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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • If your dome light isn’t an LED, then you should replace it with one. It won’t completely fix your problem but it will give you 9 to 10 times longer to catch it.

    There’s really no reason that every car doesn’t have a voltage cut off to protect the battery such that it can still start. Additionally, if they just included a super capacitor then even with a heavily discharged battery, it could charge up the super capacitor to then start the car.

    But if we went around doing smart stuff like that then we could potentially wreck the entire lead acid battery industry and that would just be awful…










  • “The official said crew on the dhow, which did not have a country flag, were planning to transfer the missile parts, including warheads and engines, to another boat off the coast of Somalia.”

    Looks like “Finding Out” to me.

    The gallows humor is real. Coping mechanisms for traumatic jobs is real. Ever hear civilian firefighters joke around? Same. Military firefighters and combat medics probably have the darkest humor. We’ve all collectively decided we want people to be really good at killing people and blowing shit up so other people don’t kill out people and blow our shit up.




  • I replaced the small wood stove with a king sized stove. If you can spare the space a bigger wood box is fantastic. If you live with mixed, rarely artic, then I recommend the Blaze King. The catalytic burn and the thermostat are great.
    If you deal with artic weather then I think Quadrafire might be the way to go. The fire has stayed smouldering for days. Very little smoke, mostly steam seen when the catalytic burner is going.

    One negative comment on the Blaze King is that if you have the thermostat on max high, and get a roaring fire going before you turn the thermostat down, the draw can force the intake to stay open. I would add a butterfly valve to the intake or a damper on the exhaust if I did it again. When I need to redo the chimney next I will do both, with maybe a remote little helper fan to assist with getting the fire started.

    I did that once and just chucked a pot of water into the firebox to cool it down. I had so much fuel in there letting it cook off would have been ridiculous but probably not dangerous. Probably.

    If it’s more just for emergencies and power outages then I would say a little battery Bank and a pellet stove would be the way to go


  • The urban residents don’t have any electric backup. The wealthy do, but if you live in the Portland Metro area, don’t have natural gas heat, and the power goes out? Fairly fucked.

    I live rurally and we got super super lucky to not lose power, but we were going to be fine if we did.

    This is the coldest it’s been here ina long long time. Other parts of the country would mock the severity, but this kind of weather is rare here.

    Portland Gas Electric raised residential rates 17% for 2024. Thankfully all that extra revenue is going towards making the grid far more reliable /S