I just posted it myself as the first thing that came to mind with something small and cute and noise-making. Hadn’t read other comments at that point.
We’ve genetically engineered other colored foods before, like golden rice.
We’ve genetically-engineered many bioluminescent plants and animals.
kagis
We’ve genetically-engineered blue flowers:
We all think we’ve seen blue flowers before. And in some cases, it’s true. But according to the Royal Horticultural Society’s color scale—the gold standard for flowers—most “blues” are really violet or purple. Florists and gardeners are forever on the lookout for new colors and varieties of plants, however, but making popular ornamental and cut flowers, like roses, vibrant blue has proved quite difficult. “We’ve all been trying to do this for a long time and it’s never worked perfectly,” says Thomas Colquhoun, a plant biotechnologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville who was not involved with the work.
True blue requires complex chemistry. Anthocyanins—pigment molecules in the petals, stem, and fruit—consist of rings that cause a flower to turn red, purple, or blue, depending on what sugars or other groups of atoms are attached. Conditions inside the plant cell also matter. So just transplanting an anthocyanin from a blue flower like a delphinium didn’t really work.
Naonobu Noda, a plant biologist at the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization in Tsukuba, Japan, tackled this problem by first putting a gene from a bluish flower called the Canterbury bell into a chrysanthemum. The gene’s protein modified the chrysanthemum’s anthocyanin to make the bloom appear purple instead of reddish. To get closer to blue, Noda and his colleagues then added a second gene, this one from the blue-flowering butterfly pea. This gene’s protein adds a sugar molecule to the anthocyanin. The scientists thought they would need to add a third gene, but the chrysanthemum flowers were blue with just the two genes, they report today in Science Advances.
“That allowed them to get the best blue they could obtain,” says Neil Anderson, a horticultural scientist at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul who was not involved with the work.
Chemical analyses showed that the blue color came about in just two steps because the chrysanthemums already had a colorless component that interacted with the modified anthocyanin to create the blue color. “It was a stroke of luck,” Colquhoun says. Until now, researchers had thought it would take many more genes to make a flower blue, Nakayama adds.
The next step for Noda and his colleagues is to make blue chrysanthemums that can’t reproduce and spread into the environment, making it possible to commercialize the transgenic flower. But that approach could spell trouble in some parts of the world. “As long as GMO [genetically modified organism] continues to be a problem in Europe, blue [flowers] face a difficult economic future,” predicts Ronald Koes, a plant molecular biologist at the University of Amsterdam who was not involved with the work. But others think this new blue flower will prevail. “It’s certainly an advance for the retail florist,” Anderson says. “It would have a lot of market value worldwide.”
I imagine that it’s quite possibly within the realm of what we could do.
For me, it’s corn on the cob.
Man, I dunno if I really want to explore this rabbit hole, but I’m sure that there’s much-less-tolerable stuff out there. Say, live mice or something.
If you’re trying to compare cost of living in different areas in the US, there are a number of online websites that will do that.
Here’s one:
https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/cost-of-living-calculator/
EDIT: That doesn’t answer your question fully, obviously, but it’s probably one piece that you want if you’re trying to find some rural place to move to.
If you want to get deals for the grocery store you need their app
That’s because they want to get their app on your phone so that they can perform data-mining using the data that the app can get from the phone environment.
I mean, I don’t think that it’s worth bothering with trying to game the system. I’m not going to give them my data, and I don’t really care about the discount that they’re offering for it. But if you want to do so, you can probably run an Android environment on a server and use the equivalent of RDP or VNC or something to reach it remotely.
grabs a random example
A container-based approach to boot a full Android system on regular GNU/Linux systems running Wayland based desktop environments.
Need to connect that up to VNC or RDP somehow if it doesn’t have native support.
EDIT: I think that I’d take a hard look at how much it’s likely to save you relative to how much time and effort you’re going to spend on setting up and maintaining this, though.
I won’t bother to make it myself, but my mother used to make a very light coffee cake on weekends that I really liked when it was very fresh and hot. Probably have the recipe somewhere. Called “cocoa ripple”. Think I’ve seen it elsewhere.
kagis
This looks kinda similar. I’d leave out the chocolate chips, though.
https://mindeescookingobsession.com/chocolate-chip-ripple-coffee-cake/
For something that I’d actually be willing to make and like, large portions of scrambled eggs. Throw in some random spices from the spice cupboard and a little olive oil.
I don’t use Mastodon, and my only real use of Twitter was searching for keywords during major disasters, but truth is a constraint on what you say, and I’d imagine that some people think that it gets in the way of whatever their other goals are.
At this point im getting solar out of spite.
Aight, and seems like a legit thing to look into, but I’d run the numbers on 'em first. Especially given that they’ve got the grid connection fee coming or present, it will make solar less-favorable than it had been in some recent years, and a lot of companies went up to homeowners and told 'em “I’ve got a great investment for you” that didn’t always turn out to be quite as good an idea as some people hoped.
You’ve got the time value of money. So if you’re buying a ton of hardware up front, that’s money that’s either you aren’t earning a return on or money that you’re borrowing and paying interest for.
The panels and batteries do not last forever. You’re getting N years of service out of them, even if nothing breaks.
You might also want to price insulation costs of various things on your place. Like, that may provide a better return. I don’t know the numbers, but windows, weatherstripping, attic, etc.
EDIT: One other option, since Fresno’s pretty arid too – you might also look at evaporative coolers, aka swamp coolers. More maintenance than air conditioning, but about an eighth the energy consumption for a given amount of cooling, can keep windows open and fresh air coming through. I have a portable evaporative cooler that I keep by my desk that works nicely unless the temperature is really exceptionally high.
Yeah, that does seem kind of unreasonable for Fresno. I mean, not that I think that there isn’t grounds to complain about the Bay Area being where it is either, but I get your point. Hits hard.
I’m not gonna ask whether you qualify, doesn’t matter for the standpoint of this discussion, but if you’re not aware, California has been pretty gung-ho on some low-income household utility subsidy programs; some of those have gone through recently. If you do qualify, hope that might help.
Sounds like PG&E also got the go-ahead to do a bunch of underground lines and rate hikes to get customers to pay for them. I understand that buried lines are more-common in Europe – you don’t have to see power lines, but it costs more to stick 'em underground and maintain 'em, and the US typically keeps 'em aboveground, unless it’s a major urban area.
Electricity costs will get even higher for many Bay Area residents after California regulators approved the latest in a series of PG&E rate hikes at a voting meeting on Thursday.
The utility seeks to recover $943.9 million in costs related to wildfire mitigation and damages from power outages during severe storms in recent years. It asked state regulators to approve a temporary rate increase of $5.16 per month for its average customer.
It’s the third such “interim rate relief” request from PG&E within a year, according to California Public Utility Commission documents. In July 2023, regulators allowed PG&E to raise rates temporarily by an average of $10.30 and then again by around $5 a month the following March.
These smaller, temporary rate hikes are in addition to regulators’ approval of a much larger general rate adjustment proposal last year to help PG&E cover the cost of burying thousands of miles of lines underground in the most wildfire-prone parts of the state, as well as other investments.
Ratepayers saw an average increase of about $30 a month on their bills beginning this year because of that.
I don’t really care about not having lines visible, though I don’t think that people not where underground lines are should be paying for those, that it should be people in an area that want them underground to cover the cost.
It would be interesting, I think, to have a journalist go to some states with wildly-different costs and do a breakdown of why electricity in different states costs different amounts. I think that it’s pretty legitimate for someone living in a place with high utility costs to ask for and and get an explicit breakdown showing why their utility provider can’t be competitive with one in another state.
Well, California has some of the highest electricity rates in the US. IIRC the exceptions are Hawaii and Alaska.
That being said, last I looked, it was more like $0.21/kWh. Hadn’t realized that it had gotten that high.
EDIT: Here’s a per-state list for average residential prices for 2024:
https://www.usatoday.com/money/homefront/deregulated-energy/electricity-rates-by-state/
That has California at an average of 29.49 cents/kWh, which is quite high as the US goes, but not nearly as high as yours. It does say that prices went up 11% since last year.
California has had a major problem where billing just happened per kWh, so that people who were using solar (or some other form of local generation) were basically dumping the cost of maintaining the grid connections onto people who weren’t doing local generation, since the solar users were purchasing few kWhs. This was very politically controversial, especially since the latter group was generally poorer. IIRC, California is just or will be passing policy changes that will limit that, so the kWh cost from the grid should drop, though people getting most of their power from solar will have a higher overall bill than they had; there’s a separate bill item for the grid connection and for the electricity provided over it.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article288420595.html
Not sure when that enters or entered into force. However, it should depress per-kWh charges, though there’ll be a fixed charge for the grid connection.
The actual software that provides the “old.reddit”-alike interface to Lemmy instances is mlmym:
https://github.com/rystaf/mlmym
A lot of the frontends can be run remotely, don’t need to run on the remote instance. Photon, for example, isn’t even aimed at the local instance at all – it’ll take any domain, in the URL, and when you log in, you specify the lemmy instance that you want to talk to. 'course, you’re shoving your password to it, so you’d want to trust whoever is running it with those credentials. I’d be a little cautious about that. But for local instances, hey, you trust yourself.
It looks to me kinda like mlmym might also qualify, and it looks like it’s just a docker command or two to run it, if you’re familiar with that system.
If that’s true, if you wanted, you might be able to just run your own local mlmym instance and have it talk to lemmy.world. You don’t need to wait for them to get their own instance back up.
I’m talking about the “thread-oriented, community-based-discussion Reddit-alike” systems.
Lemmy. Kbin. Mbin. Piefed. Couple other projects.
That is, the Threadiverse isn’t just Lemmy, even if Lemmy is – at the moment, at any rate – the largest.
As much as I would turn down the knob on some of their regulation, I don’t see why. The absolute worst case I could see is them legally-requiring people in the EU to not federate with instances abroad. That might fragment the Fediverse, but it ain’t gonna kill it.
I’m sure that there are people out there who will take commission work, given sizing information, maybe a photograph of what you want and any tweaks you want done. I’m not really familiar with that world myself, though, couldn’t suggest anything. I’m pretty much an off-the-shelf clothing kinda person myself.
Good luck, though!
Ah, glad you like it!
It’s got tons of years of posts on there, though unfortunately, a lot of people used external image hosting places that ultimately purged images, which kind of killed the longevity of many of the older forum posts in some cases. There is, perhaps, a lesson for the Threadiverse here…
I remember seeing some guy on there who IIRC said that he was a police detective, and was determined to dress like one from the 1940s or so at work – the kinda stuff you see in film noir movies. Was pretty classy-looking, IMHO. I would never, ever go to anything approaching that much effort, but I enjoy watching other people doing it. There are also some women who are determined to do noir femme fatale looks on there, all sorts of fun stuff.
You mean The Fedora Lounge forum that I linked to in another comment?
EDIT: Ah, apparently yes.
I think that we’re kind of not answering OP’s question, since exactly one person as of this writing other than him has a new style, and everyone else is nostalgic for older styles that people aren’t wearing any more, so I hate to add to the “nostalgia” pile, but I kind of miss the denim jacket from the 1980s. Sometimes quilted, if you needed extra heat. Was durable, though not appropriate for precipitation, since it couldn’t shed water. I don’t really live where I need heat, but I remember really liking them. They were comfortable, very tough, not very expensive, and I liked the look.
Jeans have never gone away since they showed up in the 19th century…but the denim jacket seems to me to be a lot less common.
Today, I’ll sometimes wear a loose, very light, unbuttoned denim shirt over a T-shirt, which is about as much as I need, heat-wise. This kind of thing:
Light denim shirt:
People certainly wear those all the time. Kinda miss the thicker, tough denim jacket, though. Haven’t had one for ages. And I didn’t just like wearing it myself, but like how it looks on others, and it works for both genders.
Don’t really understand why denim pants had so much more staying power and universality than the denim jacket. They seemed like a good pair.
It’s not on the Threadiverse, but if you like retrowear, I remember seeing The Fedora Lounge, a forum with a bunch of people who are into retrowear and are willing to go to far more work than I am to obtain, reconstruct, commission, maintain and wear it. It was fun to browse images of, though.
https://www.thefedoralounge.com/forums/
EDIT: I think that a lot of the reason that hats got clobbered was people spending more time indoors. If I’m outside and the sun is really blazing down, having a broad-brimmed, light, mesh-sided hat is nice. If it’s raining, having a hat (or hood or something) so that water doesn’t head down inside my collar. But…if you’re inside, you don’t get the benefit of the portable shade or protection from the elements. And a lot of time that people aren’t in a structure with a roof, they’re in a vehicle with a roof.
In the heyday of the hat, it was proper to take the thing off indoors. So if one follows the same convention, for most, there’s just less time for the thing to spend on one’s head than it was when people were spending a lot more time outdoors.
EDIT2: Since it’s an existing style, a shot of a fedora from Double Indemnity:
PawSense is a Windows package that tries to detect when a cat is walking across a keyboard and locks it.
https://priceonomics.com/the-software-that-detects-when-a-cat-is-messing/
I don’t know of a Linux equivalent, though I’d swear I remember something similar that was targeted at the author’s young 2-year-old daughter, was named after her, but which I cannot now find.