Home-brewer here. I’ve used a C02 canister and keg to carbonate my beer for a while, since it’s simpler and more consistent than trying to add sugar to a bottle before capping it.

I also bought a $1 adapter that lets me connect my CO2 to a bottle and carbonate a few liters of water with a few moments of shaking. Add a few tiny bottles of flavoring and I can make a 12-pack of seltzer in about 30 seconds with any flavors I have on hand. Pear is my current favorite, but I also have cherry, vanilla, orange and others, and they can be mixed. My kiddos love the ‘dreamsicle’ that is a few drops of vanilla + orange. I rarely add sugar, unless I’m aiming for a more ‘soda’ vibe.

The CO2 canister and gas regulator assembly was probably $70-ish bucks around 10 years ago. Refilling the canister is $20 and I do it around quarterly, while making 5-10 liters of seltzer a week. I have a homebrew store nearby, but I’m pretty sure that I could find a food-grade CO2 provider too, since any bar needs one.

I have friends who use SodaStream, but their gas canisters are terrible for pricing when you can do it yourself.

I used seltzer to kick a soda habit. I swapped sugary sodas like Mountain Dew for a non-sugar fizzy drink. I just couldn’t go for flat water and needed the bubbles. LaCroix and its cousins were a step in the right direction and having the ability to make my own on-demand was perfect.

Evanescence in my Lemmy? Hell yeah!

This recipe is garbage… I didn’t have any eggs, so I used olive oil. I also didn’t have an oven, so I put it all in my freezer overnight. It tasted terrible, although my 2yo liked it. My MIL told my wife to divorce me. 0/5 stars

not quite on-topic, but I hate online recipe sites/comments too

I jumped into Linux, via Mint, about a year ago when I refreshed my hardware. The transition was pretty easy, and I haven’t looked back. Steam runs fine and I haven’t had a modern game that didn’t work under default proton settings except for things I’ve run outside Steam and mods. Most of my personal PC’s workload is gaming and handful of web-based apps that are effectively OS-agnostic; Everything else has an easy equivalent in the apt repos.

I would say that my decision to embrace Linux as my OS was primarily influenced by my Steam Deck. Gaming on it has been simple and the desktop UI was easy to adapt to. I replaced my laptop with the Steam Deck, bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and a USB-C dock with HDMI out (all things I already had for the laptop). I now just hook into whatever TV is handy as a monitor when I need a computer on the go.

I was a tech enthusiast when I was younger, and am thus familiar with fucking around on the command line, but now I’m an old man who just wants his stuff to work and it just has… The barrier of entry for the Linux Desktop is effectively gone. We just need PR now.

Also, I think I’d replace Mint on my primary PC with SteamOS, given a simple way to do so. About a year ago, the desktop/beta SteamOS was not fully baked.

A company where the stated objective was to prioritize profit at the cost of human life. That’s a job to cause death.

The people working for that company are not likely to be in a position to quit over ethical issues, as they are trying to feed their families, but the CEO of that company made decisions that directly impacted other people lives and likely killed many. If he didn’t want to deny claims for care, he could have resigned. Instead, he profited.

His job was to cause death. As is the job of all for-profit health care companies.

I sure hope it’s not staffed with people that find CEOs repugnant…

There are no good billionaires and corporations are not your friend.

Don’t lump us all together. Windows users are just linux users who aren’t there yet.

I moved early this year and haven’t had significiant problems, though I’m IT savvy and can code my way around my issues. Linux is great, and I’d been halfway there for a long time, but Windows had the edge on gaming and simplicity. They fucked up, though when they started pushing for AI and Win11, at least for me. Where the Rubicon lies will be different for everyone, but it does exist for many.

We win by couching linux as the place to go to escape corporate focus and greed, not by being elitist.

Passive aggressive ‘All your veggies are actually fruits’ energy here. I love it :)

This has been a regular debate in my household and I’m with you on this.

I’m going to echo Ahardyfellow and Auster, but put it here so it hits your inbox.

It sounds like you are struggling with connections and novelty. Be active and ping your friend network, see who is up for doing new things with you: find a new restaurant and catch up, go to an active collaborative activity like an escape room, etc. Push yourself a few times and it will build momentum and keep you all connected.

If your friends aren’t up for these things, find new friends (and keep the old, you can have more than one friend group and they don’t have to interact).

I’m an introvert and leech off my wife’s friend group so I’m not the expert on making new friends, but I think Auster’s idea is solid: Find a hobby that gets you out of the house and talk to people doing the same thing. Plan to see each interaction as a success, even if it doesn’t make you a new friend or even go well. The goal is to socialize, and if you do that enough, you will find people who make you happier.

Novelty is a big factor in our happiness that doesn’t seem to be talked about much. If you are always following the same routine, try and shake it up. It’s not comfortable at the start if you’ve been in a rut, but it will make you happier. Put it on your calendar to do something new. Even if it’s only once a month, and the ‘newness’ is just doing something you like in a different place. Again, it’s momentum, and more challenging new things will seem less daunting over time.

I don’t mind the taste of the “healthy” tortillas. I generally prefer the taste of whole grain bread and pasta over white flour variants. My largest complaint is that they all seem to disintegrate when you look at them – probably a gluten thing, but they all just break or shred instead of hold together, which defeats the purpose of wrapping your food in them.

It does indeed. Thanks for sharing this, and I’m now a fan. Sadly, they seem to have split up after rebranding as ‘Twin Beasts’. I found the album for this on bandcamp: https://thetoottoottoots.bandcamp.com/album/outlaws ; and the rest of the album is great too after sampling a few tracks.

That lead vocalist is mostly incomprehensible, but his voice is awesome.

This is a really interesting question. If I were a researcher, I’d try to go chase this topic, since it seems to be fairly quantifiable.

Like Mudskipper, I can replay music in my head but it has a few caveats: I don’t really process the instruments… I remember the pitch/volume/etc but primarily of vocals. I also replay with the original singer’s voice and not my own. Replaying a few songs in my head now and I can’t even focus on the instruments if there were vocals unless they are critical to how the song works, like a bass drop. If I try to replay music that is instrumental, I get verbal recreations, like someone performing the song acapella. If i focus hard, I can hear instruments instead, but that requires thinking about it. This matches how I ‘sing along’ with instrumental pieces in otherwise verbal songs. It might just be that the backing music isn’t retained, so I can remember the melody, but not, say, a bass line unless the bass is being highlighted.

Are there people who CAN’T replay music in their heads? Are they immune to ‘ear-worms’ or do they just perceive it differently?

I’ve combined these headphones with earplugs for a plane trip. Engine roar overpowers the sound for bone conducting headphones the same way it does for earbuds or headphones that don’t isolate. You might still need to crank the volume up, though. Planes are loud. No issue of other people overhearing it at that point though.

As a parent, and as a kid who grew up in the infancy of the internet/Social Media, I think there is a very fuzzy line here. Specifically, I’m fighting the concept that ‘parents are 100% responsible’. I’m responding to Cookie, but not really disagreeing with them.

Kids have attempted to subvert their parents rules since the beginning of time. “I’m not touching you…” says the older brother in the car as his sister screams in annoyance. “You didn’t say I couldn’t have Ice Cream – With sprinkles on it!”

I am an IT professional, focused in Cyber Security. I can lock down anything that touches the internet – if it’s in my house.

My kiddo, though, has access to a school chromebook. Guess how much control I have over that.

Chromebooks are fun. I have one, I have a family account for him, where I can control what and when he can access the internet. If he logs into MY chromebook with his SCHOOL account, he bypasses all of those controls. Hell, even his school chromebooks have a ‘guest’ option that bypasses almost all controls at the OS level. That was a relatively simple fix (for MY chromebook, not his school one) once I caught it, but it’s a symptom of a bigger problem. All these internet connected devices tend to have their own flavor of browser with their own flavor of parental controls, if any. For any non-tech-savvy person to understand all the ramifications is unreasonable - and you’d better believe that the kids are more tech savvy than their parents and will find the gaps.

I don’t claim to know the solution. And I fully agree with the article linked: ‘Age verification’ and ‘Parental approval’ are BAD (from a tracking standpoint, but also because kids and parents might not align on some issues) if not merely insufficient, but I do think there needs to be some culpability on the service provider to ensure that children are not subject to obvious( and here’s the rub – what is “bad”) bad stuff.

If my kiddo turns out to be racist, that’s partially on me, but I need help from other parties to ensure it wasn’t because he tripped over a pokemon lets-play where the streamer was spewing hate-speech and he internalized that because he is 8 and takes everything for face-value. I literally cannot keep him off youtube completely, and even if I could, I would also deny him any bit of the cultural knowledge that would help him to make relationships in the real world. I have forbidden fortnight and roblox and you can’t imagine the angst I get from just those. (And he plays them at friend’s houses anyway)

The majority of the onus falls on parents, that is true, but kids are not rational and don’t see the world the same way adults do. I need help ensuring that my kid is not subject to the trash pit that the internet is. There are too many ways and places for my kid to fall in to terrible things. The linked bill is terrible, but we probably do need something to help the average parent keep their kids away from large parts of the internet. ___