CentipedeFarrier
@CentipedeFarrier@piefed.social
- Comment on That's how the world works. 2 days ago:
Not wanting to add complexity or anything but have you considered trying a deep water culture (DWC) hydroponic system? That’s all a fancy way to say a dark colored large 5-ish gallon bucket of water with specific hydroponic nutrients dissolved in the water (I use a generic balanced powder and it works nicely) and an air pump to keep the water from going stagnant. As long as you keep the air pump dry, you can do the whole thing outside without issue. I hang mine under a plastic camera guard and it works nicely.
I’m terrible at growing things in dirt because dirt remembers what you did to it (holds salts and nutrient excess unless you flush the soil), but hydroponics is a totally different thing. You can just toss the water and give it new when it starts showing signs of nutrient deficiency/toxicity. The roots end up massive and healthy and everything grows faster since there’s zero resistance in the growth medium. Just sucking up everything they can. Tho since the typical advice is to just completely toss the water at least weekly once it’s grown up (great for outside gardens or houseplants after the tomato buckets), you usually don’t end up with imbalances like that at all.
Proper care of a hydro system makes for a bountiful harvest most years, and if you want, you can very easily keep a tomato clone over winter to keep some smaller amount of production going. Hydro works very well inside because you don’t bring most of the bugs you would with a dirt pot.
Throw like 4 standard screw-in daylight bulbs of 60+watt-equivalent leds and you’ve got a grow space. No fancy expensive nonsense required.
- Comment on FAA launches flying taxi pilot program spanning 26 states 2 weeks ago:
Probably for a similar reason the IRS runs off COBOL.
Allergic to improvements if they require significant overhaul.
- Comment on FAA launches flying taxi pilot program spanning 26 states 2 weeks ago:
This the same FAA that doesn’t have enough air traffic controllers to properly manage current aircraft for all airports and keep them from crashing? Or enough inspectors or whatever to ensure large planes used by hundreds of thousands of people an year are properly maintained and safe?
Spectacular idea to add another several thousand little high-tech high-fail flight pods to the mix!
- Comment on Employa destroya 🫵😫 4 weeks ago:
$15/hr still isn’t a living wage in most places, just for the record. It’s better than server wages for sure, but it’s not stable-life-level income.
- Comment on It makes me shudder 4 weeks ago:
Depends if you can stand to wear a wool turtleneck (over another shirt that keeps the wool only touching your neck).
I can’t stand any turtleneck, personally, for exactly the same reason I can’t do tags. It’s there touching me, and it feels wrong but won’t go away, and the wrongness bothers me. Even super fluffy soft fabrics are wrong on my neck.
- Comment on Thronehenge 5 weeks ago:
I’ve played enough video games to know there’s either some valuable quest item in there, or a really good joke about digging in the toilet for treasures. Zero other options.
- Comment on We really need to bring back the 70s conversation pits 1 month ago:
If true, that definitely assumes it’s built on a slab foundation.
Where I’m from, where full basements are the norm and slab foundations are mostly for commercial properties, it would be entirely above the foundation (first floor is at least 5 foot above the basement floor) and have no impact whatever on sealing.
- Comment on lightbulbs 1 month ago:
This is why I don’t use them.
The paint in my living room looks diarrhea brown and corpse gray under warm light. It’s purple and blue, and there are a lot of windows so I can’t plan for warm light as a default. Daylight bulbs keep the color what it should be.
- Comment on You don't say. 1 month ago:
Fun fact about genuine phobias!
You can cure them with pills and a truly slight bit of effort!
Propranolol, a beta blocker that has been in use since the 60s mostly for blood pressure control, has the absolutely lovely side effect of blocking fear signals from the amygdala if you have the stones to expose yourself to them while taking it. This exposure coupled with a totally not over-reacting nervous system, can mostly or totally cure phobias.
I watched a documentary about it, realized I had an old prescription, and went “well fuck, why not try to cure my social anxiety? That’s basically a phobia, anyway!” And so I started taking it again instead of the med I was on for blood pressure. The effect happens at doses too low to be noticeable if you don’t need the pressure reduction, but it also works when you have blood pressure doses.
Anyway after about a month of taking it and living life as normal I realized yep, it worked. I don’t panic about going out anymore.
So hey, if you have an irrational fear of something, talk to your doctor.
Here is a probably biased bit of info about it and how it works (it was the best I could find without doing tons of digging for the specific study on phobias, which used 40mg), direct from the people who make it, who had no idea an old blood pressure med would become a therapy for anxiety.
- Comment on Student Parking 1 month ago:
My first one, which was downtown, did the exact same thing, so everyone parked juuuuuuuuuust off campus. All the houses within a 3 block radius were owned by either faculty or people who rented them to students, so they didn’t care at all. The only students who really used the lots were either living on campus and had to pay to store the vehicle anyway, or disabled people who didn’t have to pay.
The second one, however, was amazing. Every building could be accessed via tunnels, and was set up like a wheel with spokes so each building connected to the center as well as its neighboring buildings, iirc. You could navigate the entire campus without going outside (Midwest winters). Every building also had a huge parking lot nearby, which was free because the campus was not close to anything but residential housing; campus was completely surrounded by conservation study acreage, as ecological sciences were very important there. Busses came mostly as scheduled. It was a dream of a place to go to school, honestly.
- Comment on I've wondered since I was a youngin 1 month ago:
I disagree that violence taints your soul permanently.
This depends upon your own morals, personal justifications, and probably a ton of other factors.
I think the idea is that it’s something you are going to have to live with, one way or another. You might hurt an innocent by accident, do more damage than intended (most people would struggle to live with having killed someone, for example), or even harm yourself irreparably. You might cause people to look at you differently, you might have the wrong information, you might change the course of your life permanently.
Violence is a very complicated subject, but perpetrators of it are, indeed, always marked in some way by it, just like every other experience you have.
- Comment on Huh? 2 months ago:
We have supper clubs here, which are apparently highly regional.. as in I never saw one when I was more than a few hours out of my region, and that was several years of looking. Meanwhile nearly every town here has at least one.
It’s mostly boomers, tho you’ll find considerable millennial representation these days as well (not typically much younger people). A nice low ceiling, dim light, carpeted place that expects you to sit for a drink or two and socialize before food, take your order long before you are seated at your table sort of thing. Slow, quieter, intimate, and so popular they are gathering spots for old people. Also the food is usually killer, and/or stuff you can’t get elsewhere, for decent small town prices. No poker machines tho.
- Comment on On Venus. 2 months ago:
Even their animated stuff is superb, getting both right at the same time is huge. I hate Apple, but credit where due.
- Comment on rules of the pirate code 2 months ago:
I can be asleep at AN 8-o’clock, but will be neither falling asleep nor waking within at least an hour of either of them.
- Comment on Give me some good ones 2 months ago:
Not technically, but they got expelled for it, so yes.
- Comment on Caw caw 2 months ago:
As someone who wore nothing but superhero flip-flops through the entirety of high school in the Great Lakes region, yeah it was neither practical nor socially acceptable. But they flashed lights when I walked. I never had light-up shoes as a little kid, and these were marketed for “kids at heart” so, tradeoff. 🤷🏻
- Comment on Give me some good ones 2 months ago:
Got in a literal fistfight in middle school using that first one. Pretty sure they didn’t understand it, and lashed out from ignorance.
- Comment on Mafs 2 months ago:
Oh good, I still have room for more! For a while I was caught up to my age and got a new one every year to celebrate, but then I got old and took a bunch of the more irritating ones out.
- Comment on Drivers over 70 to undergo eye tests every three years under plans to improve road safety | LBC 2 months ago:
Also a nice dose of survivorship bias! All those old people survived the gauntlet of driving for decades without losing life or license, so safer drivers are more represented.
- Comment on Wish I was her 3 months ago:
Oh man if I found out my manager had that mentality I’d be second-guessing literally everything they say forever. I would much rather someone say “I don’t know, but that’s a good question. I’ll find out for you” than give me the wrong information confidently.
I already struggle with respecting authority figures who clearly don’t know what they are doing and thus have no actual basis for their authority, so yeah that’d be a ticking time bomb.
Please try to move away from doing that. It’s genuinely not great for your reports, only for you to put in less effort.
- Comment on Whatever happened to the days when shit just...worked? 3 months ago:
Wow is that ever a pointlessly nit-picky challenge of a story from when I was a kid, over 30 years ago………. Almost like memory isn’t perfect or something, omgno!
I don’t know if there were some little lines or something; I remember it being a black screen. But little lines would give the exact same impression of a dead/infected machine so it barely matters outside of pedantry. It didn’t display an interface, that’s the important part. As for the boot up, maybe, but also very possibly not. They had some Monty python suite of software (themes taken to an extreme, very 90s) that may have made the system function differently than you, some random techbro with absolutely zero information about the computer itself, expect. It replaced literally everything with Monty python stuff and was installed from iirc 12 2.5 floppy discs! Did it replace the boot images, causing them to not display properly when booted in the wrong resolution? Maybe, idk. Wouldn’t be surprised. But even if it did go through the boot sequence and then land on a black screen, the result is the same. Non-functional-looking computer, because no interface. As for DOS boot, we never ran dos on it so genuinely don’t know.
The only sign of life we had from it as far as I can recall was when the screensaver would go on after 5 min, it would play the Klingon national anthem, which is a big part of why they assumed virus (we didn’t know until much later that was what was happening, or that my sibling changed the screensaver and maybe other stuff, which is probably what caused the problem in the first place), but the other software may have covered up those signs you are talking about, or maybe we all just still didn’t know what to do with it with the boot images and stuff showing up, which… idk if you know this, but even today most people don’t know how to troubleshoot or fix their computers… My parents were not tech inclined, my sibling and I were around 10-11, and it’s not like they could just look up how to do these things when their computer wasn’t working.. which is exactly what my sibling did when they got a computer of their own.
- Comment on Why does every commercial depiction of honey involve one of this things? Literally nobody has ever seen one of these in real life 3 months ago:
“Instead of getting the tool designed specifically for the thing, just get a different tool that isn’t designed for the thing, and then learn to make really precise difficult cuts!”
I come from cheese country, and genuinely, no, you are wrong. A sharper knife isn’t the problem, the surface area of the blade is the problem. Even an oiled ceramic knife doesn’t cut cleanly through many cheeses (ceramic is extremely sharp, oiling is to attempt to prevent buckling and breaking because the cheese sticks to the blade). A wire cheese slicer is consistent, and safe and easy enough for a child to use (I know because that was my first experience with one, around 5-6).
- Comment on Whatever happened to the days when shit just...worked? 3 months ago:
We had a computer sitting for like 3 years, totally unusable. It was assumed it had some sort of major virus because everything seemed to be working and making the right noises, but no interface. We didn’t have the money for repair services, and nobody knew how to fix stuff yet, so there it sat.
Until one day, when someone hooked the tower up to the monitor for a newer computer, to see if they could figure out why it wasn’t working, or at least reformat the drives and stuff.
Turns out, someone messed with the resolution, and set it to something the original monitor couldn’t display, and this was before automatic rollback, so it just didn’t display it. That’s all it was. Unusable for 3 years because we didn’t have another monitor to use to roll back the changes.
It never “just worked”.
- Comment on Make me feel like a man 3 months ago:
- Comment on Inside you are two bricks 3 months ago:
That’s the preferred order. It’s much harder to throw a community at a cop.
- Comment on Perfect size for brats 3 months ago:
Same in the regions of the US I’ve been to. Usually little cocktail weenies in pastry here, bacon wrapped is just called bacon wrapped, though.
- Comment on Settings you believe ANY game should have? (This is me advocating for a restart/reboot button on ALL games) 3 months ago:
Similarly, granular audio options that separate dialogue from ambient from music from system sounds.
I like having the background music very low, but not off, system sounds a bit above that, sound effects higher than system but lower than dialogue. And of course ambient sound levels really depend on the game and what kind of ambiance it has. Definitely don’t need my ears blown out just to hear dialogue.
Same thing with granular contrast/gamma/etc. Don’t just provide a few preset options, especially if they can only be set before you start the game (also they should never only be set from the main menu, never). Let the player choose whatever they want on the fly. I love playing with everything bright so I can see wtf I’m doing, I don’t give half a shit if the devs think it should be so dark it’s not navigable. I disagree.
- Comment on Christina Chong Has a Wild Idea for a 'Doctor Who' and 'Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' Crossover 3 months ago:
Did they ever identify species 8469 that the bird are afraid of (I think that’s the number, didn’t look it up)?
I guess that’s maybe one thing they could do with it, if not..
- Comment on Christina Chong Has a Wild Idea for a 'Doctor Who' and 'Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' Crossover 3 months ago:
But why though? What does this add to anything?
- Comment on PetSmart won't let you leave a review if you have adblockers on 3 months ago:
I wonder how many people that actually works on..
