An Aeropress. I bought it when work removed the free coffee and was super surprised at how good it tasted vs what they were serving. Later, I found a bean hand grinder that fits right inside the Aeropress plunger and now I take it on work trips, vacation and camping.

It's not fully inclusive for $20 because you need a cup, some way to procure and heat water and beans but still, it's served me well.

I keep my seedbox in the planter at the coffee shop down the road with free WiFi.

I couldn't afford one of those fancy 2-cassette boomboxes, so I had my friend bring his tape deck and we put them real close together in the quietest room of the house and recorded that way. Having several siblings meant that there were no quiet places, so we used the empty garage when my parents were at work. The audio was autrocious, tons of echo and static, but I played that tape thin until it snapped.

This worked well for me when I could see the screw and it's orientation was the same as me viewing it. If I was turning it and it was rotated 90° away from me, I'd get it wrong. In physics class, we studied electromagnetic forces and I learned about the right hand rule which for some odd reason works better for me than righy-tighty. The Wikipedia article is long and the TL;DR is that if you use your right hand and turn in the direction of your fingers, the screw will move in the direction of your thumb.

Of course lefties are SOL as are folks without thumbs.

This smells a little funny, as others have suggested. I read an article a while ago that suggested that we're not running out of raw materials; we're thinking about the problem wrong:

Chachra proposes that we could – we must – treat material as scarce, and that one way to do this is to recognize that energy is not. We can trade energy for material, opting for more energy intensive manufacturing processes that make materials easier to recover when the good reaches its end of life. We can also opt for energy intensive material recovery processes. If we put our focus on designing objects that decompose gracefully back into the material stream, we can build the energy infrastructure to make energy truly abundant and truly clean.

This is all outlined in the book How Infrastructure Works from Deb Chachra.

Canada's boss move is to remove the intellectual property laws that the US asked for and let Canadian companies and consumers thrive again.

Canada shouldn't retaliate with US tariffs

I'm going to keep posting this every time I see a reference to US tariffs against Canada.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/

The TL;DR is that tariffs would violate the NAFTA / USMCA treaty in which Canada agreed to respect US copyright law in exchange for free trade. No free trade? Canada doesn't need to respect US copyright any longer and can become a flourishing economy of products to compete with US products that are massively overpriced. Think printer ink and other stuff.

That's a bit harsh. Like my old man always said, "you gotta know when to hold 'em; know when to fold 'em; know when to walk away and know when to run."

Despite all the hate, I do have one of these. I used to have a box next to my furnace with a male end, wired up to the switch so that if the power went out for a longer duration in the winter, I could plug the furnace into the generator with an extension cord and heat the house. When the furnace was replaced, I was too lazy to wire up another. A friend who's dad is a master electrician told us that in an emergency, you could flip all the breakers in the box to off including that mains, use a male to male cable to plug the generator into a wall outlet and flip on the furnace breaker and the breaker where the generator is plugged in and power the furnace that way (so long as both circuits were amp rated the same).

Of course, it came with a disclaimer that he'd deny telling us this to the insurance company and a warning that "bad things would happen" if we somehow enabled the mains to the power company.

I rather like what the Japanese do, which is to mask up if you are sick, thereby preventing the spread to others. I would like to see statistics to know if it is effective. This could have the same net effect, but impact a smaller population.

Slightly tsngental, as a severe allergy sufferer, I appreciate how the pandemic somewhat normalized masking in public so I can just wear one without people asking me prying questions, assuming I'm a freak (I am, but don't assume it until you get to know me), or moving to a different seat on the bus when I sit down.

I read somewhere that the thought that you can vote with your dollars makes you feel good and empowered to make choices, but is overshadowed by the fact that doing so means that whomever has more dollars has more votes.

Regarding Congress, I was really hoping that this big fear of TicTok would result in some sort of GDPR type laws which empower the individuals to take control of our personal data, which could also be used to prevent our personal data from being used against us by foreign countries.

I read a paper a few years ago that basically said that food insecurity is not a problem with production, but is instead a problem with distribution. The USA throws away enough food to feed another good sized country. I don't know the exact nature of the distribution problem and whether it's a problem of resources or something else, like s political problem.