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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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    1. Yes: you absolutely want the outdoor rated PVC if you’re getting sun exposure. You can cheat, it’s not like the white stuff will be immediately destroyed, but if you want something that will last a bunch of seasons, the “grey” stuff is the way to go. Double check that it’s UV rated though, and doesn’t just happen to be grey.

    2. To get around all of that, you can bury it. Because you’re just doing it for the garden, you don’t need to dig down to the frost line. Just make sure you clear the line at the end of the season. Another advantage is that you’ll minimize the amount of water that’s been baking in the sun idle in the pipes. If it’s a heatwave and they’re in direct sun, that water can get downright hot to the touch. I’ve never lost a plant because of it but frankly I’m kind of surprised by that. If you do bury, you might consider running some electrical conduit at the same time, even if you don’t put wires in it (DO however include a pull cable for later use). What you do at either end of that is a whole other project, but you can always just cap it and get it to it when you get to it. Solar + Battery usual works great for garden automation stuff, but being able to run an ethernet cable can simplify a lot.

    3. Plastic will hold up fine, but as others have mentioned you might want one of these.. The union allows to remove it. You could do a more simple threaded system IF you are able to completely and freely rotate everything “down stream” of the valve. I’m just going to say the stupid part out loud because I learned pipe stuff the hard way: A ball valve threaded on both sides cannot be loosened from one side without tightening the other (again, unless that other side can freely rotate). Edit: alternatively unions are sold separately, and sometimes you can eek out some flow advantages that way but it’s in no way worth thinking about at garden water flow rates.

    4. Finally, a last alternative I’ve seen done well for gardens that sort of “wrong done right” is putting posts up and stringing a hose over head. It kind of seemed like as much work/expense as burying it, but I guess they had the posts, it came out really sharp in the end. You need a pretty high quality hose though. Baking in the sun and sagging under the water weight can end badly.



  • batmaniam@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldSimple as
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    3 months ago

    … I had never thought about it this way. You’re totally correct though. I spend way more time fighting with my windows machine than I do my linux these days. I also just have a lot less patience fighting it because it’s always due to some dumb shit it didn’t need to be doing in the first place.


  • batmaniam@lemmy.worldtotumblr@lemmy.worldProfessionalism at its peak
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    6 months ago

    Because it is, in fact, gen z. I deal with a lot of contractors in a tech field. There’s a lot of stuff we do that is prototype/beta level. It’s not customer facing. Rough edges are fine, having to reboot it once a day is fine, it just needs to work and if it’s not I need to know why.

    Gen Z is wayyyyy better at that than millennials. Don’t spin me some bullshit, just explain the issues and how much of a headache I’m in for. Previous folks would give me some bullshit about “well it doesn’t do that but that’s out of scope of our original contract so fixing it is $X/hr on retainment for our expertise and our ability to bring in affiliate partners”. Gen Z is much more “man, this shit is cool, but those goal posts shifted, did the best I could, call me if you have issues and at a certain point and I if you’re a pain in my ass I’ll bill you”.

    Like they just don’t beat around the bush. No spec is ever perfect, and rather than dance around it they’ll just be like “I did my best, and I’ll go extra until I won’t and I’m not really going to bother spending much time explaining to you we’re out of scope. You know it. I know it. I ain’t dancing because I don’t get paid to dance.”



  • The browns gas thing (usually “using water as fuel” by splitting it… Using power from the engine) actually has insanely specific be credible use case.

    It turns out that in very specific engine types, you can gain additional engine efficiency that’s worth the energy it took to generate the gas. The us army did a whole proper study. That net gain was, however, only present in vehicles not maintained on the usual schedule. So it did infact help some engine types that were not well maintained.

    I know this because I did a dive years back. Effeciency be damned, building a reserve of browns gas that I could dump in when I wanted for a power boost sounded fun as hell to me. You wouldn’t gain any effeciency (probably loose a ton) but you would have more power when you were mixing in the reserve you’d built up. I wound up not doing it because 1) the vehicle I had in mind was carb not fuel injection so no power gains there. And 2) dealing with generating, pressurizing, storing and delivering a gas isnt a ton of fun in a “for the lolz” project.


  • So I’m trying to find an academic article, but it’s not just the substrate. They blew right past it in the article but there is electric potential applied, and the substrate is slightly conductive which is what allows it. They seem to imply that leads to better root growth but like I said the article barley mentioned the actual e of the e soil lol.

    But bioelectrochemistry is a thing. I work on the other end, where microbes are depositing electrons, but I am aware of different technologies where the bugs use a potential as an energy source for specific reactions, usually around remidiating some nasty stuff in the ground.

    Im less aware of it affecting a plant directly (I’d assume it changed the soil bugs or something) but it’s not hard to picture. Good be something as simple as the potential changing the osmotic pressure and making it easier for the plants to take up nutrients or something.

    But yeah, pretty far from a rod in the ground, although in some cases that is basically all you’d need. The bioelectrochemistry field always had junk science to contend with.


  • batmaniam@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldWhat DID Apple innovate?
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    7 months ago

    Also standardizing hardware. Part of the iPhones success was that developers had to develop for A phone, singular. There were a lot of cool palm programs and whatnot, but having a single hardware set to bug-smash had to be a big part of making the app-market go into hyper drive.

    I don’t own a single apple product, but credit where credit is due.



  • So way late, but no that’s shifted a lot. This is anecdotal but does speak to a lot of industries: my understanding is that pizza shops now live or die by cheese prices.

    Labor, while fluctuating, doesn’t move a ton month to month. Dairy can.

    That’s like I said anecdotal, but broadly, real-estate, equipment purchase/finacince has all been so hyper optimized it squeezes the business owners out.

    It doesn’t matter the market. PIZZAOVEN-XL will sell it to you, let you leverage payments against your home equity, grab it back and resell it. They can deal with the cash flow issue. They are “assembled in America”. They don’t care if you go out of business. They’ll do it again for the same person that moves into the same space trying to do the. Exact. Same. Thing.

    And I’m not trying to draw a blanket statement across all industries. I’m just saying the wheels that make every industry move are smarter and literally longer lived than anyone starting out, and there’s a reason “John deer” and “John deer finance” are seperate companies.


  • Responding to like three of your comments at once. But I used RES since like 2010. Until June I, and I imagine many others, had zero idea what “vanilla” reddit even looked like.

    But yes, I only do r/NFL because I haven’t found that in fediverse yet. When I’m there and the muscle. Memory kicks in and I click the logo and go to the home it’s… Bad…

    I’ve popped in once or twice in the niche communities I used to do. There’s activity, but it’s stuff I would have called filler posts two years ago. Not bad just… Not good.


  • Yeah… I don’t know if the person you’re mentioning meant productive stuff or not, but I was in a pretty niche community there. One where parents were dealing with their kids on operating tables, but not often. It was as exactly the kind of thing internet forums were made for: medical advice from doctors, venting and whatnot from strangers who’d been there. I said a lot of practical helpful things and a lot of meaningless nice platitudes at the right time.

    And I was happy to do it the same way I swapped guitar tabs as a kid.

    There’s honest money in making a community space.

    There’s no honest money in monetizing a community.



  • So I’m stretching it a bit because at the end of the day this really does apply to more than restaurants, but the other commenter had it right.

    Things like rent, insurance, etc go into the cost for well above the plate. So the ingredients are one thing, but you have to make up the cost of rent, paying the staff when there’s low customer volume, all the insane amount of costs that go into running a business. That server has to make up for the cost of printing menus and delivering them by mail.

    None of this is the servers fault, who should get a fair wage, but it all adds up in a way that makes it hard for the owner. In fact, the person who sold them the grills, refrigerators, and all the other equipment, knows exactly and empirically how hard it is and sets their prices accordingly.

    And it’s not like that company’s delivery drivers, techs, and fabrication workers also don’t deserve a wage. Or the Tyson folks that are plucking the chicken delivered.

    The issue is, at the end of the day, those companies probably should be less profitable. But instead of accepting that, we put all of the companies that make all the stuff that run that restaurant into bigger companies that are now part of mutual funds, and they sell it out knowing they can grab it back if it goes under.

    So you might be able to get away with making a few plates and some money, but trying turning it into something that will let you pay your rent and put your kids into a school. “Bob’s Burgers” is pretty true to life.


  • batmaniam@lemmy.worldtoMildly Infuriating@lemmy.worldRestaurant Bill
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    8 months ago

    Restaurants have notoriously thin margins. I’m not defending this bill, and there are definitely awful practices out there, but it ain’t easy. Even a $34 dollar steak only kind of covers all the ancillary costs that make it happen.

    The biggest issue with the crunch we have going on is that food (prepared or otherwise) should be way more expensive, and that shouldn’t be an issue because most people should be making way more money. All of those should/shouldn’ts got way out of whack over the course of decades, and the circus only continued because people found crappy ways to keep it going.

    It’s a lot of industries. Construction is a great example. The developers make money. The material vendors make money. The builders make money. The sub contractors who actually put the parts together get haggled on invoices and take the lower amount because they have payroll to make and equipment loans to pay. Loans that are happily given out because the equipment can be easily repossessed.

    It’s a very good thing everything is correcting, but it’s going to be an ugly process as workers get their due and pass the burden on to the small business owners.



  • At the risk of a distro fight, if you bounce off Ubuntu give another distro a shot. I can’t really explain it but I had issues with Ubuntu being almost to streamlined; it mostly worked out of the box as advertised but when it didn’t I had no idea what was going on.

    I just learned more quickly on Debian. It’s a personal thing, so it might be you as well.

    I’ll also add: if you’re new to Linux you’re used to thinking about the Explorer, the desktop environment, etc as part the OS. They aren’t. With nearly every Linux distro, you can have a more Mac like desktop (gnome) or windows (kinda KDE Plasma). And in either of those if you don’t like the file Explorer there are options there to.

    Most of what Ubuntu does stock should be fine, but I just remember getting used to things was easier for me with plasma than gnome coming from a windows machine.

    edit: I wanted to add, some people have strong opinions about which of those other elements are better (desktop environments/explorers). It’s mostly taste, except when it isn’t, because they do in-fact have aspects than can be important. Stick to something well known and used while starting.