Uh, the cat says its 9:15.

I’m the only non-MAGA with a ham license in 4-land.

Precisely why it wasn’t worth my time any more. Trolling was fun for a bit, but that got old too. Breaking a conversation to spoil conspiracy talks with well placed facts tends to ruffle a few feathers, it seems.

Still though, the late night party conversations are fun to listen to in the Denver area. People don’t hide the fact that we have many legal drugs and a massive supply of craft beer.

Apps are somewhat buggy right now. My shokz will partially disconnect after the first song and exercise audibles are non-existent. (The audio mutes, but the watch still responds to play/pause button presses. This could be just an issue with the shokz app being confused for the time being.)

No difference in GPS connect time from the pixel watch 3, which has been historically buggy at times.

But yeah, random glitches all over the place. It’s tolerable enough and would expect app updates to fix most of them.

Diet and lifestyle tweaks are next. Aside from the immediate and massive caffeine reduction, nothing else has changed drastically. My Dr. temporarily put my request to quit nicotine on hold until we flatlined every other immediate problem, and I do agree with her approach.

There also the dangling issues of renal artery stenosis and peripheral neuropathy that stem from quite a few years of serious alcoholism. My point here is that what would usually be basic changes to lifestyle may have a higher impact on other ongoing treatments than usual.

Absolutely! Accurate numbers are impossible, because of the different medications I was on to pull me out of hypertensive crisis. My Dr and I are both data junkies, so we were able to openly discuss and hypothesize about how to tweak multiple variables in my immediate treatment. (It’s been fun, TBH. She obviously is the expert at diagnosis and treatment and I could provide her with useful feedback about what was and wasn’t working.)

However, after about a month of walking 3 times a day and about when I started to learn to jog again, we had to cut one of my meds as I was dropping into hypotension range a couple times a day.

For the last couple of months, we made a couple of adjustments to my meds while I was also increasing the intensity of my workouts (rucking and more running).

While resting heart rate is not directly correlated to blood pressure, it’s a good indication of some level of improvement. There is also a bias in this chart when we finally found the proper dosage of metropolol. Metropolol will decrease resting heart rate and put some fairly hard caps on peak heart rates:

With meds and with exercise, I also hit a new personal record the day before yesterday of 111/80 during the evening, about an hour after my workout.

Meds seem to keep my BP in-check and below the danger zone and my exercise routine does seem to correlate with BP improvements. Now that my meds are steady and its effects are hitting a healthy plateau, exercise has the greatest impact on day-to-day changes.

Sorry for the extended answer and could have just said “Yes” but there have actually been a ton of changes in-play.

Rucking is just running or walking with a weighted vest to simulate a heavy backpack. I believe the name is derived from a military style “rucksack”.

It absolutely destroys my upper body (mostly my upper back area) during my normal walk. Keeping correct posture and gait with a bit of weight takes a bit more effort and works muscles that are typically not engaged in regular walking exercises.

But thanks for the warning about pain. We evolved pain for a reason, so it’s best not to be ignored.

I understand your point. An exercise bike is probably the best option and those get super boring for me.

It’s not as flexible for me where I live, unfortunately. A bike is better used for actual transportation here and trying to figure out routes for any kind of sustained cardio would be challenging.

While I say I have a “routine”, that is not exactly true. My only routine is that I get my ass out of the house for a couple of hours and move. I am too scatterbrained to have a fixed exercise schedule and I usually have no idea what kind of exercise will be in store for me.

Maybe a bike will be a better option for me later when I roll into a more steady and planned out routine.

You are the person that suggested rucking to me when I was trying to figure out how to deal with busted knees.

Weirdly enough, it fixed my serious knee pain issues, almost overnight. I forced myself through the pain one evening and woke up the next morning and my knees were at about 90%. Any time my knees start hurting, its proving to be a decent “cure”. None of that makes any sense to me, but I am not going to question it.

It seriously hurts me though and it’s developed into a tolerable love/hate relationship now.

Edit: Forgot to say thank you. Thank you!

FL Studio on macOS.

At least it has the decency to at least attempt to show the exception. On windows, I absolutely never see errors with the core FL Studio app: It’ll just hard close in an attempt to make you believe that you weren’t actually using the program in the first place.

Considering how many legacy components of the app are still functional to maintain reverse compatibility for old projects, it’s a fucking miracle the app even launches at all, TBH.

Motor brush. Its a chunk of carbon that makes contact with a bit on the motor shaft.

Yep. When I cook steak, I usually cook an extra to snack on later by itself or make sandwiches with.

Nothing beats fresh steak, but there is a method to reheating in the microwave it without drying it out or getting it super-well done.

The nag beeps on mine are one minute apart. That is helpful for when you need to let the food sit for a specific amount of time.

Letting food stand a bit after nuking it lets the heat distribute evenly, btw. (That is why most microwave directions for frozen food include that bit.)

LPT: If you really don’t want something to get burned and want evenly heated food, start experimenting with longer times but at much less power. So, to reheat steak, cut it into strips and distribute evenly on a plate. Heat for 2-3 mins at about 25% normal power. Once you get the hang of it, you can mostly preserve the original doneness of the steak while still getting it nice and warm again.

It’s “cheaper” from a margin perspective. They can still apply a standard margin on the milk and have the price be less because of the ~500% markup on the sodas. (Admittedly, you have to twist your brain a little to think this corporate accounting is the slightest bit logical.)

If they applied the same margin to the milk, people would go batshit crazy.

But to clarify, I was initially assuming these were school style boxed milks where the raw costs could be comparable. The actual reason the milk is cheaper was price fuckery.

The margin difference is significant when you factor in the retail price of the soda is $2.59 and the retail price of the milk at $1.50.

Culvers can’t pull off a 500% margin with the milk like they do with the soda and likely uses a standard margin of about 20%-25% which still comes out cheaper than a soda. (I have no idea what their margins are, so just guessing.)

I just edited the post above after I did a price check. The retail price of the milk was more than a dollar cheaper and the milk is likely going to be even cheaper due to wholesale pricing and less delivery risk.

Now the question is, why only a $0.31 discount?

It depends on the serving of milk. If it’s a larger sized milk or juice, it’s going to be more expensive like you say. If it’s a school sized box, the total cost should be much less. Small drink boxes can be had for < $0.20 wholesale depending on your location, which should challenge the total cost of a fountain drink. (Total cost is raw materials + employee time + delivery overhead and other factors.)

There isn’t a specific source for this other than googling a bit for wholesale school milk prices. The rest is just estimates for normal business and delivery overhead.

Edit: I saw the size of the milk you just posted for another comment. The cheapest retail price I saw for that was $1.50. Locally, the cost of a Culvers fountain drink is $2.59 for me.

Prepackaged kids drinks like milk or apple juice should be slightly lower in cost, take less time to include with a meal and are less prone to spillage in transit. The total cost for delivery is going to win even if the raw cost for the beverage is similar. (Milk and apple juice boxes are likely near zero profit and is already manufactured at brain numbing scales for schools already.)

Edit: OP just posted a picture of the milk and it isn’t school box sized. I did some price checks and the milk a dollar cheaper at retail pricing. ($1.50 vs $2.59)

The required drink is at a fixed base price. The price difference is because those drinks are cheaper, not healthier. (They likely come pre-boxed which likely reduces overall cost.)

Sugar-milk health benefits are probably subject to debate and apple juice is basically sugar water.

This is an interesting problem, for sure. Sticking with open source/open platforms and staying away from closed ecosystems is a good direction to start in.

If a product line requires its own hub and proprietary software, try and steer clear of it. Hue lights are an interesting example as, IMHO, their smart lights are some of the best on the market. However, you are tied into using their apps and hub to get 100% functionality. (Much of their API is accessible via third parties and the balance of open vs closed is tolerable enough for me.)

Home Assistant is probably going to be your best start as control software. This will naturally push you in the direction of getting hardware that is usually open source and designed with Home Assistant in mind. (There are still privacy drawbacks to HA in some cases, but that is very use case specific.) Since HA is open source, developers tend to rely more on open source hardware.

If you must integrate with closed(ish) ecosystems like Samsung, Amazon or Google, never use their hub or software as a primary management system. What I mean is that you can use their hub to relay commands from HA, but turn off, disable or misconfigure features that are platform specific and you may never need. (The goal is identity places where a big provider would harvest data and not give it data to harvest from your HA system while also attempting to reduce failure conditions that might be introduced by having multiple, “primary” control systems.)

I am sorry for generalizing most of this when you asked a very specific question, but home automation is very much a “build your own adventure” kind of situation. Especially on the open source and privacy-awareness side of it, you are going to need to dig in and research each product you are interested in.

Start learning communication protocols, hardware types and how to read source code now, btw. Home automation is an excellent way to jump into the deep end of hardware + software development.

Edit: My lessons learned:

1. Open source products/projects may not stay open source or may have open functionality reduced. Samsung SmartThings has been a rollercoaster in this regard. Chamberlain is an example where they cut off their open API completely. Open products that convert to closed should be regarded as a privacy threat: When a product is monetized, so is your data.

2. Stay away from fly-by-night products on Amazon. Super cheap products from rando brands that leverage usually custom phone apps tend to get abandoned and may have critical bugs that are never resolved and may end up only being useful as botnet endpoints. (Shit IoT products can be nasty security threats as they tend to be placed inside private networks.)

3. Study new products and vendors you plan on adding to your network. Setting up your own DNS server and transparent proxy to record all Internet calls for a couple of weeks is a good option. Learn those products from the inside out: What chipsets do they use? Is their firmware open and regularly updated? What is the community reputation? Etc, etc.

4. Home automation is a “long game” hobby. Sure, you can setup something that works over the course of a few weeks, but plan on slow changes over years. From a privacy perspective, see item 1 as software tends to morph over time.

I think a conversation about Hannah Montana Linux could be quite entertaining.