Ah, I wonder if it was new enough to not be dead simple, but not new enough to not have any documentation or spare parts?

I didn’t even know what a zipper foot is, but it turns out I have one, lol. That shows what I know.

What was your hand-me-down? I’m working with a 1950s machine, and it seems to work great for me, but i have to admit I haven’t used a machine built in the past 20 years, so idk what I’m missing.

Most modern sewing machines have capability to do so much more than you probably really need.

Personally, all I really need is a machine that can do straight stitches with adjustable stitch length and reversing. I have a 1950s machine that does that, and it was free to me, and there’s attachments for zigzagging if I want.

If you are just patching and altering clothes, that’s probably all you need, too.

I’m the other way around. Anything I buy i want to run off 18650 (or similar) cells, and i don’t like anything that requires disposable batteries.

This is something I keep getting close to buying, but it seems like all the reputable brands i know are very expensive.

Then there’s “6-letter, All-Caps”-brands selling for like 1/6th the price and they are app controlled which is bad to me, and I’m suspicious of those brands, anyway.

Good stainless cookware can be stupid cheap, too. If you don’t care about fancy tri-ply, you can get a perfectly usable pan from a restaurant supply store for $20.

I have a Leatherman Tool, as in, when they only had one model, and it was called the Tool. I dread the day when I inevitably lose it somehow.

Agreed. People might balk at the cost of some tools, but generally, if you are doing a project that’s within your comfort zone, you might only need 1 or 2 more tools.

Oftentimes, tools will pay for themselves in 1 job when compared to the cost of hiring someone. An example job I was thinking of is installing crown molding. It looks like based on a rough estimate of the measurements of a normal house, materials might $1000 for cheap wood. You could get a nailer and miter saw for less than $500. Compare that to an online calculator that estimates $4,000-$6000 to pay someone to do it.

Renting tools is occasionally the way to go, but renting for a week often costs more than just buying the tool. A rental tool might be a better brand, but unless you are using it every day, you don’t need that level of durability.

I have a similar setup (keezer), and i really want to start kegging a wider variety of drinks, but I’m not going to make a whole 5 gallon batch of tepache. Putting 1 gallon of liquid into a 5 gallon keg isn’t ideal cause you either have a lot of oxygen in the headspace, or have to waste a lot of co2 purging.

Unfortunately, 1 gallon kegs are way more expensive than 5 gallon kegs.

I recently had a rental car while on a trip, and most of the cars in the rental pool were plug-in hybrids. Do they think someone who’s renting a car and staying in a hotel is going to figure out how to charge a car for just a little bit of range?

I’m not a fan of any stretchy fabric from a bifl perspective since it wears out. Depending on design it can be replaced if it needs to be.

The main problem with zippers is that they aren’t really made to be load bearing the way they are when used as a boot closure. It’s an automatic weak spot. It probably doesn’t matter for a fashion boot, but the good designs I’ve seen don’t just have a zipper to the top, they have some kind of additional support to prevent the zipper from being pulled apart.

OP, look up paratrooper boots (aka jump boots). I think they fit the look you want, and it seems like there’s plenty of brands that make them with good materials.

The way i look at it is that they make it real easy to seek and destroy trees-of-heaven, even in a forest where all you can see is the trunk.

I’ve never been someone who can eat the same thing multiple days in a row, so i can’t do the “standard” approach of making proportioned meals. I also can’t just eat food I’ve heated back up in the microwave for every meal.

In a perfect week, I’ll make some bread, some rice, a soup/stew, a sauce of some sort, etc. I also make a lot of yogurt and ricotta-type cheese (from milk, not whey), because milk is heavily subsidized where I live.

I basically just try to have different things I can combine in different orders, and typically I’m leaving some part of the process to still be done each night (roasting veggies, boiling pasta, stir frying something, etc).

Everyone (including me) wants rooftop solar cause it seems like free real estate and the idea of having your own power generation is nice, but ground-based systems are definitely better.

And obviously that’s separate from the benefits of community solar.

No one is accidentally buying ‘sparkling protein’

Obviously, true Hamburgers can only be made from humans born and raised within the Hamburg city limits.

If you see “plant burger” and you are misled to think that it must be made of beef, that says a lot more about you than the manufacturer.

Yeah, some beans just seem to give more fines. Makes sense that the process used to decaffeinate beans could make them more brittle.

Fining is a super common technique in brewing/winemaking. I wonder how they chose that specific fining agent (other than that it’s vegan, though there are plenty of other vegan options).

One thing that would make this technique better is decanting before adding the fining agent.

E.g.,

• combine coffee/water
• let sit 1 hour (or however long it takes for extraction to level off) -pour off supernatant -add fining agent
• wait till tomorrow
• decant again

Fining agents bind with stuff in the coffee, and by adding it at the start, you’ll probably lose a bunch of it to larger coffee particles that would have fallen out of solution easily.

Finings work in 2 steps: coagulation and flocculation. First stuff bunches up into larger particles due to electrostatic charge (coagulation), and then it falls to the bottom (flocculation). The flocculation part works better the colder you get it.

With a v60 (and many other types of filtering), the filter itself doesn’t do the majority of the filtration. The bed of coffee grounds basically act as a filter for themselves (obviously held up by the filter papers at the bottom). It’s why if you pour aggressively or stir the grounds as it’s filtering, it will draw down way slower; fine grounds that would otherwise be trapped by courser grounds end up lodging themselves in the pores of the filter paper.

I’ve done the same process you are suggesting (and the same process but for filtering milk punch), and it was slower than filtering with everything. I think technically, the fastest might be decanting the supernatant into a separate container, spooning the grounds into a v60, and then pouring the supernatant through it gently.

Yup. Butyric acid, it’s what makes parm and Hershey’s chocolate taste like they do, but its also what makes vomit smell like it does.