• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Coincidentally, I just got a knock-off Soda Stream from Phillips. It’s over $150 cheaper and works 2x-3x times better. I wanted to build something similar for a homemade soda bar concept, and discovered how truly cheap it can be to make soda and carbonated water at home. I was shocked at what a simple concept it is, and how much of a profit these sodas water companies make. Phillips even charging $50 for their system is a total rip-off.

    Truthfully, I think the increase in quality in the Phillips machine is due to fewer parts is an “exception that proves the rule” as these in-bottle carbonators seem to work better with fewer parts. It’s just a pressure hose connected to a co2 tank. Literally, all of $6 if you were to build one yourself from parts on Amazon (or $3 if you got he Alibaba route)

    I truly believe that the fewer parts the better in any DIY or commercial product due to the less chance of a failure in a part if there are fewer parts. This works fantastically for the “lower quality” producing companies, like Phillips.

    My inventive and engineering entrepreneur friends and I call this “fewer parts the better” concept, a “Murphy’s law compensator” as the fewer parts there are, the fewer parts that can statistically “go wrong”





  • I parents owned a cockapoo while growing up, and my siblings and I didn’t like it because it was aggressive as hell and my mother treated it like an actual factual babby.

    Once my sister was eating a hot pocket, and the dog wanted it, so it mauled her badly. It jumped up on the table randomly and mauled her face. It took several surgeries to get her face back to normal. My mother lied and told the police she had it destroyed.

    About 3 years later, it became paralyzed from the waist down after it attacked me. It jumped for my face and landed wrong. It didn’t die, and my mother blames me for the incident to this day, 30 or so years later.

    It would piss and shit all over everything until it died of old age about a decade later. All the while, my mother treated it more and more like a baby because it couldn’t get away, and it wore diapers when my mother wasn’t too lazy.

    I’m sure most of my issues with the dog were due to the owner being a shitty person.

    Though after it ate part of my sister’s face, I’m convinced that it saw everyone but my mother as “meat,” which is why I couldn’t get along with the dog. I mostly tolerated it until I emancipated myself early.


  • I’d rather remain comfortable not buying games from Ubisoft and EA.

    I refuse to waste a single dollar on every game from both companies, since we were all bent over and continue to get bent over because they just don’t care about anything but making more money.

    A good example from Ubisoft is the handling of the Driver series. They kept on releasing the games in the series in a near unplayable state before when most people had dial up.

    A good example with EA was the failed DRM with Spore. They only let you install the game 3 times, which glitched out to the point where people had to turn to piracy (warez and crackz) to play a game they paid for.

    We vote with every dollar spent, which gives me hope when people rally around good companies that do the right thing.







  • I have been using WUB, and some other extremely helpful tools that this company makes, for a few years at this point.

    The part that I LOVE about WUB is how complete and exhaustive the shut-off is for the ease of use.

    There’s no editing files, no editing anything, just download and press a button to turn on update blocking (while protecting the services that could mess up by blocking). Press another button to unblock everything as good as a fresh install.

    It’s as if it was never blocked when updates are toggled on, and it’s as if Windows update is completely removed with the blocking is toggled on.


  • My alts are always on my same name. It helps me not have to remember, but it helps me to compartmentalize.

    I have one over on lemmy.world that I made when RiF went down and it pointed to that instance. ‘Reddit is Fun’ was my trusted app of choice for so long that I figured that I’d go with their recommendation.

    That mindset was apparently shared with a lot of people, and lemmy.world became overcrowded and unusable every other day for a while due to traffic. That’s when I read that one should get registered at a closer and/or smaller instance in order to have better service.

    That’s when I moved over to SDF’s shockingly fast lemmy instance.





  • Random computer quirks always fascinate me. The strangest one I had involved a computer that shouldn’t have existed.

    One time in the early aughts I had a patchwork computer that I put together from the junk pile of a local computer store that a buddy of mine ran.

    It was barely holding together in a rusty frame, with zip ties and wood glue.

    Its modem was temperamental as hell. It would only stay online so long as it was pinging a website via command prompt. It was only some websites, too. Like I could ping Geocities, but not livejournel.

    I remember many weekends doing Mephisto runs in Diablo II, praying that my command prompt doesn’t bug out anytime I’d get anything worthwhile.