[-] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago

I still like rinsing filters just because I find that I can more reliably get the filter to sit right in the funnel than if I just put it in dry. I don't worry about using hot water or anything like that, though

[-] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

Yeah, it's really frustrating when someone with higher body fat that floats like a cork tries to tell you how to do it.

Technique can't overcome density. I will say that I got slightly better at it after learning to SCUBA dive (or maybe I just got fatter). In scuba, you move up and down in the water column by adjusting the range of your breathing. You basically try to get your neutrally boyant setpoint at 50% lung capacity. To go down, you try to control your breathing from 0-50% and to go up, you breathe from 50-100%. It made me slightly better at keeping my lungs really topped up with air.

To float, I basically have to hold my lungs at max capacity, and then exhale-inhale as fast as possible, which is unnatural and takes concentration. I usually have to use my arms for a little bit of upward thrust through that breath.

There's no lungs in my legs, so those will sink no matter what. People claim you can "use your core" or some other BS to keep your legs afloat, but the fact of the matter is that if your upper body is positively buoyant and your lower body is negatively buoyant, there will be a rotational moment pulling your legs down, and it can only be counteracted by external application of force (i.e., kicking your feet). I can either float on my back with a mild amount of kicking, or i can do like a face-in-water deadman float, and just pull my head out of the water occasionally to quickly breathe.

[-] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago

I'm going to disagree with everyone here. Loads of people throughout history have learned to swim by literally being thrown in. It's not a good way to learn, but people do it. Even babies can do it.

Given a little bit of reading first, you'd do just fine. Yeah, the motions might be a little off cause it's hard to learn a complex movement from a book, but it would be good enough.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

You're getting downvoted for saying something sorta close to true, but not exactly. I agree strongly with everything you said here, though.

Generally, with any complex human-machine interface, you want to cast as wide of a net for accommodation as possible because there are so many variables that come into play.

Like if you are putting together a basketball team, you probably want a bunch of tall dudes, but you never know how many Muggsy Bogues's are out there unless you let everyone play.

For a fighter pilot, would you rather have a female with greater ability to distinguish color, or a male that can pull higher g's? It's impossible to say what specific traits would lead to the best outcome in all possible engagements.

Even things like colorblindness can be a positive in situations because camouflage can stick out to colorblind people. Some types of deafness comes with immunity to motion sickness.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

I'm not sure. I know in a lot of those places, the rationale is that the terrain is too flat, so rifle bullets can travel too far.

The problem is that I don't know if that actually corresponds to increased risk of death. It sounds plausible, but idk if there are real stats to back it up.

A quick search for some plausible data turned up California's official stats, and going back a few years, I never saw more than 5 deaths in a year. Extrapolating the rate to the whole US, that's like 50 per year. Other sources just say "less than 100 per year for the whole US".

Without a specific study, it's just as plausible to attribute the fatalities to sheer proximity of the shooter to the victim rather than bullets traveling far. Bigger targets are easier to hit. Just looking at the California data, which includes injuries, this seems to bear out, and most injuries and fatalities are due to close range shotgun bird hunting (i.e. the Dick Cheney).

And really, if you wanted to completely eliminate the risk of rifle bullets traveling further than intended, you could mandate the use of any elevated shooting position (which some places do for archery).

[-] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

Here's an example: Delaware only allows shotgun, pistol/pistol caliber long guns, and muzzleloader, no true rifle.

https://www.eregulations.com/delaware/hunting/deer-seasons

Connecticut only allows rifle on private land.

https://portal.ct.gov/deep/hunting/2025-connecticut-hunting-and-trapping-guide/deer-hunting#PVSHOT

Iowa has no rifle allowed.

https://www.iowadnr.gov/things-do/hunting-trapping/iowa-hunting-seasons

Lots of states have restrictions against modern (and by modern, i mean bottlenecked) rifle rounds, and if you want to use a rifle, you have to either find a 150 year old cowboy gun, or buy a really expensive new gun using one of several specialized cartridges that cost like $2 a round.

And then when it comes down to it, if you live in a state where it is legal to hunt with a regular rifle, you end up finding that half the time any public land that you can hunt on is restricted to archery only, so unless you happen to be a large landowner, you can't hunt with a rifle.

[-] [email protected] 15 points 5 days ago

That's not true. With no controls, there is no significant difference in tolerance by sex. When controlled for height, females have lower tolerance than males. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3753357/

[-] [email protected] 10 points 5 days ago

There are a lot of differences between how the US and how Australia do hunting. For one, there is no commercial deer/elk harvest in the US. Commercially sold venison can only be from farmed deer/elk. I think deer leather can be sold, but there are a lot of hoops to go through.

Also, in the US, most hunting regulations exist not for ethical or conservation purposes but to prevent people from being able to subsistence hunt. They wanted hunting to be a rich man's game like in the UK. The existence of hunting seasons is a good example. Another is regulations on method of take; for example, you often must use outdated equipment like bows and muzzleloaders, and the use of modern, effective rifles is severely curtailed. Compare that to Australia where you can use night vision/thermal scopes and rifles with supressors, and i believe there is no "hunting season".

The reality is that both countries have an overpopulation of large herbivores in areas, and the answer anti-hunting people give is the reintroduction of large carnivores. While we should do that in more rural areas, it's not feasible in urban/suburban areas where deer proliferate.

Many municipalities actually have to pay to have deer culled, and they do that rather than making it easier for people to hunt.

Tl;dr, i think there are some things I like better about how Australia handles hunting, but theres also things about the US's method i like.

17
Green walnut season (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

It's the time of year to collect green walnuts for making nocino or vin de noix. Ive never done it before, but figured I should try since I have so many black walnut trees growing near me. Apparently, you should only use nuts you've picked yourself, not the immature fruit on the ground because the tree has rejected it, and it likely has pest damage.

I made a fruit picker out of a plastic bottle cut to have a notch at the top to hook around stems. What I've learned so far is that most walnut trees are either too tall to reach the nuts, even with a long pole, or they are too young to produce nuts. It seems like the best place to gather them is on the edge of fields/paths/etc, where big trees may have low branches. Standard fruit pickers will likely not work, either, because they are designed for larger fruit like apples, so they cant grip something as small as an immature walnut. Since they are not ripe, the tree also does not want to release them. I was only able to get a few to start, because I need to modify my picker to have a cutter or something like that.

Since I only gathered a few, I figured it wasn't worth doing nocino as it takes 6 months, so it did "walnut molasses" while I figure out how to modify my picker.

https://foragerchef.com/green-walnut-honey/

35
submitted 4 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

I recently booked some backcountry campsites in a national park (in the USA). My plan is to hike from one town to another over a few days, and the camp sites are by reservation only. These sites are not accessible by road. When i made the reservation, it required me to put in the make, model, color, and license plate of my car. I will not have a car with me, nor could I (since there are no roads), yet this information was required of me (no opt-out).

I'm assuming this is just because the system (recreation.gov) is run by a giant defense contractor (booz allen hamilton), and they want to harvest as much information as possible. It made me wonder what other government services are only available for car owners that are completely unrelated to car ownership. I'm inspired by seeing a post about while ago that talked about government services that require you to have social media accounts.

I'm sure there are other examples of this phenomena.

P.s., luckily, the sign up form is dumb, and it didn't use dropdown menus for car make/model/color, so i just put in gibberish.

[-] [email protected] 76 points 1 month ago

All concussions are traumatic brain injuries, not all traumatic brain injuries are concussions.

[-] [email protected] 90 points 1 year ago

Elbows have always been allowed on the table. The rule for fancy dining was that you couldn't have elbows on the table during a course, i.e., when people are actively eating, but before/after, it's fine. That's a reasonable rule to be considerate of space.

13
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

I have a 100 W rigid solar panel including a charge controller that I currently only use for camping to charge batteries (also useful in an emergency at home). It strikes me as a waste that I could be generating more clean energy with equipment that I already have, but I don't have anything in mind to use this energy for.

Obviously I could try to tie it into my home to run more of my household on solar, or buy more/bigger batteries to charge, but with 100 W of generation, it's probably not worth it without a significantly increased investment.

I tried searching around online, and I found plenty of discussion for what to do with a whole house that generates excess capacity (mainly sell to the grid), but nothing really on what to do with small scale DC generation.

Anyone here have thoughts?

13
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Does anyone have a good method for dealing with plant debris? I'm thinking about things like stems from plants, or even just pruned bits. I don't have a place to compost effectively. My normal method for woody debris is to cut it to little pieces with garden shears, and for leafy stuff to just let it dry out and crunch it up. After, I'll just stick it in the bottom of a pot that I'm going to put a new plant in. It gets a little broken down, but not as well as I'd like, and I can only do it when I have a new plant to pot, so I end up with a random pile of stuff that sits around for a while.

I wish I had like a tiny woodchipper or something.

[-] [email protected] 139 points 1 year ago

their operating systems could send sensitive information to Beijing

Cool. So let's pass legislation that prevents any auto manufacturer from sending sensitive info to anyone unauthorized by the owner of the car. Just because you buy a car "assembled" in the US doesn't mean that your data isn't being harvested, stored improperly, and sold to all bidders.

15
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

I've been using my grinder (Baratza maestro plus) for ten years now, and I got it used. I've replaced some parts (e.g., burrs), but I'm wondering if it's finally time to let it go. It seems like it's not grinding as consistently as it once was, but I'm thinking it would be good to quantify it.

I've seen sieves used to classify ground coffee, specifically, the brand Kruve seems to be a nice implementation. It's $90 for the cheapest version, though, which doesn't quite seem worth it to me. It seems like it'd be better to just spend the money going towards a new grinder, but I figured it would be good to ask for anyone's experience here.

43
Woodworking CAD (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Hi everyone,

I looked through this community, and I didn't see much discussion of the use of CAD for woodworking, so I figured it was worth a post. I learned CAD ages ago, and I've used it sparingly in my professional life since then. I'm working on a project now that would benefit from CAD, so I figured I'd try to get up and running with a software for personal use.

I know sketchup and fusion360 have long been the major players for woodworkers, but I am wary of "free" personal use licenses that can be removed or degraded at any time. As this is Lemmy, I'm sure plenty of you are interested in FOSS options as well. I know there are some programs out there specifically for woodworking, but if I'm going to learn a new software, I want it to be more general purpose so I can use it to make things for 3D printing, etc, if needed. I also want something parametric to be able to easily change designs. For those of you unaware of what that means, it basically means that you can design things with variables instead of exact numbers. That way you can punch in numbers later on to easily update your design. In my case, I'm making cabinet doors in a few different sizes, and I'll be able to generate plans for different doors with only 1 model. Theoretically, I could upload the design for anyone else to use/modify as well on a place like thingiverse (someone give me a shout if they are secretly horrible or something, I'm generally wary of providing value to a corporation for free).

This all drove me to FreeCAD. FreeCAD is a FOSS CAD software that has a huge range of different capabilities. The different tools are divided into "workbenches" of different uses such as architectural drafting, 3d printing, openSCAD etc. There are also user created workbenches that you can install. There's even one specifically for woodworking (that I haven't used yet).

I've started into some tutorials, and most of them are focused on building a single widget. While that's great if you are planning on making something to 3d print, us woodworkers are usually assembling different parts. The tutorials for woodworking specifically I've followed along with so far seem to follow the same workflow:

First, a spreadsheet is set up to establish all the parameters you want to be able to change, then, each part is designed individually. Finally, all of the pieces are brought together and assembled.

While this is great if you already have a design in mind or an object, and you are trying to make a model of it, it's not the way I would ideally go about conceptualizing a new design. To make a nightstand, for example, my preferred methodology would be to assemble some simple rectangular panels to represent the top, bottom, back, front, left, and right. After those are in place, I'd start adding joinery, details like routed edges, and cutting out space for a door. It doesn't seem like freecad is necessarily set up to do things that way, though I could be wrong. This might even be how the woodworking workbench does things, I just figured I'd start learning the default workbenches first.

Anyone else use freecad or another CAD software? What's your workflow like? Want me to report back once I've had more time to play around with it and learn some stuff?

11
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

I've had irrigation running on my porch for a few years now, so I figured it was worth making a post about how it works, and the pros and cons of it. I'm by no means an expert.

Pros:

  • you don't have to worry about plants drying out on a hot weekend while you are out of town.
  • you can grow plants in smaller containers than you'd otherwise be able to
  • you can put plants in spots that would be annoying to water by hand

Cons:

  • it's a lot of plastic. Typically the tubing is polyethylene or vinyl.
  • you need to drain it in the winter
  • it takes some time to figure out how to get the right amount of water to your plants
  • the system that I have (and most off-the-shelf systems, I think) is not compatible with a rain barrel.
  • you need a hose spigot

I have a porch with a lot of plants. My roof hangs over the porch, so I don't get any rain on my plants, and they are completely dependent on watering. This would typically work fine all throughout the spring, but then once summer comes, and the plants need more water, I'd inevitably lose some plants while I'm out of town. I can have friends water plants like my indoor plants that maybe need to be watered once a week, but I'm not going to ask someone to water 30 outdoor plants twice a day.

There are a few different common types of automatic irrigation systems. The most common you've probably seen is little sprinklers. Those are not ideal for containerized plants because you'd waste a lot of water, and get your porch/balcony really wet. Theres also things like soaker hoses which arent useful in our case. The type that I have, and recommend, is drip irrigation. It does exactly what it sounds like and drips water right where you want it.

There's two types of drip irrigation, and two subcategories of each. Individual emitters or emitter tubing, and each of those are available as simple emitters or pressure compensating. Individual emitters are just single droppers, and tubing is what it sounds like, a tube with a bunch of holes in it at regular intervals. The single droppers come in different sizes for different flow rates, and they are generally more convenient than the emitter tubing unless you have a big planter bed or something where you put a loop of the tubing.

If you think about a tube with a bunch of holes in it, the most water will come out of the first hole, and each subsequent hole will put out less and less, until eventually, for a long enough tube, nothing would come out. The water that comes out would also be dependent on what your water pressure is. To use that kind of system, you have to be crafty about it, and maybe arange your plants or run the tubing from thirstiest to least thirsty. Pressure compensating emitters somewhat solve this problem by outputting the same amount of water, as long as the water is somewhere between the highest normal household water pressure and a pretty low pressure. I can tell you firsthand that they dont work perfectly, and you'll have some that put out water faster than others, but it's mostly okay. I actually rearranged my plants to just put the more needy ones under the fastest drippers.

One thing you need to always keep in mind is the pressure of the water. I have no clue what the actual numbers are for my water pressure is, so let's say it's at 10 where it comes out of the house. It then passes through the timer (more on that later), which might nock off 1 unit of pressure. The water then has to travel up a floor of my house to where my plants are. The change in height might nock off another unit, and the resistance of that long stretch of skinny tubing might nock off another. Now it's down to 7. Each emitter might take .5 units. Once we get down to 1 unit of pressure, there isn't enough to push past the mechanism inside of the emitters, so you can't have any plants past that point. If you follow the math, that gives me 12 emitters. Technically, the emitters dont reduce the pressure in the main tube, they reduce the flow, which leads to a corresponding drop in pressure. Obviously, bigger diameter tubing can carry more water and water more plants. This is all why a rain barrel would be hard to use, the pressure will be pretty low unless your barrel is up much higher than your plants. Any debris from the barrel could easily clog the drippers, too.

I have probably 30 plants on that system, but I was only able to have about 12 with a single line of irrigation tubing, which in the US, at least, is 1/4 inch diameter. I had to run 1/2 inch supply tubing, and I have branches off of that with the 1/4 inch tubing. You might think that tubing with 4 times the cross sectional area could carry 4 times the water, but it's actually way more than that because of math reasons I don't need to get into.

The emitters come in different sizes, rated in volume per hour. I have basically all one size because I can always put 2 in a bigger pot.

The last thing to mention is the timer. The cheapest ones just have analog dials for "water for x minutes every y hours or days". Figuring out how much water to give takes some time. To start, I would make sure all of the plants are not sitting in completely dry soil. Dry soil, especially with peat in it like lots of potting mix, does not absorb water well, so water might roll off to the side, and down the edge of the container and out the drain holes. Then I'd run the water till you see it start to drip out of the drain holes a lot indicating that the soil is full. Then I'd back it off from that point by a bit. My emitters are rated for 1/2 gallon per hour, and in the spring, with seedlings and cool weather, I might run them for 5 minutes every day or every other day. When it gets to the summer, I have my timer water twice a day, with 10 mi uses in the morning, and another 5 minutes during the heat of the day. I have a "smart" timer that lets me have slightly more complicated schedules like that. If you are a tech savvy person, you could set up automatic rain delay.

Lastly, I'm not trying to promote any particular products over others, but this is the kit I started with, and I've expanded from there. It seems like the components are all fairly standardized in size, at least in the US, so you can mix and match from different companies to problem.

Hope that helps some people, and feel free to ask any questions.

TL;DR, irrigation is pretty useful and easy to set up.

1
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Every Thanksgiving since I was a child, I've had to make something for Thanksgiving. Typically, and I think this goes for many Americans (and presumably Canadians cause they have a similar Thanksgiving), this involves sharing the kitchen with way too many cooks. It can be difficult to know what tools you'll have in an unfamiliar kitchen, and when/if you'll be able to use the stove, oven, etc.

I'm trying to move things towards a better model, where I make the entire menu, and other people are responsible for drinks and cleanup, but there are always holdouts determined whatever particular dish they feel strongly about.

My normal approach is:

  • Insist on making the turkey. The turkey is the most common thing people mess up, and it sucks to have to choke down dry turkey.
  • Bring an insane amount of my kitchen with me. Words can't describe how frustrating it is to try to cook with only the world's dullest knives, a thermometer that starts at 160 F for "rare beef", and only a salt shaker of iodized salt.
  • Do as many "make ahead of time" or "make outside of the kitchen" dishes as possible. Sous vide sweet potatoes, salads, etc.

What are your methods for ensuring that your Thanksgiving meal doesn't suck?

P.s. My packing list for things to bring to cook at another person's house contains:

Thermometers, knives, shears, a scale, cutting boards, rimmed baking sheets, cooling racks, a vegetable peeler, a microplane, a pepper grinder, kosher salt, aprons, a big mixing bowl or two, a cake tester, a bread knife, a citrus juicer, a few Mason jars, butcher twine, a gravy separator, all the herbs and spices I'll need, a high wall saute pan, a sturdy frying pan, baking soda, baking powder, yeast, lemons, limes, butter, my sous vide circulator, heavy duty foil, and a liquid measuring cup.

Anything you think I'm missing?

[-] [email protected] 83 points 2 years ago

That's the whole point of how any aid works in most situations. Especially with the US's military-industrial complex. Ukraine gets munitions, US industry gets the money. The point is not to build a military industry for Ukraine.

The infamous "government cheese" was given to the needy in the US not because poor people have a dire need for cheese, but because the government wanted to give a lot of money to wealthy dairy farmers.

To suggest that lawmakers don't understand that that is what they are doing is crazy.

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evasive_chimpanzee

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