My Soundcore earbuds recently kicked the bucket a bit too quickly for my taste, so I'm looking to spend more than $40 on my next pair. However, I'm not enough of an audiophile to get top of the line Bose/Sony ones. What is the best mix of good price and quality you've found out there?

Is it just me or does it feel like there is no big new song of the summer this year? Nothing is standing out to me. Like a Watermelon Sugar type of anthem, etc. What big hit are you all listening to a lot so far?

I've been idly browsing for a home weather station for a while, hoping to contribute to the local sensor network for a region that's got lots of microclimate variation. I saw this one from Seeed Studio today, and was hoping for some reviews and advice. Seeed Studio devices are known for open source software, and I wouldn't mind playing with writing a tie-in for sprinkler system automation so we're not irrigating when it's about to rain. It wouldn't be situated so far from the house that we'd need to use the LoRaWAN feature, though.

Concurrently, we just had an inch of rain dropped on our house in the space of 15 minutes, with winds that were taking down tree branches. The weather report says "light rain", weather stations a mile away continue to indicate that everything is bone dry with quiet air. This rainstorm breaks a nearly month-long drought. I'm finding it nerve-wracking that climate change makes it impossible to use past local weather as a predictor of what to expect for gardening, home maintenance, and outdoor activities, and local weather reports are so inaccurate. So that's (hopefully) where the weather station might come into play.

That being said, any chat about your local conditions and reporting from your station is welcome.

I enjoy a few weather tools. For example, I enjoy
blitzortung that shows live lightning. Currently, you can see a long chain of lighting through eastern Germany and up through Denmark, Sweden and Norway.

This is expected, since we’ve had very warm weather for a while, and it’s supposed to change to colder weather soon.

But is there a good website that can show me easily the weather front that is currently creating all those lightning strikes? The sites I know only shows vague colors and you can perhaps implicitly see some change in pressure, wind, temperature etc, but nothing that clearly shows an east front where for example you would expect lightning soon.

When talking with my therapist, the subject of writing is a constant. My obsessive approach to writing is a source of frustration.

I write well in my first language, and aspire to create short fiction . But I'm an over planner and way too critical of my own writing.

Anything longer than a single page is impossible for me because I'll obsess with editing and some misguided sense of "perfection", cutting paragraph after paragraph until I'm left with a decent micro story that you can read in two and a half minutes. Most of the time I don't even get this far.

So my question is, how can I force myself to be less self critical and obsessive, let things flow, and write longer stories? Are there any advices, books, courses, practices and exercises I can use?

My hypoglycemia issues are not related to diabetes fwiw. That said, I tend to get hypoglycemia a few times a day. If I catch it quick enough and treat, it's usually not a big deal, but if I get too low (maybe once I get into the 50s mg/dl), then after treating (usually about 15 minutes later), I get so. freaking. tired. Like, barely able to stand up exhausted. Currently dealing with this as we speak, and it's very frustrating. My endocrinologist told me it's normal to get tired like this while recovering. I'm curious if anyone else deals with this? If so, do you have any advice for dealing with the fatigue?

Tildes might be too small of a platform for this. If no one deals with hypoglycemia here, please feel free to remove it. I thought with the prevalence of diabetes, it would be likely there are folks who encounter this.

I have a box of scrap parts of PLA left over from 3D printing and I'm wondering what to do with them. PLA can apparently biodegrade but only in really specific conditions I don't think I can achieve like keeping it at 60c. I know there is a device that can turn the scraps in to new filament but its way too expensive for me. What should with this stuff?

I use Github and Netlify to run some simple websites for free. It works well. However, I've been thinking of experimenting with a database-backed website for fun and Netlify doesn't have any persistence.

What's a good way to do this that scales to zero when nobody's using it? I want to be able to forget about it entirely for months or years at a time. When someone visits, it should start up and run on demand without costing me $20 a month on standby.

Back in the day, I used Google App Engine for this. I learned a lot of datastore tricks to get around its poor latency, but I'm lazy and don't want to do that anymore. I'm pretty sure I want a SQL database and full text search. Either sqlite or Postgres would do, but I doubt there's a cheap enough way to run Postgres.

Litestream looks interesting and so does LiteFS, except that it's pre-1.0 and I don't know what changes fly.io will make that I have to keep up with. If I used Litestream, I'd have to figure out how to run it and where to store the replication logs.

Edit: one nice-to-have is being able to easily dump the database and run it locally or on another cloud provider. (I don't anticipate it getting so big that it's impractical.)

Just interested in how people's smart homes are set up and how they enjoy things or what they may dislike/wish was changed.

Alexa? HomeKit? Google? A mix? Other?
Glitches?
Any complex or otherwise unique use cases you've set up?

What are you reading and what's next on your list? Are you enjoying it or just trying to get to the next book you want to read?

I'm almost finished with Columbine by Dave Cullen. It's an in depth look into what led up to the massacre, the aftermath, and how it could have been avoided. It's a well written book and sadly still very relevant today. I would recommend it to any true crime enthusiast.

Next up is either Mindhunter by John Douglas & Mark Olshaker or Children of Dune by Frank Herbert. I've been in a true crime phase for the last year, but I'm also trying to finish the entire (original) Dune series.

So let's be real, a lot of dubs don't live up to the original. Stuff gets lost in translation, the actors aren't as good, for some reason they choose a guy who sounds like he's 10 to voice the teenage protagonist (coughanothercough). A lot of people prefer subs for that reason.

But sometimes, sometimes the dubs throw out the original script and go all-in on the hamminess for gag dubs, and by god they can be amazing.

The golden example: the Ghost Stories dub. They got a generic ghost hunting anime that they knew wouldn't sell that well in western markets, and thus gave the English distributors free reign on changing the script. Every episode is like an Abridged series, and so politically incorrect but so amazing for it. The voice actors are very obviously having a blast with all the ad-libbing going on, you can see them developing the characters themselves and loving it.

So what other amazing gag and parody dubs do you guys know of?

Just got a new laptop. Downloaded firefox plus a few extensions, found a thing that fixes Windows 11's weird task bar, deleted the bundled McAfee, installed steam, GOG, and Epic and switched everything to dark mode. I feel like I'm forgetting a ton of things, but I'm not sure what.

What do you include as part of the standard setup anyone should do with a new computer?

I think this has to be one of the oldest questions there is in the TTRPG world, but I wanted to see if the general consensus has changed with the rise of virtual tabletops.

When you have a player cancel on you, do you skip the session, or play without them?

What is your reasoning behind your decision?

Personally, I always play without them. This is a change from when I first started DM'ing, as back then I wanted to be 'fair' to my players. As I left University and went into work however, waiting until everyone was able to play became such a rare thing that it would mean hardly ever playing.

I love shoegaze. Nowadays, I am a bit out of the genre and scene but hearing shoegaze always makes me happy.

My first introduction to the genre was through Lowtide. They are an Australian trio (originally quartet) that were inspired by the classics like Slowdive. "Held" was the first ever shoegaze song I remember hearing a/o loving. Their self-titled album is one of my favourites of all time, and I have it on vinyl!

Of course, the landmark shoegaze album remember by many is Loveless by my bloody valentine. Great album, noisy asf and has awesome songs like "Only Shallow" ,"To Here Knows When", "Blown a Wish", "Sometimes", "Soon", "I Only Said". There are many other bands out there that deserve recognition, like Show Me Mary with "A Dream" from their self-titled EP.

So yeah. Post some of your shoegaze picks, if you love shoegaze.

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

Years ago, circa 2017, I spent a few weeks in Portland, OR for work. Naturally, I ended up at Jeffrey Morgenthaler's Clyde Common regularly. On one of the weekends, I went to Common for brunch and they served a "breakfast" cocktail in glass coke bottles. From memory it was sweet, earthy, rich with slight chocolate hints, mildly carbonated, and strong. It was totally different from most breakfast cocktails that opt for bright and citrus flavors (i.e. mimosas, bloody Marys) and I think the carbonation definitely helped soften the otherwise heavy design of this drink.

Unfortunately, I didn't have the foresight to ask about the cocktail's construction and Common closed shortly after. Recently, I've been trying to recreate it from memory, or more generously, recreate the idea of it (short of Morgenthaler himself identifying the cocktail, there's no way I'll be able to reproduce it). My best guess is that he made something close to a black Russian and ran it through a carbonator.

Here are my thoughts to riff off of that type of drink for a strong breakfast cocktail:
2 oz Bourbon, 1 oz Mr. Black, .5 oz Amaretto, .5 oz Maple Syrup, topped with carbonated water, built neat in a highball glass. I'm still tweaking the proportions, but given that Mr. Black is less sweet than other coffee liqueurs, and considering the dilution from carbonated water, I think a half/half mix of Amaretto and Maple Syrup is sweet without being cloying. I also went with Amaretto instead of another syrup like orgeat to keep the alcohol content higher.

Any thoughts? Other ideas in a similar vein?

In light of our 4th 5th^ish? anniversary here, I believe it is time for another thread on those beloved furry/scaly/feathered friends we all know and are beholden to.

So fellow Tilderinos, share your pets! Photos! Stories! Antics! Attitudes! How they've changed your life! How you've changed theirs!

Inspired by this thread

Several users expressed interest in reading Roadside Picnic after I recommended it in another (now deleted) topic about the movie it inspired, Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky, which in turn inspired the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. videogame series. So I thought this would be the ideal opportunity to create a Pop-up Book Club event about it to encourage others to join us in reading it, so that we can all discuss it afterwards.

My description of the book from a previous comment that enticed the others to read it:

The basic premise was really unique and interesting, too. Without giving too much away, it's a story of Alien "invasion" only when the Aliens visited Earth, instead of doing any of the standard scifi trope stuff, the event was basically like that of a Roadside Picnic to them. That is to say, they showed up, barely noticed the humans who were tantamount to ants to them, did whatever Alien travelers with incomprehensibly advanced technology do when taking a quick pitstop on another world, and left a bunch of trash behind when they left. The story is about "stalkers" that venture into the exceptionally dangerous wasteland left behind by the Aliens in order to recover their trash (also usually exceptionally dangerous, but also exceptionally powerful) in order to sell it on the black market.

IMO, it's a very good classic scifi novel, and also a relatively short one too (only 224 pages) which makes it ideal summer reading, and ideal for this sort of thing since it’s not a huge commitment. I think this could be fun, so if you feel like joining in, please feel free to. I will also be rereading the book to refresh my memory of it, and roughly a month from now I will make a follow-up topic so we can have the discussion.

The book is available on paperback at Amazon for $15, or on Kindle for $10, but your own local retailer or library might also have a copy. The Strugatsky brothers are both long dead though, so you can always pirate it relatively guilt free if you can't find it elsewhere.

p.s. If there is a decent level of interest, and this goes well, maybe we can even make this a regular thing. :)

Edit: For all the latecomers, don't worry if you don't read the book in time for the Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.

Let me know if you're interested by leaving a comment and I will ping you when the Discussion topic gets posted.

Hello ladies and gentlegamers, welcome to a new kind of weekly thread. Unlike more reputable threads around here which get their games from places like Steam and the Nintendo e-shop we are here to explore the some thing much more raw made by deranged indie developers running on too little sleep. That’s right we are here to talk about video games that come from game jams

Whats a game jam you may ask. Well imagine if you locked a group of game developers in a box for box for some quantity of time ranging from a few days to a few week and told them to compete with each other by building something around a theme and then judging whatever each other came up with, that's a game jam. Its voluntary crunch time and people are crazy enough to actually sign up for these things for some reason. There are more games submitted for various game jams than anyone could ever play and that is where I come in.

I select a double feature of two games each week on Saturday. I make no assurances related to quality or sanity. If you have issues with these picks leave a comment I will try and accommodate your feedback next week. Now without further ado, welcome one and all to the Saturday Game Jam thread(Its still Saturday somewhere in the world right?)

Anger Foot

Platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux
Genres: Shooter, Action

Do you dream of battling a sewer dwelling cabal of lizard people, are you mad that Gunpoint only let you have the gatecrasher upgrade on the last level, do you like hurting other people?

Anger Foot is a Hotline Miami inspired first people shooter born from the 7day fps game jam. Its got a thumping hardbass soundtrack and nonstop action to keep your blood pumping. Its since moved on to greener pastures and has a stated release on Steam in 2024 so if you like the prototype make sure to wish list the game on Steam.

Interminal

Platforms: Windows, macOS
Genres: Walking Sim

After gunning people down why not stop and smell the roses or perfumes as the case may be. Interminal is a short experimental game also coming the 7day fps game jam about wandering around an infinite airport smelling various perfumes, watching the planes take off, and contemplating life. Its a shame that everyone here lacks the hardware to actually let you smell the perfumes but you guys are an imaginative bunch so I trust you. Let me know what your favorite perfume is in the comments.

That’s all for now. In true Tildes fashion I wanted to start slow and maybe grow later. Again leave feedback in the comments if you feel an improvement can be made

NEXT WEEK

What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

I've really enjoyed Kenji's channel as I find it informative and not oversensationalised like the vast majority of food YouTube channels.

Are there any others that have got that magic mix of giving the food science and practicality, while avoiding the clickbait and sensationalism stereotype?

I love hearing about obscure or forgotten films that people are passionate about. I was in a thread on Reddit, IIRC, and someone mentioned The Man From Earth. I just watched it for the first time and I can see its appeal.

I'm sure you have more than one. For me, a couple of favorites off the top of my head are Wristcutters: A Love Story and Wings of Desire. And some old timey classics that I rarely hear mentioned anymore are I Know Where I'm Going and The Lady Eve.

I'm always in the market for new podcast recommendations, so here are some of mine. All available via your regualar podcasting app, probably.

No Such Thing As a Fish, the QI podcast. Odd facts and trivia. Rarely do I hear things I already know on this one. Obviously it's no Answer Me This but what is?

A Problem Squared, comedian Bec Hill and stand up mathematician Matt Parker answer listener questions, usually in excessive and fascinating detail. The presenters are good friends in non-podcast life and it shows in their chemistry.

The Guilty Feminist, a great mixture of standup comedy and discussion on a wide range of topics. Great selection of guests.

Lateral, Youtuber Tom Scott hosts a panel quiz where lateral thinking is rewarded. Fairly lightweight but still fun.

A Podcast of Unnecessary Detail, the Festival of the Spoken Nerd team do a podcast (Steve Mould, Matt Parker, Helen Arney). It is as you might expect, nerdy facty sciency stuff.

Wheel of Misfortune, comedians Fern Brady and Alison Spittle take listener submissions on unfortunate or embarrassing events and discuss their own misfortunes with a guest with a different topic each episode. More funny than perhaps it sounds.

Every now and then, my Japanese class and I head out to sing karaoke. I've never really been a fan of karaoke, but perhaps that's because most karaoke libraries don't really have any of the songs I've learned and/or want to sing.

So does anyone have any recommendations for Japanese karaoke songs? I'm not mentioning my personal music taste to keep the topic general, but feel free to ask if you're interested in helping me in particular.

I need to replace my Logitech G935s, the plastic on the top broke on me. Ideally I would replace with something with:

• more battery life
• better sound stage
• well built/premium feel

It's very hard to tell what is good out there - with so many options, and my concern is if I just buy any bluetooth enabled headset it will introduce audio latency which isn't something I can live with in games. But I cannot stand having a cord attached that gets all twisted up.

I'm not tied to it having an attached mic, as I can buy one separately but its a plus.

Anyone out there have any good recommendations? What does everyone else use?

I recently upgraded my phone and to my dismay everyone followed apples moronic choice to remove aux ports.

I want to keep using my KZ in ears, and while they have bluetooth adapters I rarely like how bluetooth sounds and also don't want to worry about having to charge them either.

Both adapters I've bought either buzz like crazy or my phone is convinced is constantly disconnecting and pausing my music. Anyone know of anything in the budget range thats as good as KZ or good adapters?

For many they are considered ~hobbies so ~hobbies.cars and ~hobbies.motorcycles would be a logical place. I don't know if ~transport would be a suitable main category for this since then trucks, tractors, trains and boats could also go there without bloating hobbies' sub-groups too much.

I'd like to hear your input on this, cheers.

When talking about adding new features to tildes, many people talk about adding more ways to customize your profile, since right now we only have the username and the user bio. The most common way other sites do this is by having profile pictures, but considering tildes is text based that wouldn't work out well.
Another way of doing this would be signatures. Not only would that distinguish tildes from reddit and HN, but it would be text based and look ok on the tildes layout. But what do you guys think? Would it be neccessary?

Edit: u/TooFewColours said this and i think it seems good. I've also heard about allowing your username to be a certain font:

I'd be opposed to profile pictures, but maybe simply being able to choose a single colour that decorates your profile page in a simple way would be a cute addition. Given the colours in the logo, I think it would be on-brand.

Every person in my household takes a daily regimen of prescription medication and/or supplements. We keep ending up in situations where we run out of something because we don’t have a good way to keep track of our remaining supply of each thing. We need a better system for managing this!

We each use a 28-day (4 week) pill dispenser box which helps somewhat. I refill the dispensers when they are empty. The problem is, some of the medications run out in the last week of the dispenser. At the time I fill it, it’s way too early to call the pharmacy for a refill. But by the time the supply runs out I’ve forgotten about it and have to scramble to get more. I hope I’m explaining that clearly. It’s complicated because every medication runs out on a different schedule.

If you’ve got a solution to this problem please share it!

I've recently noticed that some particular users, who post/comment quite often, frequently contribute with high quality content across an impressive spectrum of themes. These posts/comments usually go into great detail, an approach suitable of a "semi-expert", that honestly baffles me.

This lead me to think that Tildes users might be using AI language models to aid in the writing of their posts/comments. This possibility is quite disheartening since I found Tildes to be an extraordinarily engaging community, with a distinct human element that I haven't seen in other bigger forums. The possibility of a significant portion of Tildes content being generated by AI makes this sentiment a mere illusion.

So here are my questions:

1. Is there any reasonable way of determining which posts were written with the aid of AI?
2. Is the Tildes community okay with the content being generated partly, or entirely, by AI?

Please forgive me if I'm being a cynic, I've spent too much time in forums with significantly lower quality content than Tildes.

Edit 1: Just wanted to cite this paper to somehow justify my uneasiness when it comes to writing texts with AI in command. As I've commented below, LLMs might get in the way of learning the person's true idea/opinion.

Edit 2: As I've said in the comments below, I had no intention of accusing any particular user with this post. Clearly, I've failed to convey my intent so I'll try to clarify my original idea a bit more:

Because I'm new to Tildes and haven't got any other forum experience besides Reddit, I was amazed with how much and how fast some users post extremely high quality content, since this was certainly not the norm in Reddit. As with many other online platforms, spammers armed with AI can be a difficult problem to deal with, so I've made this post with the intent of starting a discussion about this matter and to understand the Tildes community stance. My relatively negative view of the use of AI is due in part to my experience with such spammers in the past. Forgive me if I've assumed the worst...

From the little time I've spent in Tildes, I'm quite sure the community grew to know each other and I'm hopeful that my post will not cause undue witch hunts. And I've also learned that because people got to know each user's stylistic voice, it's fairly easy to spot a possible AI spammer.

Thank you for the insightful discussion so far !

A recent thread had me reflecting on my own mental health journey and what really made a difference for me, I was interested in opening a discussion about what other people found most valuable too. I'll add my own as a comment.

Very basic question, what are the herbs/spices/seasonings that are the staples of your cooking?

Are there any that you use that are under-the-radar that you recommend?

I ask because I have gotten into cooking a lot more in the last six months or so and am looking to restock a spice rack I have had for years with things I will use. So nothing is too simple (salt/pepper) I'm just looking for ideas and looking to see what flavors the rest of Tildes enjoys!

I noticed that r/pokemongo and r/TheSilphRoad are down because of the blackout, so now I'm not sure where to go for information. The actual Silph Road forum was shut down by Niantic, and ones like Pokemon Go Hub aren't as focused on PvP or have the kind of discussion that the subreddit did. Does anyone know of other forums out there?

Books, films, foods, gadgets, games, etc. A good review/analysis can enhance our understanding and appreciation of the works or products. Let's give them some shoutout.

Edit: add analysis (can't believe I forgot one of the big categories like this) ^facepalmed

I've got a small collection of equipment. I've been really cautious about buying more. There are a few things I regret buying.

1. A series of knives that were good enough, but actually garbage, rather than just spending £30 on a victorinox or similar.

2. A garlic thing which looks cool but is hard to use. Garlic crusher by Royal VKB

And I was wondering, are there any bits of kit that you thought were going to be great but which ended up in the back of a cupboard or drawer?

I am a trans lesbian and plan on running away from my enviroment when i am prepared (mostly due to unrelated matter, but it does have a impact on everything). I wanted to see your experiences with it and how you are now, to help get a perspective on my future.

I know the scene is in a rut right now with iOS 16 having pretty much no hope (and with iOS 17 right around the corner), but I wanted to see if anyone else is using a jailbroken iPhone (or any other device) on a day to day.
If you are, drop your device, version and tweak list, I wanna add some new tweaks to my collection! My favs at the moment are Jellyfish (LS clock replacer), Saw (removes space at the bottom of the screen) and Ampere (iOS 16 style battery)

Hello everyone. I am an avid gamer but I allocate my playtime very differently from most other players. I prefer to spend my time playing very short(typcially under 30 mins) games created for game jams(limited time themed game development events) on itch.io.

Here is example of what a set of game jam entries looks like.

Many of these games are only about 15 minutes long so it is possible to play and review many of them per week. My question to you guys is that given the short nature of most of these experiences, is there at least mild interest in posts about these games and if so would it be better to post a weekly thread where I focus on a specific gamejam and review some of the games and encourage other users to join in and review some more of the games or should I focus on posting direct links to the best games I find when I sifting through these collections.

I’m am excited to share this area of gaming that people don’t talk about much and I would love to hear peoples thoughts on the subject.

Edit: The first thread is up

I'm a young single adult with a fairly well paying remote job. I've been in my career for almost 4 years now and have saved up a decent chunk of money through investing and saving.

My game plan was to use the "market crash" that everyone was predicting in 2023 to try and make a stab at purchasing a home. When the interest rates spiked I thought it was a great sign for me because I thought for sure that housing prices would fall accordingly, jokes on me though because several months later homes in my area have barely gone down in price at all and even closer to town in nicer areas prices continue to climb.

Not only that but the only real thing the rate hikes have done for me personally is make what was looking like a modest mortgage payment suddenly become far less affordable, even with my very low personal spending.

Is anyone else in a similar situation? Are we doomed to rent forever? Should I move out to the boonies where it seems like that's the only place left with non-insane housing prices?

I look at Zillow and houses in my area that sold for 200k~ less than 5 years ago are now on the market for 400k-500k. It feels like anyone who didn't get in back then is just completely screwed

/rant

I tried to register here the other day with my preferred username, which was taken, so I replaced an S with a 5 as I've done in the past. Now I realize that might have been a bit deceptive - someone reading my comment might think it's coming from the other user or vice-versa, and I don't want to be that guy. What's the vibe here about that? Should I invite myself under a new name once I'm approved for invitations, or keep this username? I'd just DM the other user if that was an option on tildes.

edit: Thanks, all! I'll keep it until/unless the other user feels strongly about it.