For everyone following along at home: this website is worth a click if you’ve never seen it before!

Rinsing rice does wonders. Without a rice cooker you’ll need to strain it, but it’s still worth it.

1. Measure rice by volume. Let’s say 2 cups worth
2. Put into fine colendar and rinse until the water comes out clear. Mixing with your hand will speed this up. You can also do this in the pot you’re going to cook in and dump water out
3. Put strained rice in your pot
4. Add cold water. The ratio of water to rice matters a lot and varies by species of rice. The ratio will be printed on whatever container your rice came in. For Jasmin rice it’s 2 water to 1 rice, so for our two cups of rice you’ll need 4 cups of water
5. Cover, turn on medium-high heat, being to boil. Don’t go far because it will boil over when it does boil
6. Turn the heat down to low, crack the lid, and set a timer. The amount of time needed will vary based on rice. For Jasmin, 15 minutes is a good check-in time
7. Pop the lid. See water bubbling up? If yes, replace lid and come back in a few minutes. If not, use a wooden spoon to get a peek at the bottom of the pot. See water? If yes, replace lid and come back fairly soon to check again. If not, your rice is done. Turn the heat off, fluff, enjoy.

We made rice for years using this method and it is a very reliable cooking method. Rice doesn’t really leave you a lot of wiggle room though, which is where a rice cooker comes in handy. As an added bonus, some rice cookers come with water lines in them. I measure my dry rice into the cooker, rinse using the cooker, dump most of the water out, and fill to the appropriate level.

Different species of rice have very different textures and somewhat (subtle) different flavorss.

Some rice, like basmati, can be cooked using the pasta method (intentionally use way too much water and strain the excess off after the rice is cooked). I guess all rice could be cooked that way, but you would be giving up some starch.

I wonder how they calculated the range. If it’s representative of the real world drive cycle these will experience, the estimate might not be too far off. A postal route is constant low speed stop and go. Regen is much more effective at higher speeds, so they’re probably dumping most of their kenetic energy to hear via friction brakes. Suspect their drive cycle is going to be something like an endless cycle of 25 kw acceleration, rest, 25 kw acceleration, rest, etc.

https://ingenext.ca/products/boost-50

50 hp for $1k

I can’t find them right now, but there are similar things you can buy to unlock factory features at a discount.

Up front disclaimer: this is all conjure on my part.

I own an “AI” laptop (only because I was interested in a snapdragon x). Most of the AI enabled features don’t really require a NPU, such as a decent background camera blur, some paint and photo stuff, live captions, etc. Microsoft was looking for a headline feature that didn’t already have a CPU/GPU/cloud implementation. Enter: recal.

IMO this is very much about finding a novel feature, that doesn’t have an alternate implementation. The near term motive is to justify their “AI” PCs to customers in hops that customers adopt them. I suspect the long term goal is opening up a revenue stream for AI - get customers used to “AI enabled” features and then tack a subscription cost onto them, but I truly hope this won’t be the case - especially when the hardware you own has a NPU.

I haven’t spent much time looking at Linux support due to having a busy personal life, so I’ll live with Win 11 in the meantime.

That said, I don’t think anyone has Linux booting on any Snapdragon X machines yet. I think there’s a signing limitation (eg device OEM signing) and a graphics driver gap. It does seem like the first will be overcome eventually, otherwise no one will be able to build their own machine.

More people in the market means more people working on both of these things!

I certainly won’t complain about cheaper, but I’m pretty happy with my Lenovo 7x Slim. It has a 14.5" 3k OLED display, so it’s not the battery life champ, but it’s built well and priced pretty well at $1,200 MSRP. You can upgrade the ram to 32 GB and the SSD to 1 TB for $110 combined. Typical Lenovo experience for shipping a custom build, but the laptop itself is great. Uninstall McAfee and away you go. I’ve only heard the fan kick on once, it doesn’t heat up in any meaningful way, the screen and keyboard are great, windows hello is surprisingly nice with facial recognition, etc etc. No comparability issues so far, but I also didn’t buy it to game on.

Growing the ARM share of the market will only make the experience better for everyone - for both windows and hopefully also for Linux.

Oh, I still buy burgers. I’ll just go to a burger establishment to get them instead. Fast food used to be fast (aka convenient) and cheap. Now it’s just fast.

Note that I was not a frequent fast food eater before this, but I have pivoted to going to restaurants when I forget my lunch.

Or random application availability and/or ease of use.

Two cases in point:

• Photo Mechanic. It makes it really easy/fast to sort through tons of photos. There are some Linux compatible alternatives, but they’re just not as good
• Fusion 360. There are a couple of things you can do to make it work, but since Linux isn’t officially supported the install process can be a bit fiddily and there’s no guarantee that an update won’t break things.

Things are certainly better now than they have been in the past, but if you’re somewhat time limited (eg your computer is more of a tool than a thing to spend time tweaking) Linux can still be a bit offputting - especially if some of the core applications you use aren’t officially supported.

It’s pretty annoying in 10 too. I had a big scratch folder on my desktop and one day it decided to start syncing with one drive after a restart and one of those setup/welcome like screens.

Related: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/japanese-adoption-rates-majority-adult-men-a7524301.html

98% of all Japanese adoptions are employers adopting the adult men on their staff, not children

…

Some of Japan’s most famous companies have remained a “family-run” businesses because of “mukoyoshi,” such as carmaker Toyota, which was founded by Kiichiro Toyoda in 1937.

Suzuki is also famously run by adopted sons — in fact, the current chairman and CEO Osamu Suzuki is the fourth consecutively adopted son to run the group.

I work at a big company. We have tons and tons of problems to go solve that are getting little attention in addition to having a lot of redundant and/or “what would you say you do here” type positions. Most of this happens by accident, but it’s nearly impossible to unwind and redeploy those teams. My guess is that the big reasons why is because of leadership not wanting to look bad - a mix of “why did you staff this to begin with?” and “why did you let this go on for so long?” When these groups are eventually found during a reorg they tend to be let go vs redeployed, which makes it even harder for the remaining groups to do anything. The cycle is truly silly.

This isn’t about imperial vs metric, it’s about measuring by mass vs volume. A good example here is flour. Weighing out 30 grams (or about 1 ounce) of flour will always result in the same amount. On the other hand, you can densely pack flour into a 1/4 cup measuring cup, you can gingerly spoon it in little by little, or you can scoop and level. When you do this you’ll get three different amounts of flour, even though they all fill that 1/4 cup. Good luck consistently measuring from scoop to scoop even if you use the same method for each scoop.

I agree with your overall sentiment, but I personally find googles fuel savings optimistic and/or flat out misleading. “Hey, you could turn off your usual route here and get there in a similar time… Or you could stay on your usual route and save 2% on gas” seems to be a very frequent occurrence for me.

I also don’t think that needs AI. The pathfinding algorithm just needs to apply different weights to the choices based on things like changes in elevation, number of stop signs, total distance, etc. Navigation systems from yester-year could do this well before the prevalence of AI. That said, AI can be used to develop and/or tune these algorithms instead of having a dedicated team of humans focused on this specific area.

Duck Duck Go is repackaged Bing and Yahoo for the most part. - Said as a duck duck go user

At some point I should really try out one of the paid search options…

Really? Pixels have had that function for a while now. I always assumed it was stock.

We have two kids in a 3 bed/2 bath 1350 sq ft home. We do have a full basement, but the kids aren’t really allowed down there (power tools, toy stash, etc). I guess I do hang out there some nights, but that’s only because my gaming computer moved downstairs years ago when our oldest started to be able to reach the keyboard and pull key caps off it.

In our experience, you’re probably not going to do a lot of entertaining while you have young kids. While one of your kids is under 3-4, and sometimes older, they’re going to need naps. They’re also going to have early bedtimes. Naps are mostly behind us, and we do have afternoon play dates, but the kids don’t really care what space they’re in as long as they’re engaged and have things to do. Having an adult gathering is… very rare. We have a nice sized yard, so we tend to have gatherings outside.

I don’t think we need extra bedrooms or bigger bedrooms/bathrooms. An office might be nice, but working from the basement works just as well. A toy room could be nice, but to me it would be wasted space as the kids get older and have fewer, but larger/more engaging, toys. At least around here, the extra room comes with extra walls that result in a space that’s not often used (think a formal dining room).

There’s also the financial side of things. We could afford a larger house, but would rather be putting any extra into 529s, our own 401ks, etc. Kid related expenses really add up before you start also thinking about a bigger mortgage payment.

If anyone is ever in SE MI, the Henry Ford Museum and it’s adjacent Greenfield Village are worth a stop if you’re into Americana and machinery. They’re both filled with a lot of interesting things to see, learn, and do.

Samsung phones are largely assembled in Vietnam. It looks like they’re one of the few phone companies not relying on China though.

I am aware of them, but given my general lack of focused fitness I am fairly ambivalent about a fitness tracker. I do spend a decent amount of time chasing my kida outside and take the stairs/park far away at work, but my smartphone does a good enough job at tracking those activities.

A smart watch/fitness tracker makes sense if you’re actively engaging in use cases that they will enhance, but that’s not the case for me right now. I just want an easy way of knowing what time it is and I’ve learned to manage notifications on my phone so the important ones still catch my attention.