Fondots

Fondots , 1 month ago

Went to the outer Banks with my wife, her grandmother, her brother, and his girlfriend.

First of all, I don’t dislike any of them, I like them better than a lot of my own family, but we’re different kinds of people. If I hadn’t married my wife, they’re not the sort of people I’d ever choose to interact with, I’d make polite conversation with them at a party or something, but I’d never really give them a second thought.

I’m not a beach person, I hate sand, I hate sitting around in the sun, I hate the biting flies, I like fishing but don’t really enjoy surf fishing. They all of course wanted to spend a lot of time on the beach.

They have a lot of love for this island, once upon a time their family owned a vacation house there and they’d pretty much spend the whole summer there. I have no such nostalgia goggles, so as far as I’m concerned it’s a pretty meh place to spend your time. It has a handful of mediocre restaurants and bars, a bunch of touristy stores selling mostly beach themed bric a brac and artsy craftsy junk that I have no real desire to buy or even wander around a store looking at, and a grocery store and liquor store with pretty limited selections. Nothing really there that appealed to me.

We mostly cooked at the house, which isn’t really my idea of a vacation, I get it, it’s cheaper, but I’m trying to avoid doing chores, that’s kind of the point. Nonetheless, I do enjoy cooking, I planned out my meals, came up with cocktail pairings, etc. had to modify them a bit on the fly because as I was finding out my brother in law and his girlfriend are kind of picky eaters. The other parties kind of skimped a bit on their meal planning, we had some meals that were frozen store bought lasagna and such. I kind of knew my meals would be fancier and more involved than theirs but I kind of expected them to put in at least a little effort.

Her grandmother was in the early stages of dementia, not too bad at the time, but she was a little restless and forgetful, which just made her a little annoying to deal with when we just wanted to chill at the house.

I had also somewhat recently started a new job working night shift, so my whole schedule was kind of flipped upside down and most of the time I just really wanted to sleep.

Also the place was about a 9 hour drive, which baffles me because we have a lot of perfectly fine beaches with more stuff to do within an hour or two from home.

We decided to drive mostly overnight to avoid traffic meeting up at about 11 IIRC to drive down in 3 different cars, we’d get there probably by about noon accounting for bathroom breaks, grabbing breakfast on the way, etc. giving us a chance to put pack, grab lunch, maybe take a nap, then still get some time in do vacation stuff (whatever vacation stuff means on an island with literally nothing to do)

I kind of figured they would all have their cars mostly loaded and be ready to go, which was wishful thinking, we didn’t actually get on the road until well after midnight, it might have even been after 1.

I really felt like I wasted my week off from work. Only real things I enjoyed was when my wife and I rented a boat with her brother and his girlfriend and just kind of boated around for a few hours, and playing boardgames at the house at night, but I didn’t need to spend about 18 hours driving and spend a week there to boat around for a few hours and play boardgames.

They had talked about trying to do annual family vacations after that (they were at least going to throw me a bone and not do the beach every year, though I suspect a lot of my other gripes would’ve still persisted) but luckily for me the next year COVID hit, her grandmother’s dementia has progressed a lot since then and her mom is taking care of her, and we’ve all just had general life stuff keeping us busy so that hasn’t happened.

Fondots , 1 month ago

In the grand scheme of disasters, I didn’t get this too bad, but hurican Ida.

I live in an area with a lot of rivers and streams and we experienced some historic flooding for our area to the point that it took us a few days or weeks to even know exactly how high the water got because the river gauges went completely under water, the old records were totally shattered.

My house was at a high enough elevation that I didn’t have an immediate flood danger to my house, but we did loose power for about 16 hours, which meant I did need to go bail out my basement sump pump every so often because the pump wasn’t running without power. People who were closer to the rivers of course got it worse, some people had to be evacuated from their homes by boat, lots of flood damage to go around, a handful of homes practically got washed away completely. There was some concern about certain dams potentially being overwhelmed but thankfully nothing much came of that.

I work in my county’s 911 center, and of course they paged out for anyone available to come in to do so. I tried, couldn’t make it more than a mile or so in any direction without hitting flooding and that was the before the worst of the flooding. Some roads and bridges were really fucked up from the flooding.

Luckily I have some friends nearby with a generator so we ran our perishables over to them to throw in their fridge. Those friends get their water from a well, and their generator doesn’t have enough juice to run the well pump with their fridge and stuff, so we bartered some potable water and cold showers with them in exchange.

They pulled up the stats at work for how many storm related calls we had, water rescues, electrical fires, downed trees, flooding, etc. I don’t remember the numbers, it’s been a few years but they we insane.

Fondots , 1 month ago

I often joke (only half-joking if we’re being honest) that we need large scale reintroduction of large predators into all of our natural areas.

There’s a lot of well-documented reasons why it’s good from an environmental standpoint, and that why it’s only half-joking.

But I also like to think the idea of having to deal with wolves, bears, mountain lions, etc. might keep at least some of these fuck-heads at home, or at least keep them on marked trails, picnic areas, visitor centers, in their cars, keep their dogs on leashes, etc. and if they don’t, maybe they’ll at least get eaten.

Fondots , 1 month ago

One of my favorite scary facts about the moonies that I don’t see talked about much is that a couple of the founders sons had a falling out with the church, and went and started their own, even crazier church. They made the news a few years back doing some rifle blessings and some kind of mass wedding ceremony (also with rifles)

Not for nothing, they also own kahr firearms

Fondots , 1 month ago

I think this is kind of a thing for a lot of stereoscopic 3d technology.

I could play the virtual boy, 3ds, watch 3d movies, etc. for hours without issue, and other people can’t take it at all.

I don’t know what factors play into that, maybe it’s genetic, maybe there’s some kind of skill/technique/habits about how you focus your eyes, or how often you blink, maybe it’s just luck of the draw that your pupil distance is just right or wrong. Maybe it comes down to something ridiculous like how many hours you spent trying to make sense of Magic Eye books when you were a kid.

Fondots , 1 month ago

Even if it was for batteries, unless we get fusion factors down to something that can fit in a car, power drill, smartphone, etc. batteries are still going to be a big part of the equation.

Sure, you can generate enough juice to power whatever you want, but only as long as it’s plugged in, anything that needs to get detached from the grid is still going to need batteries, and you probably don’t want your car hooked up to a 10 mile long power cord for your commute.

Fondots , 1 month ago

There was one team fairly recently that thought they had developed one that got a lot of press, but it turned out to not be true.

But that was only for that one specific case, it didn’t prove that room temperature superconductors can’t exist in general, there are still other teams working on developing them, and theoretically they could be possible, we just haven’t quite worked out what materials will exhibit superconductivity at room temperature, under what circumstances, and how to make them.

And we have some materials that come pretty damn close, Lanthanum decahydride can exhibit superconductivity at temperatures just a few degrees colder than some home freezers can manage (although at very high pressures)

Fondots , 1 month ago

The issue people are worried about is that no one is making the decision to kill kids, it’s the AI making the call. It’s being given another objective and in the process of carrying that out makes the call to kill kids as part of that objective.

For example, you give an AI drone instructions to fly over an area to identify and drop bombs on military installations, and the AI misidentifies a school as a military base and bombs it. Or you send a dog bot in to patrol an area for intruders, and it misidentifies kids playing out in the streets as armed insurgents.

In a situation where it’s human pilots, soldiers, and analysts and such making the call, we would (or at least should) expect the people involved to face some sort of repercussions- jail time, fines, demotions, etc.

None of which you can really do for a drone.

And that’s of course before you get into the really crazy sci Fi dystopia stuff, where you send a team of robots into a city with general instructions to clear it of insurgents, and the AI comes to the conclusion somehow that the fastest and most efficient way to accomplish that is to just kill every person in the city since it can’t be absolutely sure who is and isn’t a terrorist

Fondots , 1 month ago

I’m an eagle scout from the days before they started accepting girls, I remember always hearing about how much cooler the BSA program was than girl scouts

Part of the problem is with how things are structured. BSA troops tend to stick around for a a while (the troop I was part of well over a decade ago is still going strong and just a couple years off from its 100 year anniversary,) so you end up with a lot of accumulated knowledge and resources over the years, people stick around after they age out of the program to stay on as leaders, they bring their own kids into the program years later, we had some 2nd or 3rd generation eagle scouts who had all earned it from the same troop their fathers and grandfathers did, we had a garage full of troop gear, a pretty decent troop library fell of merit badge books, old handbooks, various first aid and camping manuals, etc. some troops have their own cabins or campsites or other such properties, and the organization makes it very easy for new scouts to find an existing troop, pack, crew, ship, etc. to join.

Girl scouts often don’t have that. Sometimes they do, and when they do they can actually do a pretty amazing program, I’ve heard of some girl scout troops who’ve done some pretty cool stuff that honestly puts my own troop to shame, but more often they kind of tend to get formed with a group of girls around the same age and their mothers, never really do much recruitment, and when the girls either age out or lose interest and drop out the troop just kind of folds. They have to put a lot into the cookie sales and fundraising because they’re usually starting with no troop gear or other resources, there’s not much generational knowledge about how to run a scouting program, so they tend to just kind of have to figure things out on the fly. And a key part of the boy scout program was “boys teaching boys” the older kids in the troop take on leadership roles and help run the program teaching the younger kids, if you’re starting with a group all about the same age, you lose out on a lot of that dynamic.

Also as far as recruitment goes, at least back when I was in scouts, even if you waned to join an existing girl scout troop, it could actually be pretty hard to find them. BSA had their BeAScout website, you could find all the local groups, meeting schedules, and contact info pretty easily, girl scouts, at least at the time, didn’t have anything like that. I remember there was one time my troop wanted to reach out to some of the local girl scout troops to see if they wanted to participate in some kind of event we were having, and they had a hell of a time finding any contact info for them.

Also, some of the girl scout leader training requirements seemed a little excessive, maybe the situation has changed, but I remember hearing that they had to have leaders with specific training for pretty much any little part of their planned activity, like there was a specific training to go on camping trips, a separate training if you wanted to have a campfire on the camping trip, etc. and a lot of them were paid courses and I don’t think they were cheap. I don’t have anything against training in general, I had to do a few when I was a boy scout leader, but some of what I heard from the girl scout side of things sounded pretty excessive to me.

Fondots , 1 month ago

I rarely drink coffee on my days off, when I work I bring a 20oz mug of drip coffee with me. At my old job, I’d probably polish of a pot or two to myself most days, mostly because walking back to the break room and brewing a pot when it was empty was a good way to avoid actually working that no one ever batted an eye at.

Fondots , 1 month ago

Not exactly sending them to coworkers, but I did kind of refer a coworker to one once.

I work in 911 dispatch, it’s kind of hard not to end up a little desensitized to some crazy shit. We once had a call about some kind of industrial accident, someone’s arm caught in a machine or something along those lines. Obviously not going to share too many specific details about the incident, but we did have a teams on location ready to do a field amputation if needed, but luckily they were able to get the person out without any major injuries.

So our conversations tended to be about a lot of the crazy gory fucked up things we’d taken calls about or otherwise seen or heard about, and I mentioned the Russian lathe accident video to one of my coworkers (don’t look that up if you’re not the kind of fucked up who can deal with that sort of thing, it’s a guy getting caught in a heavy duty lathe and spun around and mashed against the machine until someone comes and hits the emergency stop, at which point there’s nothing much left of him)

That piqued her interest, and she went and watched it on her phone at her next break.

I wouldn’t send the video to anyone, especially not out of the blue, and when it comes up I warn people not to look it up if they’re the type of person who would be significantly disturbed by it. In general I won’t even mention it to people who don’t work either in some sort of emergency services or medical sort of field where we have to occasionally deal with that kind of thing, or in a machine shop where they’re working around those kinds of machines, and even then it’s something that only gets brought up to certain people in certain contexts.

Fondots , 1 month ago

If I go out and kill a newborn fawn in the woods for shits and giggles without the appropriate tags, out of season, etc. it’s still poaching, just the same as if I went out and killed an 8 point trophy buck I didn’t have a tag for, took it home, ate it, mounted it’s head on my wall, etc. That fawn may not have survived, it may not have grown into anything impressive, but at the end of the day I killed a deer I was not legally allowed to kill. The guy writing the law probably didn’t have killing fawns for fun in mind, they probably pictured something more like the second example I gave, but I think most of us would agree that the fawn-killer should be punished just as or maybe even more harshly that the buck-killer.

I can’t think of any good reason it shouldn’t be the same for fish.

EDIT: also, usually with fishing regulations, there’s also size limits, you can’t keep a fish under a certain size, it has to be thrown back. These fish were almost certainly under the legal size. Not to mention creel limits, even if they were somehow all of a legal size, and even if he somehow did everything else legally (which he didn’t,) I suspect the creel limit on salmon is significantly lower than 18,000

Fondots , 1 month ago

It’s pretty damn hard to pick just one thing, so my best-of list

There’s really basic foundational things like the wheel, cutting tools, fire (if we want to count it as an invention,) string/rope/cordage, writing, clothing, cooking, agriculture, metalworking, etc. the sort of things that are absolutely basic building blocks of civilization.

Moving a few milenia up, and in no particular order,

the Haber Process to synthesize ammonia, which allowed for the creation of synthetic fertilizers. If you’ve eaten any commercially grown food in the last century, you probably owe it to the Haber Process.

Antibiotics are another big one, as are vaccines.

Vaucason’s lathe arguably laid the foundation for a whole lot of fabrication techniques that led to the industrial revolution

Refrigeration

Steam engines and later internal combustion engines

Clocks

Compasses

Printing press

The telephone

Airplanes

Computers and the internet

Cameras

Fondots , 1 month ago

I’ve done a bit of googling around about e15 gas, and I’m not gonna lie, I really don’t know what to make of it, there seems to be a whole lot of contradictory info about it out there, some sources say it’s cleaner, others say it’s dirtier, and pretty much all of the articles I can find feel like they’ve been bought and paid for by one big megacorp or another.

When I kind of try to average together what I’ve read, and make no mistake I’m no scientist so I very well may be way off the mark on this, I think what I’ve come up with, is that it’s worse for smog and general air quality, but better in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s also ever so slightly more renewable, though really that’s kind of a negligible difference, 85% of it is still basically just regular gasoline, and the regular gas you usually buy is probably 10% ethanol anyway, so it really doesn’t make a major change in terms of how much petroleum you’re burning at the end of the day.

As far as saving money goes, you may get slightly worse MPG and/or performance using it, although annecdotally when I’ve used it, any difference was completely unnoticeable to me, YMMV (literally) depending on your car, the kind of driving you do, etc.

There’s also a deep rabbit hole to go down about corn subsidies and such that I’m not going to touch with a 10 foot pole right now.

If, and that’s a big “if,” my assessment is right, which I’m by no means confident about so please don’t take this as anything other than the musings of some asshole on the internet who’s skimmed a bunch of articles and is trying to piece together the facts, I kind of feel like this may be a bit of a wash. Probably something that needs to be really considered at the local or individual level to weigh the pros and cons, taking things into account like what your local air quality is like, how efficient your vehicle is, what you’d do with the money you save, etc.

Of course, everyone should do some research about this, make some informed decisions, seek out more info, be skeptical of claims on both sides, etc. Please do not take my word for it, my words, thoughts, and opinions about this issue aren’t really worth anything.

Fondots , 1 month ago

I just tend to hedge my bets with lots of disclaimers for things I’m not totally sure of. I know I’m not an expert on these matters, and I don’t want anyone taking what I say and spreading it has hard facts when I know there’s a real possibility that I may have it completely wrong. Hopefully no one can read my comment and go “well this guy sure seems to know what he’s talking about, I’m going to take his word for it and tell all of my friends,” but maybe it’ll get them to take a second look, see what info is out there and be mindful about where that information is coming from and try to draw their own conclusions.

And really, as far as having an opinion goes, this shouldn’t really be the kind of thing we’re dealing in opinions about. This should just be a matter of hard facts and numbers, but unfortunately due to industries like agriculture and oil sticking their fingers into, those hard facts are usually too hard for most of us to come by, so we’re kind of left with nothing but opinions based on what spotty facts we have.

Fondots , 2 months ago

I like guns, I don’t currently own any, that will probably change at some point in my life, but one of the several reasons I don’t have one is because I don’t have any space in my house that I’d want taken up by a gun safe.

I don’t even have kids and I don’t plan on having any, I can count the amount of times there has been a child in my house on one hand with fingers to spare, and if I have it my way my count will never reach my other hand, and the only time those children were out of an adult’s immediate supervision while they were here was when they were in the bathroom, but I can’t guarantee that will always be the case, I don’t know what friends or relatives may bring kids over and what may happen that will distract us from what they’re doing.

I live in a pretty safe neighborhood, but break-ins happen, and I don’t want my guns out on the streets, so not only will my safe be merely child-proof, it’s also going to be securely bolted to the wall and/or floor, and it’s going to be hard to break into, and ideally hidden from sight. No one’s getting guns out of my house against my will without at least some time and power tools.

Should my wife or I ever have a mental health crisis, I want to make sure that we have the means to secure those guns until we can get them out of the house by changing the combo or hiding the keys or whatever (and that would also be the end of guns in our house for good)

Anyone who doesn’t think of these kinds of circumstances has no business owning a gun.

Fondots , 2 months ago

I’ve seen a couple places offering what they’ll call something like “enhanced ebooks”

I admit that I haven’t given any of them a try, but the gist is that they’re an ebook with some extra multimedia content. It kind of looks like some places that do them do the absolute bare minimum to slap the “enhanced” label on them and just add some extra pictures and maps and such, and others go whole hog with added video, the full audio drama treatment with sound effects, different actors for the various characters, narration, etc. so some of them may potentially fill the role you’re looking for

Fondots , 2 months ago

This is sort of second-hand advice, because luckily I’ve never really had any kind of skin/hair issues (except that I’m now losing the later, but I made peace with that and shaved my head)

But my wife has had some dandruff issues in the past, so I’ve learned a little from her.

Part of the issue is that there’s kind of several different issues at play that cause dandruff or dandruff-like symptoms, and common usage of the term often doesn’t really differentiate between them very well, even though the appropriate treatments for them may be very different.

For a long time, a lot of focus with dandruff was on fungal causes, and so a lot of the commonly-available anti-dandruff shampoos and treatments work, at least in part, by being antifungal.

Of course, if your dandruff isn’t actually caused by fungus, antifungal ingredients won’t do anything to help with your dandruff problem, and may even make it worse by drying out or irritating your scalp. That turned out to be my wife’s case, and her issue improved significantly by basically switching to any other shampoo besides anti-dandruff. It took a little fine-tuning and trial and error to figure out which shampoo and conditioner worked best for her, but the big first step was staying away from anti dandruff products.

There’s a lot of different combinations of hair types, skin type, and underlying conditions that could be at play, so there’s no-one-size-fits-all solution. If you haven’t already, a good first step is probably to talk to a dermatologist, or if you already are working with one, it may be time to look for a new one.

Failing that, do some research, figure out what send like is most likely to be causing your issue and the l how to treat it, try some things, if they don’t work, try some different things, repeat as necessary.

Fondots , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

I think there’s room for a little bit of nuance here

It’s pretty much always going to mean you’ve been a little dumb, or naive, etc. so it’s an insult in that sense.

But I tend to hear it used by southerners in sort of a “aw, they don’t know any better/can’t help it” sort of way.

So more like when I call my dog an idiot because she got her leash tangled around a street sign again. There’s no malice in it, she’s dumb, but she can’t help it, she’s just a dog.

Not like if I call my coworker an idiot because he’s continuing to fuck up the same basic shit no matter how or how many times you explain it to him, he should know better and can help it.

Now, there’s arguably another level of insult/disrespect implied because they are talking about you in the same way they would a dog or a small child. I don’t think that’s really something they usually intend, but of course the intention isn’t really as important as how the target actually feels about it. You can also probably get really psychological about it and dig into how their word choice reflects how they view others in relation to themselves or something, but I’m neither interested in nor qualified to go down that rabbit hole right now.

Disclaimer- those are just hypothetical examples I gave, both my dog and my coworkers are actually pretty pretty smart and capable. She’s actually the first dog I’ve ever had who actually seems to understand how to not get tangled on a street sign, so I mean no disrespect to her, or to my coworkers either I guess.

Fondots , 2 months ago

It will definitely vary from place to place, but I work in 911 dispatch, and I’m pretty sure you’d have to be in a really dysfunctional hellhole for police to not show up to an OD call involving a child.

Fondots , 2 months ago

I’m no nanotech scientist, so I won’t pretend I know all of the ins and outs here, but I’m sure when most people think about nanotechnology, they’re probably picturing something like the later generation iron man suit from the marvel movies made up of billions of tiny nanobots that can reconfigure themselves and such. If such things will ever be possible, they’re still a long way off

I have a hunch you probably have some visions in your head of tiny robots similar in size to a red blood cell swimming around in someone’s blood stream, that seemed like a trope that was used by a few different sci Fi series when I was growing up, and certainly the kind of thing I personally picture when I think of nanobots. Problem is, at the nano scale, those kinds of things are kind of huge, a blood cell is a few thousand nanometers across. Most of what we’re doing with nanotechnology is just a handful of nanometers in size, at the scale of a few molecules or even atoms. Eventually we may be able to put some of those parts together to make tiny robots and computers and such, but right now we’re still kind of figuring out how to make the nuts and bolts and gears and such to make those bots out of.

There’s also a lot of nanotech research that you may not really think of as technology but more as something like material science or chemistry. Any time you hear about new developments with carbon nanotubes or graphene, that’s nanotechnology. Practical applications for stuff like that are still mostly works in progress, we’re probably years, decades, maybe even centuries out before some of those things really come into their own, but when we do work out the bugs, they will absolutely be revolutionary.

But it’s not all far future stuff, it’s almost guaranteed that you have used and maybe even have in your home or on your person right now something that makes use of nanotech in some way. One example I saw mentioned a lot is sunscreen, there’s a lot of sunblock that makes use of zinc oxide and/or titanium dioxide nanoparticles, clothing may contain nanoparticles to help with things like waterproofing, reducing odor, etc. there’s lots of mundane nanotech that you’re probably already taking advantage of.

Fondots , 2 months ago

I don’t really like that they seem to be floating the idea of adding ads to the mix, but as long as this stays a separate part of the service from the on-demand section, I don’t exactly hate it.

I’ll occasionally have parties where we’ll use Pluto or similar services just to have something on. Usually something like the The Asylum channel to have a stream of something going that we’re not really invested in but that we can comment on and go “what the fuck was that‽” once in a while, and kind of do our own little MST3K thing.

And sometimes you just kind of want something on in the background while you’re doing stuff, and I know I’ll sometimes get a little bogged down trying to choose what I want to have on even though I’m not really going to be actively watching it.

I remember once upon a time there were some people who really wanted Netflix to add a “random episode” option, I wasn’t really one of them, but this could kind of fill that niche.

Also, if they curate it right, it could be kind of a cool way to drop new episodes. Say a new episode of a star wars show drops at midnight (or whatever-o’clock) For those who care to watch it immediately as it drops, they just need to be tuned to the star wars channel and it will come on automatically, no having to refresh and hit play. And leading up to the new episode they can do a mini marathon of relevant episodes from other star wars shows and movies that will help you understand what’s going on in the episode, maybe even create some new content summarizing content from the books, comics, and video games, etc. sort of an extended “last time on…” segment for the new episode. I’d also want it to be immediately available on-demand when it drops, but it could be kind of a good way to get yourself back up to speed about what’s going on in the show.

So there are ways this could be a cool addition to the service. Whether they actually use it that way is another matter entirely.

Fondots , 2 months ago

Just to be clear, you’re not getting downvoted because people disagree with the idea that the oil industry is a problem that’s holding back greener energy sources.

And most probably aren’t down voting because the guillotine remark being a call to violence or anything like that.

The downvotes are purely because that was a very cringy comment to read, it wasn’t funny, and it didn’t really add anything useful to the conversation.

Fondots , 2 months ago

Charcoal isn’t the same thing as regular coal

Fondots , 2 months ago

1. Welding mask, soldering doesn’t usually require any special eye protection
2. As others have said, only the darkest shades of welding glass provide adequate protection, and the ones that do are fairly uncommon, most hardware stores and even many welding supply places won’t won’t have dark enough masks or glasses on-hand normally. They may be able to order them, but don’t expect to pick them up off the shelf at your local store.

Fondots , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Yeah, in English soldering and welding are different processes, there’s also brazing, which really kind of mucks the terminology up.

I’m sure you’re probably pretty familiar with the actual processes (probably moreso than me, most of my knowledge is second-hand from growing up with my pipefitter dad and hanging out with a few welders,) but just so you know how we use the terms in English (and for anyone else who’s reading this who might be curious)

What we call soldering is a relatively low temperature process, the filler metal gets melted but not the base metal, it’s often done with a soldering iron, or regular butane, propane, or mapp gas torches, usually with no need for an oxygen torch.

Brazing is basically just hotter soldering, the base metals still aren’t getting melted, it may involve an oxygen torch, there’s also some brazing processes that use arc welders, like TIG brazing with silicon bronze filler.

For the non-welder types, you can kind of think of soldering and brazing as metal hot glue. There’s a bit more to it than that, but that’s kind of the general idea.

And welding is when the base metals are getting melted together, and it’s pretty much always going to involve either an arc-welder or oxy-acetylene torch.

Most hardware stores probably stock about a shade 10 lens, which is adequate for most common welding processes. You really only need to go higher for a handful of processes, like carbon arc welding (darker lenses may be recommended in a lot of other cases, but 10 will meet or exceed the minimum requirement in most cases)

I’ve seen some mixed information about exactly what shade is safe for viewing the sun, but they all agree that 10 isn’t adequate, I’ve seen some sources that say anything darker than 10 is ok, others say darker than 12, and still others insist on 14. It’s probably one of those things that depends a lot of factors, how long you look, how sensitive your eyes are, the weather, viewing angle, etc. I’m no expert and certainly don’t take this as legit safety advice, but I’d imagine you could probably steal some quick looks at the sun with shade 10 or so lenses without causing significant damage, but you probably don’t want to stare at the sun for a few hours for the whole duration of the eclipse.

I have seen a lot of auto darkening helmets that go up to a shade 13. So if you have one, think that’s an acceptable level of risk, and can either set it to 13 or trust it to do it automatically (I kind of suspect, though I don’t know for certain, that looking at the sun may not trigger it as reliably as looking at a weld that’s right in front of you) you can certainly try that.

I suppose there’s also the possibility that the equivalents of ANSI or OSHA or whoever sets the standards for welding lenses in your country, may use a different system or terminology than we do here in the states, which could make most of what I’m saying here largely irrelevant.

Personally I have a pair of glasses made by Phillips safety with shade 14 glass that I used for the last eclipse and will use again for this one. I certainly felt well-protected, the sun was just a dim circle in the sky. Of course the apparent brightness is only part of the issue since UV light is invisible and that’s where a lot of the real danger comes from, but a shade or two lower probably would have still made the sun comfortable to look at, though I can’t comment on the actual safety.

Fondots , 2 months ago

I don’t know the current state of things, it’s probably more than 10 years since I’ve bothered with rooting and custom rooms and such.

But back then I remember my phone company tried to make me pay extra for tethering and there were a few tricks using root to get around it. I think there were a few apps out there that would work on the stock room that needed root, and I think it just worked out of the box with a custom ROM.

IIRC, at that time, my carrier had disabled the tethering options in the phone settings, and to tether you had to use their pre-installed app. My memory may be fuzzy on that though.

Fondots , 3 months ago

I have a trip to Montreal coming up in a couple weeks, I don’t put a lot of faith in tomorrow’s forecast, let alone 2 or 3 weeks out, but right now it’s looking like theres a pretty good chance of rain for most of my trip, so I have a feeling I’m gonna be really grateful for RÉSO while I’m there.

Fondots , 3 months ago

I have no real firsthand experience making syrup, but one of my scout leaders years ago used to make his own so I picked up some bits and pieces from him.

When it comes out of the tree, it’s very watery, I’ve never had the chance to try it myself but I’m told that it’s very refreshing, and I believe it’s actually lower in sugar than something like coconut water.

Then you boil it down to concentrate it into a syrup.

And as I understand it, that’s pretty much it, I suspect at some point it maybe goes through a sieve or a filter of some kind to catch any particulates that might be in there.

I don’t know if it’s a common practice, but my scout leader had also rigged up a reverse osmosis system to cut down on how long he needed to boil it. Normally with a RO system, it puts out clean water and you throw away the concentrated waste product, but in his case the “waste” is what he wants, not quite syrup, but more concentrated maple water that requires less boiling to make syrup.

Fondots , 3 months ago

No it isn’t.

Fondots , 3 months ago

In my experience, when a dish tastes like it’s missing something, most of the time it’s acid. My go-to is a healthy squirt of yellow mustard.

Fondots , 3 months ago

Nutmeg is a criminally underutilized spice, and a little goes a long way. Damn-near everything I cook gets a little bit of nutmeg.

If what you’re cooking tastes like it’s missing something but you can’t quite put your finger on what it is, in my experience most of the time it’s acid. My go-to way to add that is with a good squirt of yellow mustard.

A little bit of cocoa powder finds its way into a lot of darker colored savory dishes like stews and such

Fondots , 3 months ago

On the other hand, they also believe that we were created in his image, so perhaps he created atoms because he himself is made of atoms.

Fondots , 3 months ago

40mph is probably a bit extreme, but “20mph, tops” is also pretty low

E bike laws, terminology, and manufacturers can be kind of a wild patchwork of nonsensical bullshit but a lot of states recognize, with some degree of regulation or restrictions, what have commonly come to be called class 3 e bikes, that can go up to 28mph, and in my shopping around I’ve seen plenty that advertise that speed or even higher.

There’s a lot of imported e bikes that play fast and loose with the regulations and their quality control, and I’m sure there’s a dedicated bunch of people tinkering with their bikes to make them go faster and remove built-in restrictions, so there’s probably a lot of people zooming around at 30+MPH

Fondots , 3 months ago

We’re probably not talking about the cute hornless domesticated puffballs you’re probably picturing when you hear “sheep,” but something more like a bighorn sheep, but honestly even a domesticated ram can be pretty intimidating.

And really, canned hunting like this aside, why not hunt sheep? They’re not all that different from a deer, probably the most popular type of game animals at least in the US if not the world. They’re both ruminate ungulates with horns growing out of their head, depending on the species they can be in roughly the same weight class as deer or even larger, and sheep can be pretty well-adapted to some environments that deer aren’t as well-suited for, so they can present more of or at least a different kind of challenge to hunters (which is part of the appeal for some hunters)

I don’t support what this guy did or the type of hunting industry he’s involved in, but hunting wild sheep isn’t exactly a novel concept, and is fairly popular in areas where wild sheep are present.

I know in the US it’s something a lot of hunters would like to do if they had the opportunity, but those opportunities are limited (and rightfully so) for conservation reasons, most states have a lottery system to get a bighorn tag because the demand for the tags well exceeds the amount of hunting the sheep population can actually sustain, meaning you often have a less than 1% chance of getting a tag the first time you apply for one, so I guess I understand the appeal of this kind of hunting as a way around the tag system for wild sheep, even if I don’t really agree with it.

Fondots , 3 months ago

I’m normally a fan of bitter and other really strong flavors, but personally most negronis are just too much for me, lengthen it out with some prosecco to make it sbagliato though and it’s a damn tasty drink.

Fondots OP , 3 months ago

Yeah, when I talk about freezing chunks of meet to thaw and slice later, I’d be cutting into 1-2lb chunks to slice as needed, not trying to thaw and refreeze a whole 5+lb log of meat.

And it’s really the quality I’m worried about, I understand it from a food safety standpoint, I’m just trying to figure out the best ways to freeze which things, don’t want to take a pack of meat out of the freezer and have it be tasteless mush or dried out or whatever.

Also the savings doing this are pretty nuts, in some cases I’m getting the whole thing for the price of just a couple pounds if I got it from the deli counter. I think I got a 6lb pastrami for about the price of what maybe 2lbs at the grocery store would have cost me, cheaper per lb than some of the cheaper lunch meats, so sadly even if I end up throwing half of it away (which is what I’m try to and so far successfully avoiding) I’m still saving money.

Fondots , 3 months ago

I don’t know how common they actually are, but I see car window breaker & seatbelt cutter gizmos being sold all over the place. I know I keep one in my car where I can easily get to it, though my car emergency kit is probably better stocked than most people’s, and most first responders also have them in their kit.

Also an automatic center punch will usually do the trick as well, it’s a fairly common tool, though in an emergency it may not be practical to go rooting through your toolbox to find one.

Fondots , 3 months ago

The US is not blameless for what is going on.

However, ultimately Israel is the country that is carrying this out, if people like Netanyahu and his cohorts weren’t pushing for this, it wouldn’t matter how much money, weapons, and other support the US gave them, this wouldn’t be happening.

If the US pulled all support, Israel could and almost definitely would press on with it, probably not as efficiently as they are currently, but still the war would continue. Maybe the US pulling support would lead to a quicker end, maybe it would just drag things out, maybe it would lead to extreme escalation with a desperate Israel choosing to use their nuclear weapons either against Hamas or against other Middle Eastern nations that choose to get involved without the US acting as a deterrent.

The US helped create the circumstances that allowed this to happen, but the fact that it is actually happening is on Israel.

Fondots , 3 months ago

For a while, there was a meme on Reddit that went “This is bullshit - you’re oversimplifying a complex situation to the point of no longer adding anything useful to the discussion.”

It was somebody’s answer to an askreddit post asking “If you could only post the same one sentence to everything you wanted to reply to on reddit, what would your sentence be?”

People like you are the reason that answer resonated with enough people to become a meme.

Fondots , 3 months ago

mental health checkups for repeat offenders

This one, I think, is particularly huge.

I work in 911 dispatch in the US, we have a lot of repeat callers, and it’s probably no surprise that a lot of them have drug, alcohol, or other mental health issues.

It happens a lot that one of them will finally do something that gets them hauled off to jail or to a psych hospital or whatever, they get out, do ok for a little while, then relapse, or stop taking their meds, or otherwise fall back into their old patterns and they’re back to causing issues for another few months, years, etc. until they again do something they can be brought in for and start the cycle again.

Making sure, in some way, that they’re following up on whatever treatment, counseling, etc. they need after they get released could be huge for a lot of them. There are some programs in place, but it can be hard to ensure they’re actually sticking to them, and of course there are usually money, time, and transportation issues they often need to overcome to stick with them as well.

Fondots , 3 months ago

I’ve made bigos a couple times, my family is polish, but we’re a few generations removed from the old country, so it wasn’t exactly part of our regular diet growing up, just something we had once or twice at the local polish church’s feast.

The first time I made it, most of the recipes I found were ridiculously plain, mostly just cabbage, sauerkraut, pork, and kielbasa stewed together without much else, which don’t get me wrong, is a damn fine meal on its own, but I kind of knew deep down there had to be more to it.

So I just kind of took what I knew about polish food and threw it all in a pot, and what I came up something really close to that Chef John recipe. I don’t think I had allspice in mine, and I threw in a jar of pickled beets and every kind of mushroom I could get my hands on, but otherwise that’s almost exactly what I came up with. I’m kind of proud of that now that I’ve seen his recipe.

If anyone has ever been curious about the perpetual stews you tend to hear about in medieval fantasy books and such, bigos is probably about as close as you can get without actually keeping a pot simmering for weeks at a time (although if you want to keep it simmering and add to it as you go, more power to you.) Historically that’s pretty much exactly what it was, whatever the local hunters showed up with went into the pot, so it’s also a pretty hard thing to screw up, there’s not exactly a wrong way to make bigos.

Fondots , 3 months ago

A lot of people are saying it’s primarily a NY thing, so I’d just chime in to say we use it in PA as well, at least in the Philly area, to refer to the northern parts of the state.

Not much more to it than youre going far enough north to be out of your city’s metro area, but staying in the same state. In PA I’d say upstate probably starts around the Poconos. I think new Yorkers kind of tend to use it to refer to the rest of the state, we wouldn’t tend to do that here, Central and Western PA are different things than Upstate PA, although there is definitely some overlap and there’s not exactly clearly defined borders.

I don’t know how many other states use the same terminology, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s pretty common in other largish states with larger population densities in the southern part of the state and lower densities in the north (I don’t know off the top of my head which other states that would apply to, maybe it’s only PA and NY)

Fondots , 3 months ago

I usually have to stop and think about it, not recalculate it but it takes a few seconds for the query to run.

I’m not big on celebrating my birthday, I just kind of check off some milestones

Old enough to drive, vote, drink, rent a car, run for president (not quite there yet, look for me on the 2028 ballot though) get an AARP membership, retire, and then that’s pretty much it, then I’ll coast the last couple of decades of my life no longer needing to know how old I am.

Fondots , 3 months ago

If your wife is the type who would want to wear a sleep mask, you could put your lights on a timer to make you up, if you have smart lights a lot of them have a feature to turn the brightness up slowly to wake you up more gently. She wouldn’t be bothered by them if she’s wearing a mask but they’d get you up.

Fondots , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

We all live with the knowledge of impending death every day, it’s something we all have in common that will come for all of us at some point.

For a lot of us, the hard thing to deal with is the uncertainty about when. We might keel over tomorrow, or even later today, but if we live our lives like that’s the case, we might screw ourselves over if we manage to live for another 70 years. We might fuck up our health, leave ourselves poor, homeless, ruin our reputations, etc.

It’s a balancing act to squeeze in as many good times while we can, while setting ourselves up to have many more good times in the future and for others to continue having good times after we’re gone. Plan too conservatively and you miss out on a lot of stuff now, but if you go completely balls to the wall now you leave yourself nothing to work with later.

Put a hard limit on things with the world ending though, and you remove a whole lot of uncertainty from the equation. You don’t have to worry about making things last, or the long-term consequences, you get to live entirely in the now, because there is no (or very little) later.

I’d rather have another 50+ years of normal good times and people to continue having that opportunity long after I’m gone, even if it means going to work, than a scant few days or hours (or whatever scenario we’re imagining in this case) of raucous debauchery, but if that’s the cards I get dealt and theres no way of changing that outcome, I can either mope about it and waste the little time I have left, or I can lean into it and make the most out of it.

From where I’m standing, anyone who’d rather mope is the one with real issues.

Fondots , 3 months ago

FWIW, I’m about as white as they come, and I’ve probably been carded more in my lifetime to buy spray paint than I have for alcohol.

It’s pretty standard practice in my area. Maybe it’s different in other places, or from one store to another, but most places around me seem to err on the side of carding everyone.