the more you know

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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moonlit-tulip:

prokopetz:

Problem: Clothing has inadequate storage space.

Bad solution: Normalise pockets.

Good solution: Normalise utility belts.

#this but unironically #I wear a utility belt and it’s so great and y’all should join me

…now that you mention it, that actually sounds like a pretty excellent way to get around the problem where a lot of otherwise-excellent skirts lack pockets and are thus impractical for me to go outside in. (At least insofar as the belt is light enough to not be uncomfortable the way backpacks are.)

Do you have any advice on how to get started trying out utility belts? It hadn’t occurred to me until this post that they might be a thing worth looking into, so I don’t have a good sense of what the market for them looks like or of any particular pitfalls I’d need to avoid.

The first thing you’ll need is terminology: they aren’t normally called “utility belts” because I guess that’s too nerdy or something. The main keywords you’re looking for are “belly bag” or “fanny pack”, though they are also occasionally called “belt bags” or “waist bags”.

(I usually call mine a belly bag in day-to-day conversations, though I sometimes call it a utility belt if I’m emphasising the preparedness aspect.)

I’ve had my current one for ages, but I *think* I got it in the camping section at Walmart. It looks roughly like this [link], though mine has only one side-release buckle (the lefthand one). Eastsport seems to have discontinued those models as part of a pivot towards backpacks, but that picture still gives you an idea of the sort of thing I mean.

—

Some tips on using them:

You can use the bag as a platform, allowing more stability while carrying bulky objects.

Don’t be afraid to string other pouches onto the belt strap. Maybe don’t go *all* the way around–a pouch right in the back would be both difficult to use† and probably uncomfortable while sitting in chairs with backs–but a pouch on either side is very doable, and perhaps a couple of small things as well like a paracord bracelet or pen-fork pouch.

Speaking of which, here is a list of the stuff I had in my belt as of two years ago [link]. It’s *mostly* still accurate, and certainly remains useful for inspiration.

—

†though perhaps no worse than a backpack in that regard

Tags:

#reply via reblog #utility belts #clothing #the more you know #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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moonlit-tulip:

rustingbridges:

moonlit-tulip:

brin-bellway:

rustingbridges:

anyway how do I get firefox to remember my web history forever

@moonlit-tulip, you eventually gave up on getting this to work per se, right? Have you tried that repurpose-web-scraping-software-to-make-a-URL-archive idea yet?

I actually got indefinite history-saving working, a bit over a month ago! I’m not confident it’s going to stay working forever—they already broke it on me the once, I wouldn’t be surprised if they did so again eventually—but, for the moment, I’ve got essentially three tricks, in ascending order of difficulty.

First: go into settings, and in the History section, set it to “Firefox will: Remember history”. This is the default for that setting, so it’s probably not a concern; but, if you changed it in the past for whatever reason, changing it back will ensure that your history gets saved and doesn’t get deleted after the end of each browser session.

Second: in about:config, change the value of places.history.expiration.max_pages from its default value to a very large number of your choice. (I went with 2147483647, because that’s the maximum and I didn’t see any reason not to.) By default, Firefox has a limit on how many history entries it will store, and will start auto-deleting the oldest ones as you open new pages; I don’t know of any way to avoid the limit entirely, but setting that number high enough is the next-best thing. Supposedly your browser will start slowing down as it saves more history entries, though, so… be warned? (I haven’t experienced this firsthand, but also I only discovered that setting a bit over a month ago, so my history hasn’t had much time to build up yet.)

Third: use BrowsingHistoryView to export your history to CSV, and update your backup every few months, such that if Firefox does start deleting older history again you won’t lose what you’ve got. If your history is anywhere near as large as mine, the resulting CSV files will likely be large and annoying to work with; but it’s still worth it, as least for me, for the peace-of-mind value it gives.

hmm well they’ve probably been monkeying with it, then, because I actually have slightly different about:config stuff here – specifically I’m seeing only a transient current max pages, which won’t let me put in a number nearly that large (I’m on 78.0.2).

the search continues!

There’s a plus sign button at the bottom right of the config interface; if you do a search for places.history.expiration.max_pages, set the type to “number”, and then click that plus sign, it’ll create the entry. At that point it should work as I described; I’m on the same Firefox version, so there shouldn’t be any underlying differences interfering.

(I’d forgotten, at the time of the previous reblog, needing to create the entry myself like that. But, in retrospect, I’m pretty sure I actually did need to.)

Tags:

#101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #conversational aglets #the more you know #amnesia cw?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

teeth-thief:

im gonna make garlic meringues

 

lemondropleaf:

or you could reconsider?

 

teeth-thief:

no like legit!! I could totally just, skip the sugar, add a little salt and some raw garlic/garlic powder, set that shit to 225 and bake for 75 minutes. I honestly don’t see why this wouldn’t work

 

teeth-thief:

shit man I could do all KINDS of flavors. Italian sausage. Rosemary. Salt. Add food coloring to differentiate what’s what. im SO doing this later

 

bea2me:

Savory meringue? I’m going to need follow up on this. I’m guessing it will be like fleeting croutons but enquiring minds

 

teeth-thief:

everyone give me flavor ideas. this is gonna be just like that time I tried to use drink mix in meringues but worse <3

 

teeth-thief:

as it turns out, salt breaks down egg whites. the only ones that worked were the garlic ones and they tasted like garlic dirt so I tossed them. do not try this

 

bea2me:

Thank you for the sad but important update. Now we know why these don’t already exist. My last savory experiment proved that garlic ice cream hasn’t gone mainstream because it tastes like frozen Alfredo sauce, so you can file that under time saved

 

porthos4ever:

…. This exchange is magical

Tags:

#food #the more you know

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

etirabys:

I googled “how to become a fossil” because I’ve been reading about what archaeology and genetic analysis tells us about ancient humans from their remains, and I feel left out. I, too, wish to be dug up, admired, and analyzed by people unimaginably different from me.  While looking into this I hit the motherlode of good science articles re: informativeness and tone on this topic. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180215-how-does-fossilisation-happen

However, if you want your remains to become a fossil that lasts for millions of years, then you really want minerals to seep through your bones and replace them with harder substances. This process, known as ‘permineralisation’, is what typically creates a fully-fledged fossil. It can take millions of years.

As a result, you might skip the coffin. Bones permineralise most rapidly when mineral-rich water can flow through them, imbuing them with things like iron and calcium. A coffin might keep the skeleton nicely together, but it would interfere with this process.

There is a way a coffin might work, though. Mike Archer, a palaeontologist at the University of New South Wales, suggests burial in a concrete coffin filled with sand and with hundreds of 5mm holes drilled into the sides. This then needs to be buried deep enough that groundwater can pass through.

Archer even suggests getting buried with copper strips and nickel pellets if you fancy fossilised bones and teeth with a nice blue-green colour to them.

I love all the scientists interviewed for this piece.

5. Get discovered

Now you need to think about the potential for rediscovery.

If you want somebody to chance upon your carefully preserved fossil one day, you need to plan for burial in a spot that currently is low enough to accumulate the necessary sediments for deep burial – but that will eventually be pushed up again. In other words, you need a place with uplift where weathering and erosion will eventually scour off the surface layers, exposing you.

One good spot might be the Mediterranean Sea, Syme says; it’s getting shallower as Africa is pushed towards Europe. Other small, inland seas that will fill with sediment are good bets, too.

“Perhaps the Dead Sea,” she says. “The high salt would preserve and pickle you.”

Tags:

#death tw #interesting #the more you know

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

rustingbridges:

andmaybegayer:

andmaybegayer:

Oh huh. when Horizon Zero Dawn PC came out it was very cheap, ZAR 236 (~USD 13), and I bought it quickly because I knew I wanted it and I assumed it was a mistake on steam’s part that I could take advantage of. They later tripled the price to ZAR 680 (~USD 40), which I thought was them fixing it.

Turns out what actually happened was that this was just steam’s regional pricing adjustment at work, but the adjustment was so steep (particularly in Argentina, which was only USD 7 equivalent) and for such a popular game that loads of people used VPN’s to buy the game at foreign pricing.

Lowering the effective price for other countries is a pretty sensible move on Steam’s part, and I hope they don’t stop doing it. The South African Rand is nowhere near the weakest currencies out there, but the amount of disposable income here is much lower (heck, South Africa only /got/ a legal minimum wage last year, and it’s about USD 1.3/hour after a 10% hike this year) and paying dollar prices is hells of expensive. 60 dollars is pricey in the USA, but paying ZAR 1000 in South Africa is hideously expensive for many people. It’s even worse in places like Kenya or Indonesia. There’s a reason why I’m considering moving my server infrastructure to Russian providers who work in Rubles.

The GOG store makes a selling point of “you always pay the base price” which I guess attracts euros and pounds but means that I sometimes find software 30% cheaper on Steam because they actually sell at local adjusted prices. SteamDB actually lets you see prices per country and you can see how wide some of the adjustments are.

@rustingbridges said

dang that’s a low minimum wage. what’s rent / general expenses like

Big Mac index is about 50%, i.e. you pay half as much for a big mac here than in the USA in raw currency terms, and that calculation more or less carries to a lot of food products, cost of living and so on. As you can imagine, ½ USA expenses but ⅙th USA minimum wage means living on minimum wage Is Not Great.

If you work 40 hour weeks at minimum wage you make ~ZAR 3300 (USD 200), and the lowest rent 1 bedroom apartment you can get anywhere near a city is usually around ZAR 2000. Rural areas are cheaper but there’s actually an adjustment on minimum wage for farm workers that drops it to like ZAR 18 per hour, or about One Dollar. You can make up to 3-4× minimum wage without a degree in most cases if you manage to work up to like, store manager or whatever, but that’s kind of your cap without some kind of professional training. Food and other expenses eat the remaining money extremely fast.

If you’re on minimum wage and on your own it’s extremely hard to get by, and even with roommates or family it’s very rough, if you want to try renting. A lot of people live in multigenerational homes for historic, cultural and economic reasons. What “if you want to try renting” means is something I’ll get to under the cut, because unfortunately for this explanation, South Africa is less one economy as much as it is like three in a trench coat. We’ve already covered Low Income, but there’s also The Professional Class and Informal Economies.

Keep reading

yeah that’s not great

Tags:

#adventures in human capitalism #South Africa #interesting #the more you know

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

sigmaleph:

shieldfoss:

korora12:

shieldfoss:

You can tell the people who hacked twitter were normies because they didn’t use Obama’s account to post about the chaos emeralds.

Or worse, posting about how someone stole his shoelaces and he can’t find them

Fuck that would have been the best

from @brin-bellway‘s tags:

#(I’ll admit I don’t get the chaos-emerald one but I do get the shoelace one)

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/you-mean-the-chaos-emeralds

Tags:

#high context jokes #the more you know #oh look an update

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

cromulentenough:

zvaigzdelasas:

air139:

tilthat:

TIL that both the Energizer and Duracell battery brands use a pink bunny as their mascot. Duracell had it first, but they failed to renew the North American trademark, so Europeans associate the pink bunny with Duracell and North Americans see it as an Energizer brand.

via reddit.com

I knew it

626425c8bbd0f149c1ed71bf0c363e8ad72f5a8b

What the fuck

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e0/Energizer_Bunny.png

f35204974e709bea90ffc80a982c560c051c8103

Wtf

Tags:

#advertising #the more you know #rabbits

digitaldiscipline asked: What is your favorite animal tidbit about the denizens of Lake Baikal?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

bunjywunjy:

actually my favorite thing about Baikal is the lake itself!

viewed from above, it looks like nothing particularly special. sure, it’s a big lake, but it doesn’t have the surface area of the Great Lakes or the Caspian Sea, right?

11e08ddccd55db837d5050399e56504c436c905f

WRONG!

BOOM.

51a94364c850b66cd3e228bb3fde0a2554fd2b3b

see, Lake Baikal really isn’t a lake at all, it’s a deep rent in the earth’s crust called a Rift Valley that just happened to get water in it. and the Baikal rift is one of the deepest and narrowest on earth, making this deceptively placid lake slightly over a MILE deep! that’s bonkers nutso.

like, you think the OCEAN is bad, just imagine being in a little fishing boat on this thing without realizing just how far away the bottom is….

0e75f81e1fbdff2d3039d37421d078fd9dd901e8

 

bigwordsandsharpedges:

fee89043c021e5b59b41753f8ab3a38cc51f1701

Holy fucking shit

 

hematite2:

That bitch has a quarter of the fresh water in the entire world?!

 

whitmerule:

I notice you never answered the crucial first question, OP. What lives in it? What lives down in that lake?

 

bunjywunjy:

congrats, you lucked out this time! because it’s

a957cf387b6fa6bbd931722a6d8eb4db417a1017

THEY

that dwell in the depths

 

whitmerule:

THEY!

I love they!

(this other branch is also good)

Tags:

#the more you know #geography #seals #adorable #(I don’t think that seal is *quite* my style but I see the appeal)

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

nightpool:

prokopetz:

Huh – I just noticed that Tumblr’s post IDs jumped six hundred quadrillion places on February 24th of this year. It happened at some point between 6:20 PM and 6:35 PM UTC, from the look of it. I wonder what that was about?

Tumblr switched from a sequential ID system based on ticket servers to a system based on snowflake IDs. To preserve sortability, Snowflake ids use the uppermost bits of a number to represent the timestamp of the post’s creation and the lowermost bits to represent worker ids and random entropy. This means they’re going to starting near the limit of 64-bit numbers, several orders of magnitude above where tumblr’s id space was beforehand.

The well-known implementation complexities of using snowflake-based systems with javascript’s 53-bit numbers was the cause of liking and reblogging being broken on the desktop Tumblr dashboard for the majority of the 24th: https://tumblr.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043298974-February-24th-2020-Intermittent-errors-affecting-Tumblr

Tags:

#The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #the more you know