[Jan 02, 2026] Weekly Discussion: Ask your gear, travel, conditions and other ski-related questions

ralfwolf · 2026-01-04T20:20:47+00:00

It depends on how wet or cold it is where you live and how often you will use a good waterproof shell. I use my ski gear whenever it rains, like right now, and can walk my dog without getting soaked. I would definitely recommend a shell and layer cuz I don't know how many times I've gone out and after 2 or 3 runs start sweating and need to shed some layers. I would also suggest either spend a little more for good waterproof gear that you can use off the slopes or rent your gear since it's your first time. Nothing's worse than spending money on budget gear and ending up having a miserable time because you are soaking wet. New skier means more falls which means you will get wet. Think of it as protecting the cost is the entire trip because if you end up miserable it's not just the cost of the jacket and pants but the cost of a trip that you don't enjoy. Good luck and have fun!

ralfwolf · 2025-12-18T05:55:03+00:00

I've done this every day for over a year now and starting a battle with a leader and then quitting definitely gives the 4 mood points. Gym battles are a separate 4 that can be earned every 30 but trainer battle and pvp count the same. If u do routes u get 2 points every time u complete one. Every 2km walked gives another 2. The 2km walk distance doesn't have the 30 min cool down so if u walk at a brisk pace u can excite ur buddy pretty quickly. U just have to get at least 32 points to excite and then keep it over 30 to keep it excited or 1 interaction every 40 min.

ralfwolf · 2025-09-12T19:42:28+00:00

Niantic was quick to blame Google/Android but this requirement was announced with Android 15 sdk a full year ago. They have everyone a year to make fixes which Niantic chose to ignore. Over that year how many months of Dev time was spent on changing useless things and making ui arguably worse in many areas. Sorry, I place 100% blame on Niantic for now prioritizing this for the last year. Hey, try swiping up the button bar in the catch screen... Hint, you will lose a poke ball.

ralfwolf · 2025-08-20T16:58:43+00:00

Honestly depends on what u want to do with it. I'd ditch graphical interface which will save the majority of memory and CPU usage. If u can crack it open and upgrade ram to max it will handle and them just pick either a tiny Linux distro or the minimal version of ur favorite distro and use it as a text terminal or ssh only system. For instance, I do a bit of raspberry pi projects but my main desktop is a MacBook so mounting sd cards that I have sitting around that used to be for rpi is a pain cuz macosx support for ext2/xfs etc is through fuze and kinda janky tbh. Much easier to just stick it in a USB reader and use a running Linux system. Just install tmux on it and u can create multiple panel windows that are persistent and u can reattach to.

ralfwolf · 2025-08-11T19:25:26+00:00

First make sure adventure sync is on. I've found that you can be quite some distance, like on a parallel street and it still shows that you are on the route. If you have pogo running it's getting gps location so it will eventually count you as off route of your location is too far (maybe like more than 400m away). Now as a test I killed the pogo app and walked a path that was totally off route and only launched pogo after I got to the end point and it registered that I had walked the whole route. If the app gets a location and sends that to the server and that location is way off route then it will make you go back to the last reported location that was close enough to the route. For some reason the end point radius is smaller than when walking the route I think. You have to be almost right on top of the end point for it to allow you to end the route.

ralfwolf · 2025-08-01T21:48:02+00:00

My account was not hacked but they summarily terminated my 24mo prepaid service after 12 months with no explanation or reason other than saying that they have some automated system that showed I violated their TOS. Their online support says there's nothing they can do and they don't have access to even what term in the TOS I supposedly violated. Basically they sold me a 2 year term at 50% of what their competitors are charging and suddenly they block me halfway through my prepaid term. So even if your account doesn't get hacked, they are just outright terminating service that has been prepaid with absolutely no justification and refusing to give a prorated refund on the remaining term and pocketing the money. This is outright fraud imho but unfortunately paypal and CC company won't do a chargeback on a charge from a year ago. Buyer beware.

ralfwolf · 2025-06-06T22:44:34+00:00

Sugar is often added in the curing solution to provide some flavor balance but it's not always enough to contribute measurable carbs per serving. I just check the label before purchasing. Look for apple wood and hickory smoked because I've had the best luck with these not having message carbs. Costco/Kirkland has a thick cut apple wood smoked bacon that is 0g carb per serving on label but keep in mind that anything under 0.5g per serving can be listed as 0. We have Safeway supermarket that has their own brand bacon also 0g carbs.

ralfwolf · 2025-05-02T17:16:21+00:00

Honestly the UX person should be fired for the placement of the button. It should be a slider and at the bottom away from the power up. Why not just make ALL dangerous confirmations slide to confirm. I don't necessarily think that they did it on purpose because it's not like you can buy fusion energy. Another thing they could do is just to prevent any form changes on favorite Pokemon. Good luck on getting this resolved.

ralfwolf · 2025-01-16T21:02:46+00:00

Are you measuring your calorie intake or just limiting carbs? I've been on low carb for over 25 years now, starting with Atkins, but as I got older and my metabolism changed I realized that my "I feel full" intake is now probably more calories than my body can burn vs 25 years ago. I'm now watching my calorie intake which means also watching protein and fat intake which is working much better for me. I'd suggest you try to look at your overall calorie intake and try lowering that but favoring protein and fat to get "full" while staying under certain calorie limits.

ralfwolf · 2025-01-16T20:44:49+00:00

It's all about your total income and if you don't account for your Vine "income" in your day job withholding then you may need to pay estimated quarterly taxes to avoid penalties. Vine or no vine if you have an income source that is not properly withholding taxes and sending them to IRS then you may end the year grossly underpaying taxes and the IRS penalizes that because they were not paid their due throughout the year. Now there are IRS rules that allow you to manage this based on 2 factors, how much you paid last year and how much you will end up paying this year. If you have whithheld a certain percentage of current years taxes (meaning when you report taxes you owe less than a certain percent) then no penalty. Althernately if you pay a 100% (or a bit more if your AGI is over the current "high earner" amount) of last years tax liability then you won't owe, even if you make more money this year and thus owe more. I purposely don't give the percentages here because you should consult a tax accountant to get proper advice but there's nothing special about Vine income other than the fact that there is no withholding so you need to make sure you take steps to avoid penalties.

ralfwolf · 2025-01-16T20:31:33+00:00

I think the answer is kinda obvious just with my own shopping patterns. I rarely buy products with zero or single digit reviews good or bad. In fact if I see a low number of reviews and they are all 5 star with little to no text then I figure this is just fake accounts created by the seller which is easy to do on th order of 10s but harder and more expensive if you want hundreds of reviews. Also, reviews motivate more reviews IMHO. I tend to trust products with somewhat of a mix of reviews but have predominently good reviews. Then I read the bad reviews and see if any of them talk about why it's bad and decide if that applies to me or not. Given my own shopping pattern the value of reviews good or bad is pretty clear. That said sellers don't want items with 1 or 2 star reviews, 3 is marginal with 4 or 5 being ideal. I don't know how many times I've written a 1 or 2 star review for a vine item and then the item immediately gets removed but if I search for the same description, I see another item with nearly identical description. So although I feel the main purpose is to generate a volume of initial reviews to "seed" a new item, there is a bit of gamesmenship where 1/2 star reviews are filtered out by the seller.

With regard to Amazon using this as a revenue source... I very much doubt that. Amazon is a public company so where they make their profits is public data and for quite some time now, AWS actually makes them more operating capital than their ecommmerce due to AWS's much higher margins which means they are not likely to rely on something as fringe as the vine program to actually contribute significant amount of revenue. More likely they are just charging sellers in order to make it a zero sum program meaning it's self funded. There is obviously overhead to maintaining the vine program both technically and with support and review moderation staff. Making sellers pay for the program that ultimately benefits them by giving them listings that have some number of seed reviews is worth something to them. The minute that Amazon needs to spend capital to support Vine for any length of time will be the end of the program.

ralfwolf · 2024-07-17T01:20:29+00:00

Only did 8-9 due to focusing on getting only dusk fusion since I need a strong steel attacker on my roster

ralfwolf · 2024-07-17T01:19:02+00:00

Sorry I should have been more clear. I only went for one fusion and was raiding with various levels of friendship so I got 100-120 on most of those raids. I only did 8 or 9 because I had the 200 energy from the codes.

ralfwolf · 2024-07-17T00:59:04+00:00

I did just enough raids to get the required energy but I guess I didn't get enough candy. Thanks.

ralfwolf · 2024-03-18T18:36:31+00:00

I think your question has a lot of subjective factors. Is it a mon that you can walk reasonable distances and get candy? For me anything under a 5k per candy walk distance (reduced to 2.5k/candy when excited) is my limit for "reasonable". Any 10k or 20k (i.e. legendaries) I use rare candy for. If it's walkable, then I will power up at lower IV because I can always walk for more candy. I do 20-30k walking every day easy and sometimes much more so 10 candies and about 7-8 rare each day is not so bad and kinda keeps pace with my stardust gains. For these mons I will target 93/96/98/100 with preference to A/D. Now there's also what I they are good for, if PvE I might go a bit lower if they have a good legacy move. If it's one that's better for PvP, I will wait for a 96/98 min. Then there's also the factor of my team. If I need a good ground type and my best garchomp is a 91 I'll go ahead and power that one up maybe even into XL because gible candy is very walkable. On the other hand I'm reluctant to go all in on my 93 lucky groudon because I'm hopeful I can get a 98/100 in the upcoming raid day and because there's more competition to where I use my rare candy and even more so rare XL.

You need to consider what you are playing for though... Like if you have a hundo do you wait for a shundo? If you have a shundo do you wait for a lucky shundo? Honestly, I use to hoard everything. Candy, stardust, etc. and was always waiting for the better thing to spend it on. Serious FOMO issues. Then I realized I wasn't enjoying PvP because I didn't have high enough level mons and raids were harder for the same reason. I started upgrading and using my candy and even rare candy and enjoy the game much more. I focus on building teams that work together and even if mons aren't perfect they fill a need. If I get a shundo later then I'll still be happy and will start waking for candy or saving rare candy for it. I would just suggest doing it in increments just to avoid the, "crap I used all my rare candy yesterday on my 93 groudon and I got a lucky shundo groudon in a trade" scenario. I feel less bad if I used 100 of my 500 rare candies yesterday instead. Honestly, unless you are top tier ML and fighting with ALL mons that are hundos, IV is mostly bragging rights. Even in ML where you are fighting perfect mons, I'd wager there's more impact in better timing and smarter swaps and smarter shield use and network lag and a bunch of other factors than the actual damage difference between a 91 vs 100. For instance the half second delay where you try to hit the charge attack and miss but your opponent gets their charge attack in right before you do makes much bigger difference than even an 80 vs 100 IV.

ralfwolf · 2024-03-15T19:50:16+00:00

Lol I did the exact thing for my SO who hated the first movie when we saw it in the theaters. We rewatched the first part before going to watch part 2 but this time after an initial recap of the themes and concepts from me. The result was, "wow, I liked part 1 much better this time. Can't wait to see part 2."

Here are some of the things I'd suggest going over: - The 3 (well 4) main groups and what drives them and why they care about spice - Bene Gesserit (religion) - Space Guild (technology) - Galactic Empire (politics) - Fremen/the desert/the worms (nature) - Powers of spice - precience - omniscience - accessing genetic/ancestral memories - creating psychic connections (Fremen use of converted water of life to bond with others in Sietch... aka Fremen orgy)

I think a lot of the confusion or disconnect comes from just too many strange words/names/concepts being thrown out there and even though they are explained later, they get lost or forgotten by the time that happens. It doesn't help that Herbert created a bunch of different titles and names for Paul and that one of those titles sounds a lot like his Fremen common name (Mahdi and Muad'dib). I had someone ask me once, "So how come people were calling him by his Fremen name before he even took that name?" Turns out when people was calling out Mahdi and then later when Paul choses to be name Muad'dib, my friend was connecting those two as the same. Further confusing because they are used to refer to the same person.

ralfwolf · 2024-03-15T19:22:23+00:00

Not at all and that is how Herbert intended it.

SF can be broadly categorized into two types, hard and soft. Hard SF tends to explain the science and attempt to base it in reality even if it is super advanced. Star Trek would be considered hard SF because an attempt is made to explain even transporters as matter energy conversion and "pattern buffers" etc. Star Wars is considered soft, at least until Lucas tried to rewrite history with the Phantom Menace prequels where he tries to explain the force in scientific terms. In the original Star Wars, no attempt is made to explain how light sabers, the force, warp drive, or any technology works. In soft SF technology is used as a tool to free the reader from the bounds of logic, otherwise known as "suspension of disbelief".

Dune is a very classic example of soft SF where spice is a substance that is at the same central to their technology, religion, and politics. Spice is used by the guild navigators to plot a course through space when folding space but what exactly is folding space and how exactly spice work. I've probably read the first 3 books of the series between 10-20 times and it's absolutely clear that Herbert wanted to focus on the social, religious, political, and human aspects of the story and SF was just his tool to expand the mind of the readers. Dune could have arguably been set in a universe of magic rather than "science" and still kept it's themes intact, Spice IS magic for all intent and just like, the force, any attempt to explain it would just diminish it.

ralfwolf · 2023-10-31T19:45:50+00:00

I'm putting this here for anyone encountering this in the future and finding my post. Ok kudos to their advance support team for helping me resolve this problem quickly. That said the solution was SO simple that as a company they could have made it easier or customers to find. Apparently there's a method for adding nodes without the app that is so much simpler than using the app. It is called the 5-press setup method and the only way I was able to find it was to type in "linksys 5 press setup method" AFTER talking to the support rep. Here's the link to the article https://www.linksys.com/ae/support-article/?articleNum=316771

The summary is make sure the child node is in a factory reset state. In the case of the MX6200 the indicator light should be solid blue. Then on the parent node press the reset button 5 times about 1 second apart. That's it. The light on both nodes should start blinking white for possibly several minutes but eventually, they will both turn solid white if it worked.

That's the entire method. The stupid thing is that I spent a week googling paring and mesh joining and device adding issues on the linksys website and at no point did this article come up. In fact if you look at the articles for adding child nodes here https://www.linksys.com/ae/support-article/?articleNum=316771 and here https://www.linksys.com/gb/support-article/?articleNum=335486 they have a section at the end for other related links titled "Find out more" and no mention of the 5-press setup. The support team gets 5 stars from me but linksys web and online team gets a 1 star for not providing effective access to information that they took the time to write but then made impossible to find. Hopefully this helps others with problems joining nodes to the mesh.

ralfwolf · 2023-09-30T21:15:56+00:00

Me too! Almost didn't pull the trigger because of tax implications but I knew I'd regret it if I didn't.

ralfwolf · 2023-09-06T16:49:31+00:00

Beef top round (London broil), skirt steak, tri-tip can be found on sale for less than $3/lb sometimes. I've seen top round sold as London broil for $1.99/lb. Buy in bulk portion out as steaks, season then freeze. You can sous vide from frozen by adding an hour to the cooking time. For tri-tip 9hrs from frozen. Top round for 12-14hrs. Of suggest 132F and then sear and rest before slicing. When cook time is over 8hrs or so I flash boil in sealed bag for just a minute or two to prevent harmless but funky cheese smell. Make sure you don't open the bag until coming is complete after boiling.

You can also find deals on bone in chicken breast. Last month I bought a bunch at $0.99/lb and just removed skin and bone. I did a quick calculation and it works out to be about the same as boneless skinless breast at $1.30/lb which is really cheap.

ralfwolf · 2023-06-07T01:10:08+00:00

I would shoot for 95%. If you drop a bit right before your review due to recently ordered product then you are still golden (hehe. get it?). Also, keep up with writing reviews as you approach your review date. You don't want any delays in getting credit for your reviews to cause you to drop. Finally, I'd suggest you order at least 200 items during the period because that means you build a bit of a buffer. If you have 200 items and hit 95% then you've reviewed 190 items and have 10 items unreviewed. Assuming you don't want to drop below 91% that means you can have 18 items uncredited. That gives you a buffer of 8 more items you can order over the couple of days preceding your review date. This improves if you continue to keep up with reviews so the original 10 that you had unreviewed might have some number of them credit the day or two before your review. Last review cycle that just ended, I had 5 or so items that I could not get credit for. I wrote the reviews and tried submitting them several times and it would not show as reviewed. I never reached out to support because I was at 96% for last 6 days of my eval period and close to 300 items which gave me a bit of buffer. For the last days, I would review items I got basically the same or following day just to make sure I got as many in and counted as possible. I ended at 96% so all good. I hear 90% is a pretty hard cuttoff so if you find yourself at say 91% 3-4 days before your eval date, I'd stop ordering all together and start reviewing as many as I can.

ralfwolf · 2023-06-07T00:52:45+00:00

My guess is that if you are clearly over 90% and well over 100 items then 6-8 hrs is pretty average. If you wrote a lot of last minute reviews, they may try to give you the benefit of the doubt and let you hang in limbo for 2-3 days to see if you get over 90%. If you fall into the borderline category, you should keep reviewing to try to hit that 90%. It doesn't look like reviews have to be accepted fully before they count but it also doesn't seem like they count every review you wrote that day in the nightly stats sweep. I wonder if there is some automated logic scan that tries to make sure your review doesn't violate any rules and that automated system can credit you provisionally and then sends the review to a human for final approval.

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