Usual recommendation for leaded solder is well-ventilated work area, eye protection and gloves, an extraction system is a nice to have, but my bedroom’s ventilation is somewhat lacking so a filtered facemask is an alternative solution. This has P100 cartridges which are pretty common for soldering/welding applications.
Eye protection for soldering is the kind of thing that is not so much about protecting you from chronic issues in the long run, but rather defending you from the 1 in 1000 chance that the flux core of your solder bubbles over and splats you in the eye with a drop of molten lead and flux, so it’s really the highest priority PPE you should get if you only do soldering infrequently.
Rosin inhalation probably won’t fuck you up that bad three or four times a year, but there’s not much to do about an acute case of eyelead.
Tags:
#even *more* uses for P100s! #*makes notes* #(not that I have any intention of soldering anything) #the more you know #injury cw #poison cw?
personally I’m happy for this new Steam Handheld deal because either gaming on Linux gets a renewed focus that kind of collapsed ever since Proton came out, or in a couple years there will be hundreds of forgotten compact Linux-ready handhelds on eBay. Win-win!
Tags:
#I hadn’t heard of this until just now but that sounds about right #fuck Steam but their existence may be exploitable #(although the pictures make it look a bit on the large side for storing in a utility belt) #the more you know
they’re one of the fruits where the supermarket variety is the supermarket variety because it survives the trip, not because they’re good
meanwhile tomato plants are really low effort. if you have favorable conditions you can do literally nothing
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Where are you *finding* conditions that aren’t full of weeds and wildlife-competing-with-you-for-the-food and the occasional blight? A greenhouse?
(…actually, that might not be a bad idea. I *have* heard of people building little personal greenhouses in their backyards, and nothing keeps squirrels from taking one bite out of your mom’s tomato and walking away like a fucking *door*, right?)
Re: surviving the trip, home-grown zucchinis taste about the same but we’ve noticed the shelf life is *vastly* longer. Store-bought zucchinis start to shrivel up and go soft within a few days of bringing them home; home-grown zucchinis can sit in the fridge for several *weeks*. Makes it a lot easier to plan your meals.
Honestly, probably a good part of my problem with gardening is that, because *Mom* loves home-grown tomatoes for some fucking reason, they end up the focal point of the garden and a great deal of my gardening-related labour is thoroughly alienated: I never see the fruits *or* the vegetables of my labour.
A garden optimised for what *I* thought was most worth growing would have zero tomatoes and more garlic and zucchini, with perhaps just enough potatoes to keep in practice so that I can put potatoes in the victory garden. And probably more perennials like mulberries. And possibly mushrooms. And I would want to do a bunch of research and expert-consultation regarding which weeds are secretly edible, since anything *that* easy to grow sounds like something I should take advantage of.
(I’ve been meaning to do some more digging into how to eat dandelions. I’ve heard you can put the new greens in salads and the petals in pancake batter, but I don’t normally eat salads *or* pancakes. Can you just, like, munch on a raw dandelion flower straight-up? Can I fulfil my childhood dream of eating a pretty flower I found in the backyard?)
Yeah, you can just munch any part of dandelion – I often do that when I’m reading in the garden. Older leaves get bitter and shouldn’t be eaten in big amounts, and roots need cooking. Flower is just fine though.
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Hell yeah!
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This is another area where I like a lot of the things the communing-with-nature people are putting out but for completely different reasons. I want to know more about the natural world around me *so that I can exploit it better*. Which wildflowers can I eat? What’s the name of that one plant where when you run through a field of them it sounds like popcorn popping? Can I eat those too?!
(I never stopped wanting to stick interesting plants in my mouth: I just learned to resist it, to assume everything was poisonous until proven otherwise. And for the most part, nobody ever taught me which interesting plants I didn’t have to resist.)
I never stopped wanting to stick interesting plants in my mouth: I just learned to resist it
i never learned this and im still alive. i like to think it’s made me stronger
as for tomatos I don’t think you have to do that much? if your soil and weather conditions are good you can just put the seeds in the ground and come back later to find that you have a giant cherry tomato bush which is overrunning the rest of your garden and that produces way to many tomatos for any ten people to eat
if you don’t have this you might need to water them? I remember watering tomatos. most of the weeds around here don’t get tall enough to fuck with tomatos much. if it’s a major issue you can put them in pots I guess. we never had trouble with squirrels, altho we did have to stop growing tomatos in the backyard because one of the dogs ate them all. I don’t grow many tomatos because I don’t like tomatos, but fresh ones really are better.
idk about potatos specifically but I think durable transportable stuff like potatos and onions is the relative advantage of actual farmers. relative to growing fragile vegetables that kind of thing is probably only worth doing to the extent you’re having fun with it
My mom has tried to grow tomatoes pretty much every year for the past 10+ years and we have had very few home-grown tomatoes to eat
It might be where we live– people not from here think you can grow anything in Georgia but the summer heat really is too much for a lot of plants to handle. The state was also plagued by droughts for a lot of my childhood.
We also had a lot of Critters come sample the garden. Deer, squirrels, rabbits, tomato hornworms, etc etc etc. It always made my mom SO dismayed to come outside one morning to find that a deer had chomped off the entire top half of her biggest tomato plant, but you’d think she would have learned to expect it after about the fourth time
We DID sometimes get to eat the tomatoes if we picked them while still green and then used them for fried green tomatoes. Fried green tomatoes are really delicious. It’s just not what we had wanted to have when we planted tomatoes!
I’ll admit I don’t know anything about Georgia. I think it’s where depressing movies about plantations take place. it produces SCAD students. there’s a big airport I’ve never connected thru.
I asked my mother about tomatos and her opinion is that they’re easy to grow but you have to water them very regularly or else they’ll be sad and also blighted. this is maybe extra true if it’s very hot and sunny, which I’ve been told is the case in georgia. conversely farther north you may have trouble getting enough sun? that could make tomatos slower, maybe
idk about deer. the three places I’ve grown tomatos were:
suburb, but not near the forest so no deer. plenty of squirrels and rabbits but they were never a problem
fire escape. only cats and pigeons, neither of which are much trouble for tomatos
middle of nowhere. shitloads of deer but in the summer they just eat stuff in the forest. huge problem for slow growing perennials but not so much for tomatos
The previous post [link] reminded me to post an update on this:
>>What’s the name of that one plant where when you run through a field of them it sounds like popcorn popping? Can I eat those too?!
I took a picture of a popcorn flower and searched by similar images, and it’s a Plantago lanceolata (sometimes called a ribwort plantain). And apparently you *can* kind of eat them [link], though it’s more of a medicinal thing than a food thing.
Tags:
#oh look an update #food #gardening #reply via reblog #flowers #the more you know #poison cw? #proud citizen of the Future
Canada Post has assigned postal code H0H 0H0 to the North Pole
Tags:
#one December I was at a party and I won a trivia round by knowing this #I’m drinking out of the water bottle I won right now #our home and cherished land #Christmas #the more you know
A fun curse you get when you spend long enough looking at consumer electronics is automatically figuring out roughly how much power something uses. This is useful sometimes: if you know your laptop sucks down about 8 watts while browsing the web, and you have a 40 watt hour battery, you know you have about 5 hours of battery life. If you know that you only have 50 kilowatt hours left in your prepaid electricity meter, you can estimate whether you need to buy more now or if you can let it slide until tomorrow, by tallying up everything that’s running.
It also makes you develop strange opinions and heuristics. This electric heater pulls 2000W which means it costs about ZAR 2 per hour to run. All the stuff plugged into my desk runs an estimated 150-200W depending on how much computing I’m doing, so that’s ten times less than that. My lights are 4×5W or 20W so that’s ten times less than that. If I decide that, to account for my convenience, I should turn off my lights if I’m leaving the room for more than 10 minutes, I should sleep my computer if I’m leaving the room for more than 1 minute. This is of course, nonsense, the convenience factor here is not fixed, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think about it every time I turn off my lights but leave my PC on.
If you happen to know that the rated power for a single wall plug (in South Africa) is about 3700W, then you also start to see danger where most people do not. Most people learn that the dangerous thing about power strips is that you can plug in too many items and that’s mysteriously dangerous somehow, but the REAL danger with power strips is that they put the full load of everything plugged into them onto a single wall plug. Daisy-chained power strips with 40 cellphone chargers plugged in is relatively safe. A power strip with two electric heaters plugged in is a recipe for disaster, and will pull excessive current in basically any house on earth. That’s how you get house fires.
(Note: in the USA your plugs are rated at only 1875W per plug (or maybe 2500W, depends on the plug), so many appliances such as hair-dryers, heaters and other high-power devices are only safe to use if they are the ONLY item on a wall plug. Multiple-slot extension cords have a much higher risk of exceeding minimum safe levels in this situation compared to countries with higher voltage wall power.)
If you ever find yourself wandering aimlessly through the appliances aisle of your home goods store, muttering about rated versus nominal current and trying to estimate how long per day you actually /run/ a blender and really how many days a year do you use it anyways, is it worth springing for the more efficient one? I’m sorry to say there’s nothing we can do to help you.
Technology Connections at it again with informative videos about my debilitating obsessions.
Tags:
#are you telling me other people *don’t* wander around hardware stores muttering about whether to spring for the more efficient appliance? #adventures in human capitalism #the more you know #the power of science #domesticity #fun with loopholes
I know nothing about it but seriously any password manager is better than no password manager.
But okay here’s what you want to look for in a password manager:
Portability – you log in to accounts across devices, you want your password manager (PWM for the rest of this post) to work across devices and sync across devices. For most people you’re going to want a PWM with an app, but some people like to store a password vault on various devices so they aren’t reliant on internet connection to access passwords.
Security – A PWM should never store your passwords in plaintext, they should always be encrypted. Pretty much all decent PWMs use 256 bit AES encryption which I know sounds like gibberish but basically it means your passwords are locked up with really hard math and if you’re comparing options do a ctrl+f on each PWM’s feature page for “256″ to make sure it uses the proper encryption standard.
Usability – Some PWMs are a pain in the ass. You should try out a couple that seem like good options and figure out which one feels most usable for you. This may mean that you want a PWM with an app, or one with a browser extension that works in your browser; it may mean that you want a PWM with a very simple user interface. You may find that the paid features of a PWM make it more usable for you than the free version. The thing is that you have to USE it. Whatever PWM you are most likely to use based on the interface and features is the one you should install.
Port-ability – There’s always the possibility that your PWM will have an update and the update will make it unusable for you; maybe you’ll hate the layout, maybe it’ll add steps that make using it inefficient. You may need to bail on your first choice, which is why you should make sure that whatever PWM you choose makes it easy to transfer your credentials from one PWM to another. Look up how-tos and tutorials on “how to move my passwords from bitwarden to apple password manager” or “how to import passwords into firefox password manager.” Any reasonable PWM will allow you to easily export your credentials; if they don’t let you export with a simple process, don’t install it.
Features to look for:
Password Generator – a tool that will create passwords of varying complexity for you. If your PWM won’t generate complex passwords for you but will only store passwords you’ve created I would recommend looking for a different manager.
Password Checker – a tool that ensures the password you have selected isn’t on any lists of compromised credentials.
Customizable Security – maybe if your desktop and your cellphone are password protected with a short timeout you don’t care how long your vault stays open. Maybe if your desktop screen lock you want your PWM to lock itself after fifteen minutes. Maybe it’s easier for you to log in with a pin than a password, maybe you want to require multifactor authentication for access. Setting your settings the best way for you personally is going to make the whole PWM more usable for you, so make sure you’re comfortable with the options your PWM allows.
Cards and ID – Some PWMs will allow you to securely store credit card info. This is extremely handy and very useful if you do happen to lose your cards. Some will let you upload photos of your ID or your car insurance or other things. This is also very, very handy.
Customizable folders – Look, sometimes you just have to sort things. Your PWM should give you the option to create a folder structure that makes sense to you instead of limiting you to predefined categories.
Off the top of my head that’s all I can think of. I’m sure that the apple password manager is better than nothing so you should absolutely use it if that’s what’s easiest for you.
This is why the 256 bit AES encryption is important! If the password manager is hacked through the company’s servers getting broken into or something like that nobody has your passwords. The company doesn’t even have your passwords.
Choose a good, complex, memorable password for your password manager, don’t share that password with anybody unless it’s a life-or-death situation (literally; I don’t know the password to my spouse’s password safe unless he is going in for surgery) and unless someone is able to crack your password or gains physical access to your desktop while your password vault is unlocked there’s no way to get at the passwords.
You do need to have SOME good security practices in place to ensure safety even with a password manager.
Don’t let people remote in to your computer
have your computer time out after short period
lock your phone and require a password to get back into it
don’t give people you don’t know and trust physical access to your devices
Use complex, unique passwords to log in to your devices and your password manager (I like doing this with song lyrics – “Nggyu,Nglud,Ngraady57″ is a rickroll and a family member’s birth year so it’s complex but easy for me to remember)
But if you’re worried about your passwords getting revealed in a data breach the way personal data gets revealed by like, target and experian and the US government then don’t worry about that. That doesn’t happen if you choose a password manager with appropriate encryption.
Tags:
#PSA #the more you know #(I personally use KeePass (XC and DX variants)) #(I’m very happy with it but it is not for the faint of backup) #(for those use-cases I hear a lot of praise for Bitwarden)
I went on a camping trip this weekend and made one of those “how am I just learning about this now” discoveries:
It’s a “fire tube”: basically just a collapsible straw that you can safely stick deep in the coals of a campfire and blow a lot of oxygen into it.
It’s weirdly addictive. Unlike fanning a campfire with newspaper or whatever, where the effect lasts less than a second, blowing with the tube a couple times make the fire significantly brighter and hotter, with a powerful sense of accomplishment. Also the visual effect when you blow on the coals is hypnotic: it dims overall but the “edges” of coals get brighter, like you just ran it through an edge-sharpening algo.
I may have done it so many times last night that I gave myself mild ear pain from all the backpressure.
Have you ever seen those concerning statistics about criminal recidivism? Like: 44% are re-arrested within a year, and 83% within nine years (source: this Department of Justice report).
I’d seen those statistics before, and been concerned. There’s a great case for shortening prison sentences for deterrence reasons, because likelihood of punishment is much more deterring than severity, but at least prison incapacitates criminals from plundering society while they’re imprisoned. Why hasten prison release if they’ll be back soon anyway? “Once a criminal, always a criminal?”, asks one headline about recidivism.
But today I learned that there’s a huge caveat to those statistics. The more often you go to prison, the more you’re counted in recidivism statistics.
Consider five people who go to prison. Four of them never commit another crime, but one of them was Criminal Georg, who is imprisoned ten times. Out of the fourteen prison sentences (ten for Georg, four for the others), nine of them are followed by recidivism (Georg’s first nine). The proportion of these people who are serial criminals is 20%, but the recidivism rate is 64%.
When considering people rather than prison releases, the recidivism rate is lower than I thought.
Thank you, I hadn’t seen it and it’s a great resource!
I knew I’d seen this pattern before, but I didn’t have a name for it. The linked post by Elizabeth Wrigley-Field tells me it’s called “length-biased sampling.”
The mentions several examples with real-world importance, incl. the recidivism one, and argues the concept should be more widely known.
(It also makes an argument that “length-biased sampling is the deep structure of nested categories” which sounds interesting but which I am not awake enough rn to wrap my head around)
Tags:
#fun with statistics #(well maybe not ”fun”) #the more you know #prison cw
On the one hand this is extremely cool and an elegant solution to the problem, on the other hand it’s probably fortunate for Japan and China that we only went about a century between the rise of typewriters and the invention of computers with phonetic IMEs, or else I think they all would’ve gone completely mad.
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