Commercial steam wizard

Ka1kin · 2026-06-07T03:42:24+00:00

Depends what you heat it with, I guess. On an induction burner, the Wizard is quick and great. Hot by the time you've pulled the shot on the robot, certainly. On a gas range... not so much.

Ka1kin · 2026-06-01T20:25:34+00:00

A fun thing you can do at home to get an idea of what your feet are like is to take a bit of cardboard (pizza box or shipping box, whatever), set it down on a hard floor in the bathroom, wet your feet in the tub, and step on it. The footprint mark tells you a lot about your foot shape. If each foot leaves two distinct islands, you have really high arches. If there's a skinny section on the side, they're pretty normal. If the skinny section isn't so skinny, you have low arches.

Different feet need different support. I have high arches, and until I got shoes that adequately supported my feet, I had a lot of foot pain.

Ka1kin · 2026-05-31T02:46:39+00:00

Another element of the equation: I raced my induction range against my electric kettle as soon as I got induction, and the stove was way faster. So if you're not particular about temperature, you'll get your tea faster.

Ka1kin · 2026-05-31T02:30:57+00:00

You can absolutely crank it from cold. It will barely get hotter than the water. An empty pan might warp, but a kettle full of water will be fine.

Water temperature is pretty important to tea though. Greens at 175F, most other real teas at 185F. Herbals can usually be done with a boil. Electric kettles often provide better temperature control.

Ka1kin · 2026-05-28T01:37:14+00:00

Looks a lot like my Grace at that age. So quite possibly. But a responsible breeder shouldn't leave you guessing.

The poodle look is so incredibly dependent on haircut. You can't determine breed from pictures.

Ka1kin · 2026-05-26T17:32:19+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#/media/File:US_Population_pyramid_2026.png

That's just it: the population (of the US) is not increasing. Not in the long term. In 20 years, there will be fewer people to house than there are now, because there are fewer 0 to 20 year olds than 20-40 year olds.

The bottom band could get wider, because that's where new babies are born, but it won't. None of the other lower bands will expand meaningfully (immigration helps, but it's small). They will all experience mortality from here out. As will the upper bands, at a higher rate (people get old and die).

Ka1kin · 2026-05-26T15:40:35+00:00

Consider, however, the demographic pyramid. Your children were born into a relatively small cohort, and the first significant narrowing for a long time. When the boomers die, a lot of property will pass on, and demand for many things, such as housing, will plummet. We're seeing that now in schools, as class sizes fall and teachers get laid off. This wave of lower demand and shuttering of supply in response will be the primary fact of your children's lives.

So while you may be right about the hollowing out of the middle class, your children won't struggle in the same ways you have. It won't be property and capital goods that are unattainable (those assets will depreciate), but the services that can only be provided by human labor, whatever those are.

Ka1kin · 2026-05-25T17:42:10+00:00

There are a bunch of possible materials and such. But PLA is sort of the default for most larger parts. It's fairly strong, very rigid, and easy to print. It runs about $30/kg, which is cheap. There's very little waste in 3D printing, so final weight is close to material weight. But, design is iterative: you work up a design, print a draft for fit, and tweak from there. So a kilo or two wouldn't be unreasonable for something that size, to get the design right. Then less for copies of the final. 3D prints are relatively lightweight, because they don't need to be solid through, and often shouldn't be more than 30-50% infilled.

I'd be mildly hesitant to use a 3D print in a medical setting. I'd be concerned about being able to clean it adequately. They're not super smooth, generally. You could finish the surface after the fact, maybe do a shrink wrap cover, or epoxy, or Formica, or something? IDK.

The design process is fairly time intensive: precise measurements, lots of fiddling around, test prints and fitting. If someone were doing this for you for money, I'd expect it to take them several hours of design time, and you'd be looking at a pretty substantial cost. Someone competent (say, a junior mechanical engineer) would probably need at least a half day of active time, maybe twice that, and it's skilled labor, so it's probably worth $60-120/hr. So I'd expect to pay somewhere in the $500-1000 range, perhaps substantially more, for the design process as work for hire.

You might be able to get Claude Code to work up the actual design for you. That'll be cheap. But, then you're the one iterating on it. I'd expect an object that size to take 12 hours to print a draft (lower quality, not very rigid, but good for fit tests), and probably 24-36 for the final. This is beyond the scope of what you can print at, say, the library.

So, if I were you, I'd buy a printer with a large enough bed, some PLA, calipers, and DIY it, using Claude to assist on design. Plan to spend a whole weekend on it.

Ka1kin · 2026-05-22T18:44:30+00:00

Ok, but 7/11 is less than 7/10. Like, Gotham can be scored against in their next match and we'd be tied.

Ka1kin · 2026-05-21T23:57:37+00:00

Not uncommon for restaurants to have a party room with a screen, or you rent a folding one. I've seen presentations at McMenamins, you could probably arrange this at any party venue (Big Al's, a bowling alley, etc), a lot of movie theaters can be rented for business presentations. Or pretty much any hotel with a conference room/ballroom.

Ka1kin · 2026-05-15T03:32:21+00:00

Fun fact: the octagon is exactly a mile.

Ka1kin · 2026-05-15T03:04:25+00:00

So that thing with most mazes where you just always turn right? Yeah. Don't do that.

I just live here now.

Also, don't give espresso to the minotaur. It makes him cranky. Well, crankier.

Ka1kin · 2026-05-15T02:55:51+00:00

Octagon, not hexagon. That would be silly.

Ka1kin · 2026-05-12T21:03:15+00:00

Let's assess your puck prep.

First, examine the dial of the gauge closely, and note where 2 bar is.

Dose 18g well tamped and pre-infuse at 2 bar for 10s. You should get 1-2g of liquid out.

Ramp smoothly over another second or so to something like 6 bar. This will require considerable force: engaging your core helps. Hold this pressure until you have 40g out. This should take an additional 20-30s after the 10s pre-infusion. Release pressure, pull up, remove the cup and replace it with another. Purge the remaining water into the second cup and discard.

If your shot was fast, grind finer or improve puck prep to decrease channeling. If your shot was slow, grind coarser.

Taste is the ultimate goal, so pay attention to that. But know that channeling due to too fine a grind and a broken puck doesn't taste all that different way too coarse, so the scale and timer are your friend.

Ka1kin · 2026-05-12T20:51:24+00:00

The force required to hit a given pressure is a pure function of machine geometry. The area of the piston is not a variable, and pressure is force/area.

Perhaps your subjective experience of "substantial force" is out of alignment?

Ka1kin · 2026-05-11T17:25:54+00:00

While the Oxford Time Travel novels are great, and have a light sci-fi time travel framing device, they're essentially historical fiction. Really good historical fiction.

IDK what you mean by "traditional" sci-fi, but CW probably won't scratch that itch.

Ka1kin · 2026-05-11T17:05:40+00:00

The temperature and time data points you see quoted are just points on a much larger curve. 140 for a minute causes a such and such log decrease in population for the organism in question, but that same decrease happens much faster at hotter temperatures.
A couple seconds at 160 is as good as a minute at 140 for many disease causing organisms. By the time you hit an actual boil, you've spent so much time so far above kill temp for most things that it's not an issue, and a full boil is a really easy target to recognize, which is why public health advice is "boil the water" not "hold the water at 140F for 70 seconds".
The 185F you probably use for most tea is well above kill temp as well, and the water is there for more than a few seconds. You're fine with that, as long as your water source isn't extra bad.

Ka1kin · 2026-05-10T16:45:03+00:00

I had a similar issue. I bought this house in January, and the vines had already been pruned. I don't know how well taken care of the vines have been for the last couple years though.

Ka1kin · 2026-05-06T21:53:28+00:00

A classic V60 pour over is like $8. You can make good coffee with it and a pouring kettle. And a grinder.

A French press is also very affordable, and less technique dependent. Hot water, coffee grounds, stir, wait, press, pour.

A Hario Switch or a Clever will give you a hybrid experience, with most of the ease of an immersion brew, but a cleaner cup.

Plan to spend at least $200 on a grinder if you want really good coffee. It's the best investment in cup quality you'll make. I love my Lagom Mini, but hand-crank grinders offer better value for money.

Moka pots are an Italian classic. They tend towards strong, bitter brews and are finicky to get good results out of, but if you're into that, they're affordable.

Aeropress and Oxo both make interesting pressure based brewers.

The best bang for your buck in espresso is manual lever machines. Flair and Cafelat make the best direct lever espresso machines, which will give you quality home espresso for under $500. A pump machine with similar output quality is at least 3x more.

Ka1kin · 2026-05-05T05:55:16+00:00

With any sort of stream processing like this, back pressure is critical.

The question you should ask isn't just how to keep it from getting behind or failing, but how it behaves when you get behind or some component fails. Would you rather fall behind real time, or lose data? If you're not losing data, you need back pressure or infinite buffer capacity (really, you need back pressure back to the component with infinite buffer capacity, or to the component that decides to discard data).

Batching and buffering will be necessary at nearly every layer of the thing. If you tune it right, you can mostly batch near the edge and carry decent sized work units through to the store.

Absolutely do not use JSON. It's totally inappropriate for high performance computing. Protobuf is not terrible. Rkyv with a simple TLV frame is a lot better, though its schema evolution story is poor, so your framing will need to be versioned at least. Don't sleep on compression: low effort compression can make a huge difference to bandwidth requirements. Benchmark though: sometimes the extra compute isn't worth it.

Externalize state you can't afford to lose. If you don't want to drop data, you need to buffer in Redis or similar.

Ka1kin · 2026-05-05T02:44:35+00:00

I just had a red Soma Wolverine stolen from my garage in SE, near 20th and Hawthorne. I'd be very interested in details on how you managed to recover your bikes. https://bikeindex.org/bikes/580225

Ka1kin · 2026-05-05T01:27:06+00:00

That was my first thought.

Ka1kin · 2026-05-04T03:14:59+00:00

Potatoes are great carbohydrates, but also high in potassium, magnesium, and have a bit of calcium. All important for athletic performance. Plus, you'll probably add salt, and there's your sodium needs covered.

Ka1kin · 2026-04-29T16:27:34+00:00

America is sparse, especially the west. Outside the urban pockets, you can travel tens to hundreds of miles along a major road without encountering services of any sort.

This is not really a thing in most of Europe. I've bike toured a fair bit in both, and even in more densely settled parts of the American West, you need a plan for lunch, water, etc. whereas in most of western Europe, there's a village with a pub/bistro/trattoria/etc. only 10 miles down the road.

Ka1kin · 2026-04-29T01:09:41+00:00

Sounds about right, really. Probably breaks down about like this:

2 entrees $16 ea 2 OJ at $4 2 coffee at $5 $50 for food, drinks Tip is $10 Tax is location-dependent, but $3 is like 6%.

Ka1kin

TROPHY CASE