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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Lots of things. The main one is dust mites. Any clothes that I have in my closet or drawers that I haven’t worn for a while will make me sneeze uncontrollably for an hour if I pick them up. Same if I get a spare sheet from the linen closet, if it’s been in there for months, it will set me off. When I vacuum the house, I need to use one of those hypoallergenic HEPA vacuum filters. Dust mites are everywhere all the time, no matter how well you clean your house. Technically it is the shedded and disintegrated shells of dead dust mites that people are allergic to, it accumulates over time in places the mites live.

    Other than that, I’m also quite badly allergic to black mold, and have a reaction to pollen and grass seeds.

    I’ve never taken a proper allergy test, I’ve probably got others I don’t even know about.



  • The concept of “inclusive or” in language is a bit different than that used in boolean logic.

    The simple case is: “would you like chips or salad?” “Yes.” Vs “Would you like chips or salad?” “chips”.

    In this case, it’s unclear whether the question is: “should a video card or monitor come with a cable?” “Yes” Vs “Should a video card or monitor come with a cable?” “Monitor”.

    The two examples I wrote were attempts to reframe the question in two different ways to avoid that ambiguity.

    As you pointed out however, OP wrote the question backwards, in a way that could be interpreted in a third manner, where buying a cable includes a video card or a monitor.


  • Printers are one of those things that has never come with a cable. I remember even back in the 90s, you’d buy a new printer, and they’d ask “do you need a printer cable too?”. Back then they were parallel port cables, but the trend continued when printers adopted USB.

    I always thought it was a blatant upsell conduit. Of course I need the cable. Can’t use the printer without it!

    These days however, I’ve got so many printer cables including parallel port, USB-B, and ethernet, but I mostly print via wifi. Now I’m glad they don’t come with cables, and same with graphics cards, and even mobile phones.










  • My favourite use of this meme was in a recent episode of Tor’s cabinet of Curiosities. The episode was talking about Wikipedia’s lewdest editor. There was a famous Wikipedia editor who was a little too obsessed with creating hundreds of new very detailed wiki pages about super specific boob-related topics. About half way through the episode about the career of this editor, Tor started a sentence with “As he breasted boobily across Wikipedia…”. At that instant I felt the meme had achieved full power. I had to pause the video and bask in the beauty of it.



  • For tracks I’m familiar with and play often, I can usually tell the difference between 128kbps and 192kbps on an MP3. In very rare cases, with the right song and the right earphones, I can discern 192kpbs MP3 from 256kbps. But I definitely can’t tell a 256kbps MP3 from FLAC. The Wikipedia article on audio transparency says that MP3 becomes transparent on average around 240kbps.

    I’ve recently started using the Opus codec. It is higher quality at lower bitrates than MP3. Opus is considered transparent on average at around 160-192kbps.

    Personally, I’ve been re-encoding all my FLACs to 192kbps OPUS for storing on my smartphone where space is limited.


  • I got the first Pokemon game (Pokemon Red) when I was 14 years old. I never watched the anime. Back then the game was revolutionary, I’d never played anything like it. The goal of collecting all Pokemon, gaining experience to level up, evolving to make new Pokemon, selecting and organising my squad, it really played into my young brain chemistry. I finished it multiple times. I got a game boy link cable to trade Pokemon with my friends and battle them at school. Thats exactly who the game is made for.

    I also played and finished Pokemon Silver, and Crystal. But after that I stopped playing them. Too similar, too repetitive, too many different Pokemon to know and remember, mechanics got too complicated.