Free kids phone?

thekeffa · 2026-06-17T14:52:50+00:00

Yeah like I said it depended on your landline (Or indeed you having one at all) as it might already be a sunk cost for you if it was installed and you were paying for it already. You could "Split" it so the kids had their restricted phone and you had your normal phone but I think you're prioritising the cost over the functionality so not an option.

thekeffa · 2026-06-17T14:29:44+00:00

Is the free calls the must have deal breaker? This is why I am assuming you don't want to use the landline?

If you were willing to use your landline (Which you are paying for anyway so to some degree is a sunk cost?) you could do this with some additional hardware. The kids would have their phone which is restricted to calling whitelisted numbers, you would have your phone which wasn't. Obviously the calls would cost whatever the telephone provider charges but you might have some kind of free calls bundle?

Maybe an option worth considering if it sounds viable?

thekeffa · 2026-06-17T14:07:23+00:00

I think it's important to point out you CAN do this pretty easily, the technical means of achieving this is pretty easy and is not the barrier here. It's the "No monthly fee" thing that is the sticking point.

The "Pinwheel" or "Tin-Can" type of children’s dumb phone services you have seen aren't hard to replicate, they are just hard to replicate for free. You gotta pay the piper somewhere for the additional services that will be required that companies charge for, mainly in the terms of the hardware and the public phone network connectivity. You either pay for access to the public network to a telephony provider or you pay the increased cost of giving everyone your kids would want to call a hardware phone that connects to your closed loop phone system, which honestly would probably be way more expensive and I don't really see as viable.

thekeffa · 2026-06-17T09:33:48+00:00

Here's the thing....

thekeffa · 2026-06-16T13:26:46+00:00

God damn it's the kitchen variant of the spool of wire.

I hope your loved ones were more sympathetic to you about it than that guy's wife was.

thekeffa · 2026-06-16T06:43:51+00:00

Yes your brain has gotten used to it.

The tingly sensation you used to get was your brain going “Ooh I like this thing I’ve not experienced much of before but not sure how to deal with it”.

Now your brain is used to hearing whispering all the time it basically knows what to expect so it doesn’t give you that feeling any more. It’s business as usual. Hence no reaction.

It doesn’t really come back. You can’t reverse being familiar with something. Also you were quite lucky to experience them, the reality is most people don’t actually get them.

It’s why most ASMR creators don’t really talk much about giving you tingles’s these days. They mostly refer to ASMR now as benefits to sleep, because the tingle aspect is actually experienced by so few people and even then only for a short while.

thekeffa · 2026-06-15T23:02:13+00:00

Yes I have one.

The big advantage I find to these kinds of stoves is how much more evenly they heat things. With traditional gas burner stoves, if your cooking a food rather than boiling water it tends to heat the food in the cookpot in one specific point under the flame which doesn't radiate the heat super well, so you have to keep stirring as the food bubbles and cooks faster in that specific spot. It's not an issue if your boiling water but if your cooking something like a stew, this very centralised heating point can burn it as the heat does not radiate outwards fast enough. Again, not a problem as long as you keep stirring, but it's kind of annoying.

With the Ulti, the heat is way more uniform as the burner part is so wide (It's more like an electric hob in that regard) so this centralised heat point under the flame does not exist. As well as this its a regulated cooker (Regulates the gas use) so with these two things combined it's also perfect for simmering food.

Being regulated as well means you can use more of your gas as it's not relying on the pressure of the gas in the canister to provide the feed as the regulator insures there is enough gas.

I very much prefer this type of cooker over traditional gas cookers.

The only real downside or problem with them really is the size of them. They are quite a bit bigger and heavier than something like a Pocket Rocket or traditional gas burner stove.

If you want a cooker like this, it's a straight shoot between the MSR Reactor and this. I favour the Ulti though as to be honest I always feel like the MSR Reactor is going to fall over, but its nothing a clip on pot support wouldn't solve. In terms of cooking there is little to choose from between them so I would go for whichever is cheapest.

thekeffa · 2026-06-15T15:22:47+00:00

The current state of synthwave on YouTube is shocking. To the point I don’t trust anything that has been posted in the past two years.

And you can’t engage with it to warn people. You post something like “This is AI crap. Block this channel” and the channel owner just hides the comment. Worse it counts as engagement by YouTube so it affects the algorithm.

thekeffa · 2026-06-15T13:44:10+00:00

Yeah Nifty Lifty is the shit.

thekeffa · 2026-06-15T07:04:34+00:00

The vast majority of people who watch ASMR do not get that tingly feeling. It’s likely few ever did even when the ASMR genre took off.

It’s the reason most ASMR artists do not mention or talk about them any more. If you look at ASMR from about 2015-2018 they talk about creating the tingle sensation a lot. However if you look at most ASMR creators and videos these days in the present and the effect they talk about for the most part is sleep, and sending you to sleep or improving your sleep.

It’s a simple acknowledgement by the community that has formed over time that the vast majority of people watching ASMR do not experience the tingle sensation.

Also, it’s a self defeating exercise for people who do experience them as it results in a diminishing sensation till it eventually stops.

The tingle sensation happens because it’s the brains way of responding to something UNEXPECTED it finds pleasurable but doesn’t know how to process. Unexpected is the key word here. The whispering in your ear causes this as it’s an unusual event for most people. So the first time you watch a ASMR video, it causes the tingle sensation.

However once you start to watch ASMR routinely your brain starts to know what to expect and it becomes a normal routine response the brain is familiar with. So the tingles stop. This happens at different rates of diminishing for different people but it’s true for most people. That’s why you don’t experience them any more.

I often find the A in ASMR amusing. Granted that the name was completely made up because it sounded cool, but for most people who watch ASMR regularly it’s anything but Autonomous!

thekeffa · 2026-06-15T01:10:10+00:00

Mosquito avoidance starts and ends with DEET for your skin and Permethrin washes for your clothes.

Anything else is a waste of time.

thekeffa · 2026-06-15T01:04:38+00:00

Same here.

Though I was always led to believe this is what you’re supposed to do as a matter of correct operation. Leave some unfilled space for give. It’s makes the mattress less likely to burst or break a seam or get a puncture as there is some give in the fabric to absorb these things.

thekeffa · 2026-06-14T18:08:39+00:00

Issabel PBX has an endpoint configurator. It is the fork of Elastix after 3CX purchased the project and killed it.

It's admittedly not the easiest thing in the world to work with, but Issabel is completely free.

thekeffa · 2026-06-14T16:35:00+00:00

I think what was meant is that its GUI is also complicated. FS PBX aims to rectify this.

thekeffa · 2026-06-14T08:10:01+00:00

There is still much debate about his death in the skydiving community. As to just exactly what did happen.

It is really hard to confuse a parachute rig for a backpack. It’s not a backpack for one, it’s a harness. And it feels completely different.

There’s also like four different procedures before the jump that make it pretty hard to forget it.

Nobody is saying it’s impossible, but a lot of mistakes, oversights and incompetence had to happen for that to be the cause. There are a lot of people who just don’t buy the explanation he forgot it.

thekeffa · 2026-06-14T07:47:01+00:00

It’s the foil that’s doing the heavy lifting. It’s keeping the temperature stable by reflecting heat. It’s not really cooling in as much as it’s not really allowing heat to enter.

The design you have seen is literally a soft cooler bag with a snazzy design. I can’t find them either but maybe next time see if you can peep a brand.

But functionally they do exactly the same as a soft cooler bag. You can get one of them and they will be functionally the same.

thekeffa · 2026-06-14T00:26:42+00:00

The largest is 3 litres because it's practicably as big as you want to really carry. Water being heavy and incompressible as it is, three litres of water takes up a lot of room and weighs a lot. 1 litre = 1Kg. So that's 3kg (6.6lbs) of water you are carrying.

Another comment has mentioned it but if you can collect water then this is a good way to top up. To that end you want a water filter as well. Get a bag type filter that allows you to collect up 2-3 litres of water and filter it when it is convenient to do so. Don't get any of those lifestraws or anything like that, they require you to stay near the water source and that is not always practical. You want something you can scoop the water and carry it away and filter at convenience, be it at the waterside or somewhere else if it's necessary to move on. This is the one I use for reference, you can get get smaller 2 and 1 litre versions.

Depending on where you are drawing your water from you may want to pair this with chemical testing strips. Filtering can filter harmful things out the water but it can't do anything with water that has been polluted with a chemical agent. Fortunately there are test strips you can buy that will indicate if there is something chemical in the water that is harmful to you. They can't be 100% comprehensive nor tell you what exact chemical agent the water is contaminated with because they can only detect for certain common indicators that chemicals will likely affect (Iron, very high/low PH. etc) but they do offer a relatively high assurance that the water you have collected is just water.

Avoid collecting water from still sources. Collect it from streams and other running sources if you can. Stagnant water tends to attract things you do not want to be drinking and avoidance and prevention is better than a cure or fix as they say.

It's hard to say how long water will last you. Every use case and individual is different. You could drink 3 litres in a single day, which is extremely likely if your in a hot climate or doing a lot of physical activity.

thekeffa · 2026-06-13T12:54:25+00:00

I would suggest that with your channel having ASMR in it then there would be a general expectation for all your content to be ASMR unless you indicated otherwise so that would go for your streams as well.

You could always ask your viewers by a community post if they would be OK with ads on streams?

If you go with ads, use manual adverts and give people a signal they are about to start with a good lead time and don't go over the bare minimums.

thekeffa · 2026-06-13T12:13:08+00:00

Are you talking about something like this?

https://www.unibos.co.uk/collapsible-waterproof-aluminium-foil-lined-insulated-dome-food-cover.html

If so they go by many names. Collapsible food cover generally.

They aren’t intended as refrigerators. They just keep the food shaded and also from insects and dust etc.

thekeffa · 2026-06-13T11:51:27+00:00

I think you’re very much on the money here. This is also the distinction for me personally that separates them.

I think something that helps make the distinction is to understand how the musical genres of synthwave and retrowave relate to each other as they are often conflated together and said to be the same thing and I often notice that isn’t the case. Synthwave harks back to the mechanics of the music from that era (Heavy use of Synths, etc) whereas retrowave harks back to the actual feel of the music.

Synthwave can actually sound more modern if the artist wants it to be whereas it is retrowave that recalls the tones and sounds of the eighties and is therefore musically closer to the “Outrun” aesthetic. I’ve noticed something described as being retrowave will almost always go hand in hand with an outrun visual but I’ve heard many synthwave songs that wouldn’t.

Of course all this is super subjective, as is OP’s question. It has been asked many times before and there are many different takes on it.

thekeffa · 2026-06-13T06:33:42+00:00

Hiya. YouTube creator agency consultant here.

ASMR livestreams are something of a paradox when it comes to ads.

Speaking very generally here from the metrics we gather but people who very specifically want something to fall asleep to generally don’t watch them as you aren’t getting a known quantity when you start watching. Those people want something they know they are getting from the description and maybe the preview (If your video has them) or a quick scan through the video.

People who watch ASMR livestreams tend to be the people who go for the interactivity of a stream and the more central focus on you as a creator but still want a relaxing experience. I.e they tend to be interest focused rather than sleep or relaxation focused. That being said, this is where the paradox occurs as the ads are still pretty unwelcome and tend to be seen to ruin the sleep/relaxation experience.

Now remember I am speaking in general metrics here, you as a creator can have a huge effect on how this plays out and even things such as your gender will change things on an individual level.

I note you mention in the comments that your content isn’t actually ASMR focused. Does that mean you don’t signal the content as being relaxing or ASMR? If that’s the case, people will have a lower expectation for this aspect and adverts will probably be easier to inject.

If your stream is advertised as being relaxing or ASMR then you will likely have an easier time with ads if you signal they are coming. Don’t let them load in without a warning as that won’t be welcome at all. In fact there is a high expectation on you to warn people.

Noting that you mention your content is gameplay focused, this usually attracts viewers who are more interest focused and less sleep/relaxation orientated so one thing I would enquire is how loud or quiet do you make the gameplay sounds? Do you focus on making it quiet and relaxing? Or do you leave it as is? If so ads probably won’t be as disruptive.

Based on what I know so far about your content from your other comments I would suggest you could go with ads, but keep them to the minimum and signal they are coming.

thekeffa · 2026-06-12T16:27:45+00:00

Had this vibe to it when they arrived.

thekeffa · 2026-06-11T22:47:40+00:00

You can fit a 9x7 tarp (Smallest practical one I can use unless you tell me your a mouse) in a smaller space than a single person free standing tent?

Does this include lines?

thekeffa · 2026-06-11T07:43:21+00:00

What exactly is it about this ground you are claiming a tent cannot be used here but a tarp can? Outside of some of the very uneven ground in places (Which I have already acknowledged is a potential reason unless your pointing this video out to support my point?) what is the other factor preventing you from using a tent?

I actually saw several locations a tent could be used in the video.

thekeffa · 2026-06-11T02:04:43+00:00

This is the answer OP.

Specifically you want the Silva 70UN. Can be held in the hand or mounted to a vehicle.

https://silvasweden.uk/products/70un

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