Living offgrid in a campervan since 2018 w/ pibble+boxer Muffin.

LIKE dogs, books, thoughtful people of all flavors DISLIKE bullies, sh1tposters, partisans, noise

  • 2 Posts
  • 188 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • warning: some non-linux included below

    • minix
    • slackware
    • early Debian
    • FreeBSD (ftp installs instead of 20 floppies! OMG!)
    • Debian
    • Crunchbang <-- loved that original project
    • Solaris (friend gave me a Sparc 5)
    • DSL, Puppy linux (had a tiny netbook)
    • **Debian on workstations and servers since ~2014 **
    • various debian-based distros on RPI

    I do spin up other distros in a VM from time to time to see what’s what. Most recently NixOS since people won’t STFU about it. :-)



  • I’d rather mods who don’t want outside participation to be able to stop their communities from showing in All.

    Agreed. Niche communities can get hammered with downvotes and “I don’t want to read this” comments from readers of ALL.

    It’s confounding: “show me everything”, then “I don’t like the content in your niche community”. WTF?












  • During periods of short supply and/or increased coffee has been often been replaced or augmented by various other ingredients. For example:

    … during the American Civil War, Louisianans looked to adding chicory root to their coffee when Union naval blockades cut off the port of New Orleans. With shipments coming to a halt, desperate New Orleanians looking for their coffee fix began mixing things with coffee to stretch out the supply. Acorns or beets (cafe de betterave) also did the trick. Though chicory alone is devoid of the alkaloid that gives you a caffeine buzz, the grounds taste similar and can be sold at a lower rate. – source



  • Closest I’ve come to Mad Scientist was probably yeast ranching to control costs in homebrewing.

    • sterilize agar media and plates/tubes in poor man’s autoclave (pressure coooker) and hood (open oven door and vent fan) - infection rates were surprisingly low with this low-tech approach. I lost maybe 5% of cultures to spurious growth.
    • streak yeast from $$$ pure liquid cultures, grow, store if successful.
    • also experimented with yeast suspensions in sterile distilled water based on a 1930s science journal article from a dude in Africa. The suspensions did better in the heat where agar would just remelt…
    • a few days before needed scrape the streak into a small amount of sterile wort (20ml? on a homemade stirplate (PC fan and HD magnets under an unpended tupperware bowl!), stepping up to pitchable volume coinciding with the batch cooling to pitch temperature…

    It was a lot of fun and instead of one 5gal batch of beer from an exotic $20 yeast sample you could get as many as you wanted. In practice I usually did 5-10 cultures from each pure sample. Could do more than that but there was a limit to how much stuff I could sterilize in my “autoclave” at one time.


    Edited to add: I successfully cultured yeast from hefeweizen, but since what’s in the bottle is typically for secondary/priming rather than primary it was only for fun. I had 100% failure trying to harvest wild yeast from the air or sampled from fruit skins. I couldn’t isolate the yeast from other critters.