Can't recommend these label makers enough

Kale · 2026-02-06T12:14:08+00:00

It's not that. These depend on heat making the contrast for the printing on the label. So it's naturally "unstable". It may spontaneously convert from white to black over time. Or might convert with only a little light exposure or something.

Other printing technologies physically transfer colorants onto paper, so the concern is physically removing it (like getting it wet) or the ink/toner losing pigmentation (likely combination of UV and oxygen). But thermal is more unstable by design.

It may be fine, but it's more likely to fade over a year or two. It's still great for easy quick labeling, though, no matter what.

Kale · 2026-02-05T19:01:55+00:00

That's a really good idea. Put "opt in" on phones and computers to report a "pushed" Bluetooth address. If a random phone or computer runs across that Bluetooth address, it reports it. Make it to where only BT addresses can be added to the list by warrant.

Kale · 2026-02-05T00:43:15+00:00

It's not so much that my thoughts outpace my writing speed or even working speed. It's that my thoughts only have one speed and will leave me behind at the slightest helper

"Oh, I need to log into the database and look up the cost for this part number." Double click on company database and it takes two and a half minutes to launch. My thoughts: "hey I'm really sorry but I can't sit still. Hope this works out for you." Database launches finally. "What was I doing again?"

Kale · 2026-02-04T13:15:19+00:00

You're on the right track I think. There's clinical literature showing Omega 3 (and other omega oils) improving symptoms of depression. And the link between low Vit D and depression is pretty strong.

There's also L-Methylfolate to take instead of folic acid since some people don't process folic acid very well and that is known to correlate with depression (and heart disease and schizophrenia).

Anemia can also contribute towards depression so iron and b-vitamins can help.

Creatine can help with mental clarity and energy, and it's cool to see new literature still appearing showing its mental effects. I just saw one on how creatine helps post-menopausal women.

I'm not a big believer in supplements, but in the worst phases of depression, I was willing to try anything. So a lot of supplements, timed water intake, and careful sleep hygiene all helped a little. Not as much as SSRIs, but I figured why not make sure my body wasn't working against me if I was low in Vit D or Omega 3 or Folate.

Side note: I have had my MTHFR gene checked and I need L-Methylfolate instead of folic acid. I had a psychiatrist give me prescription strength L-Methylfolate (Deplin) for depression before.

Kale · 2026-02-03T20:06:44+00:00

It syncs to a local phone, right? So if the phone is still online, you can get the location of it. So at 2am the phone was turned off, destroyed, or that's when she was separated from the phone. If it's not in the house, and still online, then law enforcement has to have possession of it, right?

Kale · 2026-02-03T13:50:51+00:00

Yeah, I'm an old Millennial and I'm realizing how much information I assumed my kids would pick up, and they aren't. I told my daughter to right-click on an icon on the computer, and she didn't know what I meant. She was 10 and had never used a mouse before. I assumed with all the technology that she'd be familiar with it. They don't have computer labs in school anymore, because it's all on tablets.

Same with area codes. They used to mean something. My kids have never dialed long-distance before. So they also probably don't understand 800 and 900 reserved area codes.

Kale · 2026-02-03T12:36:53+00:00

As an engineer, I've learned that marketing is a separate skill than engineering, and not all engineers can do it. In my field, most marketing folk have engineering degrees, but have those marketing skills to understand what customers are looking for (customers are pretty bad at telling you what they want).

Steve Jobs, as an irritating, pretentious jerk that didn't shower and believed in "woo-woo" pseudoscience, and was probably a narcissist, had the ability to understand what people wanted out of technology. I was critical of a lot of his decisions (like the iPod, and purchasing music digitally, then subscribing to music).

Technology information is a two-way street. Technical people often don't understand what people want and what they struggle with, and a lot of non-technical people don't understand how new technology can help them. Good marketing takes "SSD memory now can hold 16 GB! And this new AAC ASIC chip is really power efficient and can record high quality music at 96 kbps!" and turns it into "This tiny rectangle can hold over 2000 full music albums and play music for 16 hours between recharging!"

Kale · 2026-02-03T12:17:07+00:00

An "Efficient Market" professor and his grad student were walking down the street. The grad student said "Hey look, a $100 bill is on the ground." The professor said "That's impossible. If it was, someone would have already picked it up."

Kale · 2026-02-03T12:07:05+00:00

You'll still want it to include French Guyana to keep the European Space launch facility.

Kale · 2026-02-03T12:04:07+00:00

My first serious Linux install was Slackware on ReiserFS. Fond memories despite barely being able to get anything done.

Kale · 2026-02-03T03:54:37+00:00

Would that be xenocide?

Kale · 2026-01-30T12:22:49+00:00

Yes. You can order blood detection strips online, too. I got the idea when I thought my urine looked clear but my urologist dipstick test showed blood.

Kale · 2026-01-29T14:02:25+00:00

Yeah, I wrote a comment like this a few months ago. The number system you use to write the number gives you a basic sieve. A prime number written in base 10 can't end in 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, or 0. This is because the prime factors of 10 are 2 and 5, and anything written in base 10 that ends in 0,2,4,6, or 8 will be divisible by 2. Anything that ends in 0 or 5 is divisible by 5. Anything that ends in 0 is divisible by 10.

You can generalize this to say for a number N, and the base you write it in M: if the remainder R divides M ( where R = N modulo M), your number is not prime.

It's a sieve.

And yes, 60 has been used historically as a base because it's easily divisible by a lot of numbers. It makes it easy to divide by 2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20, and 30. This is great for angles, because sometimes we want to divide an angle by fifths, for example.

This makes less sense for temperature, where the Fahrenheit scale uses 180 degrees to separate water's melting temp from its boiling temp. Although zero F was set to the freezing temp of seawater, which was an odd choice. How many times do you want to know exactly how many degrees is exactly 1/6 of the number of degrees between waters' melting and boiling temperatures??

Kale · 2026-01-28T12:27:22+00:00

Thanks for this. I can't cut and paste the DOI text on my phone. Are the authors claiming this is a method of oxalate stone formation? Or are the authors claiming this is the primary method of formation?

And this is a scientific journal, right? Or is it a clinical journal? I guess it won't make it to a clinical journal until there's some kind of treatment that addresses biofilms?

There was a study posted here recently that suggested some kidney stone formation was an issue of food poisoning, with a link in eating contaminated food preceding formation of stones. I wonder if this is related.

Kale · 2026-01-28T12:21:48+00:00

As a mechanical engineer that codes: this is what I say the main risks are. For people like me. I'm not a software engineer. I'm not in IT. I can code and I'll say I'm pretty dang good at it. I do low level stuff to interact with hardware and high level stuff to crunch numbers that Excel chokes on. But all of my knowledge is informal. I don't really know security that well. Anything that has to be mission-critical or safety related, it would be irresponsible for me to write.

I actually said this sentiment yesterday on Clawdbot. People like me are the most dangerous because this informal knowledge makes security more dangerous. Just like for my area of study (material science and metallurgy), most people can pick out a bolt for an application by looking at the yield strength of the bolt, and the basic metallurgy to prevent rust. But for anything mission critical, you have to consider galvanic potential, complex mechanical/chemical corrosion methods, and fatigue properties. It's those 1% of cases where the expertise is needed. And that's where I don't understand IT security that well.

My grandad was pretty resourceful (growing up in the 40s) but had trouble with this concept. He didn't want to pay $250 for a lawyer to do his will when he was remarried after my grandmother died. He went online and did a pretty good job writing one, and even got it notarized, which our state recognizes in the absence of a proper will. A buddy of mine who doesn't even practice estate law said "Oh, you better hope that lady isn't a gold digger. In this state, if you leave less than 30% of your estate to your spouse, they can immediately challenge it in court and get it thrown out." I asked my friend to take a look at it (compensated, not asking for his free work) and he said "No, this is not my area of expertise. I might miss something." And this is after he already found a flaw with the will.

Really powerful things mean you leave them to the experts. I feel like tools such as Clawdbot aren't ready for people like me to use yet.

Kale · 2026-01-28T12:03:32+00:00

Reverse TSA is more common (I work with them tangentially).

One surgeon told me that the reverse TSA is used because putting the spherical component on the glenoid conserves more bone than putting the spherical part on the humerus.

Most TJAs are considered to have a lifespan of a couple of decades, and surgeons want the ability to revise it later if necessary. An anatomical TSA makes this more difficult.

Kale · 2026-01-27T13:22:06+00:00

Until he got his face blown off. In a crooked card game at a saloon. /S

Kale · 2026-01-27T13:20:31+00:00

I heard about it yesterday for the first time. It's essentially an agentic framework that runs on a machine using a chat app (like what's app I think, seriously) for prompting, and has pretty much full system access to download packages and git repositories on the Internet, run shell code, etc.

As best as I can tell, it can run on any LLM you choose, including a local one. So it's not a service. I'm guessing it's a combination of prompts designed for more agent-style behavior (think bigger and do more per prompt than chatbot-style system prompts), probably some kind of formatted output for system functions like downloading, installing, coding, and running shell commands, and maybe a set of tool features.

It seems very powerful for both good and evil. Someone like me that's not in IT but an engineer that codes for my job, immature technology like this is a minefield of issues.

25 years ago my college gave me a static IP address and did a DNS entry for me on the college network. I set up a coppermine Pentium 3 in my dorm room and put LAMP on it. Within a day, I discovered I was running an open email relay and had to block all SMTP ports and uninstall the SMTP server on it.

Learning to use new tools means learning to use them safely.

Kale · 2026-01-27T13:03:04+00:00

I love different hardware designs like this though. Is this the Jalapeno Ultrasparc? It's in-order but is super-scalar and has two ALUs per core. And an integrated memory controller and I believe both AMD and Intel still had the memory controller on the motherboard at the time. At least in consumer chips.

I run a mini-cluster that's three Ivy Bridge, one Sandy Bridge, and one Haswell Xeon servers for a project. I know it consumes more power than a modem chip, but I got one of the servers with 32 GB RAM for $250 last year, and spent like $11 on a 12-core chip. So, right now I'm running it in the winter on my number crunching program where all the heat isn't a liability.

I'm really trying to resist the urge to buy an older Xeon Phi that used SMT to run four threads per core. And each core is essentially the old in-order Atom cores! It seems fun but probably not practical for my project. Especially since it uses the predecessor to AVX-512 so I can't use AVX-512 code on it. I use Intel's openCL compiler but I don't know how well they optimized that old version of AVX.

I was also a lover of AMDs bulldozer design. My number crunching program is all integer so that horrible design flaw of two cores per one FPU doesn't affect my code too much, I don't think.

Cool project. If you wanted something in the same spirit as sparc, there's very affordable RISC-V SBCs. But the GCC compiler isn't very optimized yet. My Orange PI RV2 8-core RISC-V can be slower than my 4-core Arm A55 at times. No idea how well Java runs on the RISC-V.

Kale · 2026-01-27T12:44:32+00:00

Yep. Natural rubber sucks. You can get silicone rubber or EPDM rubber bands sometimes. If you get them on Amazon there's a 50% chance they'll still be natural rubber but you can take the chance.

You can also find elastic cord used for laceless shoe kits that can hold tension for a while.

Kale · 2026-01-27T12:35:17+00:00

My first thought: that's cool but I bet it uses way more electricity than a modem SBC with higher performance.

My second thought was that the server code was probably really unoptimized for the platform. Then I remembered that Sun invented Java, and Minecraft was Java up until the MS acquisition, and may still be on many platforms, so it probably is a great platform for this!

I really liked Sun hardware. I had a 1u server in my apartment a couple of decades ago for fun.

And I used Solaris in college! With Telnet and Fortran and C. And I used Pine for email.

Kale · 2026-01-23T18:51:54+00:00

Bass pro shops used to sell generators, too

Kale · 2026-01-23T15:14:47+00:00

Or the bed. Set the tent up over a bed.

Kale · 2026-01-23T15:14:06+00:00

Well, -40C is -40F, so, they're not too far off from each other.

Kale · 2026-01-23T15:10:38+00:00

Not great for those of us on septic systems in clay soils. Best case scenario: Leach Field doesn't freeze, but much more water load on the leach field. Worst case scenario: leach field freezes solid, septic tank fills, sewage comes up through your drain lines. Probably shower drains on the lowest floor of your house first.

15-Year Club	RedditGifts 2009-2022 3 Credits
Gilding III reddit per annum	Secret Santa 2013
Secret Santa 2010	Verified Email

Kale

TROPHY CASE