• 0 Posts
  • 67 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

help-circle


  • if its rush hour on a highway, everyone is driving under the limit.

    This might be true in a lot of places, but let me introduce a counterpoint: Los Angeles.

    We invented freeways, and I’m convinced we’ve perfected shitty traffic. Get on the 405 anytime between 6a and 10p? Gridlock, everyone is going below the speed limit. Get on basically any of our other freeways at rush hour? Yeah, that’s going to be us doing our best impression of NASCAR, driving bumper to bumper at least 10 over the speed limit.

    It’s so well known that it’s a meme at this point. Every holiday season there’s a bunch of posts on social media about visitors needing to get with the program. My favorite this year was the “stay the fuck away from the left lane” guy.

    Is it safe? Probably not. Is it reality in LA? Absolutely.




  • I don’t know why, I’m pretty sure hotdogs are more expensive per pound than ground beef at my local shop. 70/30 (which is fattier than I normally purchase) was $3/lb last time I was there, hotdogs are almost double that. Maybe that’s just a local thing?

    I think this labelling is just marketing. Given the name of the product contains “hamburger” they can assume anyone buying it already knows they can add ground beef. I think they just added hotdogs to the label to give people ideas about other proteins they can use.

    It’s been decades since I’ve eaten Hamburger Helper, but I recall liking it more with hotdogs.




  • You sound reasonable, and I don’t have all the information, but maybe I can play devil’s advocate.

    Suppose your friend is actually a good dad, and is using his time without his kids around to catch up with his friends, listen to what’s topical in your life, and then do something other than talk about his kids?

    This is a non-rhetorical good faith question: should kids be the sole focus of their parent’s lives once they have them?

    I agree that kids need to be the top priority once people have them, no question there. But aren’t parents allowed to have lives of their own as well?

    I don’t have kids and I’m at the age where most of my friends have them. The folks I knew whose only focus was on their kids gradually phased out of the group. Many of those people ended up divorced unfortunately. The parents I see regularly spend most of their time on their kids, but also have hobbies and interests outside of just kid stuff.

    People who have their own lives in addition to being good parents seem to be happier and more well rounded. It also makes connecting with them easier for people without kids. I’m up to date on their kids, go to birthdays, and occasionally babysit. We have kid friendly dinners at each other’s homes, go camping with kids, etc… But we also go out once in awhile without them, catch games, play golf.

    I feel like that’s healthier.



  • The apocryphal story is actually kind of interesting.

    Roads and right of way established during the pre-firearm era were that you’d ride on the left, with people going the opposite way on your right. This was so you could use your dominant hand (usually your right) to use a sword to defend yourself.

    Roads after firearms were available often established right of way with riding on the right, with oncoming traffic on the left. This is because when you shoulder a firearm on your right shoulder it’s easier to aim left.

    Stagecoach drivers would sit in the left seat, with the extra person sitting on the right, holding a shotgun, hence the colloquial term for the front passenger seat.

    I have no idea how true this is, but it makes for an interesting story.



  • Again, you make some great points, especially about profit motive and lack of strong consumer rights.

    If I want a smoker I can monitor on the fly I will look at something like that thermometer paired with a standard steel smoker that will last decades.

    When I’m not going old school with my stick burner I run a Yoder YS640S with a Fireboard controller. The Yoder is an extremely high quality pellet smoker which given proper maintenance will last longer than I’ll be alive. It and the Fireboard are designed, built, and shipped from the US (where I live), which is also nice. I don’t know exactly how Fireboard runs their cloud services, but from looking at the privacy policy and sniffing the unit’s traffic (a few years ago) it looks like Google Cloud and Analytics. They also disclose that if you use the Fireboard outside of the US, that your data will be stored and processed in the US, which is interesting, but may be misleading.

    Fireboard is an interesting company, they started out by making temperature monitors and blowers for retrofitting into home built smokers, which I think is pretty cool.

    I had a fire unrelated to my smoker which destroyed the smart bits of the Yoder, and both Yoder and Fireboard customer support were excellent to work with to help me rebuild my smoker.

    I’m not stanning for either of these companies, perhaps just explaining why I’ve opted to make some tradeoffs for the convenience this particular product offers.

    If I need to adjust it remotely I will look at why I need this option first: is it realistic that I would just adjust it without checking the contents?

    Yes. I’m primarily looking at internal temp curves. Sometimes that prompts a simple pit temp change, sometimes it means I need to interact with the contents like spraying or wrapping. I’ve cooked often enough on this unit to know what the contents look like and how they react to smoke given the internal and pit temp curves.

    Generally speaking I agree with your take on garbage consumer products being designed to extract money from the consumer before crapping out early and being thrown away. I think I’ve done well to select the products I have to keep that from being the reality with my pellet smoker.




  • Having itchy palms because of an allergy might happen commonly in terms of a large population, but it is not common to have this condition. If it happens to you then you should get it looked at instead of biting them. This is the correct and acceptable response. Putting your hands in your mouth and using your teeth because something is wrong with your palms does not need to be normalized.

    If people have itchy palms for any reason, I’m not shaming them. I’m pointing out that putting your hands in your mouth is strange.



  • People have itchy palms? Itchy enough that they bite them?

    That’s fucking weird.

    That’s literally never happened to me, it sounds super strange. Are y’all putting stuff on your hands that’s tearing up your skin? Do you moisturize regularly?

    I have sensitive skin, but spend a lot of time in a kitchen with wet hands. Unscented soap to wash my hands about a dozen times a day, and unscented moisturizer to keep my skin from cracking. I’ll use a thicker waxy moisturizer during the winter when it’s really dry out.

    I use my hands for weightlifting and golf, so I have to manage my callouses, and in the kitchen I’ll pick up various small cuts and burns. My hands don’t look perfect but they’ve never… itched?


  • That makes sense.

    The last time we had a power issue and I was at my desktop I didn’t get any GUI notifications of the outage, so that’s a miss.

    However the incessant beeping coming from every APC in the house was enough to tell me that stuff was about to go really sideways 😂 I was able to manually power down my desktop before the systemd stuff kicked in.


  • That sucks!

    I’m on Ubuntu, which I admit is not a popular option around here. But when my power goes out I use apcupsd and a network component to alert my attached or networked Ubuntu machines. When the power first goes out all of my non-essential machines automatically shut down gracefully. When the backup batteries get low enough (I have several separate APC units around the house) my essential machines also shut down automatically.

    When the power comes back up one of my machines automatically powers up and runs a few checks before turning most of my other stuff back on.

    I have very few power issues which last long enough for my batteries to run out, but when I do the only evidence is a few alerts and the fact that I have to log back into everything. All of my windows restore on my GUI machines, and no filesystem issues occur. It’s more seamless than when I ran Windows, granted that was 25 years ago.

    I’m similarly not a fan of systemd, but for backup battery and power management it seems to do the trick.