Uranium 🟩

My friend has so far fried 4 or 5 steamdecks, ROG Ally and two power banks before he took my advice to buy a type c cable tester and to stop using any charger that didn’t come with the device until he could test them.

Turned out it was a damaged cable, I think it was a CC line was no longer working.

I’ve had a couple of cheaper Chinese type c and usb A multi port chargers fail; I manage to fry like 3 sex toys before I realised the type A ports were outputting 12v, and at some point something went wrong and the type c fried my phone (which I guess is on me for continuing to use the charger after the issue with the type A ports)

Something semi ambient, preferably without lyrics: Tycho, Bonobo, Nujabes

Oh wow, you must learn manual, that’s ridiculous! Where in the world is that?

I’ve not started yet, but I’m going to learn automatic when I go to learn, my GF has been learning manual for over 2 years because her dad and our friend who drives said that it makes the most sense to, when in reality that’s just because of what they were told based on outdated advice.

She even has an automatic waiting for her once she finally passes, but she’s stubborn and doesn’t want to switch to learning automatic, it’s really frustrating how stubborn she is about not giving up or approaching it from another direction.

She has dyslexia and the British Dyslexic Association even recommends that dyslexics learn automatic as it’s a known thing they struggle with. She even had to write L and R on her hands, bless her.

I’ve heard some people benefit from intensive driving courses, where you do like 2 solid weeks of lessons then take the test, but no clue if they have those in your country

I’ve suggested to her, if she really wants a manual licence then get the automatic licence, then decide if she really wants the manual, as she’ll be more comfortable with roads and driving and can just focus on the manual aspect

Awh, that’s kind of crappy. I’m hoping they just took it as a gag gift; be prepared for anything, a bit like Jack Jack in The Incredibles.

I hope theynever have to use it, but I hope they do learn how important it is.

Same for cleaning dryer lint; before I was born the entire family who lived across the road from my mum perished in a house fire from dryer lint catching.

Also add Carbon monoxide detectors to that list of devices you never want to need, but should never be without

A keychain jewellers loupe, inexpensive but invaluable, can be used for inspect something up close, whether it’s writing on computer chips to helping with mushroom identification, to identifying makers marks on old silware.

In a similar vein, cheap usb microscopes, though less versatile are incredibly useful for soldering/inspecting PCBs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_with_the_Newts

A short story about this from the same Czech author who (IIRC) gave us the concept and word ‘robot’.

Surely when it branches out?

I have experienced this, a grand total of twice, but not for 5-10 minutes (once I was in a towel and came back around vibrating on the floor which was confusing but probably was the longest one at a minute or two).

I was a chronic joint smoker and would get lightheaded standing up in general. Typically since having switched to vaping it no longer happens. Is the high otherwise pleasurable for you?

Do you have a heart/lung/blood pressure condition in general?

On theme though not literally an aeroplane; the parachuter toys, like little army men that have a parachute on them that you throw out of windows/down the stairs, they were always an absolutely favourite of mine.

Make sure to get the type with netting that connects the parachute to the person as opposed to strings as it can never tangle

https://amzn.eu/d/1GiZZRc

So you normally can be ok for a day or so, might be a little bit more sensitive, some people get panic attacks/heightened anxiety, some get a feeling of emptyness or depression. It really varies on the individual, where they are and what’s going on in their life.

There were days were I’d have a meltdown if I missed a day. By comparison; one day about a month or two after having stopped smoking tobacco due to having COVID, I felt like I didn’t need it and just stopped with basically no negatives, though I was also in a good place in terms of my life which likely helped.

Personally if people are curious about SSRIs, I’d suggest they look into Vortioxetine, it’s technically not an SSRI, which means it has much fewer side effects, but still does the same job as them, just with less foggy cognition/groggyness

I’ve only ever really taken them in the morning, I typically risk forgetting to take them in the evenings causing a headache for myself the next day. Beyond that I assumed most people took them in the morning.

Certain meds can make you drowsy and others can make you groggy but restless, the former are better before bed, the latter are better had in the morning.

That straight line thing really frustrated me, one of the things that I loved about Pokémon as a kid was going one route, noticing somewhere I can’t get to due to lack of HM then exploring the map again much later discovering all these little secrets. It made the world feel just that little bit more like there’s still something to discover.

I’m still salty they removed the base building from BD/SP, it made the underground feel more personal/less grindy than what we got (and the fact that they didn’t include the platinum e extra content in the remakes)

I’m going to take a slightly different approach of what productivety means here; for me it’s literally just making my things in my life less time consuming, easier to access and return to.

With that in mind, I use Google photos to automatically back up my photos, this could be anything from wiring diagrams, patio brick layouts, a quote in a book, to a mushroom I’m wanting to identify.

I use the app plantnet if I’m wanting to identify a plant.

I use the app seeker to download music from soulseek

I upload any research papers/books downloaded from scihub/libgen to gdrive for easier access in the future.

This is of course ignoring all of the notes/timers/reminders I use my phone for as well

Seeing that you mentioned MS365 imma just have my mini vent here, my mum is over 60 and her work has just started using MS365, so far run into a bunch of minor frustrations, but two big ones that she wasn’t able to figure out herself, and damn near stumped me:

First was trying to create an email group, so it’s easier for her to mass email her different classes, go to create the group, realise there’s a bunch of other junk like chats and shared files as part of the group thing which isn’t needed (and can’t be used by non ms emails anyway, over half of them) but whatever, get most of the way through it then realise that two people aren’t included in any group… ok that’s odd, just says they can’t be added to the group, turns out that they’ve likely had some permission set regarding not being able to be added to groups.

45 minutes in at this point and they cannot be added at all, decide to go back and manage to find the option to create a bog standard email group (list?) hidden away under a drop-down menu, this is what I wanted to and thought I was making in the first place, then realise I cannot import or move over the already existing groups to the simpler email lists, so have to start again…

Finally get all of that done and my mum starts to send her zoom links out except nothing is hyperlinking automatically, try to search links, hyper links, linking, etc via the help and nothing of relevance comes up, turns out outlook Web doesn’t support that, only the desktop app does but nothing mentions that. Manage to track down some random forum post that states that automatic linking only works if the email is set to plaintext format, not html…

Absolutely ridiculous

There’s also something deeply unsettling about the smell of O3 in any concentration where you can truly smell it, not like getting punched in the lungs that ammonia bicarbonate is, and less irritating than than NOx compounds, but the almost sweet and sickly pleasant smell to it carries a sense of dread.

Speaking of which NOx is another good one; N2 is (essentially) inert and makes up most of our atmosphere, O2 has already been explained, but run a high frequency (white) electric arc in our atmosphere and you cause the N2 and O2 to combine in varying quantities producing NOx compounds.

NOx compounds are effectively gaseous nitric acid, it has a brown/red colour, and on constant with water it forms nitric acid. It doesn’t matter whether that water is in a beaker with the NOx being bubbled through it, or the water that exists in your sinuses, lungs and eyes.

You lose your sense of smell pretty quickly when exposed to it and concentrations can build up quicker than you expected, if you’ve been overexposed to it, you’ll wake up the next day or even a few hours later, feeling like you’ve got the worst sore throat in your life, like someone stamped on your throat then tried to scrape it clean… assuming you do wake up.

1/10 do not recommend.

They’re a classic English pick’n’mix sweet, with a texture that basically like somewhere in-between a candy cigarette that’s been inflated/puffed up and what I imagine the circus peanuts candies (which we don’t have in the UK) would be like, flavored with artificial banana flavour and I think the prawns are supposed to be strawberry (but I honestly don’t know).

They’re somewhere in-between gross and great, depending on if you like sweet things or not.

Alcohol is generally well tolerated in reasonable quantities, the common ink cap mushroom is edible, but if eaten alongside alcohol it becomes poisonous

Butternut squash soup is awful without any spices and spices are too strong to be ingested by themselves but together it’s one of the best soups.

Banana milk is odd, both loved and hated it as a kid, and nowadays something about it makes me feel really ill (even when accounting for lactose intolerance), yet I love the banana from banana and prawn sweets.

In a similar vein hotdogs make me feel like death, like doubled over from stomach cramps