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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • 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.


  • We use a few Schlage connect zwave deadbolts, and they have been basically rock solid. We’re using them through Smartthings, but home assistant should work just as well. We have hardwired zwave light switches next to all of them, apparently that can help with the reliability since they will act as zwave repeaters in case the lock doesn’t pick up the signal first time - especially for changing the codes.

    Are they a perfect lock that no one will be able to pick? Probably not, but it’s a lot faster to just put a brick through your window no matter how good your locks are.



  • As someone who did this within the last couple years, my suggestion would be to just buy whatever new kit appeals to you and don’t worry about adapting your lenses. If you had Minolta autofocus lenses it might be worth getting into older Sony A Mount system, but if I remember right the adapter Minolta made for the manual focus lenses is rare and expensive.

    I had a bunch of manual zuiko lenses and kit for my Olympus OMs, and adapted them on a Canon apsc DSLR and now a Sony a7s full frame. The fact of the matter is that other than a few times that I need a specialty lens the one modern lens that I bought basically lives on it.

    Focusing a manual focus lens on an autofocus body is really hard. The focusing screens aren’t really made for it. On the mirror less a7s it’s better, but that’s largely because you can zoom way in on the screen and it has focus peaking like a video camera.

    If you don’t care about video (which is worth considering) an older Sony is worth considering. An a6000 with the kit lens should run about 350-400 USD for the body used and about 50-150 for a used kit lens. Even the fancy g master standard zoom runs about 4-500 USD used. That’s looking at keh.com anyway, you could probably get a better deal on marketplace or eBay - they were very popular and pop up locally pretty much everywhere. If you want video moving to a new body like the 6400 gives you 4k which is a nice to have.



  • 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.



  • 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.


  • 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.




  • Thank you! My God, the amount of holier-than-thou “it’s your own fault” in this thread is mildly infuriating in and of itself. Auto save and versioning have been a thing in Word for at least 8 years, probably over a decade but that’s the first version mentioned in their docs, and I struggle to think much software I use regularly that doesn’t have some form of it. Hell, even the new Notepad on Windows keeps your changes when it’s accidentally closed.

    I like most open source software but this sort of attitude in the community and what seems like an absolute disdain for any UX concept from the past 20 years makes me very hesitant to recommend it almost anyone outside very specific technical circles.


  • I think it’s a conflation of the ideas of what copyright should be and actually is. I don’t tend to see many people who believe copyright should be abolished in its entirety, and if people write a book or a song they should have some kind of control over that work. But there’s a lot of contention over the fact that copyright as it exists now is a bit of a farce, constantly traded and sold and lasting an aeon after the person who created the original work dies.

    It seems fairly morally constant to think that something old and part of the zeitgeist should not be under copyright, but that the system needs an overhaul when companies are using your live journal to make a robot call center.