I've been looking into installing air conditioning in the building that will eventually be my office and workshop. Local HVAC contractors gave me extremely large numbers as quotes. I've watched mini split installs and I'm pretty sure they're within DIY range for me. So I spent $10 and a couple of nights of reading, and took the EPA 608 type 2 certification exam today, so now (pending someone watching and approving a 20-minute video of me staring at a phone screen) I can legally install one myself for significantly cheaper.

I've also occasionally considered getting a ham radio license, solely because I like a bunch of adjacent electronics topics and it feels like the kind of thing I could be into. (So far, I haven't bothered because the vibes of the community around it don't feel right for me, but I haven't completely abandoned the idea.)

It occurs to me there are probably several more things like this that I'd never thought about. Small plane pilot's licenses are another, though those require formal training. But attempting to research this mostly returns lists of "you could be an Official Microsoft Certified Professional Excel User!". That's not what I mean.

What other useful licenses can one easily get without making it a whole career? "Useful" here means something like "having the piece of official paper grants privileges that simply learning the underlying knowledge doesn't".

As a Brit who's now effected by the Great British Firewall I'd like recommendations for VPNs that meet the following criteria either directly or via additional software/Firefox extensions:

• Use VPN only for specific apps on iOS (apply to Reddit, Discord, BlueSky and Twitter/X, Wikipedia (if it ends up banned) but not others)
• Use VPN for specific websites on Windows/macOS (apply to Reddit, Discord, BlueSky, Twitter/X, Wikipedia (if it ends up banned) websites)
• VPN considered generally trustworthy and not an American firm

Personal recommendations that you have experience with only please.

Hi everyone, I'm feeling inspired to start a tool library out of a community space. I am resisting the urge to roll the software myself and I'm wondering if anyone has suggestions about existing projects that I might look into, ideally leaning towards the lightweight side of things.

What say you, Tildes community?

Belgian Grand Prix
Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps
July 25-27, 2025

Grand Prix Qualifying:
Saturday, July 26, 2025 - 14:00 UTC / 10:00a US EDT

Grand Prix:
Sunday, July 27, 2025 - 13:00 UTC / 9:00a US EDT

Next race:

Hungarian Grand Prix
Hungaroring
August 1-3, 2025

Ironically, AI has boomeranged from surpassing human intelligence to having us spot it like a dove in a pond. So now, leave in all the little flubs to make it a bit more clear that a person at least typed this in a keyboard, you know?

This morning I found a receipt in my kitchen. It was from my roommate, who had ordered pizza from Dominoes the night before. When I looked at it, I was shocked. There was a single line item on the order, two large pizzas for the sum of $75.98 USD. I thought, "what the hell is this? How is he spending so much on pizza? And the junk they sell at Dominos? They don't even make the crust there!"

But then I looked down to the actual amount paid and it had a discount: $54.00 off the price for buying two of them. So the effective price was a much more reasonable $10.99 each. That's less than a third of the sticker price. After tax and an in-house delivery fee, it was still under half of that price.

I don't eat out that often, and fast food is especially rare for me, so I've been fairly insulated from this, but it seems that this kind of thing is happening everywhere. One pizza place I do get food from occasionally is Pieology. Their pizzas were roughly $10 not too long ago, but in recent years those prices have ballooned, with some locations asking for $15 for the same pizza order. But the secret is that they are actually still selling pizzas for those prices if you use their app - it's just that instead of giving you the real price, you get free "perks", which is your choice of a drink, cookie, and things to that effect. I never go to McDonalds, but I've heard endless complaining about how expensive it is. The retort I hear is, "you better get the app". The app is a privacy nightmare that requires practically every permission it could ask for in order to function, so rather than actually getting deals you're just subsidizing the cost of your food with the sale of your personal data.

There's almost no way to definitively prove this, but one argument that I find compelling as to why restaurants are doing this is because of delivery apps. Delivery apps take omission from the purchase price, and people really don't like seeing that they're paying more for things on the apps than they would be in the stores, so shops are raising the base price of their food in order to make things seem more fair, while offering in-store discounts so that they don't lose out on revenue from lower-income people who wouldn't order from delivery apps. If that's the case, that would mean that people ordering from those delivery apps are not only paying more for the privilege, but they are actively pushing up the prices for everyone else as well. And that's just ridiculous.

You were ahead of the curve, or most people thought otherwise, or somebody vehemently opposed you, etc.

But it turns out you were right.

This is your chance to share your vindication.

As always, the question is open to all answers: simple or complex; funny or serious; tiny or significant.