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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I believe you can change the scaling algorithm obs uses? Right click the source and go to “scale filter” is what Google is telling me, not at a computer right now. I think it defaults to bicubic which should be ok though? The switch does its own internal scaling a lot of the time and that can look pretty bad though, but unless you get into some serious shenanigans that’s basically baked in.



  • 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.


  • It entirely depends on how much and what you’ll use them for. They’re going to be around $200 USD all in, so if they’re for occasional use probably not. If you’re going to use them a lot like for work or a regular hobby then it’s not a crazy amount to spend. They tend to be more comfortable than flange earplugs, and a little better than foamies, but for me at least I don’t want them in for more than 3 hours.

    Etymotic makes a few different ones for general noise, sleeping, music, and they also do ones for their earphones.


  • Look for a local print or embroidery shop that you can get like work shirts and business cards and whatnot made. Unless you’re really in the middle of nowhere, there’s probably a local print shop that will at least be able to point you in the right direction. If you want a one off instead of a small batch look for a place that offers embroidery - it sounds more expensive but because they can just throw whatever on the machine and do a one off, it’s usually actually less expensive than traditional screen printing. Specifically for hats in not sure if you can get them digitally printed in most smaller local shops.


  • If you are working with a specific company to produce a personalized / custom product, they will generally have at least one person on staff that can do design, or at least deal with any file conversion and technical stuff like that. They should be able to quote you a price.

    If you are working with an artist first, they may have a company they’re familiar with to have the item produced, and if they do, should be able to handle most of it themselves. If they don’t, or you would like it produced somewhere specific, just let the artist know - most places will have all the information the artist will need on their website, or the artist can just get in touch with them directly.

    In general, if you’re going to an artist or design shop they should be able to give you some kind of quote with a very rough idea of what you want - especially if they do this professionally, talking to people who don’t have an art background is basically half their job. If you want to be specific it’s much more useful to send something like a mood board or a collage of similar things than a bunch of text. It’s also generally a good idea to be open to their ideas, as they often have experience that may be helpful and will see some problems much quicker than you might.




  • 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.


  • Yeah newsprint would be a pain in an inkjet depending on exactly what it’s like. It might not even be much thinner, it’s often a little “fluffy” so it can be printed fast.

    If you take it in somewhere and get it spiral / coil bound that’s probably your best bet if you don’t want to do a binder. You can do it yourself but you basically need a little desktop machine to do the punching which is annoying unless you’re doing it regularly.

    Traditional hardcover probably won’t work for you. That involves printing a bunch of booklets called signatures then sewing them together and it’s a whole thing. Basically there’s a reason well made hardcover books are expensive.

    You could do perfect or tape binding pretty easy though. Essentially you glue all the edges to a backing and then wrap a cover around it. It works ok for low usage, but if you want it to lay flat or hold up to abuse you’ll have problems. You can kind of mitigate that by using a gpod spine backing but it’s not a perfect solution. If the copy you have isn’t already laid out for printing it may be worth it to edit it a bit so the contents are farther from the spine if you do that, but it makes printing a bit more complicated.


  • So, I’ve never pirated a book but I do have some printing and binding knowledge, so some of this might be off base.

    If the original book isn’t fully chungus it’s probably printed on a low weight newsprint, a low weight coated paper, or something weird like vellum or scritta. Problem is most of that is going to be specialty and only really available in rolls or large sheets through a distributor.

    Most of the thinner stuff you’ll be able to find in sheets has become a thing with fountain pen lovers. Look for Tomoe River or Bank paper. They are in the 50gsm range and should be a bit thinner than normal 75ish gsm copy paper. It’s going to be way more expensive than normal printer paper but it should be thinner. The other issue is actually getting your printer to reliably print on thinner paper. Home printers, especially inkjets, really don’t deal with thin paper particularly well. Lasers usually do better since they tend to use a different paper pickup and path, but they can still have issues.

    Your printer should have a thin paper setting to reduce the amount of ink that it uses so you don’t get as much bleed. The other thing you’ll have to look out for is that those papers will take longer to dry than normal paper, so if your printer has a drying time you’ll probably need to set it as high as it will go. You might even want to wait a day before flipping it over for the duplex print. Which you definitely should some that will literally halve the size of the book. It will probably be fine anyway since this is likely a multi day project just given how long it will take to spit 1000 pages out of an inkjet.

    Unless you absolutely need to have the whole thing with you all the time, I would consider printing it in volumes. Even if you duplicate sections like an index or glossary or reference section or whatever, you’re still probably going to have a lot less trouble and maybe spend less.


  • It might be important to put into context that Jon is warming up the crowd before the taping of the show in this clip. Yeah, he probably misses the mark on exactly what was asked, but what is he supposed to do at that point? He’s warming up the crowd. Going out and saying, “journalism and by extension traditional media is dying a slow and painful death at the hands of software companies that don’t care about truth or art using dangerously manipulative techniques and the consequences of that are likely dire for the future of society” isn’t exactly setting the mood they’re going for.

    Given the traction this clip is getting it really wouldn’t surprise me to see a more nuanced take from him in a while that has had more than almost zero thought put into it.






  • 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.


  • Have them printed from a service. A normal deck of cards should run about $30 USD. The paper, laminate, ink and maybe sleeves will probably cost the same or more and will come out with way lower quality especially if this is your first time crafting them.

    I’ve done both and unless you want really quick and dirty prototype cards or something that is super handmade that you drew on yourself instead of designed on a computer, the ones from a printing service win hands down.


  • 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.


  • 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.