I think it ends up being the same amount of work for me. Rinse rice (optional), figure out correct amount of water for that type of rice, place on heat until done. Rice cookers can effectively detect that there’s no more liquid water, but that isn’t the same as “done” unless you used the right amount of water.

IMO, rice cookers are really handy if you are the type of person who eats rice as a staple food item that you buy in giant sacks and eat the same variety of every day. I have like 6 kinds of rice I rotate through, so I think it wouldn’t save me enough work to justify a separate gadget.

I’ve never used one of the really fancy pressure cooker rice cookers, though, so maybe my feelings would be different.

Yeah, I definitely understand that. I certainly have things that I don’t use as much as I hoped (I’m staring at a solar panel doing nothing leaned against my wall). For me, I really need the resulting “thing” to be something that I will use/be excited about.

That’s why, for me, fixing stuff that’s broken, upgrading stuff, or repurposing stuff you already own is good. Replacing a worn out jack is a relatively simple task that can turn an expensive brick back into a nice thing.

The tools you need are not a very long list. You can get a cheap, crappy soldering iron for $6, solder for $4, a crappy multimeter for $7, and one of those magnifying glass/alligator clip things for $6 from harbor freight. Despite being poor quality, a lot can be accomplished with just those tools.

I ended up buying a bench power supply for like $40, but you can just get DC power supplies from the bin of assorted cords at your nearest thrift store for basically free.

Wow, you couldn’t be more different than I am. Over the years, I’ve bought kits that had tutorials along with them, and I could never get hooked by them. I guess there’s better tutorials for things now than “make a bunch of LEDs blink in order”, so maybe the terrain is different.

There are so many kits you can find online, and I think a lot of them are more or less interchangeable. I suppose it depends on what extent you want to focus on digital vs analog circuits, but given that you mention robotics, I would assume digital. Grab one of the kits that has an arduino or raspberry pi and a bunch of other components. In the grand scheme of things, components are cheap, but no one is going to ship you the 5 exact resistors you need, so you need to have a fairly large assortment to choose from for different projects. Kits are going to come with different components like digital readouts, joysticks, etc, so just choose one that looks like it has the things you would like to learn to use.

It seems like kits are divided into “contains every part of a specific project” or “contains parts for 1,000,000 potential projects, and here’s a booklet of tutorials for some”. I prefer the second, but you could prefer the first depending on if you want to go right for robotics use cases.

Personally, my best learning has been through repairing home appliances and stuff like that. Even just “necropsies” on broken things to understand how they work.

Something that you’ll notice with electronics these days is that sometimes the difference between a base model widget and the “premium” widget that is 1.5-2 times the price is the addition of a handful of cheap parts. They might be easy to put in and cheap, but they are going to remove as many costs as possible for the base model. For example, a $350 dollar espresso machine with $100 of extra parts added can easily compete with a machine that costs $1000 or more.

I guess maybe it’s been a while since I’ve looked, but that soldering iron seems like a crazy good deal. I’ve been using a crappy iron with a way too stiff cord for the longest time cause I figured it wasn’t worth it for how little I have to solder.

If you wanted pizza to be “italian”, it would have to have no tomatoes, peppers, pepperoni, buffalo milk cheese, basil or a whole bunch of other ingredients that are commonly added to pizza.

Pizza is a global food, do with it as you will

It’s also useful as a visual notice of a parenthetical comment.

All news has a bias, some news just doesn’t tell you what their bias is. I’m not advocating for intentionally aiming for biased news, I’m advocating for knowing what the bias of the author/editor of the story is, so that when you read it, you know what conclusion they might be trying to lead you to. Even if a journalist tries their best to be impartial, that’s not possible, and like I said, it’s very easy to tell a one sided story with exclusively facts.

News sites often have multiple feeds, but many these days don’t. And the feeds still aren’t as granular as I’d like sometimes. My regional newspaper has a feed for news more specifically local to me, but it’s bogged down with children’s sports and obituaries.

I think my dream setup would allow some intelligent filters to get rid of any categories I just don’t care about, and any “top 8 widgets to do X” filler advertisement articles. Also, a way to lump together all news articles covering the same story, so I could either choose which outlets to actually read/compare, or mark all as read.

I’ve not read 1440 at all, so this may or may not apply, but I’d offer a word of caution to any news that purports to be “just facts”. You can absolutely promote an agenda with only facts by choosing which facts to publish (and what stories to even cover). It’s sometimes better to aim to get news from sources that are just very transparent about their biases instead of claiming they don’t have any.

Yeah, this is the thing that always bothers me. Due to the very nature of them being large language models, they can generate convincing language. Also image “ai” can generate convincing images. Calling it AI is both a PR move for branding, and an attempt to conceal the fact that it’s all just regurgitating bits of stolen copywritten content.

Everyone talks about AI “getting smarter”, but by the very nature of how these types of algorithms work, they can’t “get smarter”. Yes, you can make them work better, but they will still only be either interpolating or extrapolating from the training set.

I wish it had the ability to filter feeds. There’s a lot of rss feeds that have good stuff interspersed with articles that are basically ads. Like just being able to filter out “prime day” or “the top X widgets to do Y” would get rid of a lot of fluff

It’s more devious than that. If company A lays off 1000 people due to “legitimate” reasons (e.g. twitter generally doing poorly), that’s 1000 people looking for new jobs. Company B, C, and D can then take that as an opportunity to lay off 1000 people each that aren’t immediately vital to the success of the company. Company A might not have the funds or desire to rehire right away, but the other three will slowly start building back up. You end up with 4000 people competing for 100 open positions. Many may not be willing to accept a pay cut, but some percentage will, and gradually the rest will be slowly starved down to accepting less pay.

Software engineering is notoriously a high paid career path, and executives at these companies hate that, so any opportunity they get to suppress wages, they’ll jump on. Especially if you know every other big company is doing it to, so they won’t be able to turn that into an advantage against you

I use Feeder for rss feeds, and I’ll save articles in there for later

I don’t think this is android specific, but having the IR LED that allowed you to use your phone as a universal remote. I get that lots of TVs are getting fancier remotes that communicate in other ways, but there are still plenty of applications of the IR LED.

For some things I mostly just want to get rid of, and that don’t have an easily defined value, I’ve still used Craigslist. It seems like a vestige of the old internet that I’d like to keep around. If it takes a while longer than it would to sell stuff vs Facebook, that’s okay. For things that are small enough that shipping isn’t horrible, I go for ebay. For clothes, there’s a few different sites that I think are popular and good, but I basically wear clothes till they don’t have any resale value, so I’ve never needed to use them.

And density. There’s more salt in a spoonful of table salt than a spoonful of kosher salt

Have any kind of source? Every source I’ve seen says that running oversize is worse. In my own experience, it led to humidity problems, too. In fact, every source in seen says its better to undershoot than overshoot.

Yeah, if I recall what I had read about it, the part that was new was that oil well drilling technology was being applied that could really expand the types of ground it could be used in. I think the equipment has also gotten more compact, so it’s easier to drill in smaller spaces to be able to install it in more existing houses. I don’t think it’s really been any technology breakthroughs, but more like improvements in the engineering of it

The main thing with heat pumps is that they obviously do heating and cooling. For most other systems, those two functions are separate, and can be sized appropriately.

If you live in a climate that is mostly hot, with some cold days, you’d size to accommodate the hottest days. If you live in a cool/cold climate, where you’d only occasionally need cooling, you’d size for the coldest days. Going oversize is bad because it is inefficient and just doesn’t work as well. It is often better to size the system to accommodate 99% (or whatever %) of days, and have a little backup heat and/or cooling capability for when the pump can’t keep up than it is to oversize and run inefficiently most days.

I lived in an apartment with a heatpump sized to handle the cold, and it kept me warm always with no trouble. It wasn’t that cold of an environment, though. During the summer, it would kick on to cool the place, and it would cool very fast. That sounds good, but what happened is the temperature would be fine, but the humidity would be very high, and I would get condensation on my windows and mildew in my closets. I ended up having to increase the hysteresis of the system, so instead of letting the temperature rise a couple degrees above the set point and cooling a couple degrees below the set point, it had to swing much further. That made the system run long enough in one shot to decrease the humidity, but it basically made it so I’d have to either let the place get uncomfortably hot first, or cool it down to uncomfortably cool.

If the system were smaller, maybe there would be a few days a year where I would have to wear a sweater inside, but I wouldn’t have to worry about 150 days of too much humidity.

The last thing to think about is air-source vs ground-source. Air source is basically a drop in for an air conditioner, but has a lower limit on temperature it will operate. That limit has gotten a lot lower over the years, but AFAIK, there are theoretical limits it can’t beat, depending on the physics of the system and particular refrigerant. Ground source, aka geothermal, should work most places provided you have the space for it, and money to install it. Underground never gets cold enough that the physics of heat pumps aren’t effective.

There’s new technology coming along that won’t require digging. You can actually use vertical drilling instead.