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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • I’m very pro real books and as a result was hesitant to jump on the ebook bandwagon. That all changed after finishing a particularly large book early during a long trip, lugging those damn dead trees around the country for a while and unable to find anything worthwile to read in along the way. Now with my ebook any book and every book on my “to read” list taking up the same space, same weight, and I don’t worry about damaging them because the ebook is waterproof with a rugged cover.

    I still buy hard to find and out of print books at used book stores, but those stay home and get gifted to special people when I’m done.





  • Yeah, the touch screen is awful, but just try finding a decent induction range without one and without spending twice as much for the privilege. (It seems that induction ranges are the most popular for this unfortunate design trend.)There’s not really any choices out there. You can lock the screen, which is great for cleaning. Just don’t do that while you’re using the oven or range because it turns everything off and cancels the bake.

    I do love everything else about my induction range though. Cold searing stuff is faster and easier to get right. I can bring a pot of water to a rolling boil in about 4 minutes.


  • This whole idea that they “saved” it is philosophically flawed and deeply problematic from a moral and ecological perspective. Claiming that the mother “abandoned” it demonstrates ignorance of the way these animals live and care for their young.

    Regardless, a proper wildlife rehabilitation program by a zoologist would have actually kept the moose alive and been in a position to judge if the moose was safe to be re-released. Your moose story could have easily ended in the death of people in addition to the moose. This isn’t some kind of vain high horse I’m on. It’s just simple facts learned through decades of direct experience with wild animals in the wild, in rehabilitation, and in zoos. I stand by my earlier statements. I’m sorry this bitter pill is hard for you to swallow I guess. So it goes.


  • Feeding wildlife, even one treated as a “pet”, is a death sentence for them just as surely as if you had fired the gun yourself. Your neighbor killed that moose.

    Other prime examples include: feeding alligators (now you’ve created a danger to others as well, so you’ve not just killed the animal, which will need to be destroyed by officials, you’ve potentially maimed or killed a person); feeding ducks and geese (I once has a neighbor that would feed ducks in the parking island adjacent to the main entry to our apartment complex, no surprise to me that we saw many near misses and a few dead ducks in our driveway); bears (this one should be obvious, same scenario as the gators except bears are faster, climb trees, and are probably smarter than the average person they are going to encounter when they leave the woods looking for human food).

    Undomesticated animals (wildlife/wild animals) are not pets. They’re never going to be pets. They’ve just learned to manipulate some humans for food or shelter. Maybe you’ll get along for a little while with them, but that relationship has poisoned the fear keeping them safe for and from other humans.










  • Sports photography is not a cheap hobby. Expect to spend 10 times your budget just to get started. You can save (some) money by shopping used on sites like adorama or B&H. Older models of DSLR can be had for a pretty good deal because all the kids these days are hyped about mirrorless. Expect to do a lot of research and wade through a lot of articles written by gear obsessed people with money to burn. I think you can still browse archives of dpreview.com for some in depth reviews and specs, especially if you’re shopping older models.

    Pretty much any consumer camera with an interchangeable lens will do the job, it’s the lens that will really determine how good a picture you can get. There’s a reason you see a lot of HUGE (and expense) lens on the sidelines. Megapixels are much less important these days because pretty much everything has enough. The metrics you’ll be looking to maximize will be a fast autofocus system, a fast lens, and a long enough focal length to get your view in close to your subject from a distance. You might be able to find something that is “good enough” in a cheaper range with a camera with a built-in lens. If you get bit by the photography bug though, that might turn out to be a waste of money if you decide you want to upgrade.


  • That’s not how physics or lawsuits work.

    If they are using smaller blades, those blades are most certainly spinning much faster than the large blades of a riding or push mower. Thus you’re just trading mass for speed and the energy exchange can remain largely the same. You can see this for yourself if you drop items (like a handful of sunflower seeds to simulate rocks) through a spinning ceiling fan or a smaller table fan spinning significantly faster; both can easily throw those seeds that get hit by the blades around a large room. This is how the smaller blades on a lawn mower would even be able to do the same work as the larger blades of a mower.

    Also many devices, like table saws, chainsaws, and lawn mowers and considered inherently dangerous to operate. Lawsuits over injury as a result of misuse (like letting children or pets into the yard while mowing) usually have to factor in this inherent danger. There are certain safety measures in place, but I guarantee no mower operator manual suggests letting kids or pets play around a mobile set of spinning metal blades. If you fail to follow the basic instructions in an operators manual while operating a dangerous device, you don’t have much ground in a lawsuit.




  • Yes, I’ve done almost exactly this while traveling. You can even carry around a couple variously configured sd cards for different use cases. I had one with jellyfin for sharing locally and also Kodi for direct HDMI connection to TVs. There is a in app on Android for jellyfin called findroid that allows offline copies from the media server, which allowed me to not need the thing powered the entire time I wanted to watch something on my phone, just long enough to download it. Adding samba shares adds a other layer of accessibility. I had another SD Card with video game ROMs for retro gaming, but this one got left at home because it requires controllers and I didn’t think I’d use it that much. I had another with “little backup box” installed for automatically backing up my photos and videos after a day out exploring with my camera.

    I used a Raspberry pi 5 for all of this, running from a battery backup, because I didn’t really need a keyboard once I had remote connections to my phone sorted out. Pick a rugged case and you case just toss it in your bag of chargers. It took up about as much space as a pack of cigarettes. Another option would be the Raspberry Pi 400, built into a keyboard. A little bulkier, but maybe more resilient in the face of technical difficulties.