

I’m trying to make my own smart watch as a hobby experiment at the moment, and one of my most important features is NFC payments. It’s a nightmare, although I understand why. Currently my plan is to buy another smart watch or smart ring and take the NFC chip from it, which is maddening, but more or less my only option due to contactless payment security.
To do contactless payments, your bank must effectively permit the specific device, otherwise go through GPay or Apple Pay, who in turn just do the permitting themselves. Anything outside of the standard ecosystem just gets overlooked.
The best workaround while avoiding these companies is to find a smart watch or ring that has compatibility with a proxy card, such as Curve. But beyond halving the price of the accessory, this is pretty much an arbitrary decision.
I work a lot of fancy events as a caterer and often have a drink behind the scenes, but often these events are in random offices with no bar support, resulting in us drinking strange concoctions.
Spanish coke is popular, which is just red wine and coke. This is probably second only to white wine spritzers. Separately in day events, we’ve found putting espresso into coke over ice is surprisingly okay, I wouldn’t say it’s better than the sum of its parts, but probably on par with normal coke.
So I had the wise idea of shaking espresso, coke, and red wine together, just to see what it tasted like. I’d truly give it a 5/10. Which isn’t bad if not for the fact that I’d give each ingredient alone a 6/10 or better.