It's really simple when you think about it, the taste of any fermentation is going to be the taste of what you put into it minus any of the sugars. Maple syrup is sugar and the liquid extract from a tree. So once you remove the sugar, all you have left is alcohol and the liquid extract from a tree.
It's actually one of the reasons that I think my need made from honey turned out to be so lovely, is once you take the sugar out of honey what you're left with is extract from flowers.
It wasn't a terrible idea, but I tried to make maple syrup mead, and it tasted exactly like breaking a branch off of a tree and trying to suck it. Like, that green tree taste. Complete waste of some very expensive maple syrup.
The d day level of medal of honor was a serious moment. It's like "yeah, you keep dying and it's frustrating. You're watching all these other people die. But that's what it was actually like."
There was a moment where I had made it to the buildings and looked back and saw my brothers in arms being mowed down and it's a different experience than seeing it on TV.
It seems like the thing to do if you don't use printers is to erase the cups packages from your system to close that port. Not sure it's even patched yet.
It's actually pretty decent as a generic 90s square RPG, but fails miserably as a sequel or even as an addition to the Chrono trigger universe to the point that I'm pretty sure most people just pretend there was never another entry in the Chrono series.
I always figured slime is a story about the power of friendship, so sometimes you need some chatting around a table because friends don't just use demon lord powers on each other all the time.
One thing is that education isn't the same globally. You should probably have an other option to account for that.
Then you say "this argument doesn't exist."
And it replies "you're right! That argument has never been a part of package x. I've updated the argument to fix it:" and then gives you the exact same bleedin command....
Turns out trying to capture a gas from the air at the scale of gigatonnes is really really hard.
Industrial scale power requires massive destruction of nature. That's the nature of trying to light and heat millions of homes, especially in the winter. The question must become what is the least harmful most effective thing to do. It isn't as simple as "solar farms and wind farms" since you have to heat and light those homes when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. "Batteries!" Sure but the environmental devastation from having to build battery banks that large would be overwhelming, not to mention having to size your solar and wind to provide all the province's power while the sun shines and wind blows meaning there'd be way more than you expect, and then after 30 years you'd have to do it all over again because the batteries, windmills, and solar panels would all have to be replaced.
Water looks nice when it's at a scale that can't power anything too. In fact, even small enough scale fossil fuels don't look that bad. The problem is when you make it big enough to actually provide all the energy you need. One big reason why "reduce" is the most important thing we can do.
The job numbers have been revised in a downward direction pretty consistently[1]. The year over year numbers from the BLS were revised massively downwards a few weeks ago, by 800,000 jobs.[2]
Just remember that of the last 12 months, there's been something like 11 downward revisions. The bureau of Labor statistics has been doing an abysmal job with its preliminary numbers.
I'm not saying to completely disregard the data, but in a previous month I ended up making the mistake of listening to some of the old podcasts I used to listen to from NPR and APM regarding money, and I don't remember which one but one of them was just going on and on about how good the numbers were with absolutely no mention of the fallibility of those numbers.
It actually saved my life a few months back, I had a dying windows server I needed to resurrect and the tools on there were perfect for it.
I wonder if North Korea inherited the concept of the mandate of heaven?
Hirens boot cd is a great tool if you're working with windows. You are not always going to need it, but when you do need it it's awfully nice to have it.
Anyone who owned doom 1 and doom 2 got a new item in their steam or gog library with damn near everything included including stuff like sigil and a new episode they just made.
There's a new doom 2 RTX mod that clips into that version and it combines ray tracing with voxel art to give the most impressive raycast doom 2 I've imagined so far. Well worth a look especially since it's free for a lot of gamers.
I picked up an Amiga at a yard sale and found floppy disks on Amazon. I didn't bother buying any and instead bought a gotek floppy disk emulator.
One of the key bits of fermentation is that the conditions need to be pretty close to perfect for yeast to be a dominant Factor. You need to have a relatively sterile environment, you definitely need to make sure that there's nothing else competing, and you need to make sure that you're within certain factors of things like acidity. Stomach acid has a pH of 1-2, most brewable juices are closer to 3-4.
Some microbes do end up surviving the journey through your stomach, and they become the microbiome inside of you. I think that brewer's yeast would find that environment extremely challenging more than the stomach even because that microbiome is like skid row, filled with the dregs of the food you eat. The spoiled rich kid brewers yeast isn't going to thrive in that environment.
Consider a piece of advice from cider brewing: you are sometimes told if you don't have yeast to just juice the fruit without washing it and natural yeast on the fruit will grow in your cider and if you're successful it'll taste better than beer brewer's yeast. This shows that yeast is everywhere and it's on many things we might routinely eat and people aren't going around naturally drunk after eating an apple off a tree or some berries off a bush.
From a non-partisan standpoint, we're cutting it really close. Most alarm lights that haven't had masking tape put over them by the government are screaming imminent stagflationary depression, maybe one of the worst in American History, and everyone with eyes and basic math skills can see the looming sovereign debt crisis. Nobody wants to be holding this hot potato because whoever is in power at that time is almost certainly going to preside over a disaster and there's nothing to be done about it.
From a totally non-partisan standpoint, Kamala Harris is a terrible candidate for President. She speaks to the American Public like they're 4 year olds, her record as Vice President is basically free real estate for the Republicans, she was the least liked vice president in US history, her only primary campaign was the weakest of all the Democrats on stage with her dropping out first, There are better people within the Democratic party to run, but they didn't and they aren't -- instead they installed Kamala more or less by fiat. I think part of the reason for that is they're not stupid and they know full well winning the next election is a phyrric victory, and whoever is president during that term is effectively ending their political career so might as well let the weakest candidate either lose and end her career or win and end her career. In so doing, they keep their powder dry for the next viable election cycle.
Notwithstanding concerns that Trump will try to crown himself dictator (concerns that I think the conservative response to January 6th prove unfounded -- conservatives want to conserve the constitution and violating that would not go over well), he's only got one term left as president, and he's getting quite old so this is probably his last kick at the can so regardless of whether the party wants to win or not, he clearly does. He seems to be going all-in on a big tent strategy this time, which is why he's brought former democrats like RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard into the fold and adopted compromise positions on wedge issues such as abortion. Personally, as long as he retains his core identity and brand, I think it's a winning strategy, insofar as such a thing can exist.
US Jobs revised Downward by the BLS by more than 800,000 jobs
https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesprelbmk.htm
It's good to be federated.
To an extent. As I mentioned, some redditors are really too interested in having an enemy to fight, so hopefully we can get some cool people over without attracting the nutjobs who see 1945 germans everywhere.
3d printed laundry hamper repair
Short side hamper handle from the top:
https://social.fbxl.net/media/c06e0e29294d96565b1b189f3bde757486e4af9d79cb92ab3387419f5a802f4b.jpg
Long side hamper handle from the bottom:
https://social.fbxl.net/media/9890d325f4126ae3d58d94435392bff91c44b5f6b557e39a97bf5e16f891b1c7.jpg
I always enjoy prints that just become part of our lives (and especially ones that let us keep using something that's going to the landfill otherwise)
The hamper has handles that break. For most people I think that'd be time to replace it. I didn't want to do that, so I designed a new handle based on the handle on the short end. This ended up being a mistake later, I'll explain then.
I printed 2 handles (the connection between the two is just to make the printing work better since it can print the two pieces as one piece, then I just snap the two apart and clean up the spot they were connected)
I used my rotary tool to remove the remnants of the original handles. I should have used the cutting tool but I had the diamond grinder so I used that. It worked fine, I was able to fully remove the old material. A quick test fit confirmed that the handle design was pretty good (I just used a tape measure for the measurements so this was a real potential problem)
I went to the long side, but realized that the design of the hamper was different lengthwise than widthwise. I removed a couple tabs that were going to block the new handle, and instead of putting it in as designed, I just put it sideways, which fit.
I put the two in and added gorilla glue. Gorilla glue requires water to foam up, so I wet all the parts. Now everything is fitted, the glue is in, and it's just drying now. I'd consider this repair a success, and I expect the strong PLA part to give the whole hamper a lot more stiffness at those parts, and there's significantly more material in these spots that break. If the other two handles break, I'll just print two more, and at that point I can't help but think that the hamper will be bulletproof.
Solutions to the server-centric nature of the fediverse
Link aggregators have a problem on the fediverse. The approach is server-centric, which has positives, but it also has major negatives.
The server-centric approach is where a community belongs to a certain server and everything in the world revolves around that server.
The problem is that it's a centralized formula that centralizes power in a the hands of a whichever servers attract the most users, and potentially breaks up what might be a broader community, and makes for a central point of failure.
Right now, if [email protected] and [email protected] talk on [email protected] then a lot of things can happen to break that communication. if c.com defederates b.com then the communication will not happen. If c.com breaks then the communication will not happen. If c.com shuts down then the communication will not happen. If c.com's instance gets taken over by management that doesn't want person1 and person2 to talk, then the communication will not happen.
Another problem is that [email protected] and [email protected] might never meet, because they might be on [email protected] and [email protected]. This means that a community that could reach critical mass to be a common meeting place would not because it's split into a bunch of smaller communities.
Mastodon has servers going up and down all the time, and part of the reason it's able to continue functioning as a decentralized network is that as long as you're following people on a wide variety of servers then one server going down will stop some users from talking but not all of them so the system can continue to operate as a whole. By contrast, I'm posting this to one server, and it may be seen by people on a wide variety of servers, but if the one server I'm posting this to goes down the community is destroyed.
There are a few ways to solve the problem...
one method could work as something like a specific "federated network community". There would be a local community, and the local community would federate (via local mods, I presume) with communities on other instances creating a specific metacommunity of communities on many instances that could federate with other activitypub enabled communities, and if any of the federated communities go down the local community remains. If any servers posed problems they could cease being followed, and in the worst case a community could defederate totally from a server (at a community level rather than a server level) In that case, [email protected] and [email protected] could be automatically linked up once both connect to [email protected] (I'm thinking automatic linking could be a feature mods could turn off and on for highly curated communities), and if c.com shuts down or defederates with one of the two, [email protected] and [email protected] would continue to be able to talk through their federated network.
Another method would be something more like hashtags for root stories, but I don't know how server-server links would be accomplished under a platform like lemmy, kbin, or lotide. I don't know how hashtags migrate on mastodon type software and how that migrates. In that case, it might be something like peertube where a network is established by admins (or users, I don't know) connecting to other servers manually.
Finally, I think you could implement the metacommunity without changing the entire fediverse by having the software auto-aggregate metacommunities. You could create a metacommunity community1 on a.com that would then automatically aggregate all posts on communities called community1 on all known servers. The potential downside of this is you could end up with a lot of noise with 100 posts of the same story, I haven't thought much about how you could handle duplicates so you could participate but wouldn't have 100 similar posts. In this case with respect to how to handle new posts, each metacommunity would be a local community and new individual posts would be posted locally and federated to users on other metacommunities. If metacommunities of this sort became the norm, then the duplicates problem may be solved organically because individuals using metacommunities would see the posts on other metacommunities and wouldn't bother reposting the same story, much like how people see a story and don't repost in individual communities.
One big problem is scaling, doing something like this would definitely be a non-trivial in terms of load per community. Right now if one person signs up to one community, they get a lot of posts from one server. Under a metacommunity idea like this, if one person signs up to one community, they get a lot of posts from many, many servers. lemmy.world has 5967 total instances connected to it, and 2155 instances running lemmy, lotide, kbin, mbin, or friendica that could contain similar types of community, that's a lot of communities to follow for the equivalent of one single community, especially if some of the communities in the metacommunity have a lot of traffic in that community. You'd have to look at every known server to first see if it exists and second if it has a community appropriate for the metacommunity, and the metacommunity would have to routinely scan for dead hosts to remove from the metacommunity and live hosts that may start to see an appropriate metacommunity has been created.
I'm sure there are other solutions, but I'm just thinking of how things work within my current understanding.
Of course, for some people, the problem is one they don't want solved because it isn't a problem in their view (and that's a legit view even if it's one I'm not really amenable to). Some people prefer smaller communities, or want tighter control over their communities. For servers or communities that don't want to be brought into a metacommunity, it seems like some sort of flag to opt-out (or opt-in as the case may be) should be designed in -- I'm thinking something in the community description like a textflag NOMC or YESMC that server software would be designed to respect.
With respect to moderation, It seems to me that you could have a variety of strategies -- you could have a sort of default accept all moderation where if one instance moderates a post other instances take on the same action, or whitelist moderation where if one instance or one set of moderators on a whitelist take an action then other instances take the same action, or a sort of republican moderation where if a certain number of instances take an action then other instances take the same action, and probably an option for individual metacommunities to only accept moderation from the local community the original post came from. I suspect you'd want a choice in the matter per metacommunity instance on a server.
I guess kind of obvious when I say it but I'm going to say it anyway (fixed a nextcloud error message)
Anyone who knows me knows that I've been using next cloud forever, and I fully endorse anyone doing any level of self hosting should have their own. It's just a self-hosted Swiss army knife, and I personally find it even easier to use than something like SharePoint.
I had a recurring issue where my logs would show "MYSQL server has gone away". It generally wasn't doing anything, but occasionally would cause large large file uploads to fail or other random failures that would stop quickly after.
The only thing I did is I went in and doubled wait_timeout in my /etc/mysql/mariadb.conf.d/50-server.cnf
After that, my larger file uploads went through properly.
It might not be the best solution but it did work so I figured I'd share.
Machine Thinking - Origins of Precision
https://youtu.be/gNRnrn5DE58?si=VTrpcfDDDukItwCH
It's an older video, but I really enjoyed it and found it really thought provoking. Precision is something we take for granted but as this video shows it's something that was incredibly difficult to get to where we are.
Just noticed yesterday pfsense upgrade to 2.7.0 was out
Apparently it's been out since June and I just never realized, but there's a new pfsense out.
https://www.netgate.com/blog/pfsense-2.7.0-and-23.05
Not exactly timely, but I bet I'm not the only one who easily forgets about that particular thing. Most of my stuff is set to autoupdate so I tend to forget.
The upgrade downloaded a large number of packages, I think about 160, during which network connectivity continued to function. After downloading, my router PC reset, and that first boot after the upgrade took quite a few minutes. I ended up running the 90 second timer out after which it reset to 20 seconds a number of times. I was just about to start digging for an HDMI cable to see what when I heard the router beep and my internet came back. Perfect upgrade, didn't need to fix anything afterwards.
Change to my nginx config that seemed to help my lemmy and lotide installs
So both lemmy and lotide were having big problems where they'd get totally overwhelmed, especially once I started federating with huge instances. At first I thought it was because my servers aren't very powerful, but eventually I got the idea that maybe it's because it can't keep up with federation data from the big instances.
So I decided to limit the connections per IP address. Long-term testing isn't done yet, but so far both my lemmy and lotide instances aren't getting crushed when they're exposed to the outside world, so I think it's helping.
In /etc/nginx/nginx.conf, under the http section, I added the line "limit_conn_zone $binary_remote_addr zone=conn_limit_per_ip:10m;"
Then, in my sites-available folder for the services, I added "limit_conn conn_limit_per_ip 4;" or something similar. Both lemmy and lotide have different sections for ActivityPub and API, so it appears I can limit the connections just to those parts of the site.
It's only been a few days, but whereas before both instances would die randomly pretty quickly once exposed to the outside world, now it appears that they're both stable. Meanwhile, I'm still getting federated posts and comments.
Lost Ethiopian town comes from an ancient empire that rivalled Rome
I have a feeling that there's a lot of history that will be uncovered in Africa, particularly as many countries on the continent get richer and have the resources for stuff like archaeologists to learn more about the past.
In my recent history kick it was really frustrating the black hole of African history (besides the egyptians, obviously). But we're learning more about stuff like Ethiopian civilization, and obviously Great Zimbabwe, what else is out there buried waiting to be found?
My review of beowulf, written in the style of beowulf
A tale of Beowulf, Bairn of Ecgthew aethling of the Geats, firey focus of fable. Victories many, bought with bounty of blood. Twin monsters, Grendel's mother and her child in the Scylding's land, brought low by sin Time's riverbed, flows fleetingly fast Until old king Beowulf, Bairn of Ecgthew starcross'd lord, dreaded day of his death faced a dragon, and greatest of god's Geats slew it quickly, protecting his land.
Ancient tale, fable of forefathers of ancient prose, dense deep and dire. Modern readers, ancient knowledge gone will struggle much, History held in the heorot cannot help them, since a heorot they lack. thus unendowed, no strength for sound struggle Will then fail, no meaning to them.
Knowledge of the past, if that ye seek so ye desire, long lost lore read knowing well, a challenging battle Hazy and difficult, to enlighten yourself but expect not, golden rings from the lord facing the challenge, of this ancient tale.
Antarctic midge (Belgica antarctica) is the continent's only true insect, and has the smallest genome
The ice-living Antarctic midge has the smallest insect genome ever sequenced, perhaps because of its extremophile lifestyle.
https://www.livescience.com/47311-antarctic-insect-smallest-genome.html
The Visual Cliff Psychology Experiment | Plainly Difficult Documentary
Learn with Plainly Difficult! The Visual Cliff is an experimental apparatus to see if children are born with the innate ability to be scared of heights, the experiment joins a long line of child psychological testing, similar to Donald and Gua, the Bobo Doll and the Little Albert studies........ T...
https://invidious.fbxl.net/watch?v=oK1UgqHz7_U
A relevant passage from The Graysonian Ethic: "In a lot of ways you do not realize, the human race is entirely defined by our biology. Many of your deepest-rooted fears and ambitions are written into your blood, in a library that was passed down by millions of generations of successful creatures going all the way back to the single celled organisms that first spawned within the primordial ooze."
John Reber had a plan: to dam the San Francisco Bay. He convinced some politicians - and it took the US Army Corps of Engineers, and the Bay Model they built in Sausalito, to prove him not just wrong, but dangerously wrong. Thanks to all the team at the Bay Model! You can find out more here: http:/...
https://invidious.fbxl.net/watch?v=i70wkxmumAw
Good science is humble, and is often wrong, and admits it. This is a really cool story about that.
The Saccorhytus looks somewhat like a spikey jelly bean with pursed lips and is described by the University of Bristol as "resembling an angry Minion."
https://m.jpost.com/science/article-715147/
The Saccorhytus looks somewhat like a spikey jelly bean with pursed lips and is described by the University of Bristol as "resembling an angry Minion."
Wii Mini holder I set up in my living room
https://lotide.fbxl.net/api/stable/posts/11405/href
This is a little project I worked on over the weekend once I realized that my Wii mini, which I previously didn't think could be very useful for me, could be set up with the homebrew channel using the bluebomb exploit.
I own a nes mini, snes mini, and playstation mini, and they're all neat toys, but the problem with all of them is that I can't really use them in my living room. The TV is mounted on the wall fairly high up, and I don't have a shelf or anything, and I don't feel like running 100 feet of USB cables all over the place just because I might want to play some super nintendo games once a year.
The Wii was a nice solution by itself. It's small, and you can plug a classic controller into the wiimote so you can play games wirelessly and tuck them into a basket for the 364 days you're not playing wii games.
The Wii mini is different from the Wii in that it's a much simpler device. It doesn't have an SD card slot, it doesn't have a wifi transciever, it can't use Ethernet at all in its unmodified form. Also, the device doesn't have a frontloading DVD drive like the wii, instead it has a top loading DVD drive like the original playstation, so you can't just simply bolt it to the wall with a piece of wood or strap or plastic like you could with a Wii, because you won't be able to open the DVD drive. Being able to run homebrew was the final straw that made the project viable and interesting.
My solution ended up being very simple: The sides of the wii mini are at an angle and come to a point. I measured the dimensions of that angle and created a wall mounted bracket, then printed 3 of them in PLA.
A standard Wii has many mounting brackets available since the Wii was the most popular game console of that generation, but the wii mini was a last gasp and so it isn't really popular and there aren't really options out there, so this is a perfect solution for home manufacturing.
I realized that the tolerances required to hold the wii mini using these was extremely tight, so I used a piece of lined paper to create a template by putting the Wii into its mounts sitting on the table, then I used a felt marker to mark drill holes. Even so, it wasn't as precise as I'd hoped, and I also had an issue with the anchors I used. I've used plastic screw in anchors on a few other projects and it wasn't a problem, but these anchors absolutely hated my living room wall, so that became way more complicated than I would have liked. It does work, but it's not perfect.
If I were to design something like this again, I would remove the requirement to perfectly mount the anchors by printing a piece of plastic holding the three pieces in the exact spot so I didn't need to mount them perfectly. I would probably try to make it a hangable holder so I could just put a couple hangers on the wall and hang the wii holder off of it rather than try to drill securely into the wall.
Regardless, it does work as you can see, and I'm happy enough with the results. My favorite prints are the ones that quietly become a permanent part of my life, and this is a great example of that. The Wii is being held behind my TV, hidden but accessible.
Impact of COVID-19 social isolation measures on early development
According to this study, contrary to other studies I've read, abilities may have improved rather than gotten worse during the pandemic because parents spent more time with their kids.
Of course there needs to be more work done, but I wanted to post this because it's important not to ignore research that contradicts our notions.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/02/220207083421.htm
Tom Stanton
This guy does a lot of neat stuff. I watched a few electric bike videos he did where he tried building e-bikes with various features.
Tools I use to make Windows 10 work for me
The first thing I use is Windows 10 decrapifier.
To use this, open up Powershell ISE as an administrator, and paste the script into a new editor window, then run it. It will automatically remove all the garbage Windows 10 installs by default. It works pretty well with Windows 11 as well.
https://community.spiceworks.com/scripts/show/4378-windows-10-decrapifier-18xx-19xx-2xxx
Next, O&O Shutup10
This tool shuts down a lot of the different telemetry stuff to keep windows 10 your own. It also works with Windows 11.
https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
Finally, I like to install OpenShell, a start menu replacement for Windows 10. Right now it doesn't easily work on Windows 11, I use Start11 on windows 11. Openshell doesn't just replace the start menu with a windows 7 style start menu, it reimplements search so the search works much better and doesn't rely on windows search service.
https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu
Here's a bonus tip that only applies to Windows 11: If you use the open source tool rufus to create your installation media, you can tell rufus to create installation media that bypasses all the new TPM requirements. I have a computer capable of running windows 11, but I don't want to give them access to my TPM, I don't want secure boot, I don't want any of this stuff. I want to run my computer the way I want to, and this install media allows that. You lose some minor features here and there.
https://rufus.ie/en/
Cutting using an angle grinder using the "plunge technique" vs. the "gouge technique"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hid9bDnSeok
He had an idea that the one technique would be better for the disk, but he had no idea how much better. Really surprising results.