Viewing profile — biotinker

I was laid off in early June (was a staff software eng at Viam writing motion planning software for robots) and have been fiddling with electronics. Most recently I made a portable…

> For a lot of fiction books, my rule is to read the first 50 pages. If I'm not engaged, move on. Life is short. Just encountered myself doing this. I was reading John Birmingham's…

It's been that way forever. No apple reproduces true to seed, period. 400 years ago, if you wanted another of your apple tree, you grafted it.

It wasn't all that long ago that automatic transmissions had significantly worse reliability and fuel efficiency than manual transmissions.

There are some really nice things that home automation enables that was previously impossible. I live in Bend, Oregon. We have hot summer days, cool nights, and sometimes really ba…

We don't because those are mainly younger trees in people's yards. Our nonprofit has a fairly extensive list of trees we catalog and maintain on both public and private land. Here'…

There are dozens of us! I run a nonprofit group that maintains a similar but different database, ours focuses on identification of heritage varieties, I.e. apples that existed pre …

That's definitely a thing you can do! We haven't been doing that for now. The success rate doing so is somewhat less than directly grafting the whole top of the tree onto rootstock…

> I think it’s probably more important to find and cultivate wild apples showing attributes that can keep them hardy in 21st century climate. The neat thing is that these tend to b…

It isn't, really, at least not by us. Apple trees are pretty easy to propagate if they're alive. Snip off a twig, graft it onto another tree, and away it goes. Some poor-condition …

Oh cool! I've used pomological.art! Great site! I'm in the middle of building out a similar big project that takes a different tack: looking through every period pomological text (…

We work with Dr Cameron Peace's lab at WSU. They send us test tubes, we send the tubes back with leaves in them, they run the DNA tests and compare against an apple ID database the…

I got myself involved with a nonprofit local group preserving local pioneer era apple trees. They've been DNA testing and cataloging the trees, and had all the info stashed away in…

2010 was a couple years after YouTube enabled 1080p uploads. 250MB a month was insanely small in 2010.

I love that this is something that is feasible for someone to just do right now as a hobbyist or blogger. The prices involved here are very reasonable and well within reach of some…

If you scrobble to a service like last.fm you get something approaching this functionality. This is something built into most of these services.

No, we wanted full EVs. Mazda doesn't make any, only hybrids. We wound up going with Chevrolet in both instances. The Equinox EV is one of the better EVs to offer AWD out there rig…

The Subsonic API is pretty fantastic and the apps that support it are full-featured. The Jellyfin app, while completely capable of streaming music, is far far less feature-ful. Per…

In the last three years, there have been two times when we traveled, rented a car, and were given a Volkswagon. Both times, the touchscreen-only controls were such a pain in the bu…

> Colonial New England barely exists outside of active preservation attempts. As someone who grew up there, this isn't really true. It's more that buildings have been upgraded/repl…

I would suspect that the sort of person (like myself) that would rather run GrapheneOS over LineageOS would rather install themselves than buy preinstalled. Much easier to verify n…