waffles
breakfast food
No bio...
User ID: 3250
waffles
breakfast food
24d ago
Cars typically sit on a suspension that allows movement as the weight of the vehicle shifts. If you're loading a child into a car seat, the vehicle is shifting and micro-scratches are occurring because heavy object is in contact with another heavy object. Having clayed my car several times in the past, they will accumulate.
Now is it significant? You're probably getting more scratches driving 10 miles down the highway and having sand and rocks hitting your car. But one is caused by nothing in particular (unless the highway is dirty and unmaintained beyond reasonable standards) while the other is directly caused by someone else.
I understand the inevitable scratches and dings that take place when driving in the city. But I certainly think as individuals, we should strive not to be one the ones causing them.
waffles
breakfast food
28d ago
To have a pleasant society, we should not be scratching things that belong to other people. You can literally buy a pool noodle from the store, cut it down to a few inches, cut a slit in it, and keep it in the door pocket. Or even simpler, a microfiber towel. If you are in a situation where someone has parked very close to you, slip it on the door so it props nicely against their car while you attend to your child.
waffles
breakfast food
1mo ago
A little over a year ago I posted about ChatGPT's voice mode, which was, at the time, not much more than text-to-speech grafted onto the chat interface. A few weeks later I posted about a startup doing some impressive language processing, but its capabilities were limited to a 5-minute demo call and some snippets they were showcasing on their website. A few weeks ago I found out that Gemini rolled out a voice mode, which leans on the power of the Gemini LLM combined with a very decent voice synthesis model. At time of writing it is freely available in the Gemini app.
I haven't done much more than a few minute-long conversations but I foresee myself using it more in the future. Would be an excellent companion for long road trips. The only things holding me back are the privacy implications, as Google is now going to have a pretty decent collection of my recent voice data. I asked it how it does voice synthesis/transcription, and it sounds like they do all the processing off-device (i.e. they take your microphone audio, analyze/transcribe it in the cloud, and generate an audio response back) rather than using on-device text-to-speech.
You guys should try it out and report back.
waffles
breakfast food
1mo ago
Posted about some beginner gardening things last Friday. Currently fighting off some leaf miners on the zucchinis and powdery mildew on the begonias. Starting some basil plants from seed this weekend. Might plant some lavender and some mint if I can find them at the garden center. I'll need to upgrade the irrigation system though. How's my drip?
waffles
breakfast food
1mo ago
I just finished a small setup on 9 pots, I totally get the analogy now. I'll post about it at the next Friday Fun thread and you can critique it...
waffles
breakfast food
1mo ago
Thanks for the suggestions. That Youtube channel looks excellent. Regarding the mulch, like I mentioned, I just started a week ago so still trying to figure out how well the soil is holding moisture. I used mulch on a couple of the plants, but it's starting to look like the others will need it too.
waffles
breakfast food
1mo ago
Basically start at the apex of produce and work your way down
That's what I figured as well. The fun stuff are the fruits and vegetables you can't find in the supermarket, either because they're fragile or the market for them is too tiny. Thanks for reminding me about the alpine strawberries, I read about that several months back but it has since slipped out of my mind.
I actually just bought a drip irrigation starter kit last weekend from a big-box hardware store, which hooks into a typical 3/4" garden hose connection. I also bought a timer, which attaches to the 3/4" GHT and will let me run the drip irrigation to send 0.5/1.0/2.0 gallons of water per hour to each planter. For those of us who work long hours away from home and may not be able to consistently water in the morning, it's a good solution.
waffles
breakfast food
1mo ago
I've been getting into gardening lately. I grew some herbs and small vegetables many years ago, but otherwise I am completely new to it again.
Two months ago I made the rookie mistake of using "garden soil" in planters (garden soil is to be used in the ground, or in raised beds) and unfortunately nearly all of the plants died. But the California growing season is forgiving, and I haven't lost much time. Last weekend I bought a strawberry plant, a cherry tomato plant, a larger tomato plant, and six zucchini squash plants. This weekend I'm setting up a drip irrigation system to keep the plants watered, as I have quickly learned that the plants I currently have will need a lot of water.
AI chatbots have been very helpful for answering every question I could possibly have, and capturing the nuances between different varieties. (Certain strawberry varieties have runners that you should snip off to encourage upward growth! Zucchini squash may need hand pollination when flowers appear! Switch to liquid fertilizer when fruiting!) What could've been hours of searching in the library, or talking with the local gardening club, in the good old days, is now a half hour conversation at my desk. In one way, I am glad that I am able to kick off a new hobby successfully, but in another way, I'm a bit sad that I no longer have a reason to get up with the local gardening folks to figure out what's going on.
I've got a lot of planters sitting around. What should I grow next? What is everyone else growing?
waffles
breakfast food
2mo ago
I grew up in the US but my family is from southern China. Some photos from a visit in the late 2000s to the Guangzhou area. I wish I had better photos of the streetscape, but most of the trip was spent with family.
A couple of things that stick out, in retrospect:
- Billboards advertising machine tools and bathroom fixtures in a prominent corner in a small regional town
- At the time, the villages were hollowing out and younger folks were moving to the city. Only the very old and the very young were still living in the villages
- The infrastructure felt overbuilt at the time... clean new public roads going nowhere, adjacent to decrepit old buildings.
- Many people carried umbrellas, rain or shine. Aside from staying dry in the unpredictable weather, people would open them in broad daylight for some shade. Imagine walking down the street in the US on a hot summer's day with an open umbrella - people would think you were insane. Not sure if this is commonplace anymore.
waffles
breakfast food
2mo ago
I recently stumbled upon my childhood Pokemon card collection. I had a couple binders sitting in storage for many years and now I finally have some time to catalog and sell them.
Aside from being a trip down memory lane, it has been quite a treasure hunt. My ten-year-old self organized them by color, and at some point later I took a bunch of them out to play with and never put them back. I have since learned that there are a couple of gems in there - who would've thought that a promotional card received in a magazine, or one that came with a movie ticket, would have resale value twenty-five years in the future? And then recently I learned about misprinted cards - apparently there are a handful of known typos or printing mistakes that can 10x the price of a card.
I had some family who went to Japan, came to visit my family in the US, and brought me a couple packs of Japanese cards. I didn't know anyone who could read Japanese during that time, and there were no easily accessible translation services, so they remained a mystery for many years. I remember getting on the internet in the early 2000s and finding a website where someone posted their English translations, and I copied a bunch of them down into post-it notes that I stuck to the back of the card.
There must be a bunch of 90s kids in here - what happened to your collection?
waffles
breakfast food
3mo ago
Congratulations, wishing you and your wife the best.
I've been together with the missus for a little over a decade, been married for about half of that time. Every relationship is different, but I think Tolstoy stated it best... "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Having grown older and becoming more attuned to friends and extended family around me, that sentence sums it up very well. Find what happy families have in common, and the rest will follow.
Along those lines, I read some headline a few months ago from some study suggesting that a strong indicator of relationship success is having a minimum of six positive interactions for every one negative interaction. It stuck with me because it was so very practical. Is it possible to improve your relationship by simply reducing the amount of friction between each other?
waffles
breakfast food
5mo ago
I've never heard of decaf coffee processed using that method, I'll have to look into it next time I buy another bag of beans.
I might've mentioned before but I'm a one to two cups of coffee a week kind of person. Last week I put too many beans into my espresso (mind you, this is around 8 AM) and my mind was still racing when trying to fall asleep at 10 PM. The trouble is that it is hard to scale down normal coffee-making processes, when you're looking for less than a cup, or less than a shot!
I encourage you all to drink less coffee and get more sleep.
waffles
breakfast food
5mo ago
In any career, remember that you're being paid in two ways: the first being through your wages & benefits, the second being through knowledge and experience you learn on the job. If you're early on in your career, in a field where the ceilings are high, the latter is a lot more important than the former.
Sinecures are for people at the tail end of their career. There's not much use for new specialized knowledge because they won't have many years left to use it. And so they spend their time mentoring younger colleagues or providing strategic guidance - things that are easy because they've had the practice earlier on.
If you find yourself in a position where you think your salary is a lot higher than your skillset, then consider yourself lucky... but just like everything else you should one day expect regression to the mean.
Keep on hustlin'
waffles
breakfast food
6mo ago
I was looking into the various La Pavoni machines when I was searching for a lever espresso maker. They look gorgeous and must be a pleasure to use. If they made a scaled-down version I would've strongly considered getting one, but the capability of the machine was just too much for the occasional espresso drinker like myself.
waffles
breakfast food
6mo ago
I ended up getting the Flair Go, mostly because the missus didn't want another device on the kitchen counter and this model folded into a neat package. It takes a few iterations to get the technique right, but so far I'm pretty satisfied with it.
I didn't like the idea of an automatic espresso maker, having to tear down the machine every so often for cleaning and replacing soft parts. Then again, I'm just cleaning the Flair Go every time I make espresso, so there's overhead involved either way. And I'm sure in 5-10 years the O-rings will wear out too, but that's probably a lot less difficult to replace than a typical consumer machine.
We will see whether coffea arabica ends up in my back yard! I need to level up on my gardening skills first, but it's certainly on my radar.
waffles
breakfast food
6mo ago
I cannot compete with your purple prose, but I will share my relatively newfound experience with coffee.
I drank coffee semi-regularly in college, just the usual dining hall brew, but after a few bad experiences being sleep deprived in an industrial facility, I decided that eight hours of sleep was a much better option and swore off coffee for almost a decade.
One day, while browsing through Twitter (yes, it was still called Twitter at the time) I came across a post where a guy said that nearly everyone was using coffee incorrectly. Instead of waking up every day, drinking a cup, and heading to work, you should be drinking a cup on the weekend after a good night's rest, heading to the art museum, and enjoying those subtle psychoactive effects because you don't have a caffeine habit. That post completely reframed my perception toward coffee, and soon afterward I got myself a hand grinder, pour-over kit, and a bag of half-decent coffee beans.
These days I try to avoid drinking it more than once or twice a week. I found out that when I drink a full cup, at 7AM, I have trouble sleeping at night, so I have tuned it down to about 2/3rds of a cup.
I picked up a manual lever espresso maker over the holidays, and about two weeks ago I fired it up to make some espresso shots and flat whites. I will say that I have a lot of experimenting to do, as I'm still a bit inconsistent with the results. But the quantity of caffeine is just right, and I've been quite happy with the new toy.
Living in a fairly temperate climate, I am in one of the few parts of the world where I might be able to grow a coffee tree in my backyard. I learned the other day that it is not difficult to find sellers of live coffee plants on the internet. I am currently contemplating whether I should grow one of these magnificent plants in the garden!
waffles
breakfast food
8mo ago
And how do you put a price on making beautiful things to make memories around with your family?
Perhaps that's the key there. I find that the things I do or make for myself are very spartan, but for my family it has to be polished. I have a child that's too young to know the difference, but perhaps someday they'll be the reason why I put in the extra effort. We make things beautiful for other people I suppose.
waffles
breakfast food
8mo ago
I recently did some "woodworking" this last week as well... putting up light-duty shelves in my garage for storing bulky items. The shelf itself was made of 1/2" OSB plywood, with a piece of 1x2 screwed down to make a reinforcing lip. Shelves were 18" deep, 16' long. I used some cheap shelving brackets bought off Amazon and screwed them into the studs. Overall it cost me about $60 and 8 hours, not too bad for an extra 24 square feet of storage in my cramped garage.
I'm curious - what drives you to build something elaborate like that from scratch? And how do you mentally draw the line between cost/effort/time and aesthetics? I find it interesting that two people can work with their hands in a similar manner, but come at it from completely different angles. My creation ended up being all function, zero form. Even the paint job on it was a single coat, as quickly as I could do it. I can hardly imagine staining a $100 piece of wood and having to live with any errors made.
A good opportunity to inform folks around here about step potential. In short, downed power lines can still be energized, and walking by can cause current to flow through one leg and out the other.
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