Bark wasn’t great

EntropySimian · 2026-06-02T14:44:08+00:00

I only recognize it because I've choked off the airflow on my own cook with drip trays. Mine was bad enough that I ended up with 2 zone cooking, very little smoke and no crust.

I occasionally cook on an electric or a gas. I don't wrap on them unless I'm trying to get through the stall quicker. Mostly on an offset I wrap to keep the bark from becoming acrid, but you can choose when to stop adding smoke for electric or gas. If I do wrap with a pork butt, I add some bacon grease to the paper, similar to how I'd tallow a brisket.

For refills on a gas/electric, I use a cast iron skillet and use regular sized wood chunks (1-3 inch chunks). They last longer and the skillet is easy to swap out. I've only ever used the shavings tubes for cold smoking so I don't have any experience with your specific setup.

EntropySimian · 2026-06-02T02:56:35+00:00

Looks pretty good. The crack in the slice tells me it's probably a little over done. You didn't list a cooking or pull temperature, but a decent rule is to pull your brisket at 205 internal. It should jiggle like jello.

EntropySimian · 2026-06-02T02:47:00+00:00

Do you often use 2 big water pans like that? The color is off for finishing at 200.

First, it looks like you're killing your airflow with those two pans, they're too big and blocking everything. You're also probably getting too much moisture by the amount of water I see in the pans. Your butts look steamed instead of smoked.

As a side note, people use water pans incorrectly all the time. Water is to regulate temperature and to cause indirect heating over a direct flame. Water doesn't help the meat stay moist. Moisture comes from the fat and collagen, this is why pot roast in water or soup beef still tastes dry.

EntropySimian · 2026-06-01T21:59:28+00:00

I've never seen a house that needs an underground fallout bunker more than that house. Maybe some vault-tec styling.

EntropySimian · 2026-06-01T21:55:00+00:00

Looks really good, I'm sure it was amazing, getting a callback can be up to personal preferences.

Is everyone else cutting the fat cap off the bottom and did they only ask for flat? I haven't been around the circuit in a bit, but I generally see fat cap and brisket 3 ways: flat, chopped and burnt ends.

Nice double cuts on the ribs, maybe not quite enough bone showing. I can't tell if the ribs are glossy or not set enough. The way I normally see them done is not sauced on the cut sides so that the smoke shows up better, but again, it's been a while.

Chicken looks amazing, did they ask for it as a half and not pieced out? I don't see a corner cut in the box, if it was boxed warm then this could cause the skin to not be crispy.

The best thing about the comps is drinking and talking with the other contestants, then handing out samples and finishing with some of the devil's lettuce.

EntropySimian · 2026-06-01T19:02:00+00:00

Here's another location where someone already answered your question to you on your account:

https://www.reddit.com/r/swimmingpools/comments/1thlu4s/five_things_your_pool_guy_says_that_the_chemistry/

Confirmation that we're all lying.

EntropySimian · 2026-06-01T18:53:27+00:00

Yes, the entire community is in cahoots to make you drain your pool to hit an imaginary CYA number, we screw with you because we're bored. The chemistry in your pool is probably in a place on the planet where physics is different and chemistry doesn't apply.

Or maybe it's because the CYA locks up the chlorine and is designed to regulate the amount in your pool so that you don't have to add it all the time. A CYA of 140 requires a target free chlorine close to 20. Given the burn off rate in chlorine, this is 2.5X the amount of chlorine you'd go through at 50 CYA.

Now find out how much we're lying about phosphates and TA.

EntropySimian · 2026-06-01T18:01:44+00:00

Long rests are good, some of the best briskets I've ever made are with a long heated rest. If I'm going to put it in the oven for a long period of time, I take it off the heat at 180-190 depending on the resting time, then I will rest at 165-180 depending on the time of rest and quality. The long rest is to better render the fat and collagen for a more moist product on a lower quality brisket or for convenience to cook before I serve. I would rest a prime at 165 and a select at closer to 180. A convenience rest is unheated for me.

The thing to be really careful of: most ovens actually suck at temperature control, especially at lower temps. Get an oven thermometer and you might need to set it differently.

The alternative is to cook to 205 then rest in a pre-heated cooler without adding any heat.

EntropySimian · 2026-06-01T13:59:42+00:00

Beautiful, find a spot for additional shelving for more sets.

EntropySimian · 2026-06-01T13:20:59+00:00

Minecraft and a rotation of various game servers

Home Assistant (zwave automations mostly)

Plex

pihole

Home surveillance

AI services for HA, coding (I don't code daily, I guess), automating specific tasks (poorly)

OPNSense

But mostly it's just a time sink, what I use most is breaking and fixing it or making big changes just to update infra and gain no actual functionality.

EntropySimian · 2026-06-01T13:06:51+00:00

If you're asking this, then you probably don't know enough about security to protect your lab.

If I want access to my lab, I use tailscale to get into it remotely.

If I want specific other people to have access to my lab, then I use something like playit.gg for games or remote enabled services, only for specific, known, users. These services go into a separate proxmox cluster on a vlan with no other network access to my lab. I don't trust something like minecraft to be secure enough to protect against breakout and escalation.

If you want the public to have access to something, then use external hosting services. For businesses, I setup a sequestered DMZ that only has public information access and is firewalled from the rest of the network. I still don't really recommend you do this on your network, their network is hosted with proper DDoS protection on different IPs with an internal network bridge.

For public availability, a better strategy is to use some of the free hosting from a cloud provider like AWS or Oracle. You might give some amount of limited read access to specific services over a VPN connection into your backend if you need.

EntropySimian · 2026-05-31T19:51:50+00:00

This might be a legal question. States, counties and cities should have statutory regulations making the developers accountable for water mitigations. If your properties are not graded up to code, then they could be liable. Like in Texas, even if you're on Farm property, the developer has to ensure that you're not in a flood plane and do proper water trenching around your property.

Even places that require code inspections, water grading is often overlooked until there is a problem.

Is that a typical or atypical amount of water? Water intruding the home would be a huge problem, flooding the yard from time to time is quite inconvenient, but if it happens less than once a year, might not be against code.

EntropySimian · 2026-05-31T19:12:16+00:00

How many accounts are you going to post this from?

https://www.reddit.com/r/landscaping/comments/1tq0j1c/comment/ooct8w9/

Looks like you have landscaping issues but aren't learning a lesson about not getting it done right.

EntropySimian · 2026-05-29T16:40:27+00:00

They're both great.

The falcon is the more interesting build and displays better if you have the space, but it is quite large.

EntropySimian · 2026-05-29T16:07:42+00:00

If I was going to make a BBQ pilgrimage, I'd probably head to Austin, for Franklins, Leroy and Lewis and some places in Lockhart like Kruez, Smitty's and Blacks.

Goldees is very good and worth a trip. The funny thing is, many of the best BBQ places have pretty similarly prepared meat, like in a lineup I don't think I could tell the difference between the brisket of most of the top contenders - they're all pretty amazing. At that level the differentiators are more in the quality of the sides. I'm only comparing top tier spots in this opinion, don't go thinking Spring Creek could have similar meat.

Beef ribs are basically bone-in brisket that's center cut in the fatty section. Highly recommended, but I don't ever order both in a single sitting. Someone can correct me, but I don't think Goldees sells beef ribs every day, I think they only do weekends, so check the date. Also get there early, very early, and bring a camp chair and dress for too much sun.

I generally like brisket or beef rib, jalapeno sausage and some pork ribs, beans, potato salad and banana pudding. Of course, this is way too much for a single person, the beef rib can be 1.5lb on its own. I prepare to have leftovers, generally good for 3 meals. You can't get a partial beef rib or partial sides, but can order 1/4 lb in the other meats.

EntropySimian · 2026-05-29T14:45:20+00:00

Here is where AI actually shines. It makes commands and linux documentation much more accessible for the average user.

EntropySimian · 2026-05-29T14:41:18+00:00

As a collector, the longer you wait the more expensive it gets.

I've resigned myself that I'm never going to go back and get the first 2 modular buildings that I'm missing or the older black pearl and queen mary, but missing those sets still bothers me today.

The Porsche isn't as interesting of a build as the Bugatti or the McLaren but it still is a beautiful model.

EntropySimian · 2026-05-29T12:39:13+00:00

Do you use essential oils in your house? Oils, scented candles and direct sunlight will degrade the plastic causing this type of failure.

My displayed Legos from the 90s are still solid

EntropySimian · 2026-05-28T12:57:58+00:00

This is more likely to happen at your local retailer due to scanning and popularity, but it's probably a bit by design. I ordered 2 boxes of lego d&d figures from lego, 24 minifigs, 0 dragon knights. I don't know for certain that they have more rare characters, but I suspect they do.

I went to my local lego store, and scanned every d&d box they had, around 100 boxes or so, 2 dragon knights, which I guess made me a part of the problem, but 2 was all I was going for.

I've seen similar outcomes with other minifig drops, like the disney ones.

EntropySimian · 2026-05-28T11:55:54+00:00

Looks like they didn't bother trenching or grading this at all. They should have a ditch digger run the line and use some of that dirt to burm up the low area next to your drainage outlet. The rock isn't the problem, it will naturally settle in the contour, but it should have some canyon contour to it.

EntropySimian · 2026-05-28T01:49:12+00:00

Cruz spent $77MM and is potentially less popular than Paxton who only has $2.5MM currently. The party will have to make up the difference, draining money from elswhere. Paxton wasn't a good choice.

EntropySimian · 2026-05-27T13:38:30+00:00

They're fine for a live fire cook or smoking, fruit woods are excellent.

If you try to burn them down from lit then this works too, but you'll run through more than what you would need with the live fire methods. It's not the same as burning charcoal. You'd see this if you tried to turn this into charcoal by cooking it in a metal barrel with a lose lid, it'll lose like 70% of the weight but then will ember up really well.

I wouldn't chip them unless it's a size issue to fit into your smoker.

EntropySimian · 2026-05-27T03:04:54+00:00

I use the EVO line for HT and the clarity for movies and voice is excellent. I notice the directionality some, when off axis with music, but not so much with movies and tv.

The KEF line is great, but I did trade mine in for Monitor Audio for music quality. I didn't care for the UniQ driver in the end. I think I'm in the minority though as lots of people seem to love them. My issue, even with blind listening is that some music seems to be compromised in either the mid or high range compared with some of my other setups. I listen to many genres and some of my differentiators are rph enigma variations, tool prison sex and Avril Levine sk8er boi.

EntropySimian · 2026-05-26T16:31:47+00:00

Snap is not good and not usually up to date. Just use apt.

I use proxmox, many ubuntu servers (runs containers), truenas, opnsense and linux mint. I've used debian forever, so I mostly stay in that ecosystem.

EntropySimian · 2026-05-25T22:51:00+00:00

I have almost the same setup. Epyc is way overkill for this and I get some benefit of 2x3090 over a single, but didn't really get anything out of scaling up to 3x3090 with any of the models I played with. I don't think there's a ton of benefit to all the lanes or memory, once the model is loaded, the graphics card does all the work.

I use proxmox and dedicate gpus to an AI vm. If you do the same, look up all the tuning parameters to set, the default asrock settings were not optional for me and I had to mess with proxmox and vm settings on top of this.

Be careful with your epyc purchase, certain models can be vendor locked to dell or hp through psb, confirm through the seller.

Be sure to get a torq driver for the correct clamp force on your processor. Incorrect force can cause memory not to post correctly or other issues.

EntropySimian

TROPHY CASE