[–] 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I can get a "baby bottom smooth" shave with a DE. Is it better than what I could get with multiblade plastic razor? I don't know.

What I do know is that those multiblade heads cost around $4 each, and my preferred DE blades cost about 8¢. Not to mention that there is no plastic in sight, and the amount of waste is minimal.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago

    Best advice here so far.

    I have a collection of vintage DE razors and they are all different. My favourite is a 1951 Gillette Tech. It's just the right level of blade gap for me. Others may like different razors, everyone's face and beard are different.

    In general, I have found that newer DE razors tend to be more aggressive than older razors. So someone getting nicks with a modern razor may just have one that is too agressive.

    It might be worth getting a late 50's - early 69's Gillette adjustable to learn what works best. You can probably get one cheaper than a new Merkur on eBay, or at a flea market or antique shop.

    Blades also vary widely between and within brands. Do you need the sharpest blades on the planet??? Probably not. You have to experiment. Get a sampler pack from some online store and try them out.

    Soap is a big factor. Don't just go with what's on the pharmacy shelf. Buy a tube of a premium brand like George Trumper to set a baseline of how a really good, slippery soap works. Then find a cheaper brand that performs as well.

    Technique counts, obviously. I find that a 3 pass shave is overkill personally. Once with, then once against the grain with some spot touchups works fine for me. Just don't skip the "with" pass if you don't like razor rash.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago

    I cook mine in a small Instant Pot pressure cooker. Doesn't cook any faster - well it does but it uses up all time gained in building up pressure - but does a great job. It does, however, use one half as much water.

    Best thing, it's one less specialized appliance. That Instant Pot gets lots of use. Makes awesome yoghurt too.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago

    That was one of the most corrupt moments in Canadian politics. The NDP popularity was 100% due to his personal appeal. He knew that he was dying and would never sit as opposition leader for any amount of time, but he kept it secret and let people vote for him.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago

    I think that the phrase is so old that the difference between a pot and a kettle might have been fairly subtle differences in shape, but both would be black cast iron.

    Which is nowhere near as profound as your interpretation.

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  • New Articles Dump! (www.pragmaticcoding.ca)
     

    First off, I any of you have been waiting for me to get around to publishing parts 2 & 3 of my SnapCast series, I apologize for the delay. I've finally got my homelab to a state where I can start transitioning my wife over from some of the cloud services we've been using to my self-hosted alternatives. The final push on that was to get backups working properly. Anyways, time just disappeared on me.

    So here's those two articles:

    Part II

    Part III

    I've had a whole bunch of infrastructure type articles in progress for months now. I finally took the time to wrap a bunch of them up. Part of the issue is that so much of the content is inter-related that it feels wrong to publish a single article when a whole bunch of the information depends on understanding some other concept that is covered in a different article that hasn't been completed yet.

    What am I trying to accomplish here?

    As someone who has always considered himself primarily a programmer, I've also had to be "The IT Guy" for decades, and also "The Unix Guy". This meant that I ended up with a lot of practical experience with networking and data centre configuration and planning. I was in charge of configuring the rulebase on a CheckPoint FW1 firewall before some of you were born.

    At the same, I never really wanted to do this stuff, but somebody had to, and it had to be done right. But it was all "hands-on", and I would have killed myself before I'd go through the misery of getting something like a Cisco certification.

    On top of that, as a programmer I was quite a bit more involved with the business of the company than any of the networking guys we eventually ended hiring. This meant that my role morphed into being the guy that could help the network techies understand how their plumbing was going to be used by the business.

    I look at what it takes me to build a homelab, and I realize just how much I lean on the things I learned over decades of being "The IT Guy", and I wonder how hard it must be for people without that kind of a background.

    I've read through much of the FUTO article, and i can only think that even that is a hard slog for non-technical beginners. I thought that if I could share some of the things that I've learned about putting together a homelab over the past year or so, while trying to explain the underlying concepts involved, then it might help someone...and it keeps me busy and off the streets.

    Back to the article dump...

    Next is an article about DNS servers and, specifically, Technitium.

    Going hand-in-hand with that, is an article about how You Need a Public Domain.

    Finally, an article I've been sitting on forever that talks about the Lenovo M910Q Servers that I have been using in my Proxmox cluster.

    In case you're interested, I'm also working on articles about systemd, a Proxmox introduction, resilency and recovery, network security, accessing services, VPN integration and linux basics.

    As always, I'm interested in any feedback you may have, including stuff I got wrong or missed out, and whether there's any content you'd like to see. Thx.

     

    For the past few years I’ve been building and maintaining website/blog at www.pragmaticcoding.ca. It has mostly about programming, and more specifically it’s ended up having a lot of content about JavaFX with Kotlin.

    Lately, I’ve been spending all of my time building out my own homelab and self-hosting the services that I need. I’ve got a little stack of M910Q’s running in a Proxmox cluster with an HP T740 running OPNSense.

    One of my big successes so far has been to replace my Google Home devices streaming music all over the house with a SnapCast network using RaspberryPi Zeros as the streaming clients. I've been working on documenting how to do this, and the result is a three part series that explains what SnapCast is, how it works and how to combine it with Mopidy to stream music around the house.

    I have to admit that this one got away from me. It was all one article until I noticed that Jekyll was estimating it at oven 1/2 hour to read, which is way, way too long. So it became three parts, which also gives me the opportunity to release it over time, and make sure that each part is nice and clean before I post it live. Part I is an introduction to SnapCast and explains how it works and how to set up a SnapCast server in Proxmox.

    If you're interested, take a read and let me know what you think.

     

    For the past few years I've been building and maintaining website/blog at www.pragmaticcoding.ca. It's mostly about programming, and more specifically it's ended up having a lot of content about JavaFX with Kotlin.

    Lately, I've been spending all of my time building out my own homelab and self-hosting the services that I need. I've got a little stack of M910Q's running in a Proxmox cluster with an HP T740 running OPNSense.

    Since I've been spending all - and I do mean all - of my time futzing about with this self-hosted stuff, I thought I'd try to add some content to my website to help people doing the same thing. My idea was to make it more "bloggish", talking about the tricky things I've had to master along the way as I implement various services.

    But I feel like there also needs to be some foundational content. Articles that explain concepts that a lot of people, especially people without professional networking experience, find difficult to grasp. So I've started working on those.

    While I think of myself as mostly a programmer, my career (now, thankfully over) had me as an "IT Guy" more often than not. I spent 24 years at the same mid-sized company with a tiny IT department and simply had to get involved with infrastructure stuff because there was nobody else to do it. It was very hands-on at first, but as we grew I was able be limit my involvement to planning and technical strategy.

    Since the mid 90's, we went from self-hosted physical servers, to colocated servers, to colocated virtual servers to cloud servers and services. So I feel like I have the insight to provide help.

    Anyways, this is the first article in this new section. I've seen a lot of people posting questions about how VLAN's work and I know that it's mystifying to many. So I wanted to push it out before I have the supporting framework put together on the website, and it's just sitting there as the first post that's not about programming.

    My goal is to provide practical, pragmatic advice. I'm not particularly worried if some particular facet of an article isn't 100% totally correct on some obscure technical level...as long as the article gives solid practical advice that readers can act on.

    Anyways, take a look and let me know if you think this kind of article might me of use to yourself or other people getting started on self-hosting.

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