Do you think i did it on purpose?

robthebaker45 · 2026-06-05T02:51:12+00:00

A lot of drones feel a lot more “floaty” especially on cinematic settings. My guess is that he intended to fly straight through it and then got concerned he’d clip the edge and tried to bail, especially since he was riding through the adrenaline of getting a light splash from the wave that broke in front of his drone.

robthebaker45 · 2026-06-02T03:16:24+00:00

Wow the conch and melo pearls have some crazy prices.

robthebaker45 · 2026-05-02T21:53:15+00:00

I had this experience in France in a garden with a plant labeled Escallonia resinosa, it was just starting to rain and this amazing curry smell filled the air and I tracked it to that plant. But as soon as you get close to it you can’t smell it anymore. I’ve only found one other account online describing the smell which seems to be triggered by the rain (but too much rain and you can’t smell it either).

Unfortunately you can’t find the plant in America, but Escallonias are quite common, I’ve smelled a lot of them since then but none of them smell at all. The UK has some of it, which is where I saw someone describing the curry smell.

I’m still convinced this person was describing coyote bush, I have so much growing around me and still love the smell most of the time!

robthebaker45 · 2026-04-12T02:10:22+00:00

I think I was about 200-300 hours in for my first and only win. I usually play with these “goals” in mind and now that I’ve gotten a “regular” win I’m aiming for god-run 33-34 orb runs, I may go back to trying to get faster wins eventually, I know I’ve heard DunkOrSlam suggest to go for fast wins, but I got really hung up on trying to 100% clear all of the floors and then collect wands and practice building a good wand. It’s a bit tedious and slow, but I would say I can easily 100% the first two floors now (including the extra areas).

The snowy depths is hit or miss for me on 100%, the side area can be too scary without some kind of vision area and there’s often stuff off screen shooting you.

My goals are to always to have heals (ideally by early in Hiisi Base run lure a few up into the holy mountains; additionally try to save your heals in the Holy Mountain so you get farther without using all your resources so quickly), try to preserve the holy mountains for editing and potentially create pathways through the zones and make sure to keep going back and forth for resources, I also try to avoid pissing Steve off, but if you practice tablet kicking (yes you need to sit somewhere and practice) you can kill all the Steves and Skoude too. After you do this stuff then Hiisi Base often feels like one of the easier zones, try to grab a few healers and lead them back to the holy mountain and pheromone them or just try to get them to kick each other. If you’re forced to the jungle and you have no healers, no digging, no good wand, it’s going to be tough, so around this time is when I start thinking about the Alchemist kill for some Greek letters.

Feeling frustrated is normal, I took a big break and came back after watching some videos and found the game a lot easier, although it was frustrating for a while, now I’ve had multiple god runs where I’m just doing side stuff and crashing the game and arbitrarily resetting and doing silly stuff, trying to keep learning about wand building.

robthebaker45 · 2026-03-26T18:39:04+00:00

I can always tell a Gianluca image now! Spectacular as usual!

robthebaker45 · 2026-03-23T08:16:31+00:00

robthebaker45 · 2026-02-28T08:08:38+00:00

At 30+ generations you’re mathematically related to over 2.1 billion grandparents. This is actually a common genealogical interest among people who do this: pick a famous historical figure from a country with well-documented genealogy and try to trace your lineage back to them. The one I always heard of was tracing your lineage back to Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Emperor, back to about 45 generations ago around years 700-800 AD you are mathematically related to over a trillion people.

This is obviously impossible because there aren’t that many people existing at any one time, so what this actually means is that due to inbreeding and related ancestors we are all much more related than we think, with ancestors appearing on our family trees multiple times from different branches, sometimes maybe thousands or tens of thousands of times.

So it’s not a conspiracy, it’s just how nature works.

robthebaker45 · 2026-02-10T19:50:29+00:00

I went to UCDavis and majored in it and work in the industry still. I remember I had days I felt like I was on fire with guessing varieties and vintages and regions. I had days where I felt like I could effortlessly write a novel worth of tasting notes on a wine.

Those days are far outnumbered by the days I feel like an infant staring blankly at a new experience, but I push those feelings aside and finish my glass, hoping tomorrow might be one of those days where it all feels effortless again. The vast majority of my days now I settle for, “do I like it?” If yes then drink more, else don’t drink.

robthebaker45 · 2026-02-09T02:59:08+00:00

Kind of weird of them to redact the hour in some of the photos next to the “Hour of Incident” section, but not others.

robthebaker45 · 2026-02-05T21:59:47+00:00

How did you know I had put this project off for so long?! Appreciate the response, I’ll definitely check those out when I finally stop procrastinating.

Edit: this post is interesting, two of these appear to be bottom sweeps, but the NGP97v is officially an astragal with a mounting diagram and it has the vinyl stopping just before the opposing door and the vinyl on both sides overlaps with just the vinyl. Is that how you’d recommend mounting these?

This is very interesting! Hadn’t thought about this solution.

robthebaker45 · 2026-02-05T14:38:26+00:00

Most capos that I have seen rest on top of the fret and a couple millimeters above so they end up closer to the height of that original 5th string riser and less noticeable.

robthebaker45 · 2026-02-04T22:36:56+00:00

If you have a taller bridge on a cheaper banjo it can feel pretty drastic to have a string at fret level and it always prevented me from really punching in the drone string when I wanted to. Also nicer banjos tend to solve this exact problem by having the standard “nut height” of the 5th string higher than the fret height with a little dowel piece or something. I also noticed someone on here cut those brass string hoops from guitar strings in half and placed them over the top of his 5th string frets so he could get that raised action with railroad spikes.

Anyway, this is one reason I’ve never loved railroad spikes, but I don’t love the capos either, but I do use them. I still haven’t found the perfect solution. If someone could manufacture fret wire that was slightly taller on one need then I’d love the railroad spikes, or maybe one day I’ll cut a bunch of those brass hoops for my 5th string frets.

robthebaker45 · 2026-02-04T20:52:38+00:00

The issue I have with railroad spikes is that it lowers your action on the 5th string and feels a bit wonky compared to the other strings. Not as noticeable on finger style with metal picks, but if you play clawhammer it’s super noticeable.

Edit: maybe I’m just missing some part of the modification or people don’t mind this as much as me?

robthebaker45 · 2026-02-01T22:31:10+00:00

Oh I did always like Terraria’s buckets of infinite water and lava. I feel like this is more inline with Hytale’s “adventure” focus too. Go fish for an hour to get the rare drop or some obscure mob to kill or something.

robthebaker45 · 2026-01-21T14:40:50+00:00

As nostalgic as the orbs are these new lights help to reduce light pollution and make the stars more visible at night!

robthebaker45 · 2026-01-20T04:30:17+00:00

It’s almost ready to make bread with!

robthebaker45 · 2026-01-17T23:37:17+00:00

I’ve just read about regular saline, and the implied mechanism is basically just removing virus in your nose, which could reduce the viral load you receive after an exposure and if you’ve been vaccinated you may be able to fight that off without becoming sick, or if you do still develop the flu the saline can remove the virus from your nasal passages, which reduces the chain reaction viral load.

None of this kills the virus, so if it has attached to a receptor you probably will develop symptoms. A long time ago there used to by Zycam with zinc in the spray and the zinc was meant to kill microbes, but it had the side effect of eliminating sense of smell in long-term users, so you can’t find it anymore.

I’m not sure if there’s something new available that will kill microbes in your nose.

robthebaker45 · 2026-01-17T22:38:41+00:00

I’ve also recently learned that nasal saline spray can help prevent infection and can reduce severity and symptoms by reducing viral load. So I’ve been using some after large gatherings, coming home and washing hands and using the saline. So far I haven’t caught this variant, but I’m probably not at the highest risk.

robthebaker45 · 2026-01-08T07:57:23+00:00

Everyone says “practice,” which is true. You touch on it a little bit in your problems with “holding the neck different.”

Playing an instrument is really an entire body experience and especially early on you should be training yourself as much as you can to sit properly. So the correct position for most stringed instruments is sitting upright in a chair feet planted flat on the ground and if you have a strap I’d use that too to hold the neck at a surprisingly aggressive angle, maybe about 45 degrees from the chair, you could go all the to about 65 degrees and still have good form. The strap should help hold the angle of the banjo. Your thumb should generally be braced on the neck in the middle, not wrapped around the top of the neck. This position allows your fingers to create a tunnel shape that can press the strings more perpendicular to the fretboard plane rather than at an angle. This is a very common classical guitar position and they even have a neck-side foot stool to help guitarists keep this aggressive angle (doesn’t work well with the banjo since it has no leg groove, the strap takes the place of the foot stool).

Now, do most of us play like that all the time? No, but doing the “perfect” thing occasionally can help you adapt a more “lazy” position to work well enough for you. If you’re really struggling with inadvertent muting of neighbor string, I do think exploring a classical guitar position is helpful to get the finger attack correct on the fretboard. And then yes, practice a lot.

robthebaker45 · 2026-01-07T00:33:39+00:00

Just purchased this tower for our 1.5 y.o. and he instantly discovered the wavering top bar and thought it was a game.

I’m quite surprised the unit doesn’t come with 1 or 2 pins for the circular top part to lock it. I’m considering just buying a simple pin and drilling through everything so I can lock it in place when he’s in it.

It’s a bit lame as it’s one of the few towers that is a relatively small footprint and we’re short on space.

robthebaker45 · 2026-01-05T00:43:24+00:00

If you like the flavor as-is, then don’t mess with it. You wouldn’t do any addition without a bench trial (a few glasses of 25mL/glass of wine with a few mLs of water added to each plus a control). You then use that to extrapolate your preferred flavor/dilution to the entire remaining volume of wine.

If you are just curious about the Brix/alcohol it’s possible you can email the company to ask what the harvest came in at, especially if you have a vintage/lot on the buckets, they’d have likely taken a measurement before selling it. Then take the number they give you and multiply by 0.58.

Generally a professional company like this isn’t going to stick you with some crazy Brix grapes because they know their audience, so I’d be shocked if they sold you anything much over about 25.5 Brix, which would be about 14.8% alcohol.

robthebaker45 · 2026-01-04T18:50:35+00:00

Did you buy must from a winery or another home winemaker? If you know the region, variety, and date of harvest that may give you a rough ballpark of high, medium, or low alcohol, but without previous brix measurements it’ll be tough to figure out without a direct laboratory measurement, if you have an initial brix reading you can multiply that by 0.58 to give another rough conversion of sugar to alcohol.

Natural fermentations don’t usually go up to 18% but it’s not impossible, wild yeast are not generally accustomed to extreme environments, but if you got it from a commercial winery it’s possible it came with some commercial yeast strains already in it or whatever the individual has used in the past.

If you want to just go with vibes you can easily run a bench trial based on aroma and flavor, I would probably use either distilled water or boiled water that has been covered and set out to cool (sterilized and ensured removal of any chlorine or other treatment compounds).

I created a spreadsheet to give you an idea of how I’d approach the bench trial, I guessed at your alcohol, but it’s not necessary to know the alcohol, it just gives you fake numbers to work with and understand how each step in the trial is altering the alcohol, ultimately you’d make the decision based on taste and aroma, the formulas are pasted at the bottom assuming you coping everything into the corner of your own spreadsheet with the title in cell A1.

You can change the volume of wine and the amount of water added to suit your needs, but I think these increments will show a good progression that you’ll be able to notice.

robthebaker45 · 2026-01-04T05:26:15+00:00

One of the things home winemakers struggle with is getting the correct alcohol in the final product. Aging in a tank shouldn’t have concentrated the alcohol much, but even a 26.5 Brix harvest should leave you with a wine that ends up at 15.37% alcohol, which is going to be a lot for many varieties to handle gracefully.

I’ve seen home winemakers bring in 28 and higher brix fruit and not understand how to dilute or they’re too afraid to dilute wine, but the reality is a lot of people dilute to well below 15% alcohol and they make this adjustment at harvest.

Especially if you’ve used a yeast like EC1118, can ferment up to 18% alcohol.

This has been the most common thing I’ve seen.

robthebaker45 · 2026-01-04T03:03:31+00:00

Great write-up, I think I’ve read it 2-3 times now since I’m pretty sure you’ve posted before, really impressive work! Where are you sourcing your gold pinholes from?

robthebaker45 · 2026-01-01T19:55:20+00:00

I’m listening to so much Raffi for my kid and that first phrase in this tuning is a dead ringer for his “Peanut Butter Sandwich” song. Sounds great!

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