29 stories
·
0 followers

Aeropress

1 Comment and 2 Shares

This thing makes a really good cup of coffee fast. It’s well made, compact, and clean up is easy.

The AeroPress is 2.5 inch diameter syringe with a paper micro filter mounted across the bottom. It sits on top of a common coffee mug for brewing. You put in fine ground coffee measured with the included scoop. The scoop is about 1.5 times bigger than the ones you might get with regular a drip coffee maker. You put in hot water at the recommended 175 degrees which is cooler than other methods. You stir for 10 seconds and push the plunger in. Compressed air pushes the coffee out in 10 – 20 seconds. What you have in the cup is concentrated coffee. If you dilute it about 50/50 with hot water you get the strength of a regular cup of good coffee. It tastes great!

I have a French press, a vacuum brewer, various kinds of drip brewers, a good espresso machine, and I roast my own coffee. Since I got my AeroPress two months ago I favor it for all my coffee except espresso. It’s not fair to call the AeroPress concentrate espresso as the manufacture does but that’s a minor point.

[This is a Cool Tools Favorite from 2006]

Available from Sweet Maria's

Read the whole story
corpse
2350 days ago
reply
Best coffee brewing method, hands down.
Share this story
Delete

My Review Of Far Cry 5, In The Form Of A Letter To Drew Holmes, Lead Writer Of The Game

1 Comment

Joe Peacock
PO Box 962
Atlanta, GA 30030

7 April 2018

Mr. Drew Holmes
Lead Writer, Far Cry 5
Ubisoft Montreal; Ubisoft Toronto
5505 Boul St-Laurent #2000
Montréal, Quebec H2T 1S6
Canada

Dear Mr Holmes:

Fuck. You.

 

Very Respectfully,

Joe Peacock

Read the whole story
corpse
2418 days ago
reply
*nelson voice* Ha ha!
Share this story
Delete

Robots

4 Comments and 11 Shares
Don't be nervous about the robots, be nervous about the people with the resources to build them.
Read the whole story
corpse
2471 days ago
reply
Share this story
Delete
4 public comments
alt_text_bot
2470 days ago
reply
Don't be nervous about the robots, be nervous about the people with the resources to build them.
darastar
2471 days ago
reply
LOL - literally me and my husband this morning!
alt_text_at_your_service
2471 days ago
reply
Don't be nervous about the robots, be nervous about the people with the resources to build them.
Ferret
2471 days ago
reply
XKCD with the deep cuts this morning

WannaCrypt – Bad code doesn’t pay (much)

1 Comment and 5 Shares

Read the whole story
corpse
2744 days ago
reply
Share this story
Delete
1 public comment
chrisramakers
2743 days ago
reply
Geniaal :)
Belgium

“How About You Raise Your Kids YOUR Way, And I Raise Mine?” — A Starbucks Confrontation

1 Share

Hi Folks! This post appears on Nicole Roder’s blog. Author Nicole lives in Maryland with her four kids and a fierce Boston terrier, who “protects their home from some ubiquitous danger only she can see.” She called me to ask for a quote, and I wrote later to ask if I could reprint her piece! Yes/yes! Best part is the GREAT LIST of THINGS THAT ARE NOT DANGEROUS  FOR KIDS TO DO, which I have highlighted in red. In fact, all the highlighting is mine. – L.

SOMETIMES YOU JUST WANT TO PUNCH A JUDGMENTAL STRANGER IN THE FACE, by Nicole Roder

The following is an actual scenario that I experienced in real life.

I was sitting with my family in the little cafe area at Target. (Naturally.) My husband was waiting in line at Starbucks, and my four kids, miraculously, were sitting and/or playing quietly while I worked on my grocery list.

A mom and her two young boys were sitting at the table next to us, and at one point I looked up, caught her eye, and smiled. She did not smile back. That should’ve been my first clue that something was wrong with her. Instead, her eyes had a panicky look that said, “Help! I’m being eaten by fire ants and I don’t know how to get them off of me!” For a minute I considered slipping her a note that read, “Just blink twice if you’ve been kidnapped and need the cops.” But then I thought, Nah, those two little boys have at least ten years to go before they’d be capable of kidnapping.

So I went back to my grocery list. A moment later, the fire ant lady called to me. “Excuse me, are you with him?” Her panic-stricken eyes indicated she was referring to my 5-year-old son, Raymond, who was still being remarkably quiet compared to his usual Target behavior.

“Yes,” I said.

“What he’s doing is dangerous. You need to make him stop.” She squeezed her lips together into one, thin line.

I glanced over my shoulder at Raymond again. Had he gotten a hold of a knife or a blow torch since the last time I peeked? It didn’t appear so. He was climbing up and down from a stool over and over again. A clean, 3-foot-high stool, just inches away from his mother.

I crinkled my eyebrows and looked at her like, Are you serious? But she just opened her eyes wider and squeezed her lips tighter.

So I said, “He’s fine.”

Fire ant Lady: I am very uncomfortable with my children seeing this! He’s setting an example for others! This is a public place!

Me: Well, you’re free to take your children somewhere else.

Her: You’re allowing him to climb on a surface that people eat on!

Me: He’s climbing on a stool. People don’t eat off of stools.

Her: I’m sure the staff wouldn’t be happy about this. You’re putting them in danger. I could call someone over!

(Psht. Good luck with that, lady. They love me here.)

Me: You know what? You can raise your children, and I’ll raise mine.

Then she loudly proclaimed to her children that what Raymond was doing was WRONG and DANGEROUS and they were not to follow his example. After that she stomped off in a huff and actually DID complain about me to a woman who works at the Starbucks counter! The employee told me about it, laughing, and said she wanted to hide in the back till that lady left the store.

GOOD GRIEF!!! OK, know all you moms out there have experienced at least one judgmental comment from someone, somewhere. Everyone seems to be an expert on other people’s kids. Amiright, ladies?

As I steamed over my encounter, wishing I’d come up with a more cutting reply than, “You raise your kids and I’ll raise mine,” I wondered: What is it with people who want to tell every parent they see that we’re all doing it wrong? Why can’t they resist criticizing us? Do they really have nothing better to do?

I reached out to Lenore Skenazy, founder of the book, blog and Twitter feed, Free-Range Kids. Here’s what she had to say:

“America has a new favorite spectator sport: parent judging. Almost anything parents do/say/read/give to their kids can and will be interpreted by the masses, usually in the least favorable light possible. It’s as if there’s a lollipop waiting for anyone who can explain how when X did Y to little Ava, it all but assured that Ava will never recover.

“We have been encouraged to turn on our fellow parents by a media that lives to shame, a litigious society that avoids even the mildest of risks, and a general, ungrateful sense of doom and distrust, despite the fact we live in the safest times in human history. The rest of the world and all of human history would LOVE to live in 2017 America, yet we treat it like World War III out there, wondering why anyone would ever trust her kid to walk three houses down to the bus stop.”

And to that I say, “Amen!”

To all my fellow moms out there, can I please ask you for a favor? Can we please all just agree that no matter what we witness another parent doing or not doing, unless we actually see them beating the kid, there’s a good chance it’s not child abuse. The majority of parents are not abusive or neglectful, and I say this as a social worker who spent the first few years of my career in foster care. There are awful parents out there, but it’s more than likely that the woman you see at Target letting her son climb on a stool is not one of them.

And while we’re at it, a child’s parents are the people who are most qualified to judge whether an activity is safe or not.

Here is a short and incomplete list of things that are not dangerous for kids to do.

  1. Wait in the car for 5 minutes while mom runs into the store.

  2. Walk to the bus stop by themselves.

  3. Climb a tree.

  4. Ride a bike.

  5. Eat whatever the heck food their moms want to serve them.

  6. Sleep in a car seat.

  7. Jump on a trampoline.

  8. Run.

  9. Play.

  10. And a zillion other things that will not fit in this blog post.

And if you encounter one of these judgmental strangers like the lady I met at Target, do me a favor. Use the comeback that I SO wish I had thought of while she was standing in front of me: “Oh, don’t worry. He has to do ten more of those to earn his beer and cigarettes. Later I’m going to make him run with scissors.”

I love getting comments from my readers! If you’ve got a judgmental stranger story to tell, please do! Another safe kid activity to add to my list? Send it over! And please, if you’ve got a story about a time that someone could’ve judged you harshly but treated you with kindness instead, I’d really love to hear those. That’s the stuff that warms my heart! – N.R.

.

I’ll have a Caffe Mocha with a shot of parental disapproval.

.

Read the whole story
corpse
2802 days ago
reply
Share this story
Delete

Best-Tasting Colors

9 Comments and 13 Shares
I recognize that chocolate is its own thing on which reasonable people may differ. Everything else here is objective fact.
Read the whole story
corpse
2807 days ago
reply
LIES. LICORICE IS AWESOME.
dukeofwulf
2807 days ago
Fake news: "Licorice is Awesome"
Fidtz
2807 days ago
Salted Licorice is the greatest
timothyfriesen
2807 days ago
And red. It's red, not black.
corpse
2807 days ago
Licorice is black. Anything else isn't licorice.
Lythimus
2807 days ago
Salted licorice is good. DZ is garbage. It tastes rancid.
tsuckow
2807 days ago
And where is butter flavor
codersquid
2807 days ago
salmiyuck
MaryEllenCG
2806 days ago
Licorice tastes the way burning tires smell.
dukeofwulf
2806 days ago
At least burning tires release cyanide, so they might put you out of your misery.
Share this story
Delete
8 public comments
lamontcg
2805 days ago
reply
My good-bad axis is almost completely reversed. I must be from bizzaro world.
j8048188
2806 days ago
reply
Lime should be way further to the right.
greenlava
2805 days ago
agree. lime is the best color
Groxx
2806 days ago
reply
Single most contentious xkcd in history, both now and in the future.
Silicon Valley, CA
linforcer
2806 days ago
reply
You shut your ***** mouth about black licorice, Randall.
DragonJTS
2806 days ago
And what's this blasphemy about coffee?
jodamiller
2806 days ago
Putting green apple at 60% good and cotton candy at 90% good but coffee at 75% bad are the rantings of someone with the obvious palate of a child!
Covarr
2806 days ago
reply
This seems wrong. I'm pretty sure raspberry should be all the way to the right.
East Helena, MT
effingunicorns
2807 days ago
reply
Mint being better than lime is a blatant falsehood.
alt_text_bot
2807 days ago
reply
I recognize that chocolate is its own thing on which reasonable people may differ. Everything else here is objective fact.
toddmichaelryan
2807 days ago
reply
Great visual but I would have preferred to see box plots with a 95% confidence interval of the population mean.
Next Page of Stories