Really Useful Boxes are excellent. The best feature for me is that the lids are raised, so you have some room that's slightly higher than the rim of the crate. Sure, buy a bigger crate, but it's nice to pack things just about level and not worry about one annoying part poking up.
I've switched to UTZ Rako/Euroboxes for longer term storage. I even bought a beat-up dolly so I could easily transport 60L boxes around. They stack, they're divisible (e.g. 2x30L on top of a 60L) and the smaller ones fit neatly into a KALLAX cubby. You can buy them used for cheap, if you're willing to spend an afternoon scrubbing factory dirt off them. But they're not significantly pricier than Really Useful.
There are other suppliers like Auer, who make all kinds of interesting variations like toolboxes and latching/lockable boxes, but can get really expensive. You can get insert containers for them, but same problem: no transparent lids, only generic gray unless you want to buy 100.
I've been lusting after some of the Sortimo boxes that Adam Savage recommends, but I can't justify 50-100 quid per compartment box.
As for the original article... I like the idea of dots, but I would try a gridded label with sharpie marks. Having worked in a lot of workshops and labs though, boxes are not efficient. You want a good rack/drawers for things you use all the time (tape). I do like one box per project for convenience, which is often more useful than a box with generic grouped parts. If you really need to, you can do things like cut SMD tapes for each project. This way is much easier to drop back into something you only have time for on the weekend, and it's also what we would do in hardware shops (single sorted organizer with the BOM items for a project).
I do agree about the hardware side being surprising. When I was working on electronics for work, having a 4 channel scope was indispensable. But most of the time, debugging on chip/breakpoints are enough. I switched to a 4 channel mixed signal Picoscope.
(Someone else mentioned kitchen containers. I spent some time in a professional kitchen which hooked me on Cambro-style containers, or whatever Nisbet's sell in the UK. Also standardized alu sheet pans and matching silicone mats for baking.)
I have a Supernote which I like primarily because it's repairable and the developers are very responsive. It's the A5 version. It's very nice to write on and if you haven't tried eink in a while, it's pretty impressive. The soft surface is also a replaceable film. It has a Lamy colab pen which is very nice.
Downside is no backlight which many users tout as an improvement, or praise it as a minimalist perk. I don't really agree, but it does mean that the ink surface is closer to the pen so there's less parallax error. It makes it less usable as an ebook reader though, for example on a flight you'd have to use the blinding overhead lights.
Sure the price is comparable to 20+ notebooks. I think if you actually use notebooks, they're good. If you don't, it's questionable whether it'll change your habit. It also doesn't replace the satisfaction of a nice ink pen on nice paper. I have a collection of fountain pen ink that I've used since university (for years of daily lecture notes which is more writing than I'm ever likely to do again - we're talking up to 20 A4 sides a day) and the bottles are still practically full. So good writing equipment can be very economical. There are other issues like no colour (on mine) and PDF support is still ropey.
I started buying Belkin TB5 cables which are around $50 a pop. They can easily power a laptop at full load and can stream video at any reasonable resolution/framerate I might need. I've yet to find a need for an NVMe faster than 20 GBps nevermind finding USB4 enclosures, or that the cable supports up to 80. They're also not nearly as chunky as the Dell cables, which are good, but seem to have very rigid shielding.
I keep a few converters for older devices and servers that don't have (m)any C ports, but as far as a consumer "forever cable" goes, TB5 feels close. Certainly the cable's bandwidth is beyond what most people need, unless you're editing 8k video or continually shuffling hundreds of GBs between external disks.
I wish the USB spec had mandated labeling. There must be a lovely label printer they make for cables or something that shouldn’t be too expensive these days. Label a few cables a day, finish the whole house in a jiffy.
LTT or another big YouTuber made a cable and made sure to get it labeled. Also complained how difficult it was to find a supplier willing to make a better cable than usual.
This definitely happened to a paper that I submitted a couple of years ago. ChatGPT 4 was the frontier. The reviewer gave a positive, if bland, summary with some reasonable suggestions for improvement and some nitpicks. There were no grammar or line-number comments like those from other reviewers. They were all issues that would have been resolved by reading the appendices, but the reviewer hadn't uploaded into ChatGPT. Later on I was able to replicate the output almost exactly myself.
What I found funny was that if you asked ChatGPT to provide a score recommendation, it was also significantly higher than what that reviewer put. They were lazy and gave a middle grade (borderline accept/reject). We were accepted with high scores from the other reviews, but it was a bit annoying that they seemingly didn't even interpret the output from the model.
The learning experience was this: be an honourable academic, but it's in your interest to run your paper through Claude or ChatGPT to see what they're likely to criticise. At the very least it's a free, maybe bad, review. But you will find human reviewers that make those mistakes, or misinterpret your results, so treat the output with the same degree of skepticism.
The few times I've baked there, it's been a pretty good experience. There's a full height proving cabinet, yeast works really well at altitude, the ovens have steam injectors, there are good mixers, a commercial fryer. In many ways much easier than baking at home, but probably not a patch on a good bakery.
We almost ran out of sugar in 2021 and Rothera sent us a bag of Tate and Lyle in break-glass-in-emerhency box on one of the early transit flights the following summer. That's still hanging in the galley. Cream also goes pretty quickly, and forget about eggs. But you only need "egg product" anyway.
The foods that tend to be avoided are pasta and beans, or really anything which has to be boiled. There's a massive pressure cooker but it's a pain to use and clean. It's also hard to brew coffee if you tend to use off-the-boil. The best you'll get is about 93 C. Espresso is fine as its pressurised anyway.
> It's also hard to brew coffee if you tend to use off-the-boil. The best you'll get is about 93 C.
That sounds ideal for off-the-boil coffee brewing? At sea level I (and all the speciality coffee shops round here) aim for 91C, and I'll drop that to 88-89C for medium roast and lower if it looks on the dark side. Brew methods: Aeropress and cafetiere.
This is true, and even with black tea where you'd normally want hotter, I don't think anyone really pays attention
Thinking about it, we also had some "fancy" packet ramen from Momofuku. Good example there - those noodles take forever to cook compared to the deep fried ones. You'd have to soak, nuke in the microwave and still wait ages.
Most of the coffee we took down were light roast and how well the beans survived shipping/storage, how well they were roasted mattered much more.
There are a bunch of cafetieres as well, but I don't like the silt even with some of the techniques designed to minimize it.
Do they not do soaked beans? Leave them in water for 2 days and they shouldn't need a full boil I wouldn't think? Bonus: chickpea water as an egg substitute in recipes (powdered egg is nasty!). Re: coffee, mixing concentrated cold brew with hot water makes a pretty smooth cup
> Do they not do soaked beans? Leave them in water for 2 days and they shouldn't need a full boil I wouldn't think?
We'd definitely have kidney beans in chili and some other dishes, but I got the impression it was a hassle otherwise.
> Re: coffee, mixing concentrated cold brew with hot water makes a pretty smooth cup
Friend and I ran a weekly pop-up espresso bar and did a lot of experimenting over the winter. The USAP "house" beans are quite dark, but at least they're roasted within a year or two because coffee is always available and we go through a lot of beans every season. Except the decaf. That stuff is decades old.
People often bring down a big bag from one of the roasters in Christchurch. We personally shipped down a lot of specialty coffee, mostly made V60 and aeropress. The outbuilding where our telescopes live also has a Chemex and an automatic.
At McMurdo this season the espresso machine at the coffee house broke. Fortunately we had two espresso machines out at LDB, and plenty of C1 and C4 beans
I depends the beans and their freshness. If soaked and not 2yo+, it’s less than 1 hour for most of them. 30 min is enough for azuki and chickpeas if soaked 48h.
There’s other tricks: various beans can be found in the form of instant powder or flaskes (1 min watering - no cooking) semolina (5 min watering - no cooking) and pre steamed (no watering - 10/20 min cooking). I bring those to hike on the mountain and use gaz only to make them hot. Mixed with cereals semolina, spices, herbs and oil/nuts its the perfect submit meal.
I cook more with feeling than recipe and I as I hike for multi days I try to vary the meals to avoid getting bored. My typical bag includes multiples zip bag with ingredients and I pick a few to make a meal:
- semolina of wheat, whole wheat, rye, lentils and chickpeas
- flakes-instant smashed potatoes / adzuki beans. Instant quinoa packed with prots but miss carbs.
- sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds
- dried seasoning algae, yeast, zaatar or thyme. Curry powder or other spice mix.
One of my favorite mix is 1/3 lentil semolina, 2/3 wheat semolina, sesame seeds and yeast. Mix together, add water and cover for a few minutes.
Edit: last year I used a food dehydrator to pack some sauces and cooked vegetables. Works great for the ones in think slices.
Even without a pressure cooker, you can cook beans faster in a microwave oven.
However, you still need more than a half of hour if you want the beans to be soft, e.g. 45 minutes (after having soaked the beans for a half of day).
I cook all my food in a microwave oven. Except for beans, I have never encountered any vegetable that would need more than 15 minutes. For lentils or chickpeas, around 12 minutes is normally sufficient.
No mention of Claude/ChatGPT's favourite new word genuine and friends? They also like using real and honest when giving advice. Far as I can tell this is a new-ish change.
> Honestly? We should address X first. It's a genuine issue and we've found a real bug here.
Honorable mention: "no <thing you told me not to do>". I guess this helps reassure adherence to the prompt? I see that one all the time in vibe coded PRs.
There are some subreddits where this trope is completely out of control. For better or worse I follow the NBA subreddit and in the comment sections the number of people who throw in honestly as a qualifier is like way more than you would assume from natural conversation.
I really don’t understand what’s wrong with people using LLMs for these types of mundane conversations. There’s nothing to gain and it destroys value of online discourse.
I don't think anyone is using LLMs for those conversations. A lot of those replies are bots. There's a market for reddit accounts that have a solid human-looking reply/post history, to be used for astroturf marketing, so some organizations set up bots to grow such accounts. There probably are also just people who overuse "Honestly? [statement]" sentences. I've spoken to such people in person before LLMs.
But I feel like I’ve noticed an uptick in people using the adverb “genuinely” in what I genuinely believe to not be AI generated comments, articles, etc. Maybe it’s just me, I got similar vibes about the word efficacy a few years ago, before the ascent of GenAI (but after the pandemic — again, maybe just me).
I see this so often. Sometimes it’s just “no react hooks”, other times it gets literal and extra unnatural, like: “here’s <your thing>, no unnecessary long text explanation”. Perhaps we’re past AGI and this is passive aggressiveness ;)
Have you tried writing that as a skill? Compaction is just a prompt with a convenient UI to keep you in the same tab. There's no reason you can't ask the model to do that yourself and start a new conversation. You can look up Claude's /compact definition, for reference.
However, in some harnesses the model is given access to the old chat log/"memories", so you'd need a way to provide that. You could compromise by running /compact and pasting the output from your own summarizer (that you ran first, obviously).
The same is also true within the Macbook line. The 14" Pro is smaller and nearly 2lbs lighter than the first 13" unibodies. I have my 2009 college laptop on a shelf as a memento and it feels pretty chunky. This hasn't changed much in the M-series though, and the M5 is slightly heavier than the M1.
Something I miss from the Windows side is sub-kg machines, at least since Apple discontinued the 12" Macbook. It makes a surprisingly big difference when traveling, especially with Asian carriers that have hard carry-on limits. The Thinkpad X1 Carbon is a fantastic form factor, though the older Intel chips run incredibly hot. I repurposed that as a garage/workshop Linux machine. Unfortunately, the price differences between Mac/Windows also disappear when you start looking at those higher-end machines.
Baffin make some of the best cold weather boots. We use them in Antarctica, though you probably don't want the chonky -70C rated ones. I have some lighter boots rated for about -40 and they're great. Really any good gore tex mid-ankle hiking boot is probably fine. Whether you need cold rated boots is going to depend on where you're walking.
Your main concern is to stay dry and minimize snow incursion. Either wear ski pants that act as gaiters, use gaiters or use boots and socks that are high enough that you won't get snow down the sides.
If you buy boots with insulation, try not to compress it. Otherwise be aware that if you don't keep moving, your boots will eventually cool to ambient and it's pretty hard to get that temperature back up.
Check grip? Hard to test but warm doesn't necessarily mean any good on slick ice. Spikes work well if you're going on a hike and there's a lot of packed snow mixed with ice.
Don't forget good socks. Doesn't need to be anything fancy, but wool is by far the best material (not necessarily merino as it tends to be too thin). You may need to size up because of the extra padding.
Also luxury, but fan assisted boot drying/warming stations are great. They make quite a big difference if you go out a lot because moisture build-up takes ages to dry otherwise.
I've switched to UTZ Rako/Euroboxes for longer term storage. I even bought a beat-up dolly so I could easily transport 60L boxes around. They stack, they're divisible (e.g. 2x30L on top of a 60L) and the smaller ones fit neatly into a KALLAX cubby. You can buy them used for cheap, if you're willing to spend an afternoon scrubbing factory dirt off them. But they're not significantly pricier than Really Useful.
There are other suppliers like Auer, who make all kinds of interesting variations like toolboxes and latching/lockable boxes, but can get really expensive. You can get insert containers for them, but same problem: no transparent lids, only generic gray unless you want to buy 100.
I've been lusting after some of the Sortimo boxes that Adam Savage recommends, but I can't justify 50-100 quid per compartment box.
As for the original article... I like the idea of dots, but I would try a gridded label with sharpie marks. Having worked in a lot of workshops and labs though, boxes are not efficient. You want a good rack/drawers for things you use all the time (tape). I do like one box per project for convenience, which is often more useful than a box with generic grouped parts. If you really need to, you can do things like cut SMD tapes for each project. This way is much easier to drop back into something you only have time for on the weekend, and it's also what we would do in hardware shops (single sorted organizer with the BOM items for a project).
I do agree about the hardware side being surprising. When I was working on electronics for work, having a 4 channel scope was indispensable. But most of the time, debugging on chip/breakpoints are enough. I switched to a 4 channel mixed signal Picoscope.
(Someone else mentioned kitchen containers. I spent some time in a professional kitchen which hooked me on Cambro-style containers, or whatever Nisbet's sell in the UK. Also standardized alu sheet pans and matching silicone mats for baking.)
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