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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • You’re not really making your own bread unless you grow and harvest the ingredients yourself. What do you mean you don’t mill your own grains? Refine your own sugar?Can’t really even call yourself a baker unless you build your own oven. /s

    Cooking and baking are basically ALL prep work and cleanup. The actual cooking and baking is overall a pretty small fraction of the overall effort that goes into making dinner or a loaf of bread. Go ahead and feel proud of yourself if you take on more of those preparatory tasks, IF it makes for a better end result. But that doesn’t mean you get to act superior to somebody else on a different path of their own personal cooking journey. Drawing an arbitrary line in the sand and saying “this is cooking, but that is not” is kind of like drawing a line between blue and indigo on a rainbow. It’s arbitrary and adds little to good the discussion.

    Go ahead and cheat on those components where it works. Not everybody has the time, space, energy, or skill to make every bread, sauce, or spice blend from scratch. If you can make something better by getting back to the basics and fundamental ingredients, go for it! But let’s be honest when it’s more about pride than the final product, enjoyment of the meal.

    Personally, the biggest reason I prefer to avoid pre-prepared foods that only require heating is so that I can avoid certain common ingredients that are often pumped into those things in insane proportions, particularly salt and sugar. It’s not so that I can feel proud of an arbitrary label.


  • If you’d ever been really swarmed by mosquitoes or lived in a place where they are ever present you’d not be asking this question.

    • When they swarm enough they are nearly impossible to avoid.
    • When their presence is constant some people just stop reacting to the bites. I only ever notice mosquito bites on places that get chaffed (like the wrists and hands, around collars and cuffs). If they bite a place you wouldn’t normally scratch and can avoid scratching the area after a bite, for some people a welt is much less likely to form.
    • They don’t go after only people. Your irritation at a few bites is nothing compared to the diversity in the evolutionary arms race between mosquitoes and their prey.
    • Only the mothers feed on blood. Other mosquito eat mostly plant nectar.








  • Dark table corrects lens distortion based on the design of the actual lens, not the image itself. The grid it just to check in after the fact. I’m not aware of similar tools in GIMP. It’s trivial in Darktable though, as long as your lens is in the database.

    Don’t use a fish-eye lens, it’s lense distortion will be the worst and most difficult to correct. Use a lens with a longer focal length, ideally a prime lens with a fixed focal length. If you maximize focal length and distance to your object as much as is feasible, you will have already flattened the image (minimized lens distortion) a lot. If you use a prime (fixed focal length) lens from a popular brand, Darktable can remove the remaining lens distortion.

    You can remove all lens distortion by using a pinhole camera, which has no lens. But that’s probably going to be a tricky setup without an expert.






  • Next time you tape over it, try this. Cut an old credit card, hotel key card, or something similar to just larger than the switch’s recess. Tape only the top edge to the machine so that the stiff plastic or cardboard covers the switch, but can be lifted up and out of the way when you need to access it. I’ve used a similar trick to protect light switches I wanted to occasionally use, but not accidentally flip along with the other switches in the next gang over.