Now that I think about it, the cassini Oval that would mark the outer perimeter of the area that would be colored if I wasn’t modding the raw product and simply made everything where the product exceeds 255 black than the corresponding ellipse… after all, on the line x=y, you hit x+y = 256 at x=128 and y=128, but you hit xy = 256 at x=16 and y=16, so when the 2 foci are both at the origin, you get a circle of radius 128 with the ellipse formula, but the cassini circle(which may or may not be a true circle) would only have a radius of 16. Also worth noting that PNG is a lossless format, if there was an animated extention to jpeg, the lossy compression could probably shave some off… still, even with the poor compressibility, the raw bitmap data(3 bytes per pixel, 10251025 pixels per frame, 513 frames) for the combined animation come out to about 1.6GB, so I’m still getting about a 3:1 compression ratio… still, might try for doing a circular gradient with the mod 256 or the ellipses, hyperbolae, and cassini ovals with the black background to see how it impacts file size.
In other minor good news, while buying the deli party trays of new year’s eve celebrations of my youth is out of the question, I was able to splurge for some summer sausage, cheese cubes, and buttery crackers for a small, private celebration for tonight.
The deli trays of which I speak typically came in two major variants… a meat and cheese tray typically featuring a few different deli meats(often ham, turkey, and roast beef), often with each slice rolled up and several varieties of cheese, either deli sliced or cubes on toothpicks, often with a small bowl of some condiment in the middle of the tray(a fancier variant of mustard was common if memory serves) and a veggie tray featuring such things as cucumber slices, carrot and celery sticks, and other raw veggies on the crunchier, less juicy variety, often with a dip of some variety in the middle(ranch and french onion sour cream-based dipsbeing common)… Another dish I associate with this time of year are what we called sausage balls in my family… which was basically biscuit(using the US meaning of the word) dough mixed with ground sausage and shredded cheese, olled into marble-sized balls, and baked… I have memories of helping my mom make them, but aside from that the ingredients included Bisquick, ground sausage, and shredded cheese, I remember nothing of the recipe, and honestly, they were mostly bread.
Well, did the experiment and the black backgrounds really do save a ton of space… except for hyperbolae, though I suppose that makes sense since a hyperbola is an unbound curve that shoots off to infinity in 4 different directions while ellipses and cassini ovals are bound, closed curves… a black background still cuts the hyperbolae filesize roughly in half… though the Cassini oval with a black background is the smallest image in the bunch… making me think the small oval probably gets stretched into effectively a line rather quickly.
Oh, and a bonus image I wanted to include from the start but my original code ran into a crash, likely due to divide by zero and possibly due to trying to use the same variable name for a coordinate and a color channel… An ellipse is the curve where the sum of distances from two foci is constant, a hyperbola is the curve where the difference is constant, and a cassini oval is the curve where the product is constant… obviously, there should be a fourth member of the family where the ratio of the distances is constant, though I’ve been unable to find if this curve has a name(I asked ChatGPT once, but that was back when it was first taking off, and google the name it gave me didn’t seem to confirm it was what I was looking for, so I assume it was an hallucination… anyways, while order doesn’t matter for addition or multiplication, and I had to take the absolute value of the difference to avoid negative values making it into the ppms(which will make the conversion to png fail), which I’m pretty sure cancels out the order dependence of subtraction, division is order dependant in a way I don’t know how to get around, so I don’t know if ratio will have the same symmetries of the other three. Also, to get around c++ discarding the decimal part when dividing one integer by another, I multiply the distance from the first foci by 255 before dividing by the distance from the second foci and to avoid divide by zero, I just set the pixel to black if the second distance is zero, though considering pixels are my units, the distances should only be zero at the foci.
Also, my grand stepnephew(He’s my niece’s step-son, older half-brother to my grandniece), probably the living family member I get along with the best, is currently working just down the street and stopped by on his lunch break several times this week. Last time we talked face-to-face prior to this week was Christmas of 2024, as far as I know, he’s not in any of the same internet spaces I am, and we’re not in the habit of talking on the phone, so it was nice to catch up with him.
I get it, and maybe not itself funny, but I can’t help but plot out Phantom of the Opera 2 where instead of the chandelier falling, it sucks people up like the Star Lasso Experience in NOPE.
I picture it going well for a couple of months, then it starts to wobble as ceiling fans do and then before you know it you live in a haunted house.
Got confirmation a few days ago that I’m getting a raise in my SSDI for 2026… sadly, for the second year in a row, the raise isn’t big enough to cancel out a hike in my rent… Also, nearly cleared out the sub-50 minute videos from my YouTube backlog, as well as the videos over 90 minutes in length that were split into one file per chapter and downloaded to my portable media player… Granted, I’ve recently downloaded some new ones to replace them… fortunately, the newly down loaded ones are mostly in the 1.5-2 hour range and among the ones I recently knocked out was a nearly 5 hour monster.
Why is no thought is ever put into products regarding cleaning them? We have a Cuisinart air-fryer that is great, except for the fact it cannot be disassembled to clean the damn thing. Carbon and grease build up in every inaccessible part of the thing due to all that hot air blowing around frying foods…duh. The build-up actually caught fire and destroyed it (luckily no damage outside the fryer) so the company sent us a new one. I keep a close eye on it and plan on throwing it out before that can happen again.
A regular ceiling fan is a dust magnet that also catches moisture or oil/grease particulates in the air, meaning dust will stick to it - and as my dad joked “It’s easier to leave the fan on so you can’t see the dust than clean it!” My pro-tip life-hack: Spray scrubbing bubbles (the kind you’d clean a bath tub with) on it and wipe to dissolve the grease and accumulated fur.
I suspect the fandelier has been tested, so I’m sure there’s not loose dangly bits like a standard chandelier that would cause problems when blown around or hit by blades. I think it’s just shiny metal with vents but that’s gonna get so dirty like you said and be hard to clean unless there’s an easy release latch on the metal rings so you can take them off and hose them down outside with a pressure washer.
I hated the countertop air fryers that have a drawer the food goes inside, because that requires removal and cleaning every single time so it was always a pain to use. Once I got a larger air fryer/convection oven with a door and racks that could fit actual bakeware inside and function like a small oven did it change my life, and I haven’t turned on the big permanent oven in years. It heats up and cools down quicker in the summer, and cooks fast enough to be a significant game-changer. I’ve baked a small turkey breast in a high-sided pyrex dish and it cooked and browned with crispy skin perfectly in about 45 minutes.
This is part of why I don’t cook with oil… not liking the taste of grease is another reason, as is the difficulty of measuring liquid ingredients… Not sure if its an air fryer, but my house mates have this big, pod shaped thing with a drawer basket that is so disgusting with encrusted grease I wouldn’t want to use it if I had the first inkling how to use it… same goes for the 2-burner hot plate they use for stove top cooking… the coils themselves are clean since they probably get hot enough to burn away anything that would stick to them, but the area around the burners feels painted with grease… As far as I’m concerned, the only thing vegetable oil is good for is dissolving label glue that won’t come off with just soap and water, and the only reason I deem it suitable for that is because its dirt cheap compared to dedicated glue removers as smearing vegetable oil on a gluey container is rather messy and fresh oil is only marginally less disgusting than the crusty, gritty version. Thank… whoever invented the rice cooker and the electric kettle, that all my mini rice cookers need beyond washing the pot and lid after each use is an occasional wipe down with a damp paper towel and the worst I have to worry about with my electric kettle is mineral build up from my tap water… note to self, should probably buy and boil some white vinegar as its been a while.
And the cynical explanation for why stuff isn’t built for easy cleaning is the manufacturers are hoping you’ll throw it out even though it still works because it got too disgusting. Easy cleaning is part of building something to last, and building things to last is bad for business when staying solvent requires moving millions upon millions of units annually and your product is the kind of thing someone only needs one of… Which sucks since it means sometimes the good product goes out of business by the time you need to buy a replacement while the crappy versions thrive on people replacing them frequently.
I’ve had a different brand similar to that - slightly taller - with no problems. maybe the extra space prevents fires? It was an “insta-pot” branded one that is no longer available when InstaPot was the pressure cooker everyone was using. That said, I actually pulled the trigger today to replace it as mine has served well and is starting to fall apart - hopefully I’m well before the “eventually catches fire” stage!! I do have it plugged into a heavy-duty appliance extension cord in the same outlet as the microwave, and I’ve learned they can’t both draw power simultaneously.
Old one obviously in need of replacement; I know it’s gross but it basically replaced my oven and I treated it like that as far as cleaning regimen:
I understand you likely believe your consistent expression of nationalistic disdain as oblique and subtle like we’re not going to notice, but we use all the cooking oils, including olive oil from Italy.
English language tip:
Don’t neglect to match your verb form with a singular or plural noun:
Multiple things pass muster.
A singular thing passes muster.
“What passes for cooking oil?”
“Which things pass for cooking oil?”
After the fire I tried taking the thing apart to see if I could’ve cleaned it and no, the grease and carbon were all the way up in the fan and electronics and there is absolutely no way to take most of it apart due to being riveted together!
At the risk of going further off-topic here, I could rant for hours on how modern products suck.
Feel free to split this off or whatever.
Rant mode on:
The George Foreman grill: the original was quite large, heated on both sides and drained well. Literally everything under that name now, as well as all the copycats - are either 1. far smaller 2. only heat on one side 3. splash grease everywhere, 4. are so cheaply made as to worry me about their safety, or some combination of all the above.
A big problem is Amazon. Almost every product I look at on Amazon is so cheaply made it’s ridiculous. Despite a large number of sellers, virtually all the products are small variations on the exact same thing, probably even being churned out of the same factory then sold under ridiculous brand names that are just random letters smooshed together. Higher prices don’t even indicate, let alone guarantee, a better product. Prices vary across sellers on Amazon with no rhyme or reason. The sellers know their products are crap and will offer random dollar amounts to get you to keep a defective product rather than have to support it. I used to go to big box stores like Home Depot or Lowes when I wanted something better, but for some time now they seem to carry the exact same crap as Amazon.
