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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Apple has a long history of working against right to repair and third party repair shops. This includes making it difficult for third parties to source the parts needed and changing the designs to requiring part pairing in the name of security. It got to the point where repair shops were buying broken Apple products so they could hopefully source the parts needed.

    Looking through what they provided now, it’s basic stuff any third party repair shop could do if they could source the parts. It’s useful. However good electronic technicians can go beyond that and do board level repairs. But that requires schematics and diagrams. A lot of times they would have to get those through other parties who in turn got them through less than official means or violated NDAs.

    Guess what Apple isn’t providing? Board level information. This is just doing the minimum the law requires them to do.

    Bonus: Louis Rossmann talks about Apple’s history of right to repair [10 minute video]





  • Turkey is a bit of a problem because the birds have been bred to have giant breasts and can’t even reproduce on their own. You pretty much have to dry brine them to get decent flavor. To always get a moist bird, use a meat thermometer. Also, go for the dark meat. It’s always better than the light meat.

    Fresh cranberry sauce is awesome. Keyword being fresh. It’s just cranberries, sugar, and little bit of water that you cook down for about 10-20 minutes. Make it the night before then spread that on some fresh cornbread.

    Stuffing depends on the aromatics. Add some sauted onion and celery then some mushrooms or cooked italian sausage. And one more thing: cook the bread in a lot of butter.

    Pumpkin pie tends to be on the dense side and pumpkin by itself doesn’t have much flavor. Most of what we think of as pumpkin pie flavor comes from the spices: cinnamon, nutmeg, and a tiny bit of ground ginger. Homemade is better, but a lot of work. It requires roasting pumpkin, making the pie crust from scratch, and then essentially making a pumpkin custard for the filling. Worth doing at least once. It comes out nice and light instead of dense like the canned and premade stuff.

    Casserole is always hit or miss. Aunt Caroline’s recipe is either good or a nightmare.

    Mash potatoes, it depends on how you dress them up. You can rice them with some cream and butter to make them nice and smooth. Or use red potatoes for something more rustic along with some cheddar cheese or bacon.

    I’ve never heard of mac and cheese for thanksgiving. There are so many better dishes that can be made. Who’s cooking your thanksgiving dinner? Do they even know how to cook? And where’s the gravy? You can make a nice rich gravy from the turkey drippings.




  • There’s only one thing I add to my coffee: hot water to the fresh grounds when I brew it. I want to taste the coffee, the roast, the sweetness, the acidity, and all the different elements from where it was cultivated, how it was cultivated, and how it was processed. Adding sugar, cream, chicory, or anything else covers up what the coffee brings. Looking back, when I was adding stuff to coffee, I was covering up my poorly understood brew methods.

    Now, if if I was inclined to add chicory, it would be to a fairly flat neutral medium-dark to dark roast that doesn’t have much going on. That’s so that I could get a clear taste what the chicory is bringing. But I have as much interest in chicory as I have in other flavored coffees. Which is when I’m feeling morbidly curious.

    Now, if you want to add it, you do you. But there is a lot of depth to coffee when you start digging into using good beans with different brew methods, brew recipes, along with that search for the “perfect cup” of coffee.

    If you are interested in getting a good cup out of french press, James Hoffmann has a good recipe. It’s basically a modified cupping recipe.




  • That isn’t what that article says. It talks about American Rounds and other companies that use vending machine to sell restricted products. A different company Master Ammo found using AI for facial verification to be costly when they looked at it “years ago”. The article doesn’t specify how long ago that was. If it was 12 years ago, which is the age of Master Ammo, I would find that plausible.

    The machine for American Rounds was pulled because of “disappointing sales”. Retail space ain’t free, and I bet it has slim margins too.

    In any case, the whole endeavor may not be viable in the long run. They either have to get costs low enough to compete with brick and mortar stores and the Big Box stores, or they have to go where none exist while finding enough locations to recoup development costs. The devil’s in the details and unfortunately all the reporting on this has been quick news stories.






  • Go see a dermatologist.

    A few years ago I would get patches on the back of my hand that would itch and have tiny blisters. They were persistent and over the counter ointments weren’t helping. Finally went to a dermatologist when they got unbearable. The first one I went to prescribed an ointment that sorta worked, but not that great. Ended up going to a second dermatologist when I found out the first one was an anti-vaxxer.

    The second one was on top of his game. He straight up said the first ointment wasn’t a good one to use and prescribed something much better. It knocked out the spots and itchiness after a week or two. I’ve had a couple of minor flair ups since, but the ointment eliminates it pretty quick. Haven’t had any problems for at least a year.

    If you can, go see a dermatologist.




  • That depends. Are you looking at preserving the music without loss of information? Then you need to use a lossless format like flac. Formats like aac, mp3, opus can throw away information you’re less likely to hear to achieve better compression ratios. Flac can’t, so it needs more storage space to preserve the exact waveform.

    You can use a lossy format if you want. On most consumer level equipment, you probably won’t notice a difference. However, if you start to notice artifacting in songs, you’ll need to go back to the originals to re-rip and encode.