Random photos, comics, etc.

[Frank Cox]

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[Leo Enticknap]

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So the Daily Mail couldn't be bothered to buy a '24 Accord and then torch it, just for this story? Tut tut, journalistic standards really are slipping...

[Randy Stankey]

I'm not even sure that the board is hooked up to anything. There are no cable conduits/raceways under the table. I can't see any cables coming into or out of the back. Of course, they'd be routed through the back of the unit but I don't even see a headphone cable, anywhere.

[Leo Enticknap]

At least it wasn't piss and go...

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Note the position of the channel faders on the mixing board. The photographer who staged this pic clearly isn't an audio guy/gal!

[Harold Hallikainen]

I remember signs at the subway stops in Washington DC saying "Kiss and Go" for the passenger drop off area. I had not seen the hug time sign before. Very clever!

[Ryan Gallagher]

Car park? Least they could have dedicated a PDA room. Smokers get better treatment in many airports. lol

[Frank Cox]

Apparently this sign is at the drop off area in New Zealand's Dunedin Airport:
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[Frank Cox]

Didn't you know that LG stands for Low Grade.

[Leo Enticknap]

When I was researching this online, the impression I got is that Samsung fridges are notorious for things going wrong, but they tend to me minor issues that are easily fixable, with cheap parts: their compressors are long lasting. My own experience supports this: I've had the freezer door handle come loose (just a loose grub screw and an easy fix), and the LED light assembly in the fridge compartment go out (a $30 part and an easy fix). The brand you really want to avoid, apparently, is LG, because the compressors in their fridges tend to fail after 5-7 years. The compressor and refrigerant gas account for most of the cost of the fridge (environmental regulations around the handling and disposal of refrigerant gases over the last decade or so are essentially why the cost of a typical fridge has increased by around 30% over that time period), and so if the compressor dies, it's cheaper to replace the fridge than to try to repair it.

[Allan Young]

The moral of the story: defrost your fridge regularly, however disruptive that may be.

So this isn't a "frost free" model that doesn't require defrosting?

My 20-year-old General Electric fridge never needs defrosting. However, about six years ago there was build up of ice on the back wall of the freezer with a corresponding temperature rise. Defrosting the fridge worked for a few days but the ice would build up again. A bit of Googling revealed that the cause was a broken heater element behind the back of the freezer, which I was able to fix myself.

(As an aside, I'm not looking forward to having to replace it. GE pulled out of Europe about ten years ago and it's now impossible to buy a fridge of the same capacity in the UK).

[Frank Cox]

A friend of mine is an appliance repair guy -- he comes to your house to fix your washing machine, fridge, stove, whatever.

He's always told me that when it comes to appliances, avoid Samsung.

[Leo Enticknap]

About 2-3 months ago I started to notice that food in the fridge was going off within a very short time of us buying it, and in many cases way before its expiration date. What spurred me into investigating further was one occasion on which I made about a quart of grapefruit juice (using grapefruits from our tree), bottling it, putting it in the fridge, and then two days later finding that the cap had blown off the bottle, and that its contents likely could not be sold legally to anyone under 21.

It also seemed to me that the interior of the fridge was warmer than it should be. So I bought a fridge thermometer, which confirmed my suspicions. Despite the built-in temperature display showing 37 throughout, the new thermometer revealed that its interior temperature was consistently in the mid to high 50s. Furthermore, the compressor seemed to me to be running pretty much all the time, and the freezer compartment was colder than it should be: typically between -10 and -20, when according to the instruction book, it is supposed to be maintained at zero on the nail.

So I did some Googleizing, and quickly discovered that this is a known issue with this model of fridge. The temperature sensor above the evaporator ices up, and the disparity between what it is reading and what the freezer is reading causes the control board to run the compressor constantly, thus leading to more ice production in the fridge compartment, making the fridge worse. Compounding that, the ice eventually breaks a fan above the evaporator that pushes cool (but not freezing) air into the fridge compartment. Some vulture attorney firm is currently trying to get a class action suit going against Samsung for what it claims is an avoidable design flaw; though in my experience, all fridges will eventually do something like this if they are not defrosted. Ours, I'm ashamed to admit, has not been powered down between the day it was installed in 2015, and a couple of hours ago. So I'm not too inclined to blame Samsung for that.

The cure is a new evaporator cover (a part that includes the fan), an annoyingly pricey part at $165 for a sheet of plastic, a $20 fan and some polystyrene foam, but still preferable to spending the best part of a grand on a new fridge.


What I discovered after removing the old evaporator cover:
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After half an hour of getting medieval on its ass with a hairdryer:
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After installing the new one, replacing the contents of the fridge and powering it up again, its internal temperature was in the high 30s and the freezer around zero within an hour. The compressor then stopped, and my wife commented that for the first time in months, she was in the kitchen and not hearing "that buzzing noise."

The moral of the story: defrost your fridge regularly, however disruptive that may be.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Great, a Blue Zone, you learn something new every day

According to the article:
Life expectancy in blue zones is proposed to be as much as a decade or longer, compared to the average world life expectancy of 73 years in 2019.

Shortly before the pandemic hit, the average life expectancy over here was 82,2 years. It went down globally during the pandemic but has since re-established around pre-pandemic levels... So, in a year or two, this whole country over here may become a Blue Zone? Meanwhile, Switzerland already seems to be a Blue Zone... Great definition.

Also, the right one seems to be made from Junior Premium Vanilla beans:

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[Leo Enticknap]

A somewhat distinctive branding strategy, seen at my local supermarket:

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The management clearly haven't gotten the memo that we're supposed to be in a blue zone...

[Marcel Birgelen]

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Looks like Elon Musk launched the right tool to heat up the bound-to-be-controversial next few months even more. His new AI model includes an image generator that seems to be mostly uncensored. And politics aside, there are a lot of discussions whether or not those kinds of images are legal or not. This clearly being a caricature, I think this is still clearly within the boundaries of free speech. Whether or not it's tasteless or funny, is probably a more personal thing.