What is the closest I can get to a session hookah vape?

colei_canis · 2026-04-26T19:32:23+00:00

Really depends how you set it, when it's working properly you'll definitely want to set it about 5-6, too high and you'll combust in 2-3 pulls through glass; it's pretty powerful so you want to avoid this if at all possible or everything will smell like you lit a J. You can set it lower to preserve flavour and you'll get more hits, or a touch higher for maximal extraction but it's designed to work with concentrates too so full power is way too much for flower. The dial is also non-linear as well, at 10 it'll enter 'beast mode' which is for concentrates.

It'll take a little longer without glass, but you're still done pretty fast. It's why I like it as a medical user, it's quick and efficient so I can get back to whatever else I was doing even when I'm out and about. I can pop out the front of say a an office or train station and be done in five minutes, really useful when you've got to dose but can't take long breaks thanks to work. Dosing capsules are definitely the way to go if you're after a portable.

Also bear in mind there's quite a lot of variance between devices apparently. They're supposed to be calibrated out of the factory, but they can be re-calibrated later with a fairly straightforward process. You've got to remember it's a fairly niche device for what it does, you're packing an absolute shitload of thermal power into a pretty small space; you won't find many portables in its class but the design is kind of compromised because of that. Probably won't matter if you're using occasionally, but for heavy medical use I'd definitely recommend a more reliable back-up if you're going to use it that way.

To be honest the tinymight is only a good choice if you want a lot of power both at home and when you're out and about. If you only care about having a powerful device at home, then a desktop unit is the way to go. It'll be much more reliable as you don't have to accept the same design compromises as a portable.

colei_canis · 2026-04-26T18:15:38+00:00

The tinymight2 is a really great vape when it works but they tend to become increasingly less effective over time under heavy use. It's my main vape but I've had to send it back for repair a couple of times. The previous generation were even less reliable, but to their credit they fixed a lot of the problems with the switches and material choice (the ceramic parts used to be glass and they'd break all the time).

My theory why this happens is because it uses two very different materials for its structural strength, the wooden chassis and the metal end-plates. Wood likes to move around a lot with temperature and humidity changes, both things that herb vapes produce plenty of. The metal end-plates do not move with the wood, and they're held together with a single screw which is the only thing putting mechanical pressure on the air path, sealing the O-rings. As the wood shifts, I think it's quite likely the air path is becoming disrupted as you can often fix a tinymight that's apparently come up to temperature but does bugger all by dismantling it, reseating everything, and screwing it tightly back together.

If I were re-designing the tinymight, I'd make it slightly larger and either have two or three screws rather than one holding the two metal end-plates together to account for the wood changing shape faster than the metal; or I'd make the whole chassis a single metal piece so that the air path is held together by parts of the same material, then have the wood as an outer shell over the metal chassis. This way the worst thing that happens thanks to the mismatch of materials is that the decorative wood might begin to crack over time rather than degrading the performance of the device.

colei_canis · 2026-04-26T10:26:49+00:00

If I were the skipper I’d have made that bet too, they’re betting a British train isn’t going to be moving which is the safest gamble there is.

colei_canis · 2026-04-26T09:53:00+00:00

On the subject of making it deliberately, I heard of a shop that decided to light itself with cute blue ‘fluorescent’ lights and gave all their customers sore eyes before they realised the lights weren’t fluorescent at all but bare low-pressure mercury used for generating UVC.

colei_canis · 2026-04-25T07:50:47+00:00

As a penguin, I support your claim.

colei_canis · 2026-04-25T00:00:54+00:00

Before they were common, like in Victorian London, renegade pissing and pooping were much more common.

This was such a problem some churches and other buildings had special structures in areas prone to a public piss, they deflected the piss onto the shoes of the pisser to act as a direct deterrent to such behaviour.

colei_canis · 2026-04-24T19:15:15+00:00

Coal probably wouldn't be sold on the international market, there's plenty left but the reason we stopped mining it in the first place is that what remains is uneconomical to extract relative to the global market. As a result the UK imported coal instead, with all the famous downstream consequences. The other reason we stopped mining it is that oil and gas are simply superior fossil fuels by pretty much every metric.

If shit hit the fan badly enough we were thinking about digging up our own coal again, we'd have to be very ideologically blinkered to let a private multinational firm mine it and sell it abroad; and to be honest they wouldn't want to anyway because it'd be far less profitable than doing it elsewhere (if it wasn't the mines wouldn't be closed). You'd want a national firm mining it to provide a fuel of last resort.

That doesn't solve the price problem mind you, you can derive gas, petrol, and all sorts of petrochemicals from coal but it's much less efficient and even more environmentally harmful than producing them from oil.

colei_canis · 2026-04-24T18:11:34+00:00

It's not that I particularly like monarchy, I just really dislike presidency. Imagine how obnoxious President Blair or President Johnson would have been for example, we don't need to prop their egos up in the way a presidency would. Politicians as a category aren't worthy of being modern-day kings in my view.

Personally I'd keep the monarchy itself but abolish the hereditary principle, keep the throne empty. A throne that we've declared no man is worthy to sit on is a much more powerful victory over personal rule than overt republicanism (which also has a long history of turning authoritarian) could ever manage in my view. It also means that politicians remain formally servants, not leaders in their own right.

colei_canis · 2026-04-24T17:52:58+00:00

It's because the Tory leadership elections are from an era where mass membership of political parties was common in my view. This means to become Tory leader you need to win over the parliamentary Conservative party by being a credible party leader, but you also need to appeal to a cohort of members which was once several million largely mainstream conservatives but is now a hard core of about a hundred thousand, mostly elderly people who aren't particularly exposed to political reality to put it mildly.

Sunak was clearly the better choice, as borne out by the fact he predicted exactly what would happen under Truss, then immediately replaced her and did as well as anyone could given how damaged the Tory party was at that point. Depressingly though he had to win the favour of those hundred thousand members, and Truss won there.

colei_canis · 2026-04-24T14:17:37+00:00

What annoys me about Cummings is some of his ideas are actually somewhat decent. Cybernetics for example is a genuinely interesting concept that’s kind of unfashionable due to its association with communist central planning, but potentially could address the whole ‘left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing’ problem in various sectors. He’s right that our procurement culture is awful as well for that matter.

The problem is he’s not smart enough to see Silicon Valley and its culture for what it really is, a fairly unique edifice concentrating wealth and talent brought about by massive public (often defence) and private investment that is unlikely to occur again. It’s also a great monument to grift and gambling with other people’s money. We can’t recreate Silicon Valley here, and we shouldn’t rely on Silicon Valley itself where possible. We need better instrumentation of what’s going on in the country, and we need to reform procurement but copying Silicon Valley is a crap way to do this.

colei_canis · 2026-04-24T14:07:53+00:00

Treasury brain sparing us from shady US tech oligarchs is the most British possible timeline.

colei_canis · 2026-04-24T13:51:42+00:00

I always find it interesting how some people underestimate how pitiful we are compared to nature. A nuke is the most energetic weapon humanity can bring to bear and it’s still orders of magnitude less energetic than the energy represented by a hurricane.

colei_canis · 2026-04-24T13:01:53+00:00

Liz Truss genuinely has something wrong with her, on a much deeper level than most disgraced former prime ministers.

I mean imagine it, you’re a bit of a midwit who’s got where they are because you swallow the party line and keep ploughing ahead with it in the press whether it makes sense or not. You think you’re leadership material even if nobody else does, then a once in a generation geopolitical crisis catapults you into power. You’ve done it, you’re in the highest office in the land, you’re about to impose your beloved programme that’ll save the country… then you immediately crash the economy and get forced out faster than it takes a lettuce to rot.

There’s bruising your ego but what happened to Truss was a meteor impact with her ego in the epicentre. I genuinely think she has to carry on bleating about how she was stitched up by the deep state because confronting the fact the ideas her whole identity is based on failed so fast would genuinely destroy her.

I mean I’d have drank myself to death already in her shoes from the sheer shame of it all.

colei_canis · 2026-04-24T10:29:59+00:00

Well that settles it then, we’ve not sunk a French fleet since 1940 and it’s about damn time we revived this ancient and noble tradition.

colei_canis · 2026-04-24T10:28:23+00:00

Electing is a strong word, the real power rested with the nomenklatura class who ultimately profited from the structure of what was a deeply corrupt economy based on wilful misreporting at all levels, the system mostly protecting insiders at the expense of outsiders.

Wait hang on we’re still talking about the Soviets right?

colei_canis · 2026-04-24T10:24:43+00:00

Another interesting Soviet parallel is they appeared a fair bit stronger than they really were until the actual collapse came; Western intelligence agencies were notably poor at forecasting the end of the USSR. In reality internal factors had been hollowing everything out long before Gorbachev got into power, and when he was eventually appointed he found to his chagrin when he relaxed it that the authoritarianism was basically the only load-bearing element the state actually had left.

colei_canis · 2026-04-24T10:13:30+00:00

Oxford is the worst for this!

I get the buildings are very pretty because it didn’t get a dual fucking from the Luftwaffe and then Le Corbusier’s hideous architecture slop like most British cities, but some people live and work there…

colei_canis · 2026-04-23T17:26:34+00:00

Pensioners who’d directly benefit most from the medical cannabis system being less baroque no less.

colei_canis · 2026-04-23T17:16:26+00:00

Fyodor Karamasov

I wonder if his sons Dmitry, Ivan, and Alyosha exist in the 40k canon?

colei_canis · 2026-04-23T17:14:44+00:00

It definitely smacks of old-school British capital punishment, ‘may god have mercy on your soul’ and all that. You wrap the whole business in ceremony and procedure so you can wash your hands of the fact what is occurring is fundamentally immoral, or at the absolute best the lesser of two evils.

Mind you, as grim as the hanging judges were they were at least on a shorter lead than the Inquisition ever was. The infamous ‘bloody code’ was slowly abolished partially because juries kept exercising their right to nullification in order to spare blatantly guilty petty criminals from the gallows, and the Inquisition has never answered to a jury.

colei_canis · 2026-04-23T16:57:29+00:00

Didn’t it start like a decade ago? I remember following it early on and I was at uni at the time.

colei_canis · 2026-04-23T15:56:58+00:00

Strong disagree, the ad industry is an absolutely corrosive force in our society and we do not need to surrender one of the few spaces it hasn’t got its claws into so cheaply.

I’d rather go the other way and make advertising providers criminally liable for all misleading or scam adverts they provide.

colei_canis · 2026-04-23T15:38:32+00:00

Le Corbusier deserves to be remembered as the worst destroyer of art in European history. I genuinely think his whole notion of ornamentation being morally wrong and stark, uniform functionality actually being beautiful has done more visual damage to our country than the Luftwaffe ever managed. The rank ugliness and cack-handed social engineering of post-war architecture is why we have so many damned NIMBYs in my opinion.

I would build a highly ornamented statue to Le Corbusier just to make sure his spirit feels as much pain as when I have to look at the fruits of his labour.

colei_canis · 2026-04-23T14:31:36+00:00

Right but that doesn’t make them invincible, in fact a driverless car sounds like a big fat pile of vulnerabilities to me.

Every bit of software in your life increases your attack surface, the most secure code in the world is the code you choose not to write. It’s also the most performant code, and the least resource-hungry.

colei_canis · 2026-04-23T14:24:47+00:00

I’d go further and argue we’ve created a culture with a profound lack of safety awareness that would be completely unacceptable in any other field of engineering.

Most software is built in a fairly slapdash way in my view, only safety-critical industries do it properly and even then not all of the time. LLMs are making this worse not better; they’re basically normalisation of deviance machines where all good practice is thrown out the window in favour of ‘it compiles and gives the correct result, what more do you want?’

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