I’m not the person you asked, but I use microchip-based feeders for my cats and the company also sells microchip doors. I’ve been pretty happy with the feeders, but haven’t had any reason to try the doors.

https://www.surepetcare.com/en-us/pet-doors/microchip-pet-door

Pretty much. I was going to buy some shit from a non-Amazon online vendor, then got a captcha on checkout and just left. Saved me some money I guess.

Not quite. I was shopping for running shoes a while back and learned that generally, a women’s wide is the same width as a men’s standard. I think a women’s standard is usually called a B width, and the women’s wide and men’s standard would be a D width. Some brands do make other slight differences between the men’s shoe and the women’s shoe, so the swap might not always be 1 to 1, and some brands do unisex sizing, so there’s no difference in width for men’s vs. women’s.

Thanks! I was looking for a way to build my own feed, but this is the first guide I’ve seen that seems relatively simple to follow. I agree that there’s downsides to simply following hashtags, but I’m familiar with ways to curate my feed based on hashtags, and just wanted to start with something familiar. The curated feeds are probably great for a lot of people, but just really frustrated me, as the feeds I happened to browse seemed to somehow include more “junk” than what I’ve encountered with the equivalent hashtags on Mastodon.

Yeah, I saw those and appreciate the idea, but I didn’t like them, at least not yet. I just want to follow a few cat related tags, maybe some FOSS stuff, and some tags relevant to my local area. I just clicked through a few feeds related to each of those, but didn’t like any of the ones that came up. Each feed contains posts that seem totally irrelevant and I don’t understand why they’re included or how to tweak my feed to remove them.

I’m probably an idiot, but my experience was exactly the opposite. I don’t really feel like following specific users (at least for now), I just want to follow hashtags. Super easy to do on Mastodon, but I couldn’t figure it out on Bluesky.

I never used Twitter, and am not particularly excited about the general format, so I’m probably not the target user, but I check Mastodon occasionally, and gave up on Bluesky after like 2 days.

I actually found myself tempted to say exactly that earlier today. Someone said something about sucking, and my initial instinct was, “That’s what she said!”, but then I thought about the audience and felt like the gender neutral “they” might be more appropriate, but I wasn’t really sure, so instead I said nothing.

As an American living in a region with halfway decent (by American standards) public transit, I feel like I hear more comments aligned with the European side than the American side. If public transit has literally any downsides, that’s justification enough to drive for so many people.

It’s funny how much people differ. I live in a city and feel much more comfortable having my curtains wide open than when I lived in suburbia.

One of the things that sold me on my current place was the abundant south and west facing windows, meaning lots of natural light (northern hemisphere), especially in the evenings. It drives me absolutely nuts when I visit people who live in dark caves. I did finally get some heavier curtains for my bedroom since summer days can be pretty long and the limited darkness was impacting my sleep. I get wanting to avoid direct sunlight, and that you might want heavy curtains available some times, but I literally get depressed without lots of natural light and the whole day/night cycle.

Some classes translate to an online format much easier than others. How do you effectively translate an upper level chemistry lab to be done online? Even if you could do it in such a way that the student gains the theoretical knowledge, it wouldn’t give them the hands on practice that they’ll need for real lab work.

I’ve been watching a lot of older shows, and have recently binged Fresh Prince, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Cheers, Frasier, Seinfeld, and Married With Children.

I guess I’m kinda enjoying the escape back to “a simpler time” before cell phones and social media.

There’s definitely a lot of variables in that decision, so it’s not a “one size fits all” recommendation. A timed release feeder can be helpful if your cat is constantly pestering you for food, but having your cat associate you with food can also be beneficial to your relationship and can be a tool to address some behavioral challenges. If your cat is only pestering you near meal times, adjusting your routines might also work. For example, if your cats are harassing you to wake up in the morning to feed them, then adjusting your routine so that feeding them is no longer the first thing you do will likely help to reduce or eliminate the unwanted behavior since they won’t associate you getting up with them getting food.

Another potential issue is that wet food doesn’t really work with most timed release feeders, and I don’t think there’s any microchip-based timed feeders that are compatible with wet food. Wet food is much better for cats than kibble, so even if you use a timed feeder for kibble, they should also still get wet food regularly too.

Your best bet is to find activities that you enjoy that you can do on a regular basis in an environment where you’ll be around other people who also participate regularly. Sign up for a class, join a sports team, volunteer somewhere, find a local meetup group, or even just become a regular at a bar.

Making new friends definitely gets harder as we get older because people are busy and just don’t have the same opportunities to casually yet regularly interact with strangers any more. As kids, most people repeatedly engaged with the same group of people on a daily or weekly basis due to school, sports, etc., and the familiarity that came with that made it relatively effortless to develop some friendships.

Even when I totally hit it off with people I’ve just met and we exchange contact details, I’ve rarely ever intentionally hung out with them again. The new friendships that I’ve formed as an adult were either with a friend of a friend or with people I happened to cross paths with many times before we ever intentionally made plans together. It’s those repeated, low stakes interactions that have been most successful at forming new friendships.

Agreed, just trying to point out that if the laid off employees were corporate, not retail, the $15/hr assumption is probably pretty low. If retail, those could be spread across the country, and $15/hr is probably pretty generous. Starbucks HQ is in the city of Seattle, which has an even higher minimum wage than the state (I think $20.76/hour now?).

Was it baristas that were laid off or office workers? Minimum wage for their corporate headquarters is a bit over $20/hour, and I’d suspect very few corporate employees are making only minimum wage.

I remember reading something a while ago that said the rubber backed mats should never go in the dryer, and while I forget the exact reason, it wasn’t just because the dryer damages the mat. Searching online, it looks like the rubber can also damage the dryer and poses an increased fire risk.

Really? That’s what I usually buy, but there’s still some liquid in the package, so I’ve always pressed it. I guess I’ll have to try it without pressing some time.

A bit of a random question: on a single user instance, if you subscribe to a community, then later unsubscribe from it, would that community still show up in your All feed?

I like to do a bunch of baking for the holidays, and usually do a mix of easy/familiar recipes, plus some new/challenging recipes. I made caramels, and while I was pretty happy with them, I never heard one person comment on them, and they were a lot of effort compared to things like chocolate chip cookies, so I’ve never made them again.

Edit: Another is pumpkin pie from fresh pumpkins. I’ve done it, it’s not that difficult, but it’s also not any cheaper or better tasting than just buying good canned pumpkin.