The last chapter in the lives of a lot of Great Lakes freighters is hauling salt. Apparently it’s no better for ships than it is for cars.

If you get a chance, the steamship Mather is docked near the Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland. It was the flagship of the Cleveland Cliffs line, and was spared the fate of hauling salt. You can tour it, and if you book ahead, you can get an extended belowdecks tour that includes machinery spaces that you don’t see on the regular tour.

If one is into that kind of thing the Valley Camp, docked in Sault Ste. Marie, MI is a museum ship open to the public, too.

I also ended up with a stray, but he had been abandoned as a kitten when I got him. He had zero interest in the outside beyond watching the squirrels through the window screens, which he did with rapt attention.

Highly recommend the writing of Dave Goulson[0] about bees and meadow ecosystems more broadly. I’ve read A Buzz in the Meadow and A Sting in the Tale and enjoyed them both.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/323591.Dave_Goulson

I’m a furniture maker (like, for money). I’ve been using it for largely 2-D jig making for a few years and it’s been great in conjunction with a ShopBot for precise templates.

I updated to the 1.1 release candidates, and it’s been great. I do a lot of design for people who are remote, and being able to model things with more complex curves has been a game changer. Sketchup is adequate at the free level and not good enough to convince me to upgrade to paid.

The Assembly workbench has let me use FreeCAD much more closely to how I think about putting a piece together, and the sketcher-based workflow is a godsend for curved work.

1.1 is a huge leap forward. I delivered a table last year that I modeled for the client in FreeCAD. The model was super rough. I’m designing chairs for it now, and for the first time, I feel like my skills are the limit, and not the software.

If you’ve found it clunky before, it still has its rough edges, but it’s legitimately at the point where I think the good parts are good enough for me to overlook the rough edges and move to FreeCAD almost entirely.

Do you have a website with your system on it? I have an off-grid building I need to add solar to in the next year or so. After I fix the foundation and roof, of course. Naturally I’m exploring options for item 387 on the todo list instead of think about how I’m going to jack the building up.

It's a pretty simple system:

4KW of panels, 400W 48V EG4 6000XP charge controller/ inverter 3x EG4 LifePower4 48V batteries a raspberry pi running solar assistant

I feels like a bit overkill, and there is still a whole mppt unused on the 6000xp so I could still double my panel input. Also solar assistant tells me that I rarly go below 75% battery storage. If I just wanted to run my fridge and assorted convenience loads (and ran things like table saws off a generator) then I could get away with a lot less of a system.

But I'm operating a recording studio, and there were a couple days this winter where I had a full-band session and a couple days of storms and got down to below 50%.

> No one in the USA drinks h[o]t tea.

There are dozens of us.

Perplexingly I was traveling in one of the iced tea regions of the country in need of a cup of hot tea, and they had no way to make it. Like, you have a commercial coffee maker and hot cups, the coffee maker has a hot(ish) water tap. All you need is a $4 box of teabags that’ll last until the heat death of the universe. Nope.

The line frequency tends to screw with things with motors too. Moved from the US to Belgium back when compact cassette was a common format for music.

Killed a few tapes with a transformer on a US tape deck before buying a 220V 50Hz unit. No, I don’t remember if the pitch was grossly off, but I’m guessing it wasn’t.

They may have started out the same as you or me, but the conditioning and acclimatization they’ve done over their lives certainly makes them more adapted to the activities they’re doing than the average person.

Serious question: do you really think mountaineers have a different resting core temp than "normal" human beings, as you apparently have claimed?

That might be what they tell you, now explain to me how this guy was presumed innocent and jailed for 10 years.

In short: no.

I’m sure that in the Boston area we’d have had no trouble rustling up half a dozen or more.

We now live in Vermont. The options are pretty much limited to Huy Fong. Reese makes a vastly inferior product that doesn’t belong on the same shelf that can be found in some supermarkets. I know two Asian grocery stores (neither of which specializes on any particular country to my uninformed eye). They’re both small enough that they aren’t stocking hundreds of varieties of any single sauce.

So yeah. Credit to Huy Fong for capturing the mindshare with a quality product and getting available basically nationwide.

Why move to a colder place?