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If you ever find yourself the victim of an internet scam, the first thing to realize is that it’s ok, and you are not the first nor last person to fall victim to a scam. Scammers trick millions of people successfully, and though it can be embarrassing, it’s important to take some steps after being scammed both to recover your money and more important to harm and stop the scammers.
I regularly use the crockpot for larger cuts of meat, and it’s fantastic for both pork and beef. I’m going to show the process I used for a pork tip sirloin roast (think large tenderloin with a nice fat cap), but the same general method applies to other cuts and even beef as well, though you may want to change up the seasoning a bit.
First we need to get a pan ripping hot. I like to use cast iron pan like the lodge skillet $ but it’s not required. If your stove top has different burners, choose the largest one available and set it to the highest setting. Yes, the actual highest setting where it resembles the back of a jet engine. You shouldn’t use any cooking spray or oil, just let the pan preheat.
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So in case you haven’t read the news lately, apparently there’s a pandemic going on. Whether you’re sitting on a stockpile of toiletpaper and scarfing down freeze dried peas, or pacing panickedly hoping you can still find at least a napkin to wipe your butthole with, this seems an appropriate juncture to talk about sensible preparedness, isolation and planning for volatility.
Keep some canned food around, few extra jugs of water and a couple of candles in the kitchen drawer. These are the things that most of our grandparents told us and they’re part of the realm we’ll call being sensibly prepared. Ideally you’ve already been doing these things, but if you haven’t now is the time to do them slowly. Get a few cans with each grocery run, refill a few used milk jugs with clean tap water and make sure your basic supplies for adverse situations (like the power being out) are as they should be.
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Moderating a community is more like gardening than it is like engineering. It’s an art of balance and having a light touch rather than having an iron will and designs for the future. Formal moderation is important for some communities and entirely unneeded for others. When a community decides to have moderators, it should begin by having community standards.
What the law says and what a community says can and will differ when it comes to moderating content and setting acceptability. I believe the law must respect a fundamental right to free speech and any limit on free speech is extremely difficult to justify. Outside of direct actionable calls to violence, people have a legal right to speak as they please1. Of course, having a legal right to speak doesn’t mean a right to speak in a particular venue or community. Communities often times have more strict standards. If your community is geared towards young children discussing a game, then obviously the allowable content is more strict than a community of adults discussing their dating lives.
The TS80 is a portable, somewhat finicky Chinese manufactured soldering iron which is powered over a USB-C port. It heats quickly, holds its temperature very well, is extraordinarily handy and is one of my favorite soldering irons to date. If you’re still using an old corded unit and you’re like me and frequently doing small amounts of soldering in weird places, I encourage you to pick it up and give it a try. There are several kits available on Amazon but I recommend buying a minimal set $ to start with and providing your own charger (or at least buying a decent one).
Photo by Dominic Romero on Unsplash
Think of the most manipulative person you know. You know, the one who spreads rumors to create drama, or the person who knows just how to press your buttons to get you to do something you don’t really want to do unwittingly.
It’s pretty easy to get a sense that the things these people do - even if they don’t result in any harm - are bad. They kind of set off that moral “bad smell” scent that hints at us that something’s wrong. It seems kind of hard to understand why these things are bad without looking at the consequences, and yet it’s possible to condemn manipulation regardless the outcome.
Cover Photo by Devin Edwards on Unsplash
We’re surrounded by binary choices in our world: the light switch is on or off, we can have a glass of wine or not. We oftentimes want to apply this idea to other situations: our friends like us or not, our work is good or bad. The truth is very few things are actually binary, and almost everything in the world exists as a composition of states - in other words, reality is complicated.
All debates are arguments, not all arguments are debates. We aren’t here to address mindless shouting or simply attacking the other person. In a debate each side has a specific claim they’re trying to defend and advance, and is putting forward evidence for their side or rebutting evidence on the other side.
When two people disagree, why should they bother talking through the merits of each argument and trying to solve it? Why not just shrug, agree to disagree and move on?
Coming from the perspective of a Windows user, Linux may seem entirely alien under the surface. Windows favors a batteries-included, gui driven workflow where programs tend to be all inclusive. Linux favors a command line driven workflow, where only the basics are available, and programs are small and meant to be chained together.
This disparate approach is due to many differences, but there are two main ones at play. The first is the design of the kernel, the heart of the operating system. Windows favors a hybrid kernel which incorporates some features into the heart of the operating system directly and some features outside the direct kernel being heavily necessary. Linux on the other hand favors a unikernel approach which contains everything for a valid (but not very useful) operating system.
So my office lamp is in an awkward location behind a sofa. Instead of re-arranging my office furniture like a sensible person, I decided instead to just install one of those cute $20 tp-link plug that let you toggle stuff via a smart app. Of course, it turns out that the smart app takes an eon to load and I only have my phone on me about half the time.
So the answer of course, instead of re-arranging my office furniture, was to dig through the spare parts bin and make a physical button for my now smart lamp. I chose a particle photon since it speaks UDP (and has a nifty control panel, and I had one.) However, unlike the fancy new models from Particle, this doesn’t have any support for a lithium polymer (lipo) battery so we’re going to use a tp4056 package from Amazon to give us the ability to recharge our LiPo and not draw too much current from it at once. We’ll also need a button.. since that’s kind of the whole bit of this.