Hamartiogonic

Crossposted from https://sopuli.xyz/post/25634723

I wonder how native English speakers do it, but here’s how I approach this problem.

My trick involves using a consistent spelling system for encoding a random letter sequence into a sound which I can memorize. When writing, you just pull those auditory memories, decode the sounds back to the original alphabet salad, and you’re done! Needlessly complicated, but that’s a common theme in English anyway, so it should fit right in.

To make this method work, you need a consistent spelling system, so you could make one up or modify one previously invented for another language. Basically anything more consistent than English should do, so it’s a pretty low bar to clear.

Here are some example words to test this idea with:

• carburetor
• carburettor
• carburetter

Pronounce those letter sequences using that alternate spelling system. It won’t sound like English, but it’s consistent and that’s all we care about at this stage. The end of each word could sound like this:

• [retor]
• [retːor]
• [reter]

In my system, each letter corresponds to a specific sound like e=[e], a=[ɑ] etc. I’ve been thinking of including the Italian c=[tʃ], but you could use other languages too. Feel free to mix and match, as long as you make it consistent.

The idea is that it’s easier to memorize sounds rather than whimsical letter sequences. Once you have those funny sounds in your head, it’s easy to use that same consistent spelling system to convert the sound back to letters.

Once you know that trick, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to spell common words like “island”, “salmon”, “subtle”, or “wednesday. For example “cache” could be stored as [tʃatʃe] in my head. Still haven’t settled on a good way to store the letter c, so I’m open to suggestions.

I wonder how native English speakers do it, but here’s how I approach this problem.

My trick involves using a consistent spelling system for encoding a random letter sequence into a sound which I can memorize. When writing, you just pull those auditory memories, decode the sounds back to the original alphabet salad, and you’re done! Needlessly complicated, but that’s a common theme in English anyway, so it should fit right in.

To make this method work, you need a consistent spelling system, so you could make one up or modify one previously invented for another language. Basically anything more consistent than English should do, so it’s a pretty low bar to clear.

Here are some example words to test this idea with:

• carburetor
• carburettor
• carburetter

Pronounce those letter sequences using that alternate spelling system. It won’t sound like English, but it’s consistent and that’s all we care about at this stage. The end of each word could sound like this:

• [retor]
• [retːor]
• [reter]

In my system, each letter corresponds to a specific sound like e=[e], a=[ɑ] etc. I’ve been thinking of including the Italian c=[tʃ], but you could use other languages too. Feel free to mix and match, as long as you make it consistent.

The idea is that it’s easier to memorize sounds rather than whimsical letter sequences. Once you have those funny sounds in your head, it’s easy to use that same consistent spelling system to convert the sound back to letters.

Once you know that trick, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to spell common words like “island”, “salmon”, “subtle”, or “wednesday. For example “cache” could be stored as [tʃatʃe] in my head. Still haven’t settled on a good way to store the letter c, so I’m open to suggestions.

Have you noticed that many quotes attributed to famous people are actually incorrect? When someone sends me one of these fancy quotes of profound wisdom, it looks really suspicious to me if:

1. It’s a picture (as in, not text in a technical sense)
2. It’s attributed to someone famous
3. There’s a picture of that person
4. There’s no source

When I start looking into it, I usually end up reading a quote investigator article that says the original line was written a few hundred of years ago, got mutated many times along the way, and eventually was coupled with the name of someone like Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein or whatever.

BTW I put that picture together using Imgflip’s meme generator. Seemed appropriate.

Most of the time, I read the “subscribed” feed, sorted by scaled. Maybe once a week or once a month I check what’s in the “all” feed, sorted by top of the week or something like that.

My opinion is, that this is the better way to see the stuff I care about, and it allows me to ignore all the stuff I don’t care about. I’ve seen many people say that you should read the “all” feed, but I just don’t seem much value in that. There are a few people who agree with me, but we appear to be a minority here, hence the unpopular part of this opinion.

These are the hottest things I’ve ever tasted, and here’s my journey to spicy chips.

A few months ago, I decided to try some spicy potato chips. They were interesting, and next weekend I tried something hotter. They were actually really good, so I kept on trying hotter and hotter things every week, until I ran out of options at the local supermarket.

Yesterday, I visited my local Turkish supermarket, which sells all sorts of weird things I’ve never seen before. They even had a bunch of potato chips from obscure brands that are probably normal in Turkey and Middle-East.

Among those, I found these… non-potato chip thingies. Nevertheless, they’re, by far, the hottest thing I’ve ever tried. At first, I just took a tiny little crumb. It burned so hard, but after a while I was ok. Then I took another crumb, it was really hot etc. After about an hour, my mouth was strangely getting adapted to chili, so I could take small bites too. It just escalated from there, and less than 24 hours later the bag was empty.

What a weird experience! I never thought you could get adapted to chili. I thought it would be equally hot all the time, but that’s not at all how it works.

Being allergic to ads, I can’t watch YT on the default app. Google isn’t one of my favorite companies, so getting premium isn’t on my wishlist either.

When at home, I use a computer with Firefox and uBlock origin, but now I’m traveling light , so I left my laptop at home. Previously, it was possible to use my iPad to block YT ads, but that stopped working about two months ago. There are ways to watch those videos anyway, but I thought it would be fun to see if I can avoid YT instead.

Currently, I’m traveling with a tablet and several video apps, such as Nebula, Odysee and even Loops. My local TV channels have made some video apps, and nextDNS can block those ads without any issues, so now is the time to explore those as well.

Got any thoughts, questions, comments, or random stuff?

Edit: Turns out, my nextDNS was blocking .*.jnn-pa.googleapis.com, and that causes videos to stop after precisely 60 s. If you allow the jnn-pa.googleapis.com, the videos can once again play normally. That didn’t used to be a problem. Maybe nextDNS didn’t block it before, maybe YT didn’t route any critical traffic through there or something. Who knows. Either way, if your videos stop after 1 minute, make sure jnn-pa.googleapis.com is not blocked in your DNS settings.

If you click disagree, the site just doesn’t work at all. Instead, gadgethacks.com shows you this.

You know, normal sites make you accept the bare minimum that is required for the site to function, and give you an option to accept or reject all the tracking cancer and advertising plague.

Would like to know more about what’s going on with the development of this app? Any plans? How are things going? What sort of things will be the primary focus in the near future?

Spoiler, there’s more.

Location: Finland, Helsinki, Pukinmäki railway station

If you're not quite sure about getting into coffee, you can get started with a small budget, and you can make a nice cup of coffee that way. Probabaly not a great cup, but a cup of coffee you'll find enjoyable at the time. Once you start experimenting with different variables and digging a bit deeper into different flavors, you may notice that you're not getting the same cup every time. That's when you start pushing the limit of what's possible with the equipment you have available, and you'll realize that using a cheap grinder is sort of like making you play this game in the hard mode.

Examples: Using a cheap blender type grinder (blade grinder) means you can easily chop coffee to some unknown random particle size. You don’t pay much, but at least you can use recently roasted whole bean coffee, which is great. If you want to adjust the particle size in a specific way, that’s when it gets very tricky. Did you grind one second longer than last time? Too bad, now it’s way too fine and you’re getting a bitter cup as a result. Fortunately, you can easily fix that with milk, but as you start noticing more details in the taste profile, you start demanding more and more. Consequently, fixing mistakes with milk won’t be as appealing as it once was.

Using a cheap hand grinder is a lot better than an electric blender. Once you set the screw at a specific position, you’ll get the same particle size every time, which is great for consistency. What if you decide to use a french press today, but tomorrow you want to switch back to pour over, moka pot or AeroPress? Too bad, the grinder has no markings on it, so you’ll just have to eye-ball the setting and hope for the best. That’s obviously easier than timing your blender perfectly every time, but it’s still not exactly easy to get great results.

The solution: Eventually you’ll want to buy a burr grinder (electric or manual) with clear markings for different grind sizes.

When to invest? Don’t spend any more money on better gear until you’ve already “needed” better gear a few times in order to fix something you’ve noticed in your cup. As long as you’re relatively happy with your current gear and the cup it produces, there’s no need to spend more on this hobby. However, when you start noticing new things, that’s the right time to buy something that really addresses a specific thing you have in mind.

Summary: Get started with cheap gear and upgrade only when you think it’s necessary. Getting some random cup of coffee using cheap gear is easy, but getting a specific kind of cup with that gear is hard. Using more expensive gear will make it easier.

Something else? This is based on my personal experiences, and your experiences may differ. This rule of thumb might apply to grinders, but it is not guaranteed to apply to other types of equipment. For instance, I don’t own an espresso machine, so I have no idea how price is reflected on the end result in that case.

Can we please just use a space for thousands and something else for decimals? Use a comma, point, hedgehog emoji 🦔 or whatever happens to be traditional in your country, but please make sure it will never ever be confused with a thousands separator.

During covid times I heard many interesting conspiracy predictions such as the value is money will fall to zero, the whole society will collapse, the vaccine will kill 99% of the population etc. None of those things have happened yet, but can you add some other predicitons to the list?

Actually, long before covid hit, there were all sorts of predictions floating around. You know, things like the 2008 recession will cause the whole economy to collapse and then we’ll go straight to Mad Max style post-apocalyptic nightmare or 9/11 was supposed to start WW3. I can’t even remember all the predictions I’ve heard over the years, but I’m sure you can help me out. Oh, just remembered that someone said that paper and metal money will disappear completely by year xyz. At the time that date was like only a few years away, but now it’s more like 10 years ago or something. Still waiting for that one to come true…