Again, you make some great points, especially about profit motive and lack of strong consumer rights.

If I want a smoker I can monitor on the fly I will look at something like that thermometer paired with a standard steel smoker that will last decades.

When I’m not going old school with my stick burner I run a Yoder YS640S with a Fireboard controller. The Yoder is an extremely high quality pellet smoker which given proper maintenance will last longer than I’ll be alive. It and the Fireboard are designed, built, and shipped from the US (where I live), which is also nice. I don’t know exactly how Fireboard runs their cloud services, but from looking at the privacy policy and sniffing the unit’s traffic (a few years ago) it looks like Google Cloud and Analytics. They also disclose that if you use the Fireboard outside of the US, that your data will be stored and processed in the US, which is interesting, but may be misleading.

Fireboard is an interesting company, they started out by making temperature monitors and blowers for retrofitting into home built smokers, which I think is pretty cool.

I had a fire unrelated to my smoker which destroyed the smart bits of the Yoder, and both Yoder and Fireboard customer support were excellent to work with to help me rebuild my smoker.

I’m not stanning for either of these companies, perhaps just explaining why I’ve opted to make some tradeoffs for the convenience this particular product offers.

If I need to adjust it remotely I will look at why I need this option first: is it realistic that I would just adjust it without checking the contents?

Yes. I’m primarily looking at internal temp curves. Sometimes that prompts a simple pit temp change, sometimes it means I need to interact with the contents like spraying or wrapping. I’ve cooked often enough on this unit to know what the contents look like and how they react to smoke given the internal and pit temp curves.

Generally speaking I agree with your take on garbage consumer products being designed to extract money from the consumer before crapping out early and being thrown away. I think I’ve done well to select the products I have to keep that from being the reality with my pellet smoker.

Depending on the internal temperature curve I may need to change cook temps in the pit, which I can do remotely. I also monitor the curve to determine when to spray and wrap, and other activities, depending on what is smoking.

You make some good points.

I live a mile and a half from the ocean and run my smoker for long periods. It’s really nice to monitor and change the temp while I’m drinking the beer you refer to from the sand. I make a few quick runs back up the hill to tend to things, but mostly I’m free to be elsewhere for the 12-ish hours the smoker is running. It’s really nice, not a hard requirement, but really convenient.

These are commonly called “combination guns”. Usually you get 2 different calibers, typically one shotgun and one in a rifle caliber. They were used in hunts where you’d encounter different types of game (requiring different calibers) or one type of game at different distances (imagine shooting relatively far at a large animal and using a rifle, then it turns and runs towards you so you can quickly switch to a shotgun with a slug load).

Often these are called “drilling” guns, with the rifle caliber in the middle. This one is fairly unique given the number of barrels, and that they all look like shotgun calibers. My guess the big one is probably a 10 gauge in the middle.

I usually associate these types of guns with African large game hunts, and British or German manufacturers.

These are pretty rare nowadays, they’re crazy heavy and modern loads can compensate for the shortcomings old loads encountered.

Pro is free for personal use for up to 5 machines. Is there a problem with activating it?

In the US we call that style of grill a Santa Maria, a style popularized in central California, I believe by the Spanish colonists.

Also how do you microwave water? It takes ages to get water to boil in there and can explode.

Uh, I don’t use a microwave but this doesn’t sound correct. My wife boils one mug of water in about 2.5 minutes in the microwave. And I’m curious to see a citation for a microwave safe mug (no metal bits or decorations) full of water exploding in the microwave.

bitwarden became proprietary a while ago

I’m interested in hearing more about this. I recall there being a mixup in packaging and people asked a bunch of questions about licensing. But as far as I can tell the client and server code is still available as open source (under various licenses) and the repos are frequently updated.

This is an honest question, I promise. I haven’t found anything that points to regular users being pushed to anything proprietary, and no new discussions since late 2024.

I guess it depends on what you consider passable.

It’s loud enough on 25% to disturb my neighbors, it’s clear and defined enough for me to watch normally and hear everything at 7%. There’s no observable delay, and the installation is clean enough to make my wife happy. It wasn’t cheap, but I wouldn’t consider it expensive.

Some films are meant to be watched in large formats with insane audio that just can’t be replicated at home. The Dune movies and Oppenheimer are a few recent examples I can think of that looked incredible in 70mm IMAX. I live in a major metro area and there are only 3 screens within 50 miles capable of showing 70mm properly. I choose to go out of my way to these theaters once or twice a year, if a great film is showing.

Short of films shot and shown in a true large format there’s no way you’ll find me in a theater.

I’ll watch content on small screens if I’m on a plane. Otherwise it’s my 80" living room TV with passable surround sound.

This is our time to shine Hydro Homies!

Having itchy palms because of an allergy might happen commonly in terms of a large population, but it is not common to have this condition. If it happens to you then you should get it looked at instead of biting them. This is the correct and acceptable response. Putting your hands in your mouth and using your teeth because something is wrong with your palms does not need to be normalized.

If people have itchy palms for any reason, I’m not shaming them. I’m pointing out that putting your hands in your mouth is strange.

I don’t know why, but ok?

Itchy palms sounds more like an allergic reaction than a common issue.

People have itchy palms? Itchy enough that they bite them?

That’s fucking weird.

That’s literally never happened to me, it sounds super strange. Are y’all putting stuff on your hands that’s tearing up your skin? Do you moisturize regularly?

I have sensitive skin, but spend a lot of time in a kitchen with wet hands. Unscented soap to wash my hands about a dozen times a day, and unscented moisturizer to keep my skin from cracking. I’ll use a thicker waxy moisturizer during the winter when it’s really dry out.

I use my hands for weightlifting and golf, so I have to manage my callouses, and in the kitchen I’ll pick up various small cuts and burns. My hands don’t look perfect but they’ve never… itched?

Why would right wing people come out to protest ICE? They all voted for exactly what is happening.

Maybe this question should also request the responder’s general location, because I imagine the situations vary substantially.

I’ve lived in California for most of my life, and we go on frequent drives between LA and SF, usually a few times a year.

In the 80’s and 90’s bugs would cover the front of our vehicles and the windshield would be difficult to see through even with wipers and washer fluid. We’d actually have to stop to manually scrape them off.

In the 00’s and 10’s we noticed that we’d get basically zero bugs on a long drive, and that sparked many conversations about California environmental law.

I just got back from a drive up the coast and I can happily say that we’re back to insane numbers of bug strikes on the highway. Just north of Ventura I drove through a cloud of large bugs that hit like rocks and instantly covered almost my entire windshield. This situation has been noticably turning around since COVID, which I think is a good thing

I don’t know if this is common, but in my family Legos are a common gift for children, and they never get thrown away. When kids age out (usually because they move out or go to uni) the bricks get tossed in a big mixed bag and handed down to the next round of youngsters. After at least 3 generations of this, the kids now inherit literal full sized trash barrels of mixed Lego. It’s awesome!

When it was my turn I got a big bucket, but two of my cousins got all of the Technic stuff, I was very jealous.

asshat with a scuba tank

3000 meters beneath the Weddell Sea

Good luck

This is how you cook with stainless. Get a high smoke point oil, get the pan and oil plenty hot, the put the food in.

This is not, strictly speaking, true for eggs.

I’ve cooked eggs in stainless nearly every day for the last couple of decades. I can crack a few eggs in a properly prepared cold pan, and still get non stick effects, such that the food will slide right out without using a tool.

The level of heat which would require a high smoke point oil is generally much too high for cooking most styles of eggs anyway.

People should use whatever method works for them, I’m not judging, but high heat is not required for most styles of eggs.

It’s a mixed bag.

Growing up was made difficult because school is so slow that I’d rather be getting into trouble than sitting in class. By the start of middle school I’d already read the entire high school honors reading list, I had to walk to the high school from my middle school in 7th grade to take math classes. I rarely had regular school work in high school, nearly all of my academic teachers designed a different curriculum for me, which was nice but probably mostly to keep me from acting up in class. I never studied or did a shred of homework, but got good grades.

Social interactions were tough, I’m not much of an empath, not that I don’t experience empathy but emotions just aren’t intuitive, actually they often are the opposite of what you’d expect to be helpful, especially among young people. I had to concentrate to read people’s faces and mannerisms to understand the emotional and social subtexts of most interactions. I self medicated with alcohol a lot in high school.

All of my academic classes in high school were honors, and my final 2 years were all AP, while lettering in 3 varsity sports (4 total, but you can only play 3 each academic year). It wasn’t until my second year in uni that I ran into a class for which I actually had to study (nuclear chemistry), and boy was that an awful surprise. A handful of classes were like this for me, most I just showed up 3 times and got a good grade: the first day of class so I wouldn’t get dropped, the midterm, and the final.

I read quickly, think systematically, and information just sticks in my head. It was very difficult to understand why this wasn’t how most people were. Everything I do I analyze for improvement, and remember to do it better the next time. My wife calls me a skill collector because people seem to think I’m super good at everything, but to me it’s just logical that if you’re going to take time do something you might as well do it as well as possible.

After uni things started getting easier. Being forced to closely analyze social interactions and systematically give the “right” reactions is extremely useful in professional life. I wear this mask in all my interactions with all but my closest friends. It’s a bit psychopathic, but I don’t do it to anyone’s detriment, it’s mostly to get along and fit in.

I’ve self selected for highly intelligent friends, and I’m exhilarated to meet new people who can communicate with the kind of bandwidth that our brains run at, if that makes sense. I’m still close with most of my friends from high school, who have had varying levels of success, but I still have to be guarded when it comes to activities or conversation to make sure I don’t stick out too much.

In general I have a very pessimistic view of people and the world. The average person isn’t very sharp, and half of all people are dumber than that. However many smart people do evil things, most of the time for no reason at all. It’s exhausting to keep up with it all, so I just focus on my path and my family, and do what I can to directly improve my community.

It would be nice to fit in a little easier, but I wouldn’t trade my experience for anything else.