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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 28th, 2023

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  • 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.




  • 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.



  • And we’ve nowadays taken it even further, in spoken Finnish we’ve even got rid of the “hän” and mostly use “se”, which is the Finnish word for “it”. The same pronoun is used for people in all forms, animals, items, institutions and so on, and in practice the only case for “hän” is people trying to remind others they consider their pets human.

    Context will tell which one it is.


  • My best guess is the dates on which the feature was added, which can also be seen on CanIUse. Firefox added OPFS support in March this year, and much of the userbase (AFAIK e.g. Firefox ESR) is still lacking the feature – in any case it’s a very recent change on Firefox. However, webkit/Safari has had OPFS for over two years by now. I was personally unaware of the support having been added to Firefox as well, last time I checked the discussion they told they weren’t going to implement the API.

    By no means is this an acceptable excuse in my opinion, this kind of check should always be done by checking the existence of the feature, not the UA string. Though it might be that the check is still performed in the correct way as Safari users stuck on older version are also encountering the issue. But if they’re fine with using OPFS, where you need to export the files separately to access them outside the browser context (as the storage is private), there’s no reason to complain about recent Firefox versions that support this feature.

    But, the same point still stands, kind of. The main underlying problem is Google forcing new standards through Chromium, without waiting for industry consensus and a proper standard. Then, as 80% of the userbase already has the feature everyone else is forced to get on board. I still don’t really see Adobe as the main culprit here, despite the apparent incompetence in writing compatibility checks, but Google with their monopolistic practices with the Chromium project. Adobe isn’t innocent and has done the industry a lot of harm in the form of being one of the original pushers of subscription software, but I don’t think this instance should be attributed to malice rather than incompetence.

    Edit: So, a bit of additional advice for someone trying to get this to work: in case the UA spoofing doesn’t help, check the Firefox version in use – it has to be 111 or newer, as 111 was the release where File System API support was added. Firefox ESR probably doesn’t have it available. Also check that FS API / OPFS doesn’t need to be enabled through some flag or configuration parameter, and that it’s not blocked by some plugin.


  • Well, in this case it might even be a technological limitation, which can be solved with a workaround but leads to a poor user experience.

    Firefox, for security reasons, doesn’t allow opening local files for writing. That means, it’s not possible to make a web application that can autosave to your machine after you open a file, meaning you have to download a new version of the file every time you save. You can get around this issue by importing the files in question to the browser’s local storage, or by using cloud storage via an API, but local saving is a feature that people have come to expect and missing it will lead to complaints from the users.

    The missing API is called File System Access API and has been available on Chrome for years. I’ve personally had to write my web apps around this limitation multiple times, since I want to support Firefox. By no means is this a valid reason to exclude Firefox in my opinion, but I can also easily see why a company would want to not bother with user feedback on ctrl+s not working in their web application.