Month: January 2019

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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sundxwn:

 

slepaulica:

brin-bellway:

slepaulica:

brin-bellway:

live-vibe:

Landscape blog here

Thank you, Sean Bagshaw!

(Interesting that the original picture is more purple than this version. I think I actually like this one better; it seems more ethereal. Anyway, I’ve encountered too many artists’ complaints and PSAs to dare reblog sourceless art.)

thank you for finding source!

Google search-by-image can be very helpful. I’m pretty sure every one of those PSAs I’ve seen had a section on Google Is Your Friend (Also Our Friend) (But WeHeartIt Is Not Friendly). After a few repetitions it sunk in.

usually when i add stuff to my queue, it needs to be a fairly quick operation or i lose interest. but i support the concept of finding sources. and will try to do it when i can. if the internet isn’t co-operating (sometimes i can access some websites but not others), it can be too much.

Note: source link is now rotten, but still available through Wayback [link].

(While I was not the one who submitted it, I *have* been applying my new linking policy [link] retroactively where possible.  (There’s a reason my Dreamwidth’s subtitle is “now with 50% more Internet Archive”.))

Tags:

#(February 2014) #conversational aglets #pretty things #flowers

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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slepaulica:

brin-bellway:

slepaulica:

asapscience:

How many digits of π do you know?

I’m a dick!

…I was under the impression that “3.14159265” was the amount you couldn’t help but learn just by living in a culture where the concept of pi is this well-known. Certainly while I remember learning “358” and a little later “9793238” (circa age ten or eleven; I was reading Muse magazine and they had a bit on pi, and I was like “oh hey, more pi digits! that ‘979323’ is a nice pattern, I bet it would be easy to memorise. think I’ll throw in one more while I’m at it”), I don’t remembering learning the first…do you count from before or after the decimal point? Anyway, I don’t remember learning the part in my first sentence because I was so young.

(I suppose it’s not that surprising, really. I frequently have trouble telling the difference between common knowledge and stuff I happened to pick up on the way.)

Most people stop at 3.14. I used 31415926 as the pin for my old phone (I can say this now because it’s not the pin for my current phone and is not a current pin or password for anything). it seemed reasonably secure because most people just picked four digit pins and a random pickpocket probably wouldn’t guess that I had those digits memorised.

and the 535 8 979 323 is a neat pattern too (though the 8 in the middle kinda ruins it)

Tags:

#(February 2014) #conversational aglets #math #my childhood

Windows 7 is going away, please get used to Windows 10

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

ms-demeanor:

The sale of non-Professional OEM licences was stopped on October 31, 2014. Mainstream support for 7 ended on January 13, 2015. Extended support will end on January 14, 2020. On September 7, 2018, Microsoft announced that Windows 7 will get three more years of support after January 14, 2020 if users pay for the Extended Security Updates (ESU) service, however this only applies to users of the Professional and Enterprise editions of Windows 7.

I have customers ask every day if I can get them a computer with Windows 7.

NO.

NO I CANNOT.

I CANNOT BECAUSE YOU’RE GOING TO BE PISSED IF I SELL YOU A COMPUTER THAT LOSES SUPPORT FOR ITS OPERATING SYSTEM NEXT YEAR.

Microsoft fucked up so bad with 8. They fucked up so bad with the early release of 10. People are *STILL* hesitant to move to the “new” operating system (that was released three and a half years ago).

Windows 7 came out in 2009. It’s officially 10 years old.

Do any of y’all remember what a clusterfuck it was when Microsoft ended support for XP? Hell, I still get people in here with XP computers once in a while and every time it happens we have to treat them like they’re radioactive and totally isolate them from everything else in the shop. It’s a nightmare. People refuse to walk away from it.

Anyway, you’ve got ONE YEAR to learn how to use Windows 10 or to teach the stubborn luddites in your life to use Windows 10 before 7 is gone for good.

PLEASE. Start now. It’ll be better than if you wait until support is gone.

 

discoursedrome:

Oh hey, I hadn’t heard that you could pay for 3 more years of Windows support. That at least is good news.

But yeah, it’s bleak. I set my parents up with Windows 10, but for myself I’m just going to march off into the darkness and never be seen again, because fuck that business model. I’ll get a Mint box or some shit, I dunno.

 

discoursedrome:

we updated to windows 10 at work, because they’re terrified of moving away from windows despite the fact that microsoft obviously doesn’t give half a shit about enterprise clients anymore, and seeing all the lock screen popup ads urging me to buy Microsoft products at the Microsoft store with my Microsoft points – which I can’t do because it’s all firewalled off anyway – definitely makes me feel like a serious respectable professional

 

collapsedsquid:

How can they not be interested in selling an OS to businesses?  They’re fucking around with Office too, that should be basically guaranteed money.  What the hell is going on with them?

 

ms-demeanor:

IT’S FUCKING AWFUL.

And from the VAR/Reseller/Partner side they give zero solitary fucks. 

They’re gearing up for a complete pivot to running cloud software on someone else’s platform. They’re not backing the PC market anymore (I know this is very tinfoil of me but that’s what it looks like). Their big flagship hardware shit right now is the surface, they’ looking at tablets and going “hey what if we had shit locked down like Apple has for the last few decades and were able to force updates so we didn’t have to worry about backwards compatibility” 

And here’s the deal: I GET IT. 

But I think that there’s still a reasonable use for desktops and laptops instead of just tablets and phones. And enterprise is for sure one of the places you’d think they were trying to push it!

But no, look at the sorts of shit laptops on offer these days; everything’s going to super fucking simple, low storage, ultra-flimsy bullshit at three hundred dollars a pop, they’ve got just enough balls that they can outcompete a chromebook but not enough to get a student through college.

A decent enterprise desktop or laptop is *ridiculously* expensive compared to the consumer shit. Just a basic-ass i5 with 8GB RAM and a 500GB HDD and Pro license is costing me around $700 and *that’s me as a reseller before we apply our mark-up.* A laptop with similar specs and a three-year warranty with a Windows Pro 10 is a thousand dollars.

SHIT IS FUCKED UP. 

And, hey, funfact: Amazon is such a giant clusterfuck of a thing that we’ve been forced to stop buying from our normal vendors and go through Prime Business because it saves us 50-100 per desktop. 

Oh it’s also super common to only have one part number stocked at vendor warehouses, everything even slightly different (did you want an SSD? did you want more ram from the factory?) takes 2-4 weeks to get shipped from the manufacturer. 

The industry got real fuckin weird in the last two years. 

 

ms-demeanor:

#nah i cant use windows 10  #im just going to switch entirely to linux  #at least that doesnt have inherent migraine features                                                             

If you use any open source OS you are valid and I have zero issue with how you’re doing things, THANK YOU.

God I wish more people would open source. Because Windows 10 is shit and full of ads and I fucking hate it, I just know it’s going to be less of a big throbbing point of entry in 2020 than 7 is. 

 

discoursedrome:

god at work a significant portion of the workforce has been doing this slow, awkward pivot back to, in essence, dumb terminals sharing access to a mainframe. Like the mainframe is “the cloud” or whatever so in theory it’s scalable, but in practice scaling it costs money and getting somebody to sign off on that is unthinkable, and they’re setting us up with drastically less of everything than we actually need because they got sold a bunch of magic beans by salespeople and they have no real information on peak and normal resource usage since up until now everyone had individual machines like a modern workforce in an era of cheap general-purpose computing devices

so we have that going on, and then on top of that half the sales-oriented business software we’re locked into for stupid enterprise reasons is now serving everyone pop-ups about, like, Livejournal adoptables or whatever the fuck

 

rustingbridges:

Wait win10 has ads built in? tbh people are always complaining about it but I’ve never figured on why. Although I pretty much boot windows directly to steam and don’t do anything else in it so

 

brin-bellway:

>>A decent enterprise desktop or laptop is *ridiculously* expensive compared to the consumer shit. Just a basic-ass i5 with 8GB RAM and a 500GB HDD and Pro license is costing me around $700 and *that’s me as a reseller before we apply our mark-up.* A laptop with similar specs and a three-year warranty with a Windows Pro 10 is a thousand dollars.<<

…

*looks at own laptop, which was originally built for the business market, has i7 and 8GB RAM and 500GB HDD and came with Windows 10 Pro, and which I bought on eBay for USD$250 + import costs*

?!

(admittedly, it was apparently well over a thousand bucks when it was new in 2011 [link], but like, that was then)

—

>>Wait win10 has ads built in? tbh people are always complaining about it but I’ve never figured on why. Although I pretty much boot windows directly to steam and don’t do anything else in it so<<

Same. (Well, that and Audacity, because my Linux Audacity gets stuck on the loading screen (and the loading screen *remains visible even if you kill the process, I have to reboot to get rid of it*) and I haven’t figured out how to fix it yet.)

(The more time goes on for both me and technology, the less use I have for non-Linux laptops. Back in the day, I told Dad I would switch to Linux if they could figure out a way to fix the lack of Shockwave support. Remember when Shockwave was a thing?)

Also I do get that people were complaining about the increase in Microsoft spyware, and come to think of it I think I saw a Candy Crush ad once or twice on my way to Steam/Audacity.

 

rustingbridges:

A 7 year old consumer system will cost you approximately $0, so on that count the comparison still stands.

But I feel like the important thing to note is that it’s not like good hardware has gotten expensive, it’s just that consumers can now get by with cheap hardware, which is a big win imo.

Your audacity problem sounds quite strange – do you know if it’s leaving behind an x window or a spare process, or is it an issue with the window manager or something?

Come to think of it, I really have no idea what the built-for-consumer laptop markets are like, and have only the vaguest awareness of their existence. Almost every laptop I’ve ever had, and certainly every laptop I’ve had in the last decade, was a refurbished or straight hand-me-down business laptop. Businesspeople are the larval hosts of the laptop lifecycle.

(FTR, my previous laptop was *also* a 2011 model, but a lower tier: I knew what specs I wanted my next one to have and what my budget was, and it so happened that the laptop that best fit those needs was not ~technically~ any newer. Switching to this one was still a very noticeable upgrade, though.)

I don’t know what’s going on with Audacity, but IIRC it did *used* to work. I just tried re-installing it, and at some point when having to reboot wouldn’t be too inconvenient I’ll give it another shot.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #long post

Where to Download All the Books That Just Entered the Public Domain

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

{{Title link: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qvq99b/how-to-download-the-books-that-just-entered-the-public-domain }}

sophus-b:

dr-archeville:

Starting at midnight on January 1, tens of thousands of books (as well as movies, songs, and cartoons) entered the public domain, meaning that people can download, share, or repurpose these works for free and without retribution under US copyright law.

Per the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, “corporate” creations (like Mickey Mouse) can be restricted under copyright law for 120 years.  But per an amendment to the act, works published between 1923 and 1977 can enter the public domain 95 years after their creation.  This means that this is the first year since 1998 that a large number of works have entered the public domain.

Basically, 2019 marks the first time a huge quantity of books published in 1923 — including works by Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie, and Robert Frost — have become legally downloadable since digital books became a thing.  It’s a big deal — the Internet Archive had a party in San Francisco to celebrate.  Next year, works from 1924 will enter the public domain, and so-on.

So, how do you actually download these books?

It largely depends on what site you go to, and if you can’t find a book on one site, you can probably find it on another.  For instance, ReadPrint.com, as well as The Literature Network(mostly major authors), and Librivox (audio books), Authorama (all in the public domain), and over a dozen other sites all have vast selections of free ebooks.

There’s also a handful of archiving projects that are doing extensive work to digitize books, journals, music, and other forms of media.  A blog post from Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain listed some of the most recognizable works published in 1923, as well as links to download these books on digital archiving projects Internet Archive, HathiTrust, and the Gutenberg Project.  The books include:

In total HathiTrust, a massive digital archiving project, has also uploaded more than 53,000 works published in 1923 that just entered the public domain.  Over 17,650 of them are books written in English.  Similarly, Internet Archive has already uploaded over 15,000 works written in English that year.

Project Gutenberg, which has over 58,000 free downloadable books, has digitized five works that entered the public domain in the new year: The Meredith Mystery by Natalie Sumner Lincoln, The Golden Boys Rescued by Radio L. P. Wyman, White Lightning Edwin by Herbert Lewis, The Garden of God by H. De Vere Stacpoole, and The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran.  I’m going to be perfectly honest: I recognize exactly zero of those books.  But like most if not all digital archives, Project Gutenberg had some books from 1923 available for download before January 1, 2019 (like Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf.)

If you’re interested in academic papers, Reddit user nemobis also uploaded over 1.5 million PDF files of works published in academic journals before 1923.  Your best bet for actually finding something you want to read in there is to know which academic paper you’re looking for beforehand and check the paper’s DOI number.  Then, search for the DOI in one of nemobis’s lists of works — one list includes works published until 1909, the other includes works published until 1923.

It’s worth noting that projects like Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg rely on volunteer efforts, so there’s going to be disparities in the number of books available for download depending on where you go.  But over the next several days and weeks, it’s safe to expect many more books will become available legally and for free across the web.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is tumblr_inline_nlh1og06wp1qdo426.gif

Additionally, some of the editors over at Wikimedia Commons are keeping track of what’s been uploaded/undeleted from the new public domain content.

Currently, it’s mostly art and photography, but there’s at least one Sherlock Holmes radio drama in the batch so far.

Tags:

#the more you know #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

sophus-b:

dopeluminarydreamer:

the-future-now:

That’s Louis Rossman, a repair technician and YouTuber, who went viral recently for railing against Apple. Apple purposely charges a lot for repairs and you either have to pay up or buy a new device. That’s because Apple withholds necessary tools and information from outside repair shops. And to think, we were just so close to change.

Follow @the-future-now

Reblog if you:

  • Have an iPhone and are in need of repairs
  • Have a friend with that problem
  • Hate Apple and are more than happy to spite them in some way

No one will know which is it

Tags:

#in related news #Apple

Windows 7 is going away, please get used to Windows 10

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

ms-demeanor:

The sale of non-Professional OEM licences was stopped on October 31, 2014. Mainstream support for 7 ended on January 13, 2015. Extended support will end on January 14, 2020. On September 7, 2018, Microsoft announced that Windows 7 will get three more years of support after January 14, 2020 if users pay for the Extended Security Updates (ESU) service, however this only applies to users of the Professional and Enterprise editions of Windows 7.

I have customers ask every day if I can get them a computer with Windows 7.

NO.

NO I CANNOT.

I CANNOT BECAUSE YOU’RE GOING TO BE PISSED IF I SELL YOU A COMPUTER THAT LOSES SUPPORT FOR ITS OPERATING SYSTEM NEXT YEAR.

Microsoft fucked up so bad with 8. They fucked up so bad with the early release of 10. People are *STILL* hesitant to move to the “new” operating system (that was released three and a half years ago).

Windows 7 came out in 2009. It’s officially 10 years old.

Do any of y’all remember what a clusterfuck it was when Microsoft ended support for XP? Hell, I still get people in here with XP computers once in a while and every time it happens we have to treat them like they’re radioactive and totally isolate them from everything else in the shop. It’s a nightmare. People refuse to walk away from it.

Anyway, you’ve got ONE YEAR to learn how to use Windows 10 or to teach the stubborn luddites in your life to use Windows 10 before 7 is gone for good.

PLEASE. Start now. It’ll be better than if you wait until support is gone.

 

discoursedrome:

Oh hey, I hadn’t heard that you could pay for 3 more years of Windows support. That at least is good news.

But yeah, it’s bleak. I set my parents up with Windows 10, but for myself I’m just going to march off into the darkness and never be seen again, because fuck that business model. I’ll get a Mint box or some shit, I dunno.

 

discoursedrome:

we updated to windows 10 at work, because they’re terrified of moving away from windows despite the fact that microsoft obviously doesn’t give half a shit about enterprise clients anymore, and seeing all the lock screen popup ads urging me to buy Microsoft products at the Microsoft store with my Microsoft points – which I can’t do because it’s all firewalled off anyway – definitely makes me feel like a serious respectable professional

 

collapsedsquid:

How can they not be interested in selling an OS to businesses?  They’re fucking around with Office too, that should be basically guaranteed money.  What the hell is going on with them?

 

ms-demeanor:

IT’S FUCKING AWFUL.

And from the VAR/Reseller/Partner side they give zero solitary fucks. 

They’re gearing up for a complete pivot to running cloud software on someone else’s platform. They’re not backing the PC market anymore (I know this is very tinfoil of me but that’s what it looks like). Their big flagship hardware shit right now is the surface, they’ looking at tablets and going “hey what if we had shit locked down like Apple has for the last few decades and were able to force updates so we didn’t have to worry about backwards compatibility” 

And here’s the deal: I GET IT. 

But I think that there’s still a reasonable use for desktops and laptops instead of just tablets and phones. And enterprise is for sure one of the places you’d think they were trying to push it!

But no, look at the sorts of shit laptops on offer these days; everything’s going to super fucking simple, low storage, ultra-flimsy bullshit at three hundred dollars a pop, they’ve got just enough balls that they can outcompete a chromebook but not enough to get a student through college.

A decent enterprise desktop or laptop is *ridiculously* expensive compared to the consumer shit. Just a basic-ass i5 with 8GB RAM and a 500GB HDD and Pro license is costing me around $700 and *that’s me as a reseller before we apply our mark-up.* A laptop with similar specs and a three-year warranty with a Windows Pro 10 is a thousand dollars.

SHIT IS FUCKED UP. 

And, hey, funfact: Amazon is such a giant clusterfuck of a thing that we’ve been forced to stop buying from our normal vendors and go through Prime Business because it saves us 50-100 per desktop. 

Oh it’s also super common to only have one part number stocked at vendor warehouses, everything even slightly different (did you want an SSD? did you want more ram from the factory?) takes 2-4 weeks to get shipped from the manufacturer. 

The industry got real fuckin weird in the last two years. 

 

ms-demeanor:

#nah i cant use windows 10  #im just going to switch entirely to linux  #at least that doesnt have inherent migraine features                                                             

If you use any open source OS you are valid and I have zero issue with how you’re doing things, THANK YOU.

God I wish more people would open source. Because Windows 10 is shit and full of ads and I fucking hate it, I just know it’s going to be less of a big throbbing point of entry in 2020 than 7 is. 

 

discoursedrome:

god at work a significant portion of the workforce has been doing this slow, awkward pivot back to, in essence, dumb terminals sharing access to a mainframe. Like the mainframe is “the cloud” or whatever so in theory it’s scalable, but in practice scaling it costs money and getting somebody to sign off on that is unthinkable, and they’re setting us up with drastically less of everything than we actually need because they got sold a bunch of magic beans by salespeople and they have no real information on peak and normal resource usage since up until now everyone had individual machines like a modern workforce in an era of cheap general-purpose computing devices

so we have that going on, and then on top of that half the sales-oriented business software we’re locked into for stupid enterprise reasons is now serving everyone pop-ups about, like, Livejournal adoptables or whatever the fuck

 

rustingbridges:

Wait win10 has ads built in? tbh people are always complaining about it but I’ve never figured on why. Although I pretty much boot windows directly to steam and don’t do anything else in it so

>>A decent enterprise desktop or laptop is *ridiculously* expensive compared to the consumer shit. Just a basic-ass i5 with 8GB RAM and a 500GB HDD and Pro license is costing me around $700 and *that’s me as a reseller before we apply our mark-up.* A laptop with similar specs and a three-year warranty with a Windows Pro 10 is a thousand dollars.<<

…

*looks at own laptop, which was originally built for the business market, has i7 and 8GB RAM and 500GB HDD and came with Windows 10 Pro, and which I bought on eBay for USD$250 + import costs*

?!

(admittedly, it was apparently well over a thousand bucks when it was new in 2011 [link], but like, that was then)

—

>>Wait win10 has ads built in? tbh people are always complaining about it but I’ve never figured on why. Although I pretty much boot windows directly to steam and don’t do anything else in it so<<

Same. (Well, that and Audacity, because my Linux Audacity gets stuck on the loading screen (and the loading screen *remains visible even if you kill the process, I have to reboot to get rid of it*) and I haven’t figured out how to fix it yet.)

(The more time goes on for both me and technology, the less use I have for non-Linux laptops. Back in the day, I told Dad I would switch to Linux if they could figure out a way to fix the lack of Shockwave support. Remember when Shockwave was a thing?)

Also I do get that people were complaining about the increase in Microsoft spyware, and come to think of it I think I saw a Candy Crush ad once or twice on my way to Steam/Audacity.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #long post #Windows #discourse cw?

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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toocooltobehipster:

map of British accents!!

 

haus-of-ill-repute:

How can a country smaller than montana have so many fucking accents?

 

youblowuponesun:

this is why we say please do not talk about a “british accent” thank

 

doctadonner:

but me and my sister both live in yorkshire (I live in North and she lives in South)  and she has to talk slowly when she comes to the north because no-one can understand a word she says, so there’s deviations of accents within accents.

 

darael:

Oh, and then there’s:

Spread out all over the fucking place but more prevalent in the South: RP (which is what Murricans think of as a “British Accent” even though it’s a minority of the English that have it let alone the British)

 

thedreadvampy:

plus like…there’s a LOT of variation in the Lothian area? Edinburgh’s super posh.

 

dropkicks:

if you think there’s only one accent in london i’ve got news for you son

 

silly-cleo:

I’ve lived in the UK for more than half my life, certainly my entire adult life, and I still can’t successfully ID all the accents there are here. I’m sometimes mortifyingly wrong, but less so now.

 

jescissa:

There’s way more than two Welsh accents. How can you categorize it as ‘Welsh’ or ‘Cardiff’? The accent in Caernarfon is completely different to the accent in Wrexham, so that’s at least four. Then the accent of Ceredigion is different again. Five. The Welsh hill farming accent is different to the Welsh mining accent (North/South divide.) People in Penmaenmawr sound different to people in Llanfairfechan and there’s a 7 minute drive between them.

 

cosmic-llin:

This! Even if you’re grouping similar Welsh accents together, there’s at LEAST one in the North and one in the South. Cool map though!

 

brin-bellway:

Are there actually people who honestly believe there is only one British accent, or is that a myth? Whenever I see people claim Americans think there’s only one, they always use the existence of the phrase “British accent” as their evidence.

Yes, I say “British accent”. Thing is, it’s not that I don’t know there are a zillion different accents in Britain. It’s that I don’t know what they’re called, and so am forced to use “British accent” as an umbrella term because I don’t have the words to describe them more specifically except perhaps by comparison (“it was a Dave-Lister-y sort of voice*”).

*And even having heard that this is a Liverpool accent, I would still describe it by comparison if I could possibly get away with it. I don’t entirely trust my source on where Lister’s accent is from, nor do I trust Liverpool to have only one accent.

 

cosmic-llin:

I think it’s less that people really don’t know that there’s more than one British accent, and more that very often “British Accent” is used to mean Received Pronunciation (in my TV and real-life experience that’s what a majority of people will do when required to fake a British accent), which is kind of a sore point anyway because in some British circles RP is still considered “better” than other accents and people with regional accents already feel marginalised?

And yup, Lister definitely has a Scouse (Liverpool) accent, although you’re right that Liverpool accents can vary a bit!

Tags:

#(February 2014) #conversational aglets #language #accents #Britain #Red Dwarf #long post

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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alwaysfaithfulterriblelizard:

this egg fucking froze because our fridge is too cold

 

o-bellaciao:

Why would you keep the eggs on the fridge?

 

alwaysfaithfulterriblelizard:

we keep our eggs in the fridge…so they don’t denature? do you not refrigerate your eggs?

 

nanner:

Because of the way our eggs are processed and the prevalence of salmonella in american chickens, americans have to fridge their eggs.

http://io9.com/americans-why-do-you-keep-refrigerating-your-eggs-1465309529

 

colorschanging:

Wait, they don’t refrigerate eggs in other countries?

 

ladyoflate:

wait what people in other countries dont refrigerate eggs???

 

wewishyouamurphychristmas:

wait a second eggs in other countries aren’t refrigerated?????????

 

agathaheterodyne:

Waht.

 

slepaulica:

yeah, we don’t refrigerate them here. they keep like a month or two, even in summer, just crack it into a cup in case it’s accidentally taken you too long to use those eggs, give it a whiff, if it smells okay you’re good to go even if it’s really old.  don’t use the float test — that turns up a lot of false positives and sometimes you end up throwing away perfectly good eggs, which is not cheap. just turn your eggs upside down every now and then to help keep them fresh and yeah.

also chicken eggs do not look anything like those things you see on american tv shows. they have brown shells and the yolks are orange.

 

triplash:

Americans refrigerate their eggs.. 

America..

 

slepaulica:

if you read the link though, there’s actually a reason for why they have to do it, a reason that doesn’t apply anywhere else in the world.

 

slepaulica:

we should organise a charity drive to mail european eggs to americans. we can send them uht milk too, i read on the internet that they only have the kind of milk that has to be refrigerated

 

brin-bellway:

Canadians refrigerate eggs too. And re: colour, every Canadian grocery store I have ever been in carried multiple brands of eggs, some of which were white and some which were brown. (We usually buy the brown: the last time I bought white it was because we realised at the last moment we were out of eggs and Mom sent me to the white-egg-only convenience store to get a dozen to tide us over.)

Who told you Americans don’t have UHT milk? I don’t know about big ones, but there are definitely single-serving ones that I think are intended for kids’ lunches. I used to go through multiple single-serving boxes* of Parmelat chocolate milk a day when I was a kid.

(Come to think of it, did they say “no room-temperature milk” or “no UHT milk”? Because while I’ve drunk well over a thousand cartons* of milk (all bought in America) that appear to fit with the definition of “UHT milk” I just looked up, I had never heard the term before.)

*The Canadian term for this is the genericised trademark “tetra pak”, but since I’m talking about my experiences as an American in America I figured I ought to use the terminology I would’ve used at the time, despite its relative lack of precision.

P.S. Maybe I should look into the possibility of larger tetras of milk, considering I just had refrigerated milk go lumpy nine days before its sell-by date (beating the previous record of six days). Bagged milk sounds like a neat idea, but it’s terrible for preservation, and the manufacturers won’t even admit it.

 

slepaulica:

i don’t remember where i saw it. but it was an article on the internet and someone was saying that for a limited time they had uht milk available in the cardboard box things but it didnt catch on with americans because it was too weird that it could be stored unrefrigerated or something and they didnt sell well so it was taken off the market and it was a shame because they were really useful for people like university students who didnt have a fridge.

actually, i remember reading that they do have uht milk in the us, but they don’t sell it in the cardboard boxes but they sell it in the transparent gallon containers, and part of what gives the milk the shelf life of like a year and the need to not be refrigerated is keeping it from exposure to light, and so even though the milk is treated with an ultra high temperature to pasteurise it, it doesn’t have the 9 months-1 year shelf life because of exposure to light, so they have to keep it refrigerated anyway.

it is possible that the author of the article lived in a specific region of the us and was overgeneralising to the availability in the rest of their country.

do any other americans want to weigh in? can you go to the supermarket and buy a cardboard box of milk that is not in the refrigerated section of the store and it does not need to be refrigerated until opened? maybe i am wrong?

 

winterwhitewitch:

No we cannot, at least not where I live. (near San Francisco, CA) I didn’t even know what uht milk was until I googled it. All the milk I have ever encountered needs to be refrigerated, and I am actually shocked this isn’t a rule. 
Our milk choices range from non fat, low fat, regular, half and half (ughhhh), and there’s the vegan milk stuff. My dad drinks almond milk, which is an abomination. 
And I thought bagged milk was weird…

 

slepaulica:

Thank you for weighing in! UHT milk doesn’t have any preservatives in it. The shelf life is due to the combination of: sterile packaging, opaque packaging, and the high temperature at which it is pasteurised. once you open your box of milk, you have to drink it within a few days, and it does have to be refrigerated once opened because the packaging is no longer sealed and germs can get in, but the packages are 1 litre or a half litre, which isn’t all that much milk, so even without refrigeration, you can plan around using the entire thing before it goes bad.

a friend of mine without refrigeration would just reboil it every time she wanted to drink some, but in the summer months i just try to use it all up as soon as i open it, and in winter months it’s easier because i can just leave it outside and use it slowly over the course of a few days.

but the advantages are: not needing to refrigerate the trucks it is shipped in, not needing to refrigerate it at the store, and you can use it as an emergency food. you can stock up on it effectively without worrying about it going bad (within reason, 6-9 month shelf life) because it only starts going bad once opened.

Tags:

#(December 2013) #conversational aglets #food #home of the brave #our home and cherished land #in which Brin has a food poisoning phobia

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trekgate:

 

nenya-kanadka:

weareallmedie:

nenya-kanadka:

brin-bellway:

nenya-kanadka:

Agh, did I miss this episode? I need this scene in my life.

Maybe “Human Error”?

Hmm, possibly! *reads recap* I definitely remember the red dress from that one. In general I just grave all the Seven in uniform instead of catsuit scenes. <3

Nope, not Human Error. That’s a scene from Relativity I believe. AWESOME Seven (and Seven & Janeway) episode

Ah, thank you! 

Tags:

#(November 2013) #conversational aglets #Star Trek #Voyager