• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 28th, 2023

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  • Mayonnaise on pizza is surprisingly common in Finland, e.g one local pizzeria near me puts garlic mayo on certain pizzas – enough that there’s more mayo than tomato sauce. For some incomprehensible reason they also put the mayo under the cheese. As you can guess, it was repulsive. However, BBQ sauce and bacon pizza is a nice combination, which is also normal here.

    Truffle mayo did work in some pizzas, in moderation.


  • Given that there are engineers involved I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that was deliberate. Trying to get potentially offensive or otherwise NSFW acronyms past marketing without them noticing is practically an industry-wide joke at this point, which is why they are so prevalent in the FOSS space. (no marketing staff to complain)

    If that’s true in this case, though, hats off to whoever managed to get it though to official commercial standards



  • Quickly played the storyline of Detroit: Become Human through for the first time, some Dishonored for nostalgia and fell back to playing the PS2 games I never had the console for back when I was a child.

    Most of my recent hours have gone to Rayman 3, and there’s a big heap of PS2 games to go through after that. I’ve noticed PCSX2 doesn’t consume much battery, so my typical travel games tend to be PS2 games as well.



  • There are different versions for interior and exterior use, using different types of glue. At least OSB/0 and OSB/1 can be used for internal applications and are considered safe. Not that I would trust a landlord doing this to select the correct board type, especially since the safe variants might have some issues with the humidity exposure in a kitchen.

    But there still are many cases for using OSB indoors, e.g. behind drywall to give it some more strength (instead of more expensive plywood). Wouldn’t want to leave it exposed in a kitchen though, it’ll get messy if it’s not properly treated, and in the picture it doesn’t seem to be.







  • Should’ve probably included where I’m from, that being Europe, more specifically Finland. As far as I know our index for inflation (HICP) sourced from ECB hasn’t so far taken into account OOHC (owner-occupied housing cost) and has focused more on rents and other costs of living. Proposed roadmaps for changing the official indices would back this understanding, unless I’m interpreting something very incorrectly.

    There’s some rent controls in place in most European countries, so rents aren’t tightly coupled with house prices in many locations. As such, for specific dwellings it can often be cheaper to rent than to own, since rent increases are regulated at least a bit, but cost to purchase the unit altogether is not. In many more expensive cities there’s also the issue of units not being available to rent, since the rents don’t directly reflect the market value of the rented unit.

    Though including OOHC to the calculations will cause some difficulties when you take into account more rural areas, where the value of housing can not only go down, but actually be negative. In rural Finland there are cases where you can actually be paid to get a whole apartment complex out of someone’s hands, since the costs outweigh whatever rent you can get out of the place. People are opening shell companies and selling stock in an apartment complex (a peculiarity of the local system called limited liability housing companies, or asunto-osakeyhtiö) to them at a loss, to get rid of paying for upkeep.




  • No, the first mailed fine would be the payment reminder from the collection agency with some additional fees attached, after which it will move to proper collection. This applies only to parking fines issues by the city/municipality. Private parking spots have a different system, but they usually also rely on just a note on the windscreen.

    I think it’s part of the Finnish society often resorting to an honor system in these kinds of things. For private operators also due to the fact that previously the fine couldn’t be assigned to the car owner, and had to be assigned to the driver personally. Nowadays a lot of places just automatically scan the plates and you pay either via app or a website.

    Infuriatingly getting cars towed is also very difficult in finland, and I mean multiple layers of red tape and a few weeks of time spent difficult. Due to the fact that the tower is responsible for any sustained damage, that can be as little as a scratch in wheels or similar, and can’t bill the car’s owner unless they’ve been duly notified, it’s practically an impossibility for anything other than abandoned vehicles. If somebody else is in your spot you just have to find another one, even if you’re paying good money for it.

    The ticket stealing thing no longer happens AFAIK, since the PEO just scans the plates to see if you’ve paid for parking nowadays.



  • SEO is of course a problem, but it’s been a problem for a long time, and there are ways around it for those who know how to seek information. Proper use of keywords, blacklisting sites with known spam information, searching specific sites, mandating specific words and phrases to be contained in the search etc. It’s true, however, that information has become less discoverable during the latest decade – at least reliable information has.

    While AI-written spam articles and such have been a pain sometimes, gatekeeping content is in my opinion as big of a threat to the proper use of search engines for finding information. As more and more sites require you to log in to view the discussion (social media is the worst offender here) much of the search results is unusable. Nowadays the results lead to a paywall or a login wall almost more often than to a proper result, and that makes them almost completely useless. I understand this kind of thing for platforms which pay for creating the content, e.g. news sites, but user-generated content shouldn’t be locked behind a login requirement.

    I fear the day StackOverflow and Reddit decide the users’ discussions should be visible for only logged-in users. Reddit has already taken the first steps with limiting “NSFW” content to logged-in users only (on new reddit). Medium articles going behind paywall also caused some headaches a while back.


  • Well, the example was with a tent which is a single layer of cotton between you and the environment, and by no means resembles anything even remotely insulated. That’s why it needs a relatively powerful heater to stay comfortably warm. In normal use you have quite a lot of control over the temperature of the heater, mainly with the size and amount of firewood -> effective surface area of the fire.

    For static buildings the situation is different, with enough insulation you can get by with almost no heating. Zero-energy building is a thing in Finland as well, and although it has its challenges, it’s still possible to keep your home warm with only your body heat in e.g. -40. The main difficulty you’ll encounter there is getting rid of the moisture in air, since being that energy-efficient will require having your home almost fully enclosed. You’ll also need to be careful to properly limit the moisture getting out from the house, as the dew point will be inside the insulation and any moisture getting out will condense inside, eventually leading to mold.

    I haven’t actually reached the end game in Frostpunk 1, but at a glance it would require some efficiency improvements and better insulation – and given enough insulation and heating anything is possible. If your people are sleeping under the sky hugging the generator, I’d assume you won’t get past the end game. A real-world example that somewhat resembles the Frostpunk world would be people living in Yakutsk, Russia, where they have more of a brute-force approach to the -60 °C temperatures – just burn enough gas to keep your log cabin warm. Surviving outside at those temperatures without protective equipment would be difficult though, especially since most materials won’t stay flexible at -120 °C or -140 °C. You’d find it pretty difficult to move around.

    Edit: But also, a mandatory “don’t quote me on this”, as building is my hobby, not my job. I’ve some knowledge, and some experience, but by no means am I a professional.




  • If you’re using powdered detergent, make sure yours doesn’t have zeolite as the water softening agent. It will deposit in the machine, and starts eventually covering the fabrics with a talcum-like powdery substance. It gets especially bad if you either have to use a lot of detergent because of hard water, or are overusing the detergent.

    Zeolite was brought in to replace phosphates due to environmental concerns, but it has its own problems with the washing results.

    One other thing that often ruins the freshness of clothes for me is overly scented/perfumed detergent. The smell can get quite overwhelming, and contribute to a chemical-y smell and feel.


  • Just in case someone misreads this, add the vinegar as the softener, so it’s not in the first load that contains the detergent. The detergent is a base, and relies upon that fact to get rid of some of the stains, and vinegar as an acid will neutralize that. Vinegar is meant to be in the rinse cycle when washing laundry, where it can help get rid of any extra detergent by neutralizing it and do any other magic it does.

    Also, though I don’t usually encounter them often, do note that vinegar can wash away zinc and silver oxides used for some sterile clothing, and can supposedly damage lyocell.

    But overall I second these suggestions. Most times the amounts listed for detergent are far too big, and you can often get by with less.