For everyone following along at home: this website is worth a click if you’ve never seen it before!

Rinsing rice does wonders. Without a rice cooker you’ll need to strain it, but it’s still worth it.

1. Measure rice by volume. Let’s say 2 cups worth
2. Put into fine colendar and rinse until the water comes out clear. Mixing with your hand will speed this up. You can also do this in the pot you’re going to cook in and dump water out
3. Put strained rice in your pot
4. Add cold water. The ratio of water to rice matters a lot and varies by species of rice. The ratio will be printed on whatever container your rice came in. For Jasmin rice it’s 2 water to 1 rice, so for our two cups of rice you’ll need 4 cups of water
5. Cover, turn on medium-high heat, being to boil. Don’t go far because it will boil over when it does boil
6. Turn the heat down to low, crack the lid, and set a timer. The amount of time needed will vary based on rice. For Jasmin, 15 minutes is a good check-in time
7. Pop the lid. See water bubbling up? If yes, replace lid and come back in a few minutes. If not, use a wooden spoon to get a peek at the bottom of the pot. See water? If yes, replace lid and come back fairly soon to check again. If not, your rice is done. Turn the heat off, fluff, enjoy.

We made rice for years using this method and it is a very reliable cooking method. Rice doesn’t really leave you a lot of wiggle room though, which is where a rice cooker comes in handy. As an added bonus, some rice cookers come with water lines in them. I measure my dry rice into the cooker, rinse using the cooker, dump most of the water out, and fill to the appropriate level.

Different species of rice have very different textures and somewhat (subtle) different flavorss.

Some rice, like basmati, can be cooked using the pasta method (intentionally use way too much water and strain the excess off after the rice is cooked). I guess all rice could be cooked that way, but you would be giving up some starch.

Not that I remember, which is probably the reason why it was cut from the film. There is a lot of activity around him and the area around his house in the books, but it’s more side quest than main quest.

Tom Bombadil is probably the biggest omission - both the character and all tge activities that take place around their house. I remembered that sticking out to me when I watched the films for the first time, but at that point I last read the trilogy at least five years prior.

A lot of my camera gear is second hand too. It’s a great way to save some serious $$. As an added bonus, some of my “used” gear was very lightly used by their previous owner.

The true best gear is the gear you end up using

I dabble in photography as a hobby. One of the sayings is, “the best camera is the one you have with you”. The “best” cameras and lenses tend to be big and heavy, but are often overkill. There’s a certain amount of prestige attached to this gear, IMO you’re better off with compromise gear that’s smaller/lighter - especially for frequent casual use. You’ll take it out with you more.

https://ingenext.ca/products/boost-50

50 hp for $1k

I can’t find them right now, but there are similar things you can buy to unlock factory features at a discount.

Up front disclaimer: this is all conjure on my part.

I own an “AI” laptop (only because I was interested in a snapdragon x). Most of the AI enabled features don’t really require a NPU, such as a decent background camera blur, some paint and photo stuff, live captions, etc. Microsoft was looking for a headline feature that didn’t already have a CPU/GPU/cloud implementation. Enter: recal.

IMO this is very much about finding a novel feature, that doesn’t have an alternate implementation. The near term motive is to justify their “AI” PCs to customers in hops that customers adopt them. I suspect the long term goal is opening up a revenue stream for AI - get customers used to “AI enabled” features and then tack a subscription cost onto them, but I truly hope this won’t be the case - especially when the hardware you own has a NPU.

This seems like a cool idea, but they lost me at needing to make an account to view my score :(

I haven’t spent much time looking at Linux support due to having a busy personal life, so I’ll live with Win 11 in the meantime.

That said, I don’t think anyone has Linux booting on any Snapdragon X machines yet. I think there’s a signing limitation (eg device OEM signing) and a graphics driver gap. It does seem like the first will be overcome eventually, otherwise no one will be able to build their own machine.

More people in the market means more people working on both of these things!

I certainly won’t complain about cheaper, but I’m pretty happy with my Lenovo 7x Slim. It has a 14.5" 3k OLED display, so it’s not the battery life champ, but it’s built well and priced pretty well at $1,200 MSRP. You can upgrade the ram to 32 GB and the SSD to 1 TB for $110 combined. Typical Lenovo experience for shipping a custom build, but the laptop itself is great. Uninstall McAfee and away you go. I’ve only heard the fan kick on once, it doesn’t heat up in any meaningful way, the screen and keyboard are great, windows hello is surprisingly nice with facial recognition, etc etc. No comparability issues so far, but I also didn’t buy it to game on.

Growing the ARM share of the market will only make the experience better for everyone - for both windows and hopefully also for Linux.

That was absolutely the case until very recently. Qualcomm bought Nuvia, a start-up that was stacked with former Apple engineers, a few years ago. These processors are just now coming to market. Laptops with these processors are benchmarking around MacBook levels (slightly behind single core, slightly ahead in multi core).

It’s very hard to argue against Apple hardware and battery life. Maybe with windows moving slowly toward ARM they’ll catch up some. It’s going to be very tough though - Apple has full control over their hardware, which meat they can optimize their OS for it.

I really hope the snapdragon x laptops gain some traction. I recently went laptop shopping and what I wanted (good to great display, stays cold, good battery life) line up really well with a MacBook/MB air. I just couldn’t stomach the stupid mark-ups for memory and storage. I wound up with a Lenovo 7x slim. Upgrading to 32 GB memory and 1 TB storage was around $115. The non-emulated performance on windows is solid. Emulated is generally ok for my usage. I’m probably going to try Linux on it when I have a light week, but I’m somewhat wary of the impact that will have on battery life.

Thanks for the follow up!

Red dead redemption 2 didn’t stop at being pretty. If it did I don’t think we would all talk about it so fondly. Totally agree that it’s a great looking game though.

Let us know what you think of it! It certainly looks like it could be entertaining.

I work at a big company. We have tons and tons of problems to go solve that are getting little attention in addition to having a lot of redundant and/or “what would you say you do here” type positions. Most of this happens by accident, but it’s nearly impossible to unwind and redeploy those teams. My guess is that the big reasons why is because of leadership not wanting to look bad - a mix of “why did you staff this to begin with?” and “why did you let this go on for so long?” When these groups are eventually found during a reorg they tend to be let go vs redeployed, which makes it even harder for the remaining groups to do anything. The cycle is truly silly.

That’s disappointing. We’ve had our MF229dw since 2016 and it’s pulled zero schannigans.