Hey, Adam wears a hearing aid. Never noticed that before.

Ha! :D

Pins.

Yeah, that is a very smart design decision. I didn't know Sennheiser had such a thing. Next time I am in the market for headphones, I will try to purchase a set with replaceable cables.

@crusader8463 said:

I have always wondered if anyone who is a real life weapons master who has had proper training in weapon combat has ever put these weapons to use in real fighting situations. How would using something like that in a real fight work against say a guy with a sword and shield, or a trident, or a mace etc. They are usually designed to look cool and nothing else for their respected series, but I have seen some people waving one of these around and they look very deadly.

There are some problems with the design of the thing that, I think, might make it an ineffective weapon against your standard medieval arsenal:

Weight distribution. And also weight in general. It looks heavy. And clumsy. The shape of it doesn't seem to lend itself to effective thrusting or stabbing motions. Not to mention if you do attempt such motions, there's a pointy bit pointed right back at you the entire time. The way the handles are oriented, and the way it is shown to be used on the tv show and movies, is sort of along the same lines of using a quarter staff but without the range advantage.

Placement of the pointy bits doesn't make any kind of sense for any particular effective swing. It looks like it could maybe fare okay in a strictly defensive capacity against a longsword/shield combo, but offensive options appear to be limited. Historically, most effective manual (non ranged) counter to sword.shield is stabby motions with another sword or spear. The movie-style wild swings don't work and leave attacker wide open for counter attack. Besides, if you do want to go with a swing attack, a heavy blunt force sorta thing like a mace is the way to go, so dent armour plating and so forth.

... i've devoted too much thought to this. xD

Yep, Aeropress is the best point of entry if you're wanting to broaden horizons a little bit from the electric dripper, but don't want to spend too much or put in extra effort during brewing. Awesome thing about Aeropress is that it produces a nice tasting coffee even if you just have a cheap blade bean grinder. It's less sensitive, in my experience, to variable grind size than the pourover methods. :)

This is awesome. I'm amazed how close I was able to get just based on soil colour, vegetation, side of the road cars drive, whether signs show speed limit in km or miles.

Biggest swing and a miss for me was a country road that I thought should be northern europe somewhere. Road sign was in KM, cars on right side of road, camera positioned behind a truck that had latin letters, road in good repair etc. Turns out it was somewhere in Brazil. >_<

The machines will take over soon. It is only a matter of time.

Needs more fans.

It's missing the part where postal carrier drops the box from a height then gives it a couple solid whacks with a hammer for good measure.

Yep, he's absolutely correct that digital drafting software makes early design concept and testing worlds easier than it used to be. So much easier to play around with measurements and possible geometries in CAD than it is to physically put together mockups and early prototypes for the same purpose.

Looking forward to more of this questions for Jamie series. :)

Very cool. I often use google street view as a way to rehearse a driving route that I have not taken before so I have prior idea of what the entire route will look like. It is difficult for me to navigate by map or GPS alone because I have problems with sensory overload (due to autism) when driving in areas I have never been to before.

I'm not buying the heat retention as a selling point with this system. A Hario V-60 (1-4 cup size) will fit on top of a 1 litre insulated thermos. Just barely, i should say, but it definitely works without spillage during brewing. A regular insulated carafe with a flat top (20-30 bucks) also works perfectly with the V-60 and provides far superior heat retention than this ceramic pot.

@BryanSebeck said:

What are the advantages of using a specially designed pour over kettle as compared to just a regular kettle? I understand that it gives you fine control over the pour, but I have a steady hand and can get a fairly consistent pour straight out of my standard electric kettle. The thing that I don't know is if the cost/benefit is such that I can justify buying a specialty product that will take up more space in my tiny apartment kitchen. Thoughts?

The bendy spout pour over specific kettles are not strictly necessary in my experience. You can certainly do just fine and achieve the same results with careful pouring from a regular kettle. Pourover kettles just increase the margin for error in case your hand slips and you slosh a bunch of water in by accident. It's a convenience and consistency thing. I do have a pourover kettle but use regular kettle when I'm traveling.

Excellent!

I never bothered with set top box myself. It's both amusing and irritating how flabbergasted my cable company is about the situation. I have phone and internet through them but no television service. Every 2-4 weeks they call me with a new and incredible limited time offer to add television to my package. At this point they are now offering to give me a free DVR if I just sign up for 6 months of tv.

Just... just let us put the box in your apartment. Please. You don't even have to use it. 6 months and you can cancel it and keep the box. Come on. We're dying here. >_<

@Kingfalcon said:

Who's Jamie?

Jamie (codename: J-M33) is a highly advanced cyborg entity that Adam constructed to assist him in achieving world domination. :)

Weird! I do have both of the devices in question so will give this a shot this afternoon. I like the flavour of pourover a little more than aeropress, so very curious to see how this tastes.

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis turned out to be pretty good. Different tone than To Say Nothing of the Dog. It's very sad.

Currently reading The First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie. I'm about 50 pages in to book three right now. These books aren't written to hold up as individual novels, it's more just one long novel split into three parts. Interesting story. Very unpredictable. Two thirds of the way through and I'm still not sure where Abercrombie is going with it. There is some hilariously poorly written dialogue, particularly in the first book, but otherwise i'm enjoying the ride so far.

Say one thing for Logen Ninefingers, say that he has nine fingers.

Racist potato chip sorting machine! D:

Almost all of my childhood vacations turned out to be horrifying ordeals. Road trips packed into a vehicle of extremely dubious mechanical reliability. Road trips during winter, in blizzards, fog; hail storms in summer. Driving for an hour+ with the fuel needle on and well below the E because somebody forgot to fill up the tank at the last town. Spending the night in the very sketchiest of sketchy motels.

There's a reason I don't travel much anymore. Too many phobias. :(

He carried in his appendages, variously, 40 white mice, 40 black mice, a group of guinea pigs, various reptiles, human blood samples, human cancer cells, yeast, and bacteria."

Well that's not even a little bit creepy. O__O