Reading is about more than reciting facts and quoting sources. Sure, you can read, but you have utterly failed to comprehend the context or the article or the actual substance of my comments.

I understand that common names getting mixed use in families, genus, and species can be confusing, but you’re being willfully obtuse here just to double down on useless pedantry.

Alligator is the common name for the family and also the common name of a few specific species. It’s kind of like how all tortoises are turtles, but not all turtles are tortoises. All caiman are alligators, but not all alligators are caimans.

You’re not really making your own bread unless you grow and harvest the ingredients yourself. What do you mean you don’t mill your own grains? Refine your own sugar?Can’t really even call yourself a baker unless you build your own oven. /s

Cooking and baking are basically ALL prep work and cleanup. The actual cooking and baking is overall a pretty small fraction of the overall effort that goes into making dinner or a loaf of bread. Go ahead and feel proud of yourself if you take on more of those preparatory tasks, IF it makes for a better end result. But that doesn’t mean you get to act superior to somebody else on a different path of their own personal cooking journey. Drawing an arbitrary line in the sand and saying “this is cooking, but that is not” is kind of like drawing a line between blue and indigo on a rainbow. It’s arbitrary and adds little to good the discussion.

Go ahead and cheat on those components where it works. Not everybody has the time, space, energy, or skill to make every bread, sauce, or spice blend from scratch. If you can make something better by getting back to the basics and fundamental ingredients, go for it! But let’s be honest when it’s more about pride than the final product, enjoyment of the meal.

Personally, the biggest reason I prefer to avoid pre-prepared foods that only require heating is so that I can avoid certain common ingredients that are often pumped into those things in insane proportions, particularly salt and sugar. It’s not so that I can feel proud of an arbitrary label.

If you’d ever been really swarmed by mosquitoes or lived in a place where they are ever present you’d not be asking this question.

• When they swarm enough they are nearly impossible to avoid.
• When their presence is constant some people just stop reacting to the bites. I only ever notice mosquito bites on places that get chaffed (like the wrists and hands, around collars and cuffs). If they bite a place you wouldn’t normally scratch and can avoid scratching the area after a bite, for some people a welt is much less likely to form.
• They don’t go after only people. Your irritation at a few bites is nothing compared to the diversity in the evolutionary arms race between mosquitoes and their prey.
• Only the mothers feed on blood. Other mosquito eat mostly plant nectar.

Ah yes, the modern day equivalent of recording radio broadcasts to magnetic tape. Made a few mixtapes that way myself. They were absolute garbage quality and I never listen to them anymore, but it was an interesting exercise and my only option for some stuff at the time.

Now I just buy as directly from the artist as I can for things that are rare enough that they are difficult to pirate.

Ask a lawyer for an informed opinion. They’ll (hopefully) have the tools to determine what this easement means for you as a potential homeowner on the parcel. The Maine Geological Survey has an item in their FAQ of some relevance.

I don’t know how common these kinds of easements are in Maine, but I would not purchase any real property that could be used and abused at the whim of a corporation with a team of well paid lawyers.

Slowly

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This is a fun experiment, but it’s not precisely the peaks and troughs of the actual waves themselves that you’re seeing, it’s the maximums and minimums of the amplitude from those waves interfering with their reflections. You see the interference pattern, not the waves.

Dark table corrects lens distortion based on the design of the actual lens, not the image itself. The grid it just to check in after the fact. I’m not aware of similar tools in GIMP. It’s trivial in Darktable though, as long as your lens is in the database.

Don’t use a fish-eye lens, it’s lense distortion will be the worst and most difficult to correct. Use a lens with a longer focal length, ideally a prime lens with a fixed focal length. If you maximize focal length and distance to your object as much as is feasible, you will have already flattened the image (minimized lens distortion) a lot. If you use a prime (fixed focal length) lens from a popular brand, Darktable can remove the remaining lens distortion.

You can remove all lens distortion by using a pinhole camera, which has no lens. But that’s probably going to be a tricky setup without an expert.

VULFPECK /// Earworm

Every movie is a muppet movie waiting to happen.

“No Country for Old Men”, with the killer played by Sam the blue eagle.

“Brokeback Mountain”, with Kermit and Foxzie Bear playing the leads, no human roles.

Rowlf as the unexpected lead in “Lawrence of Arabia”, “Fistful of Dollars”, and “Fistful of Dollars”. In Lawrence of Arabia, only the other British soldiers are played by humans. In the Spaghetti Westerns, the only humans are the women.

“Smokey and the Bandit”, with Kermit as the Bandit, Rowlf as the trucker, the bride played by a real person, Miss Piggie as Smokey, and Fozzi Bear as the groom/deputy.

“The Blues Brothers”, starring Kermit and Fozzi as Elwood and Jake. All the other characters are Muppets, but the bands are played by real blues musicians.

“Brazil”: Kermit as Sam Lowry, Robert Dinero reprising his role as “human” Tuttle, Miss Piggy as Sam’s mother, and Jill Layton played by the only other human.

So you’re looking for validation, not an honest discussion. This whole thing just got more weird. You’re weird.

The Samsung gear watches all support Spotify offline playback. All the wearOS watches support as much local media playback as the hardware allows (I think), but managing that local library is pretty tedious and awful. Especially if like me you either listen through streaming services or streaming from a library of FLAC media on a NAS at home. With the Spotify app on my watch, I just select a playlist to be downloaded while I’m connected to WiFi and that’s it. It is not flawless though, sometimes the Spotify database or authentication gets fouled up and you’re unable to fix it until you return to WiFi. But I haven’t had many issues with it since Samsung switched away from their own bespoke watch OS to wearOS.

For running, I got a smartwatch that can store some music locally, so I don’t need to be connected to listen. Still not perfect, kind of a hassle to use, and doesn’t always work perfectly. Almost miss those tiny iPod nanos. I feel like portable dedicated music players have gone backwards in features and usability with the rise in popularity of perpetually connected Internet devices and streaming services.

Postcard aesthetic isn’t good enough?

I tried Govee outdoor lights.

The app has some ridiculously invasive permissions required to operate that have absolutely nothing to do with turning a light on/off and changing the color. Goodbye privacy.

The lights were also VERY far from permanent, they lasted through a couple months of mild weather and light use. No snow, no flooding or heavy rain, no direct sun, no extreme heat, no evident physical damage. In my case it wasn’t just one light that went, it was the whole strand and the way it failed left me feeling worried that it was a fire hazard. Their outdoor lights are not well made enough to be left outdoors for long. I would not recommend Govee lights to anyone.

They let Larry Niven write some episodes of Star Trek: The Animated Series, so now the K’zinti (cat people Niven originally introduced in his Ringworld stories) are canon in the Star Trek Universe. The producer (or maybe director, I don’t really remember) of those cartoons was color blind and as a result, those cat like aliens became cannonicaly purple.