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I think being in 100% totality would make all the difference. I was in like 60 or 70 percent totality and while it was neat, and I’m happy I got to experience it, it wasn’t insanely awesome.
It really is indescribable. Just to give you an idea, even five seconds before totality is boring. It’s day, a little darker than usual. Then, five seconds later, it’s totality, and it’s like the entire universe had been replaced by a magical fairy tale land.
It’s crazy how poorly photos convey the experience.
My photos don’t really convey the experience of watching it happen but I did get awesome pics last year. I had total coverage and got super lucky with the weather and didn’t have to leave the house. There are comments from me that has more details about how I got the photos in case anyone finds it interesting.
Oops lol just realized I just sent the link to my lunar eclipse photos, lemme fix that
This links to my photo vault that has my solar eclipse pics sprinkled in https://blog.machinations.space/photobombination/
These are my lunar eclipse pics with the more details https://lemmy.zip/post/34119331
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There were “shadow bands” that looked like wavy ripples starting around then too, and for a few seconds afterward too.
But OP’s point about non-totally is pretty accurate. It’s a little chilly, a bit like overcast, and you can’t look at it without eye protection until totality.
When we were at the 2017 eclipse it was warmer and we watch the bugs come out and birds roost/land on the nearby lake.
Dang! I should’ve taken my kids out of school and driven them 100 miles to see the totality! I may never get another chance like that.
Have you ever seen a sunset in 360 degrees around you, everywhere you looked?
I have.It’s worth travelling for. There will be more coming!
Huge difference.
As a kid I saw an annular solar eclipse (ring of fire) and thought it was pretty neat, but I wasn’t that excited for the recent total eclipse. Decided that I might as well just drive the few hours to give my young son the full experience.
WOW what a difference it made when that last sliver of sun got eclipsed. Incomparable.
Yes, being in totality is a completely different experience. Imagine looking up at the sky into a twilight, where a black hole ringed with ghostly white light hovers eerily where the sun once was. It’s truly otherworldly
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And the temperature and sound changes too. Also it’s pretty neat to be in a crowd for a moment of communal awe.
not even just the people, we were on the edge of a lake and something about the way the wildlife sounded just changed.
Would you mind elaborating on your experience? Why was it exciting ? What came through your mind at the time ?
I’ve seen a solar eclipse but I’m in elementary at the time and didn’t care for it. Now I wonder if it must have been kinda terrifying the old human thought their God was mad.
The sun is so bright that even when a sliver of it is still showing, it’s blinding. So a partial eclipse, even at 99%, just looks like the sun only a crescent instead of a circle. Oh and the shadows can look funny and you might notice it’s a bit darker.
Then you get to totality and it is something new. It gets noticeably darker, first of all, but in a different way than normal. Not like a storm or night, it’s eerie and hard to explain.
But you can also look at the sun without protection. And you don’t see any of the main disc itself but you get a clear sight of what’s around it: the waves of plasma coming off of the sun, moving while you watch.
After seeing totality, partial eclipses are now meh. In fact, once totality ended, there was still like an hour of partial eclipse left, but I didn’t care, it was time to drive home. I won’t even bother looking at future partial eclipses at home in the future, but I might fly out to a future total one. Seeing one made me understand how people who knew about them back in the day could use that to control those who didn’t. It feels profound.
Linux and open source software.
Tested out a dualboot of Linux Mint about 2 years ago on a Windows laptop. Wanted to see how far I could get on 100% open source and free software.
I got far enough that I never looked back.
Same for me with Nobara Linux. Its been a year and a half and I’m so glad I migrated over.
Alas, the one thing holding me back is that my wireless headset has no Linux support. Trying to vibe code drivers but it’s not going well.
Get a wired headset/mic and never look back :)
I’m held back by the good deal that PC game pass is, And a few multiplayer games, but I still dual boot
I’ve tried switching multiple times, but so many programs I use for work are not supported on Linux. I essentially was having to run 2 systems so I relented and tried to de-Microsoft windows.
I didn’t think Portal could possibly live up to the hype and I slept on it for a a decade. It did. Superb game
This was a triumph
I’m making a note here: huge success.
For the good of all of us. Except the ones who are dead.
So looking forward to that piece of cake
I’ve got some bad news, buddy…
An air fryer. Holy cow that thing is versatile and an amazing addition to the kitchen!
I ended up with one for free after years of not caring. What I found is that you cannot match their ability to turn the cheapest hot dogs into great hot dogs. That a kielbasa or smoked sausage becomes a work of art. Heat up a microwave burrito in the microwave and then crisp it in the air fryer. Perfect for egg rolls. Anything where that skin has to be crispy or have a bite to it is a great thing to throw into an air fryer.
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Coffee. My dad was in the navy in the 70s and you could tell by the tar he drank. Never got into it. Early 20s I got hired as a delivery boy for a coffee shop. A perk was that it came with free coffee drinks. Turns out I didn’t hate coffee, I hated the swill my father brewed. Good coffee was quite good.
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I’m not sure where you’re from, but here in the UK almost everybody drinks instant coffee and that’s how I feel about it. It’s horrible, and the only reason people seem to think they like it is because they fill it with milk and sugar.
The US. In my dad’s time it was percolator brewed (the literal worst way to brew) or with low grade, super roasted. I drink medium roast or lighter and drip brew or pour over. Vast vast difference.
The Persona series has even brought up the idea you’d praise coffee more for its mature flavor than just to wake up. In some places, they drink it at any time of day.
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I ended up with an air fryer. It’s still just a convection oven, but I use it constantly.
I love my adult E-Z-Bake oven, lol.
What’s with these? Do they heat up faster? More convection means more heat transfer? I don’t get it
Both. The fast-moving air really does have an almost frying effect, and mine takes like a minute or two to get up to temp (and fits a whole pizza).
Yep, they are convection ovens on steroids when it comes to the amount of airflow.
I was firmly on team “LOL it’s a baby convection oven, big whoop” for years, but an actual purpose-made air fryer (not a toaster oven with air fry mode) cooks like an entirely different appliance.
Induction range top. Quick on, fine degree of control, quick off, little heat radiation. Better than gas. Only adaptation was flat bottom wok which
makes the working world go roundis not quite the same experience.Keeping it clean with minimal effort compared to a gas range was unexpectedly my favorite part
I find it even easier than a glass top electric (what the induction replaced) I think it is because only the area directly below the pan is heated, spills are easier to wipe up and don’t get baked on.
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Absolutely this. An induction range was a game changer in terms of cooking and has paid for itself many times over. I lucked out and found a high end used one for $400 many years ago. When camping I use a portable one, and while not as good as a full range, it is still much better than any propane cooktop I’ve used.
Yea I got a separate plug-in induction wok because I just couldn’t get the flat bottom one to work well.
Crocs. I had avoided them for years until I went on a kayaking tour on Vancouver Island. Well, while they were ugly AF, they are one of most comfortable shoes I’ve tried that are just… Easy to slip on and off?
I’m legit scared to try them on, and be overwhelmed by how comfortable they are that I don’t care about their looks. But the fact they’re the shoes from Idiocracy is keeping me from ever trying. IIRC they weren’t even released to the public yet, and Mike Judge was like these are perfect, ain’t no way anyone would ever be caught dead in these ugly ass shoes.
I have a pair that I wear exclusively as house shoes. They are so comfortable. But yeah, I don’t want to wear them in public.
They make closed-toe versions which look far less ridiculous.
Same here. I don’t even think they look ugly anymore. They’re comfortably great.
PC SSDs when they first came out, I saved $ and splurged for 256 GB over 128 GB. In the first week I was slightly upset I didn’t save more $ and go for a big expensive 512 GB one. Immediately I was telling my other PC gaming friends it’s going to revolutionize PCs in general, and to get one ASAP!
Edit: I can’t remember shit for fuck, but the size I bought was probably quite smaller than 256 GB lol.
I remember going from a 2 minute boot time to under 40s on windows. That was all the convincing I needed
I don’t think there were SSDs that large when they first came out in the late 2000’s. I saved up for an 80GB one back around 2009, and it was an absolute piece of trash. It was fast when it wanted to be, but most of the time it would randomly stutter and just go unresponsive for several seconds causing the rest of the PC to hang up until it decided to start responding again. After fighting with it for too long, I replaced it with a traditional harddrive which at least behaved as it was supposed to.
It was several years later before I tried another SSD, buying a relatively inexpensive 120GB drive that actually did live up to the hype.
Hmmmm, I’m probably misremembering the size now that you mention it. I’m also practically incapable of remembering when something was, but it would have been around the late 2000s - early 2010s. I do remember it held Windows plus 1-2 games, and I juggled around the games I played most from SSD to HDD and back.
Buckwheat pillow
Bidet
Tell me more about this pillow of yours please
Just a pillow that is filled with buckwheat. They’re like 50 bucks. Kind of bean-baggy. If you get one, you’ll put your head on it and think,“Damn, this is kind of hard”, but then you’ll adjust it to your head and have a great nights sleep. I kept hearing about them, then I needed to replace my pillow one day and figured,what the hell. Let’s see what this is about. Totally worth it.
They’re also absolutely OP in a pillow fight (I got one when I was like 10, and never looked back)
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I’m pretty sure mine was from a company called Bean Products. I just checked, and the price has gone up a bit in the years since I bought mine. I don’t know that there is a big difference in quality between brands.
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Sobakowa, as seen on TV!
When I moved to Wisconsin back in 2006, House on the Rock was one of the first things I heard about from my neighbors to go see. My wife and I looked at the website and said “we’ll go see it someday.” Well, that day was about a month ago as back then we started having kids and getting used to living in a new place. However, over the past 19 years I’ve had people tell me that “you’ve got to go see it.”
Now… I understand.
Is that place a monument to a man’s ascent to brilliance?
Or his decent into madness.
There was stuff in that museum that I took DAYS to process and I still really am unable to understand what it was I was looking at. It took my family and I FOUR hours to walk through it. It could have been a LOT longer if we actually stopped to study more than what we did.
I’m 55 years old and I’ve seen and done a lot things in my life… None of it prepared me for the sheer onslaught that is House on the Rock. Walking out of it I told my wife that I rather chaffed at the entrance fee when I paid it… Now, I’m not sure if they charged enough.
If you’re ever anywhere close to South Central Wisconsin… Take a day and go see it.
It doesn’t just live up to the hype… It so far exceeds it that trying to explain the place will never do it justice.
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Wow. I have never wanted to take my husband someplace, with no explanation beforehand, more.
It’s so cool to see this pop up here–i went there with my wife several years ago and we were absolutely stunned by it’s magnificence and sheer scale. I plan on going back someday and spending an entire day there knowing what we’re in store for. I had been given a recommendation to check it out by a local who ran a log cabin lodge that was about 1/2 hour or so from the House. That place really blew me away, glad to know other folks are out there appreciating it too!
That carousel was insane, not to mention the amount of animated instruments and nickelodeons scattered about… The living quarters were so cool, if a little impractical. You could have the coolest parties ever in that place…
High quality audio equipment.
Yes, it’s an area filled with more snake-oil and bullshit than any other technical realm I’ve experienced, but with some knowledge (unarguably required on the part of the user) you can actually figure stuff out and get some ROCKING audio gear for pennies on the dollar.
Last year I got into electronic fix/build/mashup as a hobby, and a project I had in mind for fun was to turn a $10 Sirius Boombox that needed 8xD batteries and a wired AUX input, into a wireless BT boombox. I did it and it was fun as hellllllll. But it was not for the audio, it was for the learning. I repurposed battery cells and a charging board from a Shark handheld vacuum, and grabbed a BT board out of a scrapped shower speaker - made that work by “bolting it” onto a disposable vape battery/charger which draws from the main battery pak.
Well anyways… getting a taste of that deep, rich, penetrating audio made me realize I’d been sold THE OTHER SIDE OF THE LIE by the speaker business. That moment of looking at my Bose SoundLink and realizing I’ve been a fool for so long. The stupid Sirius boombox isn’t even that good now that I look back, but at the moment it was a HOLY SHIT moment for me. Running up to it thinking my music was distorting… but NO… it was actually musical details I’d never heard, and didn’t know existed.
Now I have a soul-destroying audio setup (for a small 1BR apartment) that I shit you not, cost me a total of $23. RXV581 Receiver, YST-SW011 Subwoofer and two Polk MXT11 Monitor tower speakers. People either discarded, sold, or donated. I got the Yamaha Receiver/Sub set because… get this… ONE of the surround sound speakers was dropped and it’s case cracked, so they threw it ALL away. The Polks were seen at thrift, first for $70 each, then reduced to $34 after a month… then one day muthafukkaaaaaaa $10 each plus tax.\
So yeah. Good audio. I had NO idea how satisfying it could be. I didn’t know what I’d been missing.
Same experience here with mid and high end audio collecting for both car and home.
What was that “holy crap I didn’t know what good audio was” moment for you?
50 dollar pair of Sennheiser over the ear (not cans) headphones absolutely blew my mind which lead to many a denon, electovoice, carver, klipsch, adcom, & cerwin-vega passing through my hands (i miss my “house” speakers (cobbled together and refoamed the woofers from 2 sets of 1970’s vintage D9’s and ran them with a 200 watt rms/ch electrovoice power amp as a bedroom dj for many a house party 😁🍻) not to say my current stereo cant thump, buuuuuttttt (i hear an old man in my head) “theres no replacement for displacement” way of thinking will probably lead to either a home theater sub or more car audio
Edit: and good taste in polk! I ran their 6.5 coaxials in the doors of my car with an Alpine 9855, kenwood power amp giving them around 80-100 watts and 24db/octave high and low pass filters (i cant recall the center freq of those crossovers but i think i rolled the lows off around 1500 hz and the highs around 4000-4500 hz)
Cool! 200 Watt RMS/ch yoooooooo
My 2nd experience, which happened to be headphones as well - a wired set of B&W I got for $2 because the cable frayed.
I’m on board with you there about the “displacement” idea. With engines technology can help, but with audio all the wave guides, custom boxes and tomfoolery in the world can’t get around physics. Bigger = better.
edit: re your edit. A big part of how I do … things… is to be patient and let them come into my life. Having been able to pick up so much crazy gear for pennies means I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if I paid retail or even used prices. When the “bug” was first starting to bite me I decided to buy a used sub for $100 which was still a deal. I nearly cried when I saw the exact sub at thrift for $9. But hey, sold the one I bought and moved on so no issue. But yeah… I don’t have the money to buy everything I’d like but I’m becoming aware of what’s good and what’s not, and I enjoy the “saving” or “free” aspect very much. Plus I get to keep the constant upgrade cycle going and make a bit of side cash too.
I’ve been a frugal audiophile for my entire life. I learned long ago that you can find gear with excellent specs, without spending thousands.
These days, I’m mostly into guitars, and I’ve found the same thing to be true - there is no correlation between quality and price. I’ve seen great guitars that are dirt cheap, and I’ve seen expensive guitars that are mediocre. I put together an entire home studio, with 2 electrics, an acoustic, a bass, and a keyboard, a new computer, interface, mic, etc., all for less than $1500, and it all sounds amazing.
You’ve done me proud, fellow frugal !
Bidet. $30 game changer. Don’t ask questions, just hook it up (it’s easy), and try it.
You’re welcome.
Ok, I guess I’ll be that guy. Every time they are mentioned, it’s always people proseltyzing. It made me consider one, but I never pulled the trigger. All of the arguments I heard felt kind of unconvincing, and I couldn’t justify buying one without trying it first.
Then I bought a house, and it came with two of them. I was excited to try them out and see what all of the fuss was about. The thing is… The ones I have suck. Now, one of them seems to have weak pressure, so it could just be a bad one. However, the other one feels like it’s trying to clean the back of my teeth, and it still doesn’t do anything I couldn’t do with paper. Sure, it might get the job done slightly faster, but I still need to use paper to at least dry off after I’m done.
Maybe a better one could change my mind, but for us, they sit there, mostly unused.
I think its better to dry off with paper than to smear poo around with it, but that’s a personal preference.
You need the ones that have an “AI” aiming feature but the AI is actually a japanese man sitting in his cubical remote controlling it.
I installed this for less then 20€ and can’t live without it anymore. I use a few toilet papers to dry my butt, it’s already absolutely clean 90% of the time. My whole family can’t go back to just wipe.
Maybe try a different model. I’ve got a simple one from Amazon that was only about $30. Now that yours is already installed on the tank, it should be easy to swap out a new one.
Disgusting, i can’t imagine not washing your ass after a shit when at home
it still doesn’t do anything I couldn’t do with paper
You are supposed to use paper and then the bidet.
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Yep, bidet people are suuuuuper-fucking-weird to the point of having some kind of anal fixation.
fellas, is it gay to not walk around with skid marks in my undergarments?
Unless you live in a modular with fucked plumbing not making this easy
It attaches to the float mechanism, so it’s pretty easy to install. Only about 15 minutes, and the results are so worth it.
It would be worth it even if you had to pay a plumber to install it. Now that I’ve lived with one, I’d pay $200 to have one installed.
My old apartment toilet didn’t actually have a way to disconnect the hose from the bottom of the float mechanism. Like the hose went all the way up into the tank, instead of simply screwing onto the bottom. As far as I could tell, it would require replacing the entire float mechanism (and hose) with a new one, which was more work (and money) than I was willing to put into a toilet that I didn’t even own.
Even searching online for how to disconnect it was unhelpful, because every post basically boiled down to “just unscrew it and it should come loose.” But it very clearly wasn’t going to come loose, because the hose ran all the way up into the center of the mechanism; The screw simply held the mechanism in place. I’ve never seen another one like it before or since, but they 100% do exist.
It was particularly annoying because I was already used to using a bidet. I moved into the new place, and discovered after the move-in that I couldn’t install mine.
Like the hose went all the way up into the tank, instead of simply screwing onto the bottom.
That’s EXACTLY what my situation is like
It sounds like you’d have to replace the whole stack, but that’s only about $15-20 at Home Depot.
There should be some sort of threaded seal around the hole on the bottom of the tank where the water flows in, and the hardware all attaches to that.
I’ve never seen anything like your situation, you might need a plumber to sort that out.
In some places all the piping and the water tank are behind a wall though
Steam deck
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I decided to spend a bit more and get at MSI Claw 8 for the extra processing grunt and Thunderbolt support, but I can’t believe how much use I get out of it. I actually look forward to commuting.
Cool little machine, looks a bit smaller and more comfortable than a deck
Sadly it doesn’t have the little touchpads, which are arguably one of the best features of the deck
Nothing but problems from mine.
How so? And regular or OLED version?
For me it’s really buggy, games and Steam OS. The constant remapping of buttons and trackpads for the games to be working flawlessly is annoying too but other than that I don’t fond too many problems.
?
Yeah, it’s a bit too big but appart from that it’s excellent
If they release a steam deck “mini” that’s like the size of a thick phone my productivity will crash so hard.
Yeah, mine never reconnects the game audio to my Bluetooth if I ever lock it. I have to quit the game and restart it for it to play audio again. Really makes it frustrating to use on the go, which is all I use it for
I got an old ipod at a yard sale that still works. Its actually really good!
Miyoo Mini Plus - Its like a gameboy for emulators. Its really great playing my old games, but with save states.
Linux. not only learning the system gave me more knowledge, it helped me get a job and eventually a career!
A Dog - My dog gives me and my wife so much love its amazing. Hes a good boy.
May I see a pic of said good boy?
Oh my goodness he’s so cute!! I bet he loves his Lamb Chop!
Yes he does. He tosses it around for hours each day. We call it his game boy.
+1 on the miyoo mini plus. I got one at Christmas last year and it’s awesome. I also got a steam deck, but I think I like the miyoo more for retro emulation.
Its a great combo! I also have a MMP+ with a steam deck.
