Doesn't matter what domain and how big or small.
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By lanyard-textile 2026-01-154:534 reply I found out my crimson-bellied conure is laying an egg today! She's nesting in some towels now, chirping away while she works on laying it.
Having an egg is relatively hard on parrots. I've given her lots of food and warmth to prepare. She is comically hungry -- she's usually not such a big eater, but she's happy today to be scarfing down her apple slices, fruit pellets, and safflower seeds.
She usually sleeps at the bottom of her cage, beneath a towel I put down for her. It's already unusual for parrots! But tonight she has made quite a nest with her towel: It's folded in half like usual, but she has nuzzled her way between the fold, so she has the towel underneath and on top of her. It's super cute.
I'm treating her with delicacy but she is determined to be a wild child of a bird. She's still flying around during the day and moving around plenty. I don't think I would be so confident if I had an egg like that inside me.
She has a stone perch that she likes to nibble on when she's working on an egg. I've wondered if it is some innate need to nourish herself with calcium, or if it's stress relief :)
So that's my night. Sitting outside of the metaphorical delivery ward with a metaphorical cigar, making sure she lays this egg that isn't even fertile to begin with! Birds :)
> I've wondered if it is some innate need to nourish herself with calcium, or if it's stress relief :)
methinks: Calcium is required to make the egg shell. Calcium supplements would help, just in case "Life finds a way".
By lanyard-textile 2026-01-1518:32 Funny enough, people often scramble chicken eggs in this case :) I guess enough calcium leeches off into the eggs themselves. Maybe I'll try that tonight.
A beautiful pause in my day reading this - many thanks. Would love to see a photo!
By lanyard-textile 2026-01-1518:381 reply :) Thanks for reading.
No egg this morning yet. But here's some pictures of her! My pretty little Christmas colored bird.
By dapperdrake 2026-01-1821:28 Beautiful bird.
By patrickmay 2026-01-1517:36 Good luck to both of you!
By lanyard-textile 2026-01-1518:43 Seven, if you can believe it! She is the only crimson bellied conure.
I have a peach front conure, two green cheeks, a meyers, a senegal, and a half-meyers-half-senegal. Quite the flock.
Their bonds are criss crossed. The bird laying an egg is peaceful to everyone but not hard bonded. So it is... weird that she is laying an egg, lol.
I got a handheld emulator console as a Christmas gift. Configuring shaders that emulate crt TVs, I realized I had no mental model of how those TVs worked at all.
I’m used to “pixels are three little lights combining rgb colors”, which doesn’t work here, so I went on a rabbit hole and let me tell you, analog TVs are extremely impressive tech.
Getting an electron beam to hit a glass, making the chemicals on it spark, covering it in a “reading motion” for hundreds of lines, and doing that 60 times a second! And the beam is oriented by just careful usage of magnets. It sounds super sci-fi for an already dead, 130 years old technology.
I also learned that my childhood was a lie. Turns out that the logic in consoles of the time was tied to the speed of the beam, which in turn used alternating current’s frequency as a clock. This means that since European current changes 50 times per second rather than 60, our games played in slowmo (about 0.8x). American sonic was so much faster! And the music was so much more upbeat!
By techiferous 2026-01-1512:272 reply Don't forget how they found a way to squish closed caption information into analog broadcast. The electron beam traces a path on the CRT display by drawing the odd lines from top to bottom (which draws half the image) and then the even lines (the rest of the owl) from top to bottom. While the electron beam is repositioning itself from the bottom of the screen to the top of the screen, there is a brief period of time where other data can be transmitted. That's where closed caption data was shoehorned in.
By Findecanor 2026-01-1514:35 Teletext used the vertical blanking interval too. It consisted of numbered pages of text, each number input on the numpad on the remote control as a form of hypertext. Page after page was transmitted after one-another, repeatedly. It was sometimes used for subtitles, with some pages with a transparent background. Better receivers cached pages so you wouldn't have to wait for its next transmission when going to another page...
Digital television formats adopted the framing from analogue formats and sends the same data in digital form within the vertical blanking interval. Many channels have stopped offering teletext. One network here in Sweden still uses it to deliver news, and I often prefer that format because the articles are concise and distraction-free.
BTW. I was once asked to hack together a system for using data in the vblank period to control relays at a remote site.
By butlike 2026-01-1514:47 Technology Connections does a really good video on this on YouTube
By schnitzelstoat 2026-01-1511:163 reply > Turns out that the logic in consoles of the time was tied to the speed of the beam, which in turn used alternating current’s frequency as a clock. This means that since European current changes 50 times per second rather than 60, our games played in slowmo (about 0.8x). American sonic was so much faster! And the music was so much more upbeat!
Wasn't this the reason behind different versions of the game for PAL and NTSC etc.? So I imagine the games would play quite similarly, just with a lower refresh rate in Europe?
>So I imagine the games would play quite similarly, just with a lower refresh rate in Europe?
That was my assumption as well! But nope, gameplay was coupled to framerate for a surprising range of years.
You can see comparisons on YouTube, check the music of the pal/ntsc version of sonic for the genesis/megadrive.
Apparently it was still happening to some extent during the PSX era. I remember the turn meter bars in FF7 filled very slow, and this explains it.
By butlike 2026-01-1514:50 If you have an original copy of Grim Fandango, the elevator-and-forklift puzzle is impossible without a patch, since the scene moves at (iirc) the processors clock speed, so modern CPUs ran too quickly to make the action possible to solve the puzzle.
This is obviously fixed in the remastered version, though
By CTDOCodebases 2026-01-1511:291 reply > Wasn't this the reason behind different versions of the game for PAL and NTSC etc.? So I imagine the games would play quite similarly, just with a lower refresh rate in Europe?
Yes and no. Some games play at a similar speed but some (most if I recall correctly) weren't modified for the PAL market so they play slow and the image is squashed down. Street Fighter II on the SNES (PAL) is a classic example of this.
By schnitzelstoat 2026-01-1512:501 reply Damn, Street Fighter 2 on the SNES is literally the first game I remember ever playing. I never knew I was playing an inferior version!
By CTDOCodebases 2026-01-179:22 It was simultaneously such a delight and a frustration.
It was a treat to play without having to empty your pockets (where I am it cost the equivalent of 120 arcade credits) but compared to the arcade it wasnt as good as it could have been.
If you had an action replay or a game genie you could use codes to speed it up though.
By Findecanor 2026-01-1514:42 The vertical resolution was also different. Some games developed for NTSC got black bars, or a silly banner in the PAL version. Many PAL games were not ported for NTSC regions at all.
What other sci fi technology is being lost on us now? I always that the complexity of the local-battery-powered copper-cable telephone exchange system was bonkers. It was the backbone for all our landline calls.
By Findecanor 2026-01-1514:44 The telephone system also powered the phone, and often worked when the power grid did not.
By mghackerlady 2026-01-1515:27 well, not quite with the 50hz thing. They slowed them down to run at 50hz, but they could've rewritten them to work at full speed by dropping frames
By TimesNewMe 2026-01-156:551 reply I went on a tour of a miso factory today and learned about how it's made!
What surprised me the most was that shiro (white) miso and aka (red) miso are both the same mix of soybeans, salt, and rice malt but fermented for different periods of time. As the miso ferments for longer, its color becomes darker while its flavor becomes milder and more complex. Beyond 3 years of fermentation, you get diminishing returns as its flavor becomes too acidic.
After the tour, we got to sample some of the naturally fermented 3 years old miso, and it was easily the best I've ever had. Most miso you can buy in a grocery store is created through forced fermentation over a few months, so if you ever get a chance to try naturally aged miso I would highly recommend!
By satvikpendem 2026-01-1510:081 reply Same as white, green, yellow, black, pu erh tea, and all of their different varieties within those categories, it's all the same leaves, just different processes.
Well, not exactly in that there are cultivars and farm differences. In that way it is a little bit like grape wine, where different processing can produce very different wines from the same grapes, but there are also differences in grapes that can come through within a style.
By satvikpendem 2026-01-1522:021 reply In a way, yes; Wuyi rock oolong will be different than a high mountain Taiwanese oolong. But what most people think of as green vs black tea, they don't realize that it's the same exact plant. Camellia sinensis has only 2 cultivars, var. sinensis (the main one) and var. assamica.
Right. A lot of people also don't realize red and white wines often come from the same red grapes.
This is quite incorrect. Of the top 10 planted wine varietals in the world [0], all ten are red grapes to red wine or white grapes to white wine:
Top grape varieties by planted hectares 1. Cabernet Sauvignon - red grape, red wine. 2. Merlot - red grape, red wine. 3. Tempranillo - red grape, red wine. 4. Airén - white grape, white wine. 5. Chardonnay - white grape, white wine. 6. Syrah - red grape, red wine. 7. Grenache Noir - red grape, red wine. 8. Sauvignon Blanc - white grape, white wine. 9. Pinot Noir - red grape, red wine. 10. Trebbiano Toscano / Ugni Blanc - white grape, white wine.
There are some wines which are produced with red grapes which are not left on skins so there is no impartation of red colour, but they are really not common and the result is most of the time a bit closer to a light rose than what would be considered a white wine. Perhaps the only style that would be semi-frequently encountered are some French Blanc de Noirs wines, various champagne examples being the most common of these. (And of course standard champagne itself, but I am not sure if that is really considered a white wine). Still, rare. It is also not possible to produce a red wine with a white grape, there is no colour in the skin to impart.
[0]: https://londonwinecompetition.com/en/blog/insights-1/how-the...
By saltcured 2026-01-1717:30 Thanks for the correction!
This was some trivia I learned long ago, but I guess without enough context for how often that process is done. Clearly, I am not a wine expert...
