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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • If you aren’t getting good bread from your bread machine, you’re definitely doing something wrong. Bread machines are pretty simple and peaked in the 90s for the most part. I have one of the cheapest ones on the market from the 90s and the bread that comes out of my kitchen blows away everything at the grocery store for a fraction of the price. I make sandwich breads, pizza dough, English muffin dough, pretty much anything and it’s all good.

    I think the big thing people get wrong is not weighing their ingredients. You just can’t make consistently good bread with volumetric measurements. The hydration of the dough (ratio of flour and water) is very important and a cup of flour can vary a lot.

    There’s also a ton of very low quality recipes out there. Even the book that came with my bread maker is pretty terrible. If you don’t want to get in to the science of it, just stick to King Arthur recipes. There’s a ton of bread maker specific ones and they often have modifications for bread makers in the other recipes.

    Ingredients matter a lot as well. Besides the fact that higher quality ingredients produce higher quality food, flour isn’t interchangeable. So if you’re using regular cheap all purpose flour instead of bread flour, the amount of water it absorbs is different and you’ll get bad results. You can get decent enough white bread from cheap AP flour but you need a lot less water. It will be basically wonder bread though, nothing mind blowing.

    In terms of effort, I guess this is subjective. But I just started some whole wheat bread and it took about 5 minutes to weigh the water, salt, yeast, whole wheat flour, bread flour, and gluten. The cycle takes a few hours and my baby will have bread for lunch for the rest of the week. And it doesn’t contain any sugar or brominated flour like every whole wheat bread at the grocery store. Also with a decent loaf of bread is pushing 8-9 dollars at the store, this saves a lot of money. This loaf cost less than a dollar even using high quality flour.








  • We had considered moving from our high cost of living area to a cheaper state but ultimately didn’t because of our young kids. We’re squeezed pretty hard here and we could all live very comfortably on my salary in another state. But I couldn’t find a place with remotely acceptable schools. And who would our kids friends be? Very worried about the influence of their peers, raised by racist homophonic garbage.

    And beyond maternal care, healthcare in most “affordable” states is just bad. We have the best healthcare system in the country where we’re at. What if we move to a state in the bottom third of the country and one of us got sick? The healthcare stories from rural America are very chilling.

    And then once the kids grow up, what do they do then? No jobs, no decent higher education, lots of heroin, etc. Their options will likely be leave or fail unless something dramatically changes in the next decade. This might not really apply to Texas or the southwest but I’m on the east coast.



  • The beauty of Linux is that you can use pretty much any distribution to game and they’re all equally suited for it since you can install pretty much anything you want.

    You don’t have to use SteamOS although you can. Different distributions have a different philosophy and are different levels of beginner friendly. If you want something that just works, Mint is a good option. Mint is basically Ubuntu but with a lot of configuration out of the box. Ubuntu is a good option as well. But you don’t really need to worry about which is best for gaming.

    Microsoft includes Ubuntu in the Linux subsystem for Windows. I don’t think they are involved beyond that. Doesn’t really mean anything except you can use Ubuntu (and some other distros) inside Windows. This is only really meaningful if you’re trying to do Linux work but your employer forces you to have Windows.

    Nvidia supports Linux but they refuse to open source their drivers. I don’t have any nvidia hardware so maybe someone else can speak to this better. But I believe the proprietary nvidia drivers are notoriously buggy and out of date. AMD support is much better. There are open source drivers that work great. I’ve never even had to think much about my graphics card. People I know who use nvidia have more trouble. So this is good for you.

    A good jumping off point would be to first choose a distribution and make a bootable USB drive with it. Most will have a “Live” version of the iso (the install file) that lets you boot in to it without installing anything. So you can boot in to it before installing abs poke around, see if you have any hardware issues before committing. If you want to proceed, Google dual boot Linux/Windows and follow guides. Make sure you backup any data on your computer case things go wrong. It’s possible to accidentally bork your Windows partition.



  • At least with brewing beer, it’s offset by the price of beer. It costs about half the cost of a commercial corny keg to brew 5 gallons.

    If you’re disciplined and brew frequently (and drink unhealthy amounts of beer,) you can pretty easily break even or save money. I calculated something like 10 brews to break even on my set up and didn’t buy anything extra until after 10 brews. You can get great deals on used stuff too since people frequently get sober and drop out of the hobby and liquidate all their equipment. This is the dark side of the hobby.

    Kinda dorky but I have a spread sheet tracking all of my brewing expenses. I also calculate how much that beer would have cost of I bought it and subtract my brewing expenses from it. The goal is to keep that number from being negative. Right now I’m pretty close to 0 because I upgraded my temperature control abilities to brew lagers.




  • The answer is really nothing comes anywhere close to milk from a mammal. Anyone who tells you otherwise is coping or doesn’t know the true gloriousness of milk foam.

    I’m a former professional barista that can’t have milk and this is the bane of my existence.

    Basically all milk alternatives are essentially the same. They are water, a bit of something to give it a name and flavor (soy, almond, oat, pick your fad), and oil. Usually seed oil.

    The oil gives it the fat that tries to be foam. Oatly is pretty good but a lot of oat milk doesn’t have enough fat, I think most soy milk is good, I don’t know of any almond milk that works well which doesn’t make too much sense since almonds have a lot of fat.

    But you have to temper your expectations. Your best option might be regular milk with a supplement to help you digest milk.



  • I get exactly what you’re saying but I’m not sure I have a great answer for you. I think it’s all about dopamine. Smoking cannabis reconnects me with that childlike feeling. Also, having a kid really helped me. Seeing the world through her eyes as she experienced childhood is amazing. Before kid I felt like I couldn’t really enjoy anything like I could before without drugs. I’m not sure how much of that is depression and how much is just getting older.