fhqwgads
@fhqwgads@possumpat.io
- Comment on How do you get people to wash their vegetables when you're at their house and you don't wanna seem rude? 2 weeks ago:
As far as I’ve found, they’re both right. You shouldn’t have to wash your mushrooms, but it’s not a bad idea if you’re not buying fancy mushrooms.
The generic button mushroom variants you’re probably getting at the grocery store are grown in compost, which often contains some manure - ie poops.
But before growing mushrooms it’s pasteurized. Mycelium is picky, and fairly easily out-competed by other stuff, so to make sure you’re just growing mushrooms and not bacteria you basically have to sterilize the medium they’re grown in.
But those mushrooms are often grown in open beds, and harvested by hand. And that means they get that poop dirt right up on them. Will it immediately give you super botulism? Probably not but it’s still kinda ick.
Fancier mushroom varieties from smaller cultivars are the ones that actually don’t really need washed and often shouldn’t be. They’re grown in highly sterile environments and they fruit out of a container, so they never touched the poop. And that’s if they even used compost - lots use straw or wood.
If you do decide to wash your button mushrooms it’s not a big deal, they aren’t actually sponges, and they don’t absorb as much water as some cooking shows say. If they get soggy it probably means they’re old, try putting them in the fridge for a few hours uncovered. It’s basically a dehydrator.
- Comment on PPSSPP has been approved for the iOS App Store! 1 month ago:
Warning: Papaton is borderline impossible when you combine Bluetooth headphone and controller lag.
- Comment on Christy blade comparison – aka “where can I get a Christy blade today?” 1 month ago:
Doesn’t seem like you can new proper blades from my limited searching, but injector blades apparently work if inserted carefully.
- Comment on Sunday 2 months ago:
I thought this was a Mystery Flesh Pit National Park post for a second.
- Comment on This person has earned a front row seat 2 months ago:
To be fair 10ths are a thing in surveying. And occasionally engineering I guess but I’ve never seen it.
I want a ruler in 3rds just to mess with people now though.
- Comment on Handy temperature conversion scale. 2 months ago:
If I remember correctly, it’s not the freezing point. Fahrenheit used a brine that included ammonium chloride to set 0 on his scale since it was the closest thing he could make in his lab that was a consistent temperature. The other end was body temperature, which he set at 96 if I’m remembering right since it’s more easily divisible than 100. He was a little off on his body temperature measurements so it’s considered a little higher than that now.
- Comment on Staying for the week at an AirBnB in Rochester, MN. This is what I just found out I'm stuck with. 3 months ago:
Often they serve areas where there’s basically no cell coverage. That’s why we used them when we did after trying a number of antennas and boosters. We’ve had neighbors put up 12m towers in conjunction with the WISP to get service.
- Comment on Staying for the week at an AirBnB in Rochester, MN. This is what I just found out I'm stuck with. 3 months ago:
It is and it isn’t, those are pretty standard fixed wireless rates. It’s largely used in pretty rural areas where you wouldn’t be able to get fiber or cable or often even DSL. They compete against things like hughesnet that’s more expensive and has something like a 15gb data cap. Or starlink for $150 a month and $500 of equipment and the weight on your soul of giving Elon money.
They often run wireless backhauls for tens of miles across multiple towers so bandwidth is pretty limited and setup and maintenance is somewhat specialized. Like yeah if you can get cable or fiber do that it’s way better. But when there’s no other option is not that bad all things considered.
- Comment on Staying for the week at an AirBnB in Rochester, MN. This is what I just found out I'm stuck with. 3 months ago:
If the signal is decent I’d bet there’s a problem upstairs too.
Going through Airbnb support really isn’t worth it and will take forever. Just message the hosts directly. If you have an Airbnb account you can be added as a guest on the trip by her and message them yourself if she doesn’t want to deal with it.
- Comment on Staying for the week at an AirBnB in Rochester, MN. This is what I just found out I'm stuck with. 3 months ago:
Ok I have an amount of experience with basically everything going on here so here’s what you should do:
First, find the listing and see if they have WiFi listed as an amenity. If they do great, you can complain to Airbnb as a last resort. If they don’t you can’t, which honestly probably isn’t going to change much unless they are turds.
Second, do a few speed tests around the house, especially next to the other duplex unit. On the Airbnb app, send a screenshot of them and say something to the effect of “hey we noticed the Internet is slow, are you having issues too?”
Either they never checked if the downstairs WiFi and there’s no signal, or there’s a problem with the Internet and they need to call the company. Both are pretty viable. Does your phone say 75% signal or -75db? -75db is not great, but 75% should be ok. If you get faster speeds near the other unit it’s likely their WiFi.
The other option is they have issues too. Fixed wireless can run into issues when things change like radar frequencies. They can call the company and get it fixed pretty quick. Even if they aren’t paying for the faster speeds the ping shouldn’t be anywhere near 600ms. Like, I lived with wireless internet for a long while and it’s slow or shouldn’t be that painfully slow.
Don’t just suffer through, often people don’t mention this kind of stuff and if the hosts aren’t on top of their tech they don’t know it’s an issue. There was an issue with the Wi-Fi firmware on a unit I do work for and the guests only mentioned it at the end of their month long stay. They should be willing to work with you especially if they advertise wifi but honestly probably even if they don’t. Like, just don’t be an ass about it and they’ll probably be pretty accommodating.
- Comment on The Wildest, Weirdest Star Trek Action Figures 3 months ago:
Clearly the writer hasn’t seen DS9. Morn is the show’s best asset, of course he has a figure. Excuse me while I go scour eBay for one.
- Comment on How have you personally found the Lemmy community compared to its competition and other social media? 6 months ago:
I tend to find that it needs about 10x the users, but I honestly don’t know if it could handle that at the moment. Generally I would assume one would use a social network for the social aspects, but right now the top (everything) post of the past 24 hours has something like a thousand votes and about a hundred comments, which is actually a pretty decent amount. But there’s maybe 1 other post with 100+ comments right now in the top of the past 24 hours that I can see. Go to a second page or scroll for a bit and you’ll see most posts have less than ten comments.
Is number of comments the most important metric? Probably not, but it is pretty important one since it’s kind of the main reason I would come here instead of just scrolling through Google News or whatever, and I’m guessing I’m not alone.
The only people who actually managed the migration in my opinion were the StarTrek.website people, and it took a clever coordinated effort in a community of people who probably skew more technical than most. For most communities that were interested in things like specific games, shows, hobbies, or whatever and not interested in a new computer toy to play with, they’ve essentially died out and are either ghost towns or full of bot posts.
In large part I think it’s because Lemmy’s discoverability is pretty trash, and while I get that it’s kind of on purpose it’s still an issue. The migration led to this explosion of communities but because finding them is harder than making them, it spread these relatively small communities out. The hope was that they would find each other and coalesce, but instead it seems like they took the path of least resistance and just slid back to their old haunts.
One of Lemmy’s key strengths is that it can act both as an aggregator that has a stream of news stories and comments but if tuned slightly differently it can act much more like an old school forum, but there’s really no way to bridge the two ways of interaction right now. I think one path forward is finding that middle ground, and slowly becoming a respiratory of useful discussions like old school forums, Facebook groups, and yeah even reddit. But to do that there needs to be a lot more searchable and discoverable and not just letting Google do it. Finding a way to both surface jokes and memes and whatever for quick consumption, but also having some way to keep those highly technical 130 page long forum posts where they reverse engineer an aquarium bubble pump or something available and simmering on the back burner, ready to be found in a few years and awakened when someone makes a breakthrough.
On a more personal note, I feel like I’m vibing less and less with Lemmy. The memes have slowed way down, the articles are interesting sometimes but the lack of any comments makes me less interested in interacting with them, and I feel like I hit the wall of reddit repost bots spamming thousands of sonic fan arts way quicker than I used to. It honestly feels a lot more like it’s dying from lack of meaningful user interaction pretty much everywhere outside the star trek memes. Half the time it feels like I’m just using Hacker News by proxy. Just like that line “butter spread over too much bread” it feels like the users are spread out over too many servers. I dunno, I’ve had a few so I’m rambling. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk I guess.
- Comment on So many expensive homes 10 months ago:
From what I’ve seen this has been turned upside down by… well essentially automation, just not the kind everyone is afraid of.
Between better techniques and tools, a lot of construction is significantly faster than it used to be, to the point that a job that’s smaller has enough… I guess “opportunity” cost that it can be significantly less profitable.
Let’s say I’m a plumber. In the 80s, I would use copper pipe and have to solder all the connections - even a small job would take a long time - on the order of days. If I do a small house it takes way less time than a big house.
But now instead I would put in long lines of PEX with crimp on connectors. It’s like 4x as fast so it should be 4x cheaper right? Except now I have to drive to 4 different jobs to work all day, set up and tear down 4 times, deal with 4 different customers and invoices, etc. OR I can do 1 big house and make essentially the same money since I cut out all the extra work.
Add to that that most people are going to use more expensive finishes on larger houses that I basically just take a percentage of, and they might request something specialty and working on small affordable houses seems like a terrible business plan.
- Comment on So many expensive homes 10 months ago:
As someone who works with people in residential construction fairly often, this is the answer - and it’s why they don’t build new “starter” homes anymore. It’s very difficult to turn a profit on a single family home that would be considered affordable most places.
Basically, its very little extra effort and expense to build a luxury house compared to an inexpensive one, and your profit margin goes from very thin to decent.
Anecdotally in my area, most residential new construction is going to retirees who have a nest egg and the sale now very expensive house, or couples who sold an inherited house. Occasionally there are people who are remotely working or people building as an investment property, but they’re in the minority.