You make some good points.

I live a mile and a half from the ocean and run my smoker for long periods. It’s really nice to monitor and change the temp while I’m drinking the beer you refer to from the sand. I make a few quick runs back up the hill to tend to things, but mostly I’m free to be elsewhere for the 12-ish hours the smoker is running. It’s really nice, not a hard requirement, but really convenient.

Pro is free for personal use for up to 5 machines. Is there a problem with activating it?

In the US we call that style of grill a Santa Maria, a style popularized in central California, I believe by the Spanish colonists.

I guess it depends on what you consider passable.

It’s loud enough on 25% to disturb my neighbors, it’s clear and defined enough for me to watch normally and hear everything at 7%. There’s no observable delay, and the installation is clean enough to make my wife happy. It wasn’t cheap, but I wouldn’t consider it expensive.

Some films are meant to be watched in large formats with insane audio that just can’t be replicated at home. The Dune movies and Oppenheimer are a few recent examples I can think of that looked incredible in 70mm IMAX. I live in a major metro area and there are only 3 screens within 50 miles capable of showing 70mm properly. I choose to go out of my way to these theaters once or twice a year, if a great film is showing.

Short of films shot and shown in a true large format there’s no way you’ll find me in a theater.

I’ll watch content on small screens if I’m on a plane. Otherwise it’s my 80" living room TV with passable surround sound.

This is our time to shine Hydro Homies!

Having itchy palms because of an allergy might happen commonly in terms of a large population, but it is not common to have this condition. If it happens to you then you should get it looked at instead of biting them. This is the correct and acceptable response. Putting your hands in your mouth and using your teeth because something is wrong with your palms does not need to be normalized.

If people have itchy palms for any reason, I’m not shaming them. I’m pointing out that putting your hands in your mouth is strange.

I don’t know why, but ok?

Itchy palms sounds more like an allergic reaction than a common issue.

People have itchy palms? Itchy enough that they bite them?

That’s fucking weird.

That’s literally never happened to me, it sounds super strange. Are y’all putting stuff on your hands that’s tearing up your skin? Do you moisturize regularly?

I have sensitive skin, but spend a lot of time in a kitchen with wet hands. Unscented soap to wash my hands about a dozen times a day, and unscented moisturizer to keep my skin from cracking. I’ll use a thicker waxy moisturizer during the winter when it’s really dry out.

I use my hands for weightlifting and golf, so I have to manage my callouses, and in the kitchen I’ll pick up various small cuts and burns. My hands don’t look perfect but they’ve never… itched?

Why would right wing people come out to protest ICE? They all voted for exactly what is happening.

Maybe this question should also request the responder’s general location, because I imagine the situations vary substantially.

I’ve lived in California for most of my life, and we go on frequent drives between LA and SF, usually a few times a year.

In the 80’s and 90’s bugs would cover the front of our vehicles and the windshield would be difficult to see through even with wipers and washer fluid. We’d actually have to stop to manually scrape them off.

In the 00’s and 10’s we noticed that we’d get basically zero bugs on a long drive, and that sparked many conversations about California environmental law.

I just got back from a drive up the coast and I can happily say that we’re back to insane numbers of bug strikes on the highway. Just north of Ventura I drove through a cloud of large bugs that hit like rocks and instantly covered almost my entire windshield. This situation has been noticably turning around since COVID, which I think is a good thing

I don’t know if this is common, but in my family Legos are a common gift for children, and they never get thrown away. When kids age out (usually because they move out or go to uni) the bricks get tossed in a big mixed bag and handed down to the next round of youngsters. After at least 3 generations of this, the kids now inherit literal full sized trash barrels of mixed Lego. It’s awesome!

When it was my turn I got a big bucket, but two of my cousins got all of the Technic stuff, I was very jealous.

asshat with a scuba tank

3000 meters beneath the Weddell Sea

Good luck

That makes sense.

The last time we had a power issue and I was at my desktop I didn’t get any GUI notifications of the outage, so that’s a miss.

However the incessant beeping coming from every APC in the house was enough to tell me that stuff was about to go really sideways 😂 I was able to manually power down my desktop before the systemd stuff kicked in.

I’m not sure what you mean?

I’m certainly not saying systemd is the only way or best way to solve this problem, only that it does in fact work, despite the other many misgivings I have with it.

I’m also not sure whether you’re trying to turn this into a measuring contest, or why? My home setups are relatively rigorous for a residential setting, but they’re all based on the many many years I worked in data centers, mostly in Los Angeles which is notorious for poor power availability and stability.

That sucks!

I’m on Ubuntu, which I admit is not a popular option around here. But when my power goes out I use apcupsd and a network component to alert my attached or networked Ubuntu machines. When the power first goes out all of my non-essential machines automatically shut down gracefully. When the backup batteries get low enough (I have several separate APC units around the house) my essential machines also shut down automatically.

When the power comes back up one of my machines automatically powers up and runs a few checks before turning most of my other stuff back on.

I have very few power issues which last long enough for my batteries to run out, but when I do the only evidence is a few alerts and the fact that I have to log back into everything. All of my windows restore on my GUI machines, and no filesystem issues occur. It’s more seamless than when I ran Windows, granted that was 25 years ago.

I’m similarly not a fan of systemd, but for backup battery and power management it seems to do the trick.

This is how you cook with stainless. Get a high smoke point oil, get the pan and oil plenty hot, the put the food in.

This is not, strictly speaking, true for eggs.

I’ve cooked eggs in stainless nearly every day for the last couple of decades. I can crack a few eggs in a properly prepared cold pan, and still get non stick effects, such that the food will slide right out without using a tool.

The level of heat which would require a high smoke point oil is generally much too high for cooking most styles of eggs anyway.

People should use whatever method works for them, I’m not judging, but high heat is not required for most styles of eggs.

It’s a mixed bag.

Growing up was made difficult because school is so slow that I’d rather be getting into trouble than sitting in class. By the start of middle school I’d already read the entire high school honors reading list, I had to walk to the high school from my middle school in 7th grade to take math classes. I rarely had regular school work in high school, nearly all of my academic teachers designed a different curriculum for me, which was nice but probably mostly to keep me from acting up in class. I never studied or did a shred of homework, but got good grades.

Social interactions were tough, I’m not much of an empath, not that I don’t experience empathy but emotions just aren’t intuitive, actually they often are the opposite of what you’d expect to be helpful, especially among young people. I had to concentrate to read people’s faces and mannerisms to understand the emotional and social subtexts of most interactions. I self medicated with alcohol a lot in high school.

All of my academic classes in high school were honors, and my final 2 years were all AP, while lettering in 3 varsity sports (4 total, but you can only play 3 each academic year). It wasn’t until my second year in uni that I ran into a class for which I actually had to study (nuclear chemistry), and boy was that an awful surprise. A handful of classes were like this for me, most I just showed up 3 times and got a good grade: the first day of class so I wouldn’t get dropped, the midterm, and the final.

I read quickly, think systematically, and information just sticks in my head. It was very difficult to understand why this wasn’t how most people were. Everything I do I analyze for improvement, and remember to do it better the next time. My wife calls me a skill collector because people seem to think I’m super good at everything, but to me it’s just logical that if you’re going to take time do something you might as well do it as well as possible.

After uni things started getting easier. Being forced to closely analyze social interactions and systematically give the “right” reactions is extremely useful in professional life. I wear this mask in all my interactions with all but my closest friends. It’s a bit psychopathic, but I don’t do it to anyone’s detriment, it’s mostly to get along and fit in.

I’ve self selected for highly intelligent friends, and I’m exhilarated to meet new people who can communicate with the kind of bandwidth that our brains run at, if that makes sense. I’m still close with most of my friends from high school, who have had varying levels of success, but I still have to be guarded when it comes to activities or conversation to make sure I don’t stick out too much.

In general I have a very pessimistic view of people and the world. The average person isn’t very sharp, and half of all people are dumber than that. However many smart people do evil things, most of the time for no reason at all. It’s exhausting to keep up with it all, so I just focus on my path and my family, and do what I can to directly improve my community.

It would be nice to fit in a little easier, but I wouldn’t trade my experience for anything else.

Gas is expensive in California too though.

I’m not sure if natural gas in California is expensive compared to other areas, but I have natural gas in my heater, water heater, laundry, stove, and oven and I pay less than $30/month. My electricity bill is an order of magnitude higher each month and there’s only two people in my household and we don’t even have an AC or electric vehicle.

I’m not aware of any modern residential gas stoves which use a pilot, they use a spark to ignite on demand. Commercial ranges sometimes have a pilot though.

It’s still relatively common to have a pilot in a gas water heater or furnace though.