Yeah. I'd like this too.

We use Aurora MySQL but I would like to be able to point to that and ask if it applies to us.

IP locations work great for probably a reasonably large chunk of services.

But it's the edges that get you.

I moved home a few years back, connected a new service with the same ISP.

They have an IP pool that is labelled as for one state (Victoria, Australia) but is also used for their services in Tasmania.

So now I have to fight every major website (Google, Amazon, Maxmind, etc) that does GeoIP lookups that I'm not in Victoria, I'm 500-800KM away.

Google was very confused for about 12 months because when I moved I also brought my wifi gear and so it would give me a precise location of my old address because it used wifi geolocation.

I don't think Marvin Gaye was using ACMA's list.

The only people who would give one of these numbers out in real life are people who otherwise don't want to give you a real number.

Anyone who needs a number for a legitimate reason should do their own validation anyway.

You can try calling them but they return "number disconnected" messages.

I have one of these that I use when dealing with retailers for which the phrase "I don't have a smartphone" does not compute. Saves the hassle of having to explain it every time, and so far I'm the only one using my made up number, so they "remember me" or whatever. But they can't actually call, and that's the point.

It's really amazing to see how far HP has fallen. They used to make brilliant printers that were top-quality, easy to service, and overall met the whole "Just Works" thing.

Then some time in the late 90s/early 2000s they let the bean counters at it, and they've become the poster child of terrible product design optimised to extract the maximum revenue at all costs from customers.

I honestly don't care how revolutionary or awesome a product is - if it's from HP I'm staying away, and would recommend everyone else to do so. The company deserves to die.

It gets half-way through the job, but runs out of paint. You load the new paint but instead of continuing, it fills the entire site with a big test print that uses 10% of the paint.

Randomly, it'll run a head cleaning cycle that involves spraying large amounts of paint into the neighbour's driveway before cleaning itself on their lawn.

Seems like a missed opportunity. Why not fill a built in sponge with that paint instead, and when the sponge is fully saturated it's time to throw out the whole machine and buy another one?

Lets not leave the Service people out, they want to get a bonus this year, too.

So make the sponge replaceable, but only with a field maintenance call-out. The sponge unit will have an NFC chip in it that if it's removed will lock the unit out until a Technician access code is entered to restore the unit.

We can sell it as a whole periodic maintenance thing - give the service guy a can of air-duster and a roll of paper towel to wipe the thing off.

(I feel dirty even writing this because I'm sure someone is taking notes and thinking these are great ideas)

That's a wonderful read, thanks for that.

For me (Well, my grandmother) it was Family Tree Maker.

To cut a very long story short - after Windows 10 restarted on her, and changed default browser and application settings too many times she was going to completely give up using the computer.

I built a new machine (a Dell AIO workstation) for her with Ubuntu, FTM and a few other things.

Worked brilliantly.

I do this, too - but I've been running into more and more companies that block you from using their company name in the email address.

It also results in awkward conversations if you have to talk to staff. I had ordered some pet supplies online a while ago registered like this.

Then I go in store more recently and they ask "Do you have an account with us?", I give them that email when asked, which causes them to pause. We went around a few times of them asking what my email was, before getting a manager who thought I was doing something dodgy and decided to try looking up my account by phone number instead of email.

Same experience, but a different perception. I’ve always found it to be a great conversation starter when I did this with my business domain. Of course, it’s mainly about spam control, but some people even felt flattered to have their own personal email address. Then there was that one time I tried to open a new bank account using bankname@mydomain - it ended up involving three levels of management. On the bright side, though, they now greet me by name whenever I walk into the building.

I think having a mail just seperately for bank can be good thing instead of having it on your own @mydomain I suppose?

Also can we have things like 2FA in banking apps? I am pretty sure...

Like my idea of thinking is to create a new proton account just for banking and doing the thing as in the article and not really ever linking the two of them or maybe even having a google account if proton causes any issue for my banks.

That’s pretty funny.

If you use a password manager you could obviously just put something random instead of the company name.

No try giving that email at the store.

I meant the password manager would just be to help you keep track of the names. The names themselves don't have to be long (e.g. `s11@mydomain.com`).

Or just rot13 or some scheme like that.

KISS, just add dot somewhere.

I had a small mom and pop shop threaten me with legal action because of copyright infringement...

I find from.bigcorp.2137@mydomain.com doesn't trigger any shadiness detectors.

Ohhh good point. So many sites basically only accept gmail + some other popular provider.

I‘m following this scheme for years now and frankly never found a site that only accepts selected providers.

A lot of asian genai startups are pretty picky and want emails from bigger providers. kling, qwen, hunyuan just to name a few.

Just create a gmail account specifically for it if that's the case.

AliExpress is one of them, as far as I know

AliExpress uses my custom domain, but wouldn't accept anything with "aliexpress" in the local part.

Correct, so I used "aliexpres" instead, which works.

iirc Cloudflare doesn't act like a normal registrar, however. You cannot use anyone except Cloudflare for your DNS provider.