Mine’s a nice stovetop kettle but it’s on an induction hot plate near my coffee maker. Works pretty similar to electric kettles that have the detachable bases, but I can use it on the stove if I want or use the hot plate for other things. The temperature controls on the hot plate also work really well for heating water to just under a boil.

I bought the induction hot plate to use when the power went out since I didn’t have 220v to run my stovetop, so this is how I make use of it so it’s not sitting on a shelf until the power goes out lol.

Am I crazy? Anyone else feel the same? Did I knock over a hornet’s nest and this post is going to end up deleted?

Not at all. You’re spot on. Granted, I do like Linux and Star Trek so many of my bases are largely covered even though I have countless users and communities blocked.

I enjoy the world building stuff but am just a lurker. Same with a lot of other non-politics/news/rage hobby stuff. I’ve been trying to make an effort to post more lately, and only interesting stuff that’s not just a rage-jerk, but I don’t want to overdo it and spam or post low effort stuff just to be posting.

Unfortunately, your observations aren’t new, and I’ve had the same thoughts for a while. It’s something of a feedback loop because the more people who don’t want to be here for the constant rage end up leaving, and the place just distills further. The only reason I’ve stuck around as long as I have is mostly in hopes of this just being a growing pain. I came here because I wanted to be here not because I got banned from everywhere else (which seems to be a significant portion of the userbase here, sadly).

All I can say is, if you can stand it, keep trying to be the change you want to be.

Yeah, that was new to me when I read the Wikipedia page. I only knew her as a character actress from guest appearances on so many shows from the 90s and 2000s.

I’ve only seen it in a you’re selling yourself short fashion.

Yeah, that’s usually how I see it, or maybe just how I’ve always interpreted it.

A question can be a shower thought, especially if it’s a rhetorical question.

Not to mention, the Philosophical Raptor meme format is pretty much just interrogative shower thoughts

I also keep my grounds in a Mason jar.

Usually I go for ease of ingesting caffeine as quickly as possible and use a generic single-cup coffee maker.

1. Fill the reusable k-cup with grounds and put it into the coffee maker
2. Fill the coffee cup with water and pour into the tank
3. Place cup and press the power button
4. Take the dogs outside while it’s running
5. Add a splash of sweetener and/or vanilla syrup
6. Enjoy

Obviously, I’m not fancy about it at all. When I do get fancy, I’ll use the French press. Sometimes I’ll cold brew in the French press overnight but I always forget so that’s a rare treat when I do remember.

https://ebooks.com/

They have a lot of DRM-free options and let you download a clean epub, but like with other stores, it’s up to the publishers whether (and/or when) they can sell them without DRM BS.

I like being able to download the epubs directly so I can put them on my Calibre-web instance and pull them to my Kobo or my phone or whatever I want to read on.

74 inches it seems (just tested haha)

There is no local or even regional mesh group. I see a lot of nodes when I’m out and about but there’s nothing coordinated. I’ve thought about starting one but don’t have time time to invest right now. From my house, I see the occasional node but none that are always visible.

But yeah, I’d like to get a local mesh group going and publish channel configs for different things, emergency alerts being one they can “subscribe” to or not.

Lol, it really is. It’s how we got the terms “Debbie Downer” and “you’re bumming everyone out”.

What are you honestly tired of people bitching about by this point?

Literally everything.

Half the posts I scroll past are just someone bitching about something. Few people posting about cool stuff, most people posting about rage this or rage that. Or if there is a post about something good, there’s people bitching in the comments how it’s not good enough.

Ugh. It’s like this place wants to be miserable and doesn’t know any other way to exist.

Hopefully a single instance doesn’t drop a massive logo or flag that fills 2/3 of the canvas 30 seconds after the event starts…again.

She just couldn’t cel-see-us together.

I feel like my experience here is very different from most people’s. I’m certainly not saying they’re incorrect about what kind of interactions they have that are so off-putting, but I also block anyone and anything that takes away what little joy I can derive from this place.

I’m not here to debate politics or see what I should be mad about, or for people to tell me how to feel about X, Y, or Z. I’ve got plenty of that in the real world. I come here to escape from that with memes, jokes, and interesting shares. I get my news and current events, in moderation/healthy doses, from actual news sites (and block them here), and I stay plenty informed without a peanut gallery of people banned from Reddit telling me how to feel or knee-jerking to this or that (usually some form of violence).

My advice: If your encounters here are overwhelmingly from people constantly putting up false barriers (which is a charitable way to put it, I might add, and I may steal that aphorism), then I cannot recommend the “Block” button enough. Works for people, communities, and whole instances.

If that’s not enough, maybe switch instances to one that’s better modded from the top or provides a specific vibe. startrek.website is great for that if you’re a Trekkie. Beehaw is, last I heard, also pretty chill and well modded though it’s still less federated for reasons I don’t even know still apply.

Ugh, yeah. My “temporary” spinners that were an emergency upgrade became permanent when I went to buy the new ones and prices had skyrocketed. I’ve got one cold spare left, so hopefully there’s a price break in the near-ish future

I feel that.

Before I downsized, I was running 3x HP DL360 G6’s with dual Xenons and 96 GB RAM each. Way overkill for my needs but I got them cheap. Unfortunately, they and my air conditioner competed to see who could use the most electricity each month. 😆

The only thing I really lost in the scale down was the ability to spin up dev/test VMs for every little purpose. I’ve mostly just started using Docker containers for things like build environments.

Their Intel graphics work great for transcoding, but yeah, not much else. I’ve got Emby one one of them, and the QuickSync hardware acceleration works well even with multiple simultaneous streams.

Works pretty great as long as you keep your expectations realistic. Easy to upgrade and pretty reliable. Only annoying thing with any of those micro PCs is the cable management is a pain because of the power bricks. I got some USB-C PD adapters and Dell-style cables and that’s made a huge improvement.

About 220W on average with peaks around 280W. I’ve got 8 Optiplex micro PCs, 5 upcycled thin clients running smaller services, fiber ONT, another micro Optiplex as a router, a storage server, main switch, and a 5 port PoE switch for my 4 access points around the house.

Before I downsized everything to the USFF PCs, I was running 3 old enterprise rack servers that were about 220W each.

It’s currently running from solar from about 7am to 4pm with my small solar setup, but I’m in the process of installing a whole house PV system so hopefully will be 24/7 solar powered soon-ish.

Funny you mention them because Cher and T-Pain were the two people I had in mind when I mentioned “few people use it well”. They both used it intentionally for a specific sound (not sure how much Cher used it beyond “Believe”, but that was the song of hers I had in mind). Under the autotune was intent for it to sound that way. I’m unfamiliar with Charli XCX but will assume it’s the same case.

Yeah, you definitely can’t autotune anyone and make a hit but people will try anyway. That’s basically how I feel about people AI-slopping all their emails to me (most of my day is spent emailing back and forth). The few people who use it well are the ones who are normally overly verbose and use it to trim the fat. One of them says what they have to say but also includes a short summary of their key points which I can somewhat grudgingly appreciate.