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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • As far as I’ve found, they’re both right. You shouldn’t have to wash your mushrooms, but it’s not a bad idea if you’re not buying fancy mushrooms.

    The generic button mushroom variants you’re probably getting at the grocery store are grown in compost, which often contains some manure - ie poops.

    But before growing mushrooms it’s pasteurized. Mycelium is picky, and fairly easily out-competed by other stuff, so to make sure you’re just growing mushrooms and not bacteria you basically have to sterilize the medium they’re grown in.

    But those mushrooms are often grown in open beds, and harvested by hand. And that means they get that poop dirt right up on them. Will it immediately give you super botulism? Probably not but it’s still kinda ick.

    Fancier mushroom varieties from smaller cultivars are the ones that actually don’t really need washed and often shouldn’t be. They’re grown in highly sterile environments and they fruit out of a container, so they never touched the poop. And that’s if they even used compost - lots use straw or wood.

    If you do decide to wash your button mushrooms it’s not a big deal, they aren’t actually sponges, and they don’t absorb as much water as some cooking shows say. If they get soggy it probably means they’re old, try putting them in the fridge for a few hours uncovered. It’s basically a dehydrator.


  • It entirely depends on how much and what you’ll use them for. They’re going to be around $200 USD all in, so if they’re for occasional use probably not. If you’re going to use them a lot like for work or a regular hobby then it’s not a crazy amount to spend. They tend to be more comfortable than flange earplugs, and a little better than foamies, but for me at least I don’t want them in for more than 3 hours.

    Etymotic makes a few different ones for general noise, sleeping, music, and they also do ones for their earphones.


  • Look for a local print or embroidery shop that you can get like work shirts and business cards and whatnot made. Unless you’re really in the middle of nowhere, there’s probably a local print shop that will at least be able to point you in the right direction. If you want a one off instead of a small batch look for a place that offers embroidery - it sounds more expensive but because they can just throw whatever on the machine and do a one off, it’s usually actually less expensive than traditional screen printing. Specifically for hats in not sure if you can get them digitally printed in most smaller local shops.


  • If you are working with a specific company to produce a personalized / custom product, they will generally have at least one person on staff that can do design, or at least deal with any file conversion and technical stuff like that. They should be able to quote you a price.

    If you are working with an artist first, they may have a company they’re familiar with to have the item produced, and if they do, should be able to handle most of it themselves. If they don’t, or you would like it produced somewhere specific, just let the artist know - most places will have all the information the artist will need on their website, or the artist can just get in touch with them directly.

    In general, if you’re going to an artist or design shop they should be able to give you some kind of quote with a very rough idea of what you want - especially if they do this professionally, talking to people who don’t have an art background is basically half their job. If you want to be specific it’s much more useful to send something like a mood board or a collage of similar things than a bunch of text. It’s also generally a good idea to be open to their ideas, as they often have experience that may be helpful and will see some problems much quicker than you might.


  • We use a few Schlage connect zwave deadbolts, and they have been basically rock solid. We’re using them through Smartthings, but home assistant should work just as well. We have hardwired zwave light switches next to all of them, apparently that can help with the reliability since they will act as zwave repeaters in case the lock doesn’t pick up the signal first time - especially for changing the codes.

    Are they a perfect lock that no one will be able to pick? Probably not, but it’s a lot faster to just put a brick through your window no matter how good your locks are.





  • To be fair I’d call it a wash. Bedrock fixes a lot of weird stuff like quasi connectivity and being able to push things like chests with pistons but also introduces it’s own bugs like weird timing things and randomly taking fall damage. There’s also weird differences like being able to do things with cauldrons or just like minor texture differences that they are slowly bringing into sync.


  • Because Bedrock runs on phones, tablets, consoles, and a host of other random crap, and does so relatively well. Because of that the install base and playtime especially among younger players is actually massively skewed toward Bedrock being the more used. Add to that rumors that the Java codebase at least was a terrible mess, and the performance issues Java edition still has to this day and it’s no wonder they wanted to do a full rewrite, especially after having to make things like the console editions and even one for the 3DS.

    The windows launcher is annoying though.


  • Yeah newsprint would be a pain in an inkjet depending on exactly what it’s like. It might not even be much thinner, it’s often a little “fluffy” so it can be printed fast.

    If you take it in somewhere and get it spiral / coil bound that’s probably your best bet if you don’t want to do a binder. You can do it yourself but you basically need a little desktop machine to do the punching which is annoying unless you’re doing it regularly.

    Traditional hardcover probably won’t work for you. That involves printing a bunch of booklets called signatures then sewing them together and it’s a whole thing. Basically there’s a reason well made hardcover books are expensive.

    You could do perfect or tape binding pretty easy though. Essentially you glue all the edges to a backing and then wrap a cover around it. It works ok for low usage, but if you want it to lay flat or hold up to abuse you’ll have problems. You can kind of mitigate that by using a gpod spine backing but it’s not a perfect solution. If the copy you have isn’t already laid out for printing it may be worth it to edit it a bit so the contents are farther from the spine if you do that, but it makes printing a bit more complicated.


  • So, I’ve never pirated a book but I do have some printing and binding knowledge, so some of this might be off base.

    If the original book isn’t fully chungus it’s probably printed on a low weight newsprint, a low weight coated paper, or something weird like vellum or scritta. Problem is most of that is going to be specialty and only really available in rolls or large sheets through a distributor.

    Most of the thinner stuff you’ll be able to find in sheets has become a thing with fountain pen lovers. Look for Tomoe River or Bank paper. They are in the 50gsm range and should be a bit thinner than normal 75ish gsm copy paper. It’s going to be way more expensive than normal printer paper but it should be thinner. The other issue is actually getting your printer to reliably print on thinner paper. Home printers, especially inkjets, really don’t deal with thin paper particularly well. Lasers usually do better since they tend to use a different paper pickup and path, but they can still have issues.

    Your printer should have a thin paper setting to reduce the amount of ink that it uses so you don’t get as much bleed. The other thing you’ll have to look out for is that those papers will take longer to dry than normal paper, so if your printer has a drying time you’ll probably need to set it as high as it will go. You might even want to wait a day before flipping it over for the duplex print. Which you definitely should some that will literally halve the size of the book. It will probably be fine anyway since this is likely a multi day project just given how long it will take to spit 1000 pages out of an inkjet.

    Unless you absolutely need to have the whole thing with you all the time, I would consider printing it in volumes. Even if you duplicate sections like an index or glossary or reference section or whatever, you’re still probably going to have a lot less trouble and maybe spend less.


  • Kind of? But hot take - their format is actually better for flat content. They seem to want people to use their “spatial video” format which seems like it can be just two videos in a QuickTime or MP4 container. It wouldn’t surprise me if you could just use ffmpeg to convert whatever into their format pretty dang quickly. It’s actually just MV-HEVC.

    Most 3D video right now is one video track with two distorted videos either side by side for flat or 180 content, or top and bottom for most 360 content. It gets encoded and played back as standard flat video and then the player does the splitting and dewarping for the headset (or for flat just correcting the aspect ratio). They don’t seem to support doing any of that in their built in player.

    Instead, with MV-HEVC, they encode one eye as the “main” video track, and do deltas to get the other eye, giving you way better resolution since you aren’t splitting the frame in half, and better efficiency since you aren’t encoding essentially the same image twice (theoretically you could have a codec that could couple copy a big chunk of the frame like that but I’m not aware of any that actually do). It also means if you play it back in 2d you just get a normal video instead of a weird distorted mess, and you can swap to the other eye if you player supports multi track video. They also do some clever stuff with captions in 3d too.

    It doesn’t seem like they support any sort of immersive 3d video (i.e. 180 or 360 degree fov) in their player at all, but I haven’t looked at it a ton. I mostly just took a glance at their developer stuff. It seems like a very apple thing to do since 180/360 video is difficult to do right.



  • Tldw: it’s boring and grindy. Honestly the video isn’t great.

    Since I played it when it was free from epic too:

    Its a game whose tediousness outstrips its interesting ideas way too quickly. There’s a loop that starts blank that the hero goes around, and the player builds the loop up over the course of a “mission” by placing things like mountains and plains and swamps. Some of these tiles spawn monsters, some help the hero, and some do both. It’s the most interesting thing in the game and also the most underdeveloped. Eventually after placing enough tiles a boss spawns and your “mission” is over and the hero goes back to camp. Technically you can keep going through loops but there’s really no point.

    Camp is made up of buildings that you build out of resources collected during the loop and serves as a sort of meta progression for the game. You build things and get new cards, classes, equipment and whatnot. They’re made of tiles but much larger and less visually distinct than the loop tiles - which is super annoying because much like the loop tiles layout is important but unlike the loop that you will place a million times, you only get one camp, so any mistakes are forever. Camp Tiles are built from resources gathered doing loops, so they feed into each other in a kind of rougelite way.

    The main problem with the game is that the systems are interesting but they have so much tedious stuff attached that the entire experience is bogged down. Take for instance equipment: the game gives you a stream of equipment that functionally can be different, it might buff attack speed, defense, all kinds of things. But the game gives you like hundreds of pieces of equipment per loop, and it’s all random so you wind up babysitting the equipment section of the screen all the time so that the hero doesn’t become underpowered and die, but you also can’t try for a “build” because any equipment you don’t use is slowly deleted. If you want attack speed the only thing you can do is pray to rngsus that it pops up consistently (spoiler, it won’t). Or the camp itself - eventually you unlock furniture for each house, there are a million different ones, and they’re all things like +1%hp Regen.

    But by far the grind gets the most real when you start looking at how many resources you need. Certain tiles grant certain resources that are given during the loop, which is a really good way to incentive players to not get stuck in a rut when building the loop - but the math is way off, and when failing to defeat the boss means that you lose 70% of anything gathered it just adds insult to injury. It’s supposed to be a push your luck thing, but you’re only allowed to leave once a loop and loops can be fairly long and … well like everything else in this game - random.

    It kinda feels like I’m just crapping on the game, but I actually think under the tedium there’s an interesting game here. The first time you find a tile interaction (of which there are far too few) is a little magical, and the plot is kind of interesting even though it’s the most overwrought sequel to the neverending story you’ll ever read. Like an annoying amount of Devolver games, this kinda feels like it would be a really good mobile game if it was somewhat streamlined.


  • Have them printed from a service. A normal deck of cards should run about $30 USD. The paper, laminate, ink and maybe sleeves will probably cost the same or more and will come out with way lower quality especially if this is your first time crafting them.

    I’ve done both and unless you want really quick and dirty prototype cards or something that is super handmade that you drew on yourself instead of designed on a computer, the ones from a printing service win hands down.