La Thai on Queen Street. Pick a soup, appetizer and entree.
3 The Alice Burger at Valentinos. Just get it. Don’t let the atmosphere scare you away!
4 Cheesestake eggrolls at Black Knight in Landisville. Just get ’em.
5 Roots auction Tuesday night. Go there for produce in the summer. Look for the outdoor stalls.
6 The best Bento Box can be found at Ginmiya in Manor shopping center. And it’s BYOB, with a wine store conveniently next door.
Ginmiya
7 Best Lancaster Pho is Noodle King on Duke Street.
8. Italian surprise! Venice Pizza at Columbia Ave and Centerville Rd.
Happy Friday Funday! This is a good day to unplug for a bit, and just enjoy the world around you without distractions. Unplug your computer and disable your network adapter, and put your feet up. No news, no email, no nothing!
But wait! Chrome shows you this annoying little dinosaur graphic.
Watch closely, and tap your space bar.
Whoa! The dino starts running!
Tap your space bar again to jump over the obstacles that come flying at you!
Eventually Chrome will win, and the game will end when you crash in to something. Just refresh your browser to play again!
I couldn’t find any similar feature in the “No Internet” pages of Firefox, Internet Explorer, Edge or Opera. (But I did find a VPN option in Opera – that’s for another post.)
Little USB sticks are somewhat out of favor these days – who needs them, when we have the whole cloud at our disposal? But I do LOVE my Kingston USB drives. The have the most satisfying form factor. Computer makers love cramming their USB ports as close together as they can. But thumb-drive makes see to think we need bit plastic surrounds on our devices, so sometimes it’s impossible to jamb the drives in side by side.
These Kingston drives are different. They are no wider or taller than they need to be. You should get yourself some!
I was doing some browser tests looking for Easter eggs the other day, and was reminded of the Opera Browser. An old favorite I forget to use. It has some nice features!
An add blocker. Activate it in Settings, then it shows up in the top right when it blocks adds. And you can turn it on and off from there.
2. A VPN option. Start it from settings, then it lives in the left of the browser bar. With a “New Private Window” and VPN, you are good to go shopping!
There is certainly a speet hit with the VPN turned on, but with the VPN and Adds blocked, pages feel like they load faster than VPN with Adds. But still much slower than no VPN. Downloads are much worse with the VPN. But sometimes you want that Privacy.
Chrome Speed Test without a VPN
Opera Speed Test with VPN turned on
“Snapshot” is a neat feature that allows you to grab a portion of a web page and save it as a png. A little faster than the Windows Snipping Tool or Snip & Sketch, I suppose, but it can’t capture outside of the browser window.
“Print” is hidden in the Opera Menu -> Page -> Print. Not a biggie, but it took me an extra five seconds to find it.
Evidently they have some big news coming out soon. I signed up for their blog updates with my [name]+opera@gmail account, so now I’ll know if they distribute my email (see my previous post.)
Your inbox gets flooded with spam. Where does it come from, and how do they get your email? Here’s how you can try to find out…
You won’t be able to investigate existing spam, but here is how to track down the source if you use a gmail address.
For my experiment, I created a new gmail email address: arj022019. At gmail.com, of course. More about that later.
Then I looked for a company on line to sign up for their promotions. I randomly found Advance Auto Parts, where I frequently shop happily. It turns out they do have a program where you can create an account. So I signed up. But notice that I changed my email address by adding “+AdvanceAuto” right before @gmail.com
I successfully signed up with this modified address. Excellent! The “Welcome to Advance Auto Parts” email came to my Gmail inbox, and I could see it was sent to the arj022019+advanceauto gmail address. Sweet.
So from now on, if I get spam to this modified email address, I’ll know it somehow came from the Advance Auto account. Perhaps they sold it, or in the Terms of Service I agreed that they could share it.
On a side note, as soon as my new Gmail account was all set up, I immediately got social emails from dinnerly.com and Audible.com. And also two Promotions emails from Harry’s Razors and HSBC Bank. The one from Harry’s Razors was a “Re:”, and I never even sent an email from this account, yet!
Perhaps Google is the WORST offender in this whole spam mess!
If you think one of your friends is a source of spam, send them an email, but modify the Reply To address by adding “+theirname.”
Just for Friday Funday I’ll put my email here in plain text and see it it gets harvested.
arj022019+wordpressblog@gmail.com
Have at it, spammers.
Update: on 12 Feb 2019 I also added a crafted email to FaceBook.
