Where I live, the socialist alternative aka SALT. They’re rather abusive towards their members and are pretty broadly hated by every other group because they co-opt movements and turn any rally into a chance to sell things and make a profit. They’re well known for being very manipulative and forceful with university students in particular. I’ve heard nothing but disgusting stories from the people who got out.

I’ve been running from my problems by immersing myself in tech, I’m not sure if that makes me like it more or less but I’ve gotten very very good at what I do.

Last night I set up an event ticketing service so friends can come to an event I’m hosting without me having to schedule them or manage capacity. Then I cried myself to sleep. -2

But I also get to set up stuff for my collectives to use, like nextcloud and wordpress and it’s awesome to be able to turn a grassroots bunch of ratbags into a semi-professional looking bunch of ratbags. +10

I used to fry a pan of frozen veggies with salt and thyme, but these days I’m often lucky enough to be able to get a lot of rescued food for free.

Eeeeeh careful when signing up at protests, you run the chance of getting into one of the culty and abusive groups who rely on naive newbies signing up on the spot. Then they take you away from your friends and family and all your money, I wish it didn’t happen constantly but I literally just got home from a protest absolutely infested with them.

The speech is a chance to say everything you want to say, as long as it comes from the heart and celebrates their marriage, you’ll do fine.

IMHO it’s totally fine to joke about yourself, as long as you aren’t generalising there’s nothing anyone can say. Transitioning is your story, and you get to tell it how you want.

I remember in one of his books, Dr Karl recalls knowing when winter started because the ER suddenly fills up with kids fighting for their lives.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/lesson

You can also be the “good at maths, bad at maths” kind

Very fucking glad to hear this, I’m sure we’ll all be celebrating in Newy this year at the people’s blockade. I don’t know much about the legal system, can this be overturned at a federal level or anything?

FnB is my favourite thing ever, it completely changed my life too. I’ll never not love having dinner with a few dozen strangers, meeting amazing people from all over the world and hearing so many incredible stories. It’s made me into a much better person, given me opportunities I never believed I’d get and it’s kept me alive and fed when I’m not doing so well.

AC’s use electrical energy to take some heat energy, and move it outside. You can kinda reverse the process in certain types of heat pumps to generate power, but it’s not even close to worth it, the efficiency is horrible.

You need a temperature gradient to capture heat energy, basically a cold thing and a hot thing, you harvest the energy as it moves from hot to cold. You’ve cooled your house down, and want to use the waste heat to create power, you’ll either have to find a very cold place somewhere nearby (unlikely to be cold outside if you’re using AC) or you can use the fact that your house is cold. So now you’ve both lost energy and heated up your house, because that lost energy has been added to the heat you originally tried to remove.

The simplified but always true rule of thumb is that whenever you use energy to create something from which you can harvest energy, you’ll never be able to harvest more than what you spent. In reality you’ll pretty much always lose energy trying to do this, I’m not aware of anything that’s 100% efficient in both directions (or even one honestly).

I’m afraid I can’t answer your technical questions, I’m really not that knowledgeable about this. All I know is you ideally want the frequency curve to be flat, I don’t think it matters much where it sits relative to that line.

Honestly, that Danon dropping off at the low end is pretty typical though it’s one of the better ones. You’d really just have to test it I’m afraid, it might be totally fine to chop off the bottom for some things but maybe it’s necessary for certain heart conditions, I wouldn’t know. If it were an option I’d say the best bet is to always stick to the analogue, but I’m absolutely with you on hating traditional stethoscopes, they’re so painful…

You probably can just leave the crushers on your neck with the volume maxed out, but I’m really not sure if that’ll work. In all honesty the speaker might be worse due to the way the acoustics in the room can change what you hear, it’s really hard to say.

Rtings.com provides frequency response charts when they test speakers, let me see if I can find one that goes low enough for you.

As for the bonus question, absolutely love it. I love when people come up with cool solutions to life’s problems, and this lets me hear my own heartbeat? Hell yeah!

Here’s an easy way to check a bunch of them quicky, the Denon home was the best I found in terms of the very low end. I’m sure someone else can do better, I’m not that much of an audiophile and know very little about speakers.

Probably worth noting that they stretch out the low end of the chart so they tend to go lower than it seems (I assume it’s a logarithmic scale). You might be able to go to a store and ask to test them yourself.

Second edit: if headphones are at all a possibility (they might be better for patients who don’t want to hear their own heartbeat) then can I recommend Skullcandy crushers? They’re completely ridiculous as regular headphones, they basically just have a metal plate they vibrate for the bass, but it goes all the way down to 20Hz, and you can crank it waaaaay up with a slider on the side. (I use these daily for music because I’m a bad audiophile who wants to have fun sometimes, I have a proper wired setup if I want the audiophile experience.)

I started a free writing journal to help generate ideas and learn to get a little more creative. It’s basically just a regular journal at this point, I just write in it whenever I have a thought that I feel I should keep. It’s been invaluable for coping with mental health stuff too. I don’t think I’ll ever stop, it’s not something I have to force myself to do any more.

Rode one recently and the actual insane restrictions on where you can ride these things left me stranded over a freeway and took longer than walking home because I had to turn around and push the stupid thing across a bridge. They charged me to not ride the bike…

I’ve got mini metro, something called shapez that I’ve not played, functional ear trainer which I’m classifying as a game cause it kinda is, and NYT games which is the only one I play regularly.

If you haven’t already done it, Pat (the Bunny) put all his stuff on archive and he’s far from the only one.

Not everyone likes the way these images are built, but the liinuxserver.io containers are so easy to use. You can replace so many cloud services using these, I’ve replaced:

• All streaming platforms
• Google drive
• Google photos
• Every note app
• The library (sorta, I just host an ebook server for manga that won’t fit on my reader)
• Grocery lists
• Exercise tracking apps

Plus I’ve setup some awesome new stuff like a website for one of my collectives and a few things to automate server maintenance.

You need somewhere to host your services (I’m using an old PC) and a little linux experience, but it’s absolutely worth giving it a crack. I might work in the industry but I learnt more making my little server than I ever did on the job.

Way to go! I’ve just started working out again too and I absolutely share your pain. I’ve been doing strength training though, I always struggle to get outside to do cardio when it’s this damn cold haha. Good on you for looking after your knees and best of luck when you start doing leg day, I know a lot of people hate it, but personally it’s my favourite.

Either way, keep it up! I hope we both stick to our plans and make amazing progress.

I went to court to appeal my conviction and fine, I was expecting a good behaviour bond but nope! Turns out judges don’t like when cops lock you up for 7 hours when they only needed to get your name and address. So woo, clean record again!

I also got super lucky and a friend of mine was playing a gig at a small town on the way to court, so I got to spend Saturday hanging out with some Aussie folk punk artists at a really cool venue.

My solicitor continues to prove herself a great ally, in the middle of my hearing she started whispering to me about how she’s been doing work with trans rescue, they look like a good group. They help people escape persecution for being trans, they have resources for getting out of the US too.

Overall a good weekend, there were still plenty of challenges but I think I managed everything okay.