biotinker

For a lot of fiction books, my rule is to read the first 50 pages. If I'm not engaged, move on. Life is short.

Just encountered myself doing this. I was reading John Birmingham's Axis of Time books. The first three sucked me in and I devoured them in a day or two apiece. Starting the fourth...something was off. The writing felt stilted, like the author was trying to cram in too many pop culture references or something. I put it down and have given it two more tries since with the same result, so now I'm done.

I'm sad, because I was really looking forwards to having several more books in the series.

It's been that way forever. No apple reproduces true to seed, period. 400 years ago, if you wanted another of your apple tree, you grafted it.

It wasn't all that long ago that automatic transmissions had significantly worse reliability and fuel efficiency than manual transmissions.

There are some really nice things that home automation enables that was previously impossible.

I live in Bend, Oregon. We have hot summer days, cool nights, and sometimes really bad wildfire smoke.

I can save a lot of money on AC if I open the windows at night and use the attic fan to pull in outside air. But if smoke rolls in, then we'd all be breathing 200+ AQI air all night.

I have outdoor AQI sensors, which if the AQI spikes, will close up the house and turn on the air purifiers.

Why would I want to automate lights?

We're bad at remembering to turn lights on and off. We like having our porch light on an hour or two after sunset, but don't need to leave it on 24/7. We also have stairwell baseboard lighting that's completely unnecessary during the day, but very nice to have already be on if we get up in the middle of the night. To each their own, though. These are just nice to have. The AQI automation is an actual health benefit to us though.

We don't because those are mainly younger trees in people's yards.

Our nonprofit has a fairly extensive list of trees we catalog and maintain on both public and private land. Here's the public trees: https://heritageapplecorps.org/index.php/All_Trees

But our mission is really heritage trees, which we loosely define as pre-WWII. We do work with landowners to get their trees DNA tested and identified if they're interested. But despite maintaining the encyclopedia I linked in the other comment, we're a small group of volunteers (~6 people) and are mainly focused on a specific geographic region.

There are dozens of us!

I run a nonprofit group that maintains a similar but different database, ours focuses on identification of heritage varieties, I.e. apples that existed pre WWII. We're in the PNW so we also have catalogs of where they were sold to make their way to us, etc, as we identify trees in old orchards.

I've learned some interesting stuff along the way, like that English varieties keep showing up in eastern Washington because English nurseries shipped to Vancouver in the late 1800s.

Our apple database is here: https://heritageapplecorps.org/varieties/

That's definitely a thing you can do!

We haven't been doing that for now. The success rate doing so is somewhat less than directly grafting the whole top of the tree onto rootstock, for a few reasons. Since our primary goal is preservation and a lot of these trees have zero clones and could be wiped out by wildfire on any given year, our first priority is to get clones of every tree.

I think it’s probably more important to find and cultivate wild apples showing attributes that can keep them hardy in 21st century climate.

The neat thing is that these tend to be self-selecting! These older orchards drop a lot of fruit and can self-propagate new seedlings. The ones that manage to survive are the ones well adapted to current local conditions.

It isn't, really, at least not by us.

Apple trees are pretty easy to propagate if they're alive. Snip off a twig, graft it onto another tree, and away it goes.

Some poor-condition trees can certainly present a challenge in terms of finding ideal graftable wood, but even a poor-quality scion is a lot easier to propagate via grafting than trying to culture in a petri dish.

Oh cool! I've used pomological.art! Great site!

I'm in the middle of building out a similar big project that takes a different tack: looking through every period pomological text (e.g. Apple of New York, Fruits and Fruit Trees of America) and pulling the images, descriptions, etc for every heritage apple variety. Includes the watercolors too. I also pull in every scanned catalog from nurseries selling fruit trees in the PNW from the late 1800s.

The goal is a tool we can use to identify apples, and also have comprehensive info on every variety, using public domain period content.

It's not fully done yet, there are bugs/issues right now but you can take a look here: https://heritageapplecorps.org/varieties/

I think we grafted ~90 scions this year. A lot of them we haven't actually DNA tested yet so no idea what they are. So many of these trees are on their last legs, so our priority is cloning them first, and then once the clones grow, DNA test those as funds are available.

I make my own cider too (though as a hobby). If we ever find ourselves in the same city I'd love to meet up and we can swap scions/cider/etc.

We work with Dr Cameron Peace's lab at WSU. They send us test tubes, we send the tubes back with leaves in them, they run the DNA tests and compare against an apple ID database they've built. We pay ~$50 per test, which is what most of the groups budget goes towards.

I got myself involved with a nonprofit local group preserving local pioneer era apple trees. They've been DNA testing and cataloging the trees, and had all the info stashed away in google drive and onedrive folders. The founder was looking to step back so they asked me if I wanted to step up as project lead, which I did.

I took the info and organized it into a nice wiki-style site with maps and descriptions so everyone in the community can learn about the old orchards.

https://heritageapplecorps.org/index.php/Main_Page

I've also learned how to prune and graft hundred year old apple trees and now have a couple dozen young grafted trees growing in my garage, all clones of local hundred year old trees, some of which genetically tested unique and are of currently unknown varieties.

2010 was a couple years after YouTube enabled 1080p uploads. 250MB a month was insanely small in 2010.

I love that this is something that is feasible for someone to just do right now as a hobbyist or blogger. The prices involved here are very reasonable and well within reach of someone wanting to do some project, though not yet at "sequence your microbiome every day" levels.

I hope we see a lot more posts like this in the future.

If you scrobble to a service like last.fm you get something approaching this functionality. This is something built into most of these services.

No, we wanted full EVs. Mazda doesn't make any, only hybrids. We wound up going with Chevrolet in both instances.

The Equinox EV is one of the better EVs to offer AWD out there right now, matching the range of a Model 3 at a decently better price and obviously massively better UI. Slower charging is the only real downside.

And a used pre-2020s Bolt is a really excellent value, because they are insanely cheap (under $15k) and due to the whole catching-on-fire thing they all had their batteries replaced in the last few years, which means you get a much newer battery than the mileage/age of the car would suggest. The Bolt is replacing a much older Leaf, so bumping the range up to ~200 miles from ~70 is a huge upgrade for us.

The Subsonic API is pretty fantastic and the apps that support it are full-featured. The Jellyfin app, while completely capable of streaming music, is far far less feature-ful.

Personally I use Gonic rather than Navidrome, because I don't care about a web UI, but if you go to the Navidrome website and look at the "Apps" page it lists every Subsonic API compatible app. There's a lot.

In the last three years, there have been two times when we traveled, rented a car, and were given a Volkswagon.

Both times, the touchscreen-only controls were such a pain in the butt that we vowed we would never purchase such a car. It was a timesaver, because in that period our family has gotten two new (to us) cars, and our experiences with the rental Volkswagons allowed us to exclude an entire manufacturer from consideration.

If they haven't re-broken their interiors by the next time we look for a new car, I guess we'll have to consider them again.

Colonial New England barely exists outside of active preservation attempts.

As someone who grew up there, this isn't really true. It's more that buildings have been upgraded/replaced over time by choice, resulting in a sparse patchwork of old buildings rather than large old cities. Places like the Wayside Inn[0] predate the country by a century, and have been "preserved" only because they have more-or-less continuously operating as an in since 1686.

The New England climate isn't all that different than the original England. I think the cultural and legal climate around old buildings is more impactful here. I would be curious to know about the comparative longevity of 17th-century wooden buildings in Europe.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wayside_Inn_%28Sudbury%29

I would suspect that the sort of person (like myself) that would rather run GrapheneOS over LineageOS would rather install themselves than buy preinstalled. Much easier to verify no one slipped you an altered image.

Isn't that what I proposed in my example though? Where a rule is made in advance that if the player abuses their power, they die. due to the canon situation in which that player's character existed?

A player that in good faith wanted to role play such a character, would work with the DM in advance to structure rules well-understood by all parties about exactly what would happen if they abuse their situation.

All the DnD situations can be trivially resolved by good-faith and communication on all sides.

Unlike Chat Control, where good faith cannot be assumed.

I of course agree that the player should not be able to overrule the GM. I don't think that was the situation here.

If you're playing an off-the-shelf campaign this is problematic. If the GM is creating the game as you go, then a good GM should be able work with the player to make this reasonable. The GM can always use GM-power to prevent a player from doing something, even if it involves a literal hand of God reaching down to stop them.

A conversation with the player beforehand to make sure you're on the same page about this sort of thing would go a long way. Let them know under what circumstances you're willing to allow them to use whatever the power is. Let them know the consequences if they don't follow those rules.

Unlike with ChatControl, a D&D game is a situation where the necessary trust is able to exist.

An example: agree the player character is some trickster djinn sent from another plane to learn to be a human and how to trick people. They have immense cosmic powers of life and death, but as part of being sent over, they can only use the power for immediate comedy. Violations result in the djinn getting yanked back to their plane and disincorporated.

Boom done. Now you have a massively OP character that can only use their power in humorous situations that don't affect the storyline, and if they try to abuse that then that's instant-death.

I actually think that a role playing game is exactly the soft of situation where this is in fact reasonable.

There is a lot of mythology about gods walking among men, hiding their true nature, etc. And more recent examples include the TV show Lucifer.

Someone wanting to roleplay that sort of being is entirely plausible. Without knowing the person's personality (which you presumably did) it's hard to say whether they would have genuinely wanted to do that or if it was an excuse.

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You found the authors' screen names and some other things they've made.

That's not finding who they are. No one has signed their names, like their real names, to this. Who are they? Intelligence agents? For which country? There's no way to know.

The neat thing is that it it doesn't actually take much money to start up a new small organization if you want to. You can accomplish a remarkable amount with relatively little money.

Some friends and I just started a tool library in Central Oregon: https://cotool.org/

There some quite generous community donations of tools (not money) to get started. Startup costs were small, and now a couple weeks after opening we have dozens of members.

It scales nicely because we can just buy more or less new tools. It's very impactful to some people, and once started there's very little recurring expenses.

You want home assistant, as other comments have noted.

I have a reasonably complex set of behavior set up. I live in Bend, Oregon at 4000 feet. This is somewhere with hot sunny days, cold nights, and sometimes a lot of smoke. The effect on the interior of the house based on upcoming weather is highly predictable.

My rules look something like this:

If tomorrow's high temperature is above 85, then as today as soon as outdoor temperature drops below indoor temperature, open all the windows and turn on the attic fan until either interior temp is below 62 or outdoor temp rises above indoor, whichever comes first. Unless the AQI outside goes over 100 for more than 2 minutes, in which case close all the windows and turn on the fan/AC to clean the air. All the while, if the house rises above temperature X, cool it to temperature Y.

Additionally, the upstairs heatpump is located in an uninsulated attic, which in winter means that heating is somewhat inefficient and we want to run it a minimal count of times to avoid warmup periods. So we program in our own hysteresis, so that there's a 6-degree difference between when the heat kicks on, and when it turns off.

No one is going to make a dream thermostat that meets your needs out of the box for you, because no one else has your local needs. The best you can do is give yourself the tools to make your reality how you want it.

We had a very unpleasant experience with AirBnB support when we stayed in a house that it turned out was infested by bats, which we discovered when we awoke to bats in the bedroom.

For anyone unaware, bat bites are so small they are not detectable, and sleeping in the same room as one is sufficient to be considered a rabies exposure.

When we reported this to the local health department while dropping off a captured bat for rabies testing, they said that previous guests had also made similar complaints about the same house.

So despite numerous guests complaining about rabies exposures, AirBnB went back and forth for nearly 6 months afterwards before finally granting a refund.

And this is exactly why I like to buy AirGradient hardware. Your CO2 sensors are some of the best I've found for the price point, and I love your outdoor monitor as well.

That said; I have started moving towards using SEN5x for a lot of my air monitoring. I've noticed the SHT3x temp sensors pretty consistently flake out after 2-3 years, and the footprint of your current DIY kit is rather larger.

Would you consider an updated version with the SEN6x once it comes out, with perhaps an ESP32c3, rather than the 8266?

This isn't terribly different than the latest precision medicine in the US. For example, drugs like Keytruda can only be used in the presence or absence of certain genetic markers in the tumor. Most cutting edge immunotherapy is similar; they require patient specific diagnoses and sometimes revisions.

These therapies are the largest focus of cancer research in the US right now with enormous funding behind them, despite having the same weaknesses you point out as bacteriophages.