Endorsements from Thumbs Readers

[osmosisch]

6 hours ago, miffy495 said:

I've actually been trying this for a week or so now. Weird to see it pop up out of nowhere like this. Can't seem to get a starter to take. I want to get one going without storebought yeast, but it's giving me trouble. Any tips?

The biggest variable is the flour. The culture in your starter mostly comes from the wild yeasts and lactobacillae living on the grain and hence in the flour. If the flour's been sterilised things aren't going to get off any time soon.

 

I'd advise trying out several flours in separate starters to see what works for you. The general process is always the same, add equal parts by weight water and flour daily (we do ~40g or so) and stir (consistency should be like yogurt), then let it sit covered. Within a week there should be small bubbles appearing, and the mass should give off a mildly sour, yogurt-like smell. The consistency also may have changed somewhat, becoming more stringy as the gluten are separated from the starch. We got the nicest starters from buckwheat and especially spelt flour.

 

@RubixsQube that looks great!

 

About this popping up, I can't speak for others but for us our latent desire for home-baked bread came to the fore because we watched the Cooked! series on Netflix. The bread episode left us both slavering.

 

[xchen]

13 Reasons Why on Netflix! Basically Life is Strange the TV show!! Loved the pilot!

[YoThatLimp]

On 4/11/2017 at 5:52 AM, osmosisch said:

I'm going to endorse baking your own bread. It's both enormously simple and enormously satisfying. You start with a flour and water porridge, let it develop into a starter over a week and then you're set. We've not bought bread for several months now and we're very smug about it.

 

I've mostly been using Dutch language resources so I can't help you much there but there's a crapton of resources out there. A lot of the joy is in the experimentation anyway. Go!

 

First try came out decently! Crumb is not perfect, but at least it gives me an excuse to try again, hah. 

 

 

[Chris]

On 4/12/2017 at 3:28 PM, xchen said:

13 Reasons Why on Netflix! Basically Life is Strange the TV show!! Loved the pilot!

There's a thread about it!

 

[osmosisch]

16 hours ago, YoThatLimp said:

 

First try came out decently! Crumb is not perfect, but at least it gives me an excuse to try again, hah. 

 

 

Wonderful! That looks very good. Want to taste dat bread :o)

 

Wife's also quite impressed!

[vehementa]

I'd like to endorse just sitting outside for a bit. I've been taking a walk in the park every day for the past while and have found a really nice spot to sit down by a small pond. Lately the ducks and the squirrels have gotten used to me and don't mind me at all. It's nice to sit there and look at them go. "Just chillin" is the kind of thing you'd think is too frivolous to actually spend time on, but even just 5-10 minutes of sitting is really worthwhile despite not being a huge time investment. 

Advanced: Bring an appropriate snack for potential critters.

small hungry friends

[infamous space turtle]

^ That sounds really nice. 

 

Iv been occasionally listening to these ambient tracks on youtube while I work on stuff. Its oddly satisfying. 

 

 

[Vasari]

On 2017-3-24 at 5:56 PM, Chris said:

Learn to make miso soup. It doesn't take very long and unless it's something you grew up with, it feels like one of those things that is reserved for a restaurant experience--but it totally doesn't have to be! It's fun, inexpensive, and not difficult to make. It's a great hot comfort food.

 

I'd like to co-endorse this. I'd never tasted miso soup until today, but I tried making it on a whim and it's delicious. Plus, once you've got the basics, you can use it as the soup for a ramen bowl.

[clyde]

On 3/31/2017 at 2:45 PM, Fingus said:

If you listen to a lot of music on your PC I can really recommend investing a few bucks in a low end cheap "audiophile rig".

Most enthusiast audio hardware is absurdly expensive, and in my opinion suffer severely from diminishing returns. But just getting a cheap pair of headphones with neutral levels and a simple DAC (digital-to-analog-converter, essentially a usb soundcard) so you don't have to deal with the super garbage soundcard that is integrated on most motherboards makes an enormous difference. The difference between investing 0$ and 50$ is way bigger than the difference between investing 50$ and 3000$.

 

I use this DAC: https://www.amazon.com/Behringer-UCA202-BEHRINGER-U-CONTROL/dp/B000KW2YEI

And these headphones: https://www.amazon.com/Superlux-681-Dynamic-Semi-Open-Headphones/dp/B002GHIPYI

 

And I'm super happy with them. I used to borrow my roommate's expensive AKG's just plugged right into my PC's 3.5mm jack and honestly just this basic junk sounds much better. Not having the output garbled by whatever agressively corner cutting soundchip motherboard manufacturers tend to use makes such a huge difference. 

 

I have a hard time wrapping my head around digital-to-analog conversion. How can this be a thing? I want to be open to the possibility that this could improve sound-quality, but it makes no sense to me. How is it possible to add more signal from a 256-bitrate file without some sort of magical machine-learning from 2027? It just makes no sense that this would be possible. What am I missing here?

At first I just figured it was impossible so I felt that I had nothing to gain from a response, but I find myself thinking about this every once in a while since the beginning of April and being like "What if it is real?"

 

 

Edit (30 minutes later):

I realized that I had an external soundcard available to be since I use it for dual mic-inputs for podcasting so I hooked it up and tried listening through it instead of through the audio-jack of the tower. I see what you are talking about. I was thinking about it the wrong way, it isn't that the DAC is adding additional signal, it is that there is already a DAC on the motherboard that is crap and a new DAC replaces it.

This is a significant improvement. THANKS!

 

Also I have a pair of Sony MDR-7506 and I am very pleased with how balanced they are.

[Zeusthecat]

On 4/29/2017 at 8:12 PM, clyde said:

 

I have a hard time wrapping my head around digital-to-analog conversion. How can this be a thing? I want to be open to the possibility that this could improve sound-quality, but it makes no sense to me. How is it possible to add more signal from a 256-bitrate file without some sort of magical machine-learning from 2027? It just makes no sense that this would be possible. What am I missing here?

At first I just figured it was impossible so I felt that I had nothing to gain from a response, but I find myself thinking about this every once in a while since the beginning of April and being like "What if it is real?"

 

Sorry, I can't resist chiming in a bit here to help clarify.

 

Analog sound is comprised of a bunch of different frequencies plus noise. Converting that analog signal to a digital signal involves taking a bunch of Fourier transforms to extract all of the various frequencies into discreet components while filtering out the noise. The more you sample the signal (the Nyquist frequency (twice the highest frequency in the signal) being the lowest possible sampling rate to reproduce the signal without error), the better the digital representation of your analog signal.

 

Converting this digital signal back to analog involves just reconstructing the waveform from those discreet frequency components and will always be limited to the original sampling rate. I don't know much about how commercial DACs work these days but I imagine the better ones just do a better job of reproducing the signal while injecting only a minimal amount of noise back in.

 

Since I'm posting in here I should probably add a relevant recommendation: mess around with audio signals and fast fourier transforms in Matlab! It's fun once you get the hang of it and gives you a greater appreciation for all of the math that makes analog to digital and digital to analog conversions possible.

[mjukis]

My endorsement is the peak design messenger bag (15 inch version) : https://www.peakdesign.com/product/bags/the-everyday-messenger/ I've had it for 2 months, it's great. The magnetic latch is great, the build is great, the balance is great. The "tube"/tripod compartment perfectly fits a card game play mat, if you're a nerd and care about such things (I do).

[dibs]

On 5/2/2017 at 9:05 PM, Zeusthecat said:

 

Since I'm posting in here I should probably add a relevant recommendation: mess around with audio signals and fast fourier transforms in Matlab! It's fun once you get the hang of it and gives you a greater appreciation for all of the math that makes analog to digital and digital to analog conversions possible.

 

But that is my job already 

[clyde]

12 hours ago, dibs said:

 

But that is my job already 

 

Is there an inexpensive soundcard you recommend?

[jennegatron]

idle forums: bad for dibs's job, bad for Ireland

[dibs]

On 5/7/2017 at 3:03 AM, clyde said:

 

Is there an inexpensive soundcard you recommend?

 

Oh, not with sound. I do analysis on much lower frequency sensors. I used to work with sound, but it was the sound of milk swishing through pipes!

[YoThatLimp]

On 4/15/2017 at 3:15 AM, osmosisch said:

Wonderful! That looks very good. Want to taste dat bread :o)

 

Wife's also quite impressed!

 

You're the devil. 

 

Learning how easy and cheap it is to make fresh, awesome bread has been very difficult for me and my carb intake, hah!

[osmosisch]

5 hours ago, YoThatLimp said:

 

You're the devil. 

 

Learning how easy and cheap it is to make fresh, awesome bread has been very difficult for me and my carb intake, hah!

I'm going to go ahead and make the prediction it's also quite a lot more nutritious than most store-bought bread so hey, bonus! I'm so happy to hear it's working out for you.

 

Our last batch of starter went bad and started to smell of feet, so it's been a nice opportunity to make some fresh and try different flours. My spelt starter & flour bread especially has come out well. The flour came from a local mill which adds a certain extra something in my mind.

[root]

In the genre of bread, my wife really likes baked pretzels so instead of only having them store-boughten I looked up how to make them and found an Alton Brown recipe and they turned out fantastic so now it's like a biweekly chore for me, so my wife can always have ready access to homemade soft pretzels.  Highly endorse!

 

 

[SecretAsianMan]

I love a good pretzel but have never bothered to try and make one myself.  Is it easy?  Got that recipe handy?

[root]

I used this recipe here - http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/homemade-soft-pretzels-recipe

 

It's pretty easy to do but does require a bit of time investment, since the dough wants at least an hour to rise and the pretzels all need to be individually rolled out and boiled.

[SecretAsianMan]

Looks like something I'd love to try but I don't have a mixer and doing it by hand seems like more effort than I can currently muster.

[YoThatLimp]

6 hours ago, SecretAsianMan said:

Looks like something I'd love to try but I don't have a mixer and doing it by hand seems like more effort than I can currently muster.

 

Yeah, that's my current predicament. There is a lot of baking I'd love to do, but I'm hesitant to spend the $250 for a stand mixer. 

 

@root your pretzels look dope!

[osmosisch]

I've never made anything dough-related that I wasn't happier kneading by hand, but then I love dough. Those are some doughpe-lookin' pretzels indeed.

[Larsjr]

On ‎5‎/‎8‎/‎2017 at 4:32 PM, dibs said:

 

Oh, not with sound. I do analysis on much lower frequency sensors. I used to work with sound, but it was the sound of milk swishing through pipes!

 

Milk swishing through pipes? Interesting. Is that some sort of bottling engineer?

[Jutranjo]

Probably looking for defects in the pipes via sound detection? Not 100% sure but you can detect faults via sound recording of pipes that are really far away from the recorder.