sxan

sxan, 9 days ago (edited 1 day ago)

This is what I’m waiting for. I have a birthday coming up. $299, great reviews on pre-production units, and the bigger brother (sister?) model is highly regarded.

Hoffman’s (comparison) review of the DF64.

I keep editing this. James’ review is for espresso grinding. As long as it can dial to as coarse as you like, and these should, they should be fit for purpose for pour-over.

sxan, 9 days ago

I have no idea. I currently have a much more expensive grinder, but it’s a big hopper type; it’s great for entertaining, or would be good for a small coffee shop… but it’s too much grinder for my use.

But you said your issues is with consistency. Maybe you just need to replace the burrs? It might be worth a shot. However, if the DFs had any issues with consistency, James would have jumped all over that, and in fact if you watch that video he uses his fancy new machine to measure consistency. Yes, it’s the 64, but by all accounts the new 54 is the same machine as the 64, but with a smaller motor. It’s going to perform very similarly.

If you think improved consistency is going to improve your coffee, and you notice poor consistency in your current grinder, then yes. The DF will be an improvement. I know nothing about your machine, but a less expensive thing you can try first - like I said - is replace the burrs.

sxan, 10 days ago

I can’t remember where I heard this, so it may be utter BS, but aren’t these 3-wheelers even less safe than motorcycles? The 2-in-front are more stable IIRC, but the 2-in-back have a tendency to tilt over at speed if there’s a sudden turn - where a bike would just turn - don’t they?

sxan, 10 days ago

They die . Statistically, outdoor cats have half a life expectancy of 2-5 years, vs 12-20 of indoor-only cats.

We’ve owned rural homes a couple of times. One time, we owned a house on 5 acres at the end of a dirt-and-gravel road a half mile from the nearest paved road. On the other side of our neighbor’s house was a culvert, with an easement - a dirt “road” - that the irrigation company inspectors would use about once a month or so to check the state of the culvert. We were one of three houses at the end of that dead-end gravel road. At the time, (in the late 90’s) we had cats we’d let out during the day and bring in at night. During the four years we lived there, we had one cat that was killed by being hit by one of the irrigation inspectors. That easement was used by one truck, once a month, and it killed our cat. We lost a second cat to coyotes; at least the cat hit by the truck didn’t have the terrifying death of being torn apart by coyotes.

Maybe you’ll be lucky, and your cats won’t go into the roads. Maybe where you live you don’t have coyotes, or neighbors with dogs, or large owls. Maybe you’ll be lucky and your cats won’t meet any other cats and get infected with one of the exceedingly common diseases of feline leukemia, feline aids, or distemper. Maybe you don’t have neighbors who poison their pest mice and rats that your cats might find and eat and themselves die in agony from indirectly ingesting rat poison. Maybe you live somewhere without rabies (although I think it’s even gotten to the UK, now).

Maybe you don’t care if your cats get killed. But it you do care, keep your cats indoors. If you live somewhere rural, there are predators that can and will take a cat. If you live somewhere urban, it’s even more likely your cat will get killed by a car. And even if you have a perfect barrier that your cats won’t find a way over or under, it won’t stop poisoned rodents from getting into your yard where your cats can get at them, and your cats will get fleas and ticks and bring them into the house. Fleas are only a minor nuisance, sure; not a horrific, lingering death from rabies, and maybe you think you’ll use a flea dip - although keep in mind flea dips can give cats neurological diseases: it’s a poison that’s spread through their systems, and some cats react poorly to it.

But, again maybe you’ll get lucky. Maybe for you the inconvenience of cleaning a litter box is worth the risk of your cat being killed. If being inconvenienced is your motivation, may I recommend a Litter Robot. They’re pricey, but worth every penny, and they last for years. And you’ll almost certainly enjoy your cat’s company for many more years.

sxan, 10 days ago

I’m not even talking about the controversy about cat impact on wildlife; I’m referring to the statistical life expectancy of outdoor cats in the US. If anyone isn’t satisfied with the one link I provided, I can find more: outdoor feline life expectancy is statistically drastically shorter than strictly indoor life expectancy. All I did was list the risks - the truth is in the statistics. But everyone who has that one outdoor cat that lived to 27 thinks their anecdotal experience trumps science 🙄.

I can’t speak to Norway. Maybe the feline diseases aren’t rampant there yet. Maybe the Norwegians have long ago exterminated all of their mid-range predators in populated areas. I doubt grandparent up there lives in a place where wolves are roaming around freely. You have coyotes or something similar there in your rural communities, my Norwegian friend from a couple comments up? Maybe the fact that few, if any, European countries have anything like the US car culture keeps streets safer for loose pets.

But in the US, letting cats outdoors statistically reduces their life expectancies. That’s not my opinion; it’s in the data.

sxan, 10 days ago (edited 1 day ago)

Psh. “Cardiovascular concerns.” Fucking read the side effects for the drugs you’ve already approved, FDA. You’ve allowed an autoimmune treatment drug that has a high chance of giving terminal fucking cancer, you dumb fucks. Fucking Viagra has “cardiovascular concerns.”

Biased, bought, dumb-asses.

sxan, 10 days ago

Yeah. Every drug has side effects; I’m saying that it’s a weak excuse for not approving it, considering all of the other crap FDA’s approved, with all of the other crap’s side effects. So label it, put a warning on it.

Cigarettes will most likely kill you if you smoke enough of them, and FDA still allows their sale even though they have no medical application. Same with alcohol; despite the alcohol industry’s efforts to link health benefits with alcohol consumption, there are as many studies showing there’s no verifiable link between any benefit and any amount of alcohol consumption. It’s a poison that dehydrates you and shrinks your brain a little every time you drink it. But it’s legal.

FDA is the only dyke preventing outright charlatanism by the pharma and medical device industries, but fuck them on this topic. They’re there to ensure companies don’t outright lie to consumers about benefits and risks; preventing access to risky behavior is not their job.

sxan, 10 days ago

This. The League of Women Voters is really good at doing summaries about candidate positions. And while they obviously have an agenda, they tend to be pretty level-headed about their analyses, and avoid rhetoric.

sxan, 10 days ago

My anecdotal evidence is the opposite.

My grandmother had three children by two men. My mother has had three children by two men (and only just; she’s had 4 husbands). My adopted sister has had three children by three different men.

Meanwhile, both of my grandfathers and my father have only had children by one woman (that I’m aware of).

I guess women in my family are just less monogamous than average.

sxan, 10 days ago (edited 1 day ago)

• $320,000
• 25m (minutes) flight time (45m (miles) range)
• “Scale model” stage - all life-size video/images are renders

The fan attachments are large enough, and are designed, to provide lift, which would be more impressive if it had a useful run time. It’s great that people are thinking of ways to combine VTOL concepts in human-sized quadcopters, and maybe this will inspire some other, more practical, future product. This one, though, I doubt will ever come to market.

Edit to make the UoM more clear, because context is hard.

sxan, 10 days ago

Yeah, sorry.

25 minutes of flight time (m=minutes I thought was implied by “time”). 45 miles of range (again, I assumed the unit of measure was implied by “range.”) I used imperial, because that’s what the article used.

I’ll correct my post to be more clear.

sxan, 10 days ago

The shortening of minutes can be m, as in “5m30s.”

I used imperial for distance because that’s what the article used, and I was quoting specs from the article. But, yes, that was unnecessarily ambiguous; it could easily have been - and I agree more likely to be interpreted as - meters.

sxan, 11 days ago

Oh yeah. We are super sensitive about our subs.

I once worked for a compny that subcontracted out to the government and to comanies contracting with the government. We were bidding on a job working with some company who was making sonar systems for the nuclear subs, and I was brought along to basically represent the dev team to work on the (a?) software component. I had to get a secret security clearance, which - if you haven’t been through this - is a dozen or so pages of the last decade of everything about your life: every address you’ve lived at; a list of people and contact information who’ve known you for that entire time and who will vouch for you; every job you’ve held and contact info for the companies… everything except an actual anal probe. And remember, I had to do this just to get into the building to talk to these people. I mean, maybe not normally, but they weren’t going to waste their time talking to me if I didn’t have the clearance. Then when I got there, it had the craziest security I’d ever seen: an outside badge door, so you had to call someone to get you, a little room with a security guard station, then another secure door the security guys had to open. And then there were badge doors in the building for different sections.

The job sounded fun: I was told one phase of testing required the developers to go on a test cruise, to answer questions and debug while underway; getting to ride in a nuclear sub (without having to join the Navy) might have been worth suffering my claustrophobia and massive distrust of submarines in general. But we didn’t win the bid, and I never got to use that security clearance that was such a massive PITA to get.

Anyway, it made me very conscious of just how serious the US takes submarine security. This guy, I expect, will disappear into an oubliette and never be heard from again.

sxan, 11 days ago

He’s a king just for the sheer, blunt honesty.

sxan, 11 days ago

Martha Stewart was railroaded. Members of Congress - and some of the worst are members of my own party - regularly do worse.

Oh, but, yeah, sincerely: the meme is clever and funny.

sxan, 11 days ago

No, but I’m a registered Democrat. I’ve lived in several states, and not all of them allow you to vote in their primaries of you’re not a registered member. So the Democrat party is my party.

Now, if we ever get rid of the electoral college, and replace FPtP with approval out ranked-choice voting (or, almost literally anything else besides FPtP), that’ll change. But for now, I accept the reality that we vote for the lesser of two evils, or we throw away our vote in a futile, and unnoticed, gesture.

sxan, 11 days ago

I went from desktop to 100% laptop over several years; now I’m back on a desktop - using one of those Ryzen 7 mini-PCs - and a 36-key GMK Cherry MX split keyboard that, stacked, is barely larger than the computer. I’m seriously considering getting a small Thunderbolt dock and just carrying that with me between work and wherever. The only annoying bit is the computer I have isn’t powered over the USB-C port, which means also carrying a power brick, and that’s the straw that keeps me synching data between my computer and laptop.

I could move everything to a bootable USB device, but even over USB-C that’d be orders of magnitude slower than NVMe or SATA.

The laptop is only two years older than the desktop (and maybe less than that since I didn’t buy the most current model), cost nearly 3x the PC, and is utterly blown out of the water by the specs on the micro(? 12.5 x 12.5 x 4 cm) PC. Yeah, the laptop has keyboard, pointer, battery, and monitor; that impacts size and cost, but still. I could almost use my PC in a coffee shop, if it weren’t for the power brick and the need to do something about a monitor.

I have a foldable phone. Maybe by the time that display technology gets scaled up (and onto the market) there’ll be a micro PC that’s powered over USB-C and I can put together a small, laptop-sized case with everything I need.

The Frameworks are looking good, though, now that they’re selling AMD models. I’ll have to check in, in a year or so.

sxan, 11 days ago

It’s not, really: 10x5x2.5 cm, plus the wall plug; but it’s still there, and it’s irritating because they could easily have powered this thing over USBC. Hell, most of my flashlights have USBC charging ports. It’s an additional thing to carry, and another thing to have to plug in. Plus, not being USBC makes it far harder to run off a battery pack.

You’re right about the rest of it, though.

sxan, 11 days ago

I’m not advocating anyone buy a gun, mind you. My general opinion on guns is the same about cars: the only person I truly trust to operate one is me; the rest of all y’all are just generally unreliable.

That said: get a long gun. Any non-Bulpup rifle with a 20” or longer barrel - it’s really hard to commit suicide with a long rifle. You can find a way, sure, but there are far easier, more reliable ways to off yourself than trying to figure out how to pull a trigger you can’t reach when the bangy end is pointed at your head. And the knowledge that most people who try doing this end up still alive but permanently mangled and with reduced faculties may drive you to seek those alternative methods.

Another plus for a rifle is that it’s simply a better weapon for killing fascists. We have a lot of evidence that handguns are almost never used in armed conflicts. They’re far less powerful than rifles (in general), and their effective ranges are drastically shorter. Get a cheap optic, do some practice shooting, and you’ll be better armed and prepared than any open-carry idiot running around armed only with their trusty Colt M1911 with official Trump pistol grips.

I really wish that last part was a joke.

I don’t mean to come across as minimizing mental health issues. I also can’t prevent you from trying to off yourself. All that said, I hope you are able to get help, and get healthy.

sxan, 11 days ago

Yeah, well, if they’re still wearing that shit during an active civil war - I mean, we’re taking about Phillies fans, so no great loss.

(Note: I lived on The Mainline for 20 years, so I think I’m allowed some ribbing. Phillies fans not only regularly trash Philadelphia in drunken riots after games, they also came to my new state and totally trashed Minneapolis while they were here. I don’t believe there’s a worse bunch of hooligans in the States.)

sxan, 11 days ago

Can’t imagine white.

Well, that’s it, right? Because not-white.

sxan, 11 days ago

I didn’t read the article; the CBS news site isn’t the worst, but it employs some of the common, horrible site design patterns, and is painful to read.

However: 34 counts. Each with a maximum possible 4 years incarceration sentence. It increases the odds of some jail time, for at least one or two counts.

The judge is said to be taking a lot of factors into consideration; I hope one is them is the unusually unanimous verdict on such a large number of counts.

sxan, 10 days ago (edited 1 day ago)

Should the Secret Service be a consideration?

Let’s say Trump brutally tortured and sexually abused some pre-teens in a basement in Texas, was tried and convicted and given a death sentance. Does the fact that hrs under the protection of the Secret Service have any bearing on the judgment? Should it?

That said, you’re probably right. He’ll have to spend a couple of years playing golf at Mar-a-Lago, a truly unjust and extreme punishment 🙄

sxan, 10 days ago

You did this programmatically, or in an application? If it were a stand-alone program, it’d make a nice screen saver, especially if the use could just keep it running with no loop.

sxan, 10 days ago

Hey, thanks! I don’t know squat about Processing.org, but the algorithm looks simple; maybe I can convert it to an OpenGL program.

Thanks for the sourcecode!