Back in the early 2000s, we had MX Tabs which was not quite open source but amazing. It collapsed because of copyright issues. But while it lasted, it had basically anything you can think of. Usually 4 or 5 versions and they were all wrong in different ways.

If you aren’t getting good bread from your bread machine, you’re definitely doing something wrong. Bread machines are pretty simple and peaked in the 90s for the most part. I have one of the cheapest ones on the market from the 90s and the bread that comes out of my kitchen blows away everything at the grocery store for a fraction of the price. I make sandwich breads, pizza dough, English muffin dough, pretty much anything and it’s all good.

I think the big thing people get wrong is not weighing their ingredients. You just can’t make consistently good bread with volumetric measurements. The hydration of the dough (ratio of flour and water) is very important and a cup of flour can vary a lot.

There’s also a ton of very low quality recipes out there. Even the book that came with my bread maker is pretty terrible. If you don’t want to get in to the science of it, just stick to King Arthur recipes. There’s a ton of bread maker specific ones and they often have modifications for bread makers in the other recipes.

Ingredients matter a lot as well. Besides the fact that higher quality ingredients produce higher quality food, flour isn’t interchangeable. So if you’re using regular cheap all purpose flour instead of bread flour, the amount of water it absorbs is different and you’ll get bad results. You can get decent enough white bread from cheap AP flour but you need a lot less water. It will be basically wonder bread though, nothing mind blowing.

In terms of effort, I guess this is subjective. But I just started some whole wheat bread and it took about 5 minutes to weigh the water, salt, yeast, whole wheat flour, bread flour, and gluten. The cycle takes a few hours and my baby will have bread for lunch for the rest of the week. And it doesn’t contain any sugar or brominated flour like every whole wheat bread at the grocery store. Also with a decent loaf of bread is pushing 8-9 dollars at the store, this saves a lot of money. This loaf cost less than a dollar even using high quality flour.

The Zojirushi bread machines are very nice but you don’t need one if you want to make excellent breads and jams. For the most part, the technology in bread makers peaked in the 90s and I’ve never seen a thrift store that didn’t have an entire aisle of them dirt cheap.

I have a late 90s Breadman I paid 20 bucks for years ago (which is expensive but it was new in box) and it’s paid for itself many times over. It makes great sandwich bread and I use it to make all kinds of doughs for other bread products. I make a nice Italian loaf, English muffins, pizza dough, etc.

It paid for itself the first month I had it. Never really felt the need to upgrade.

Why would you presume that? Maybe they’re suffering and trying to raise awareness.

Anecdotal but all of the Catholics I know have either converted to the episcopal church or they just never go to mass or talk about it but say they’re catholic so grandma doesn’t get sad. You go to mass, and there are no young people whatsoever. I don’t have hard data to back this up but it seems like the Catholic Church in the US could just collapse before a significant schism reaches us.

When I first joined, I hopped around instances and tried out a bunch. But eventually I settled on this one and I haven’t logged in to any other account in a while. I probably count as like 5 inactive users. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a lot of that.

Posts are going up pretty steady, that matters more.

Well my dad does too and he worked his ass off to prevent it. Baby boomers are just stupid as shit, there’s not really much you can do.

My dad is a tech in the telecommunications industry. We basically didn’t see him for all of 1999. The fact that nothing happened is because of people working their assess off.

There’s a guy on Etsy who 3D prints single dose hoppers. The top is made of silicon and it’s a bellows, you give it a few presses and it blows the grind stick in the chute out. It’s great, the only thing I dislike about the grinder is how fast it gets clogged.

We had considered moving from our high cost of living area to a cheaper state but ultimately didn’t because of our young kids. We’re squeezed pretty hard here and we could all live very comfortably on my salary in another state. But I couldn’t find a place with remotely acceptable schools. And who would our kids friends be? Very worried about the influence of their peers, raised by racist homophonic garbage.

And beyond maternal care, healthcare in most “affordable” states is just bad. We have the best healthcare system in the country where we’re at. What if we move to a state in the bottom third of the country and one of us got sick? The healthcare stories from rural America are very chilling.

And then once the kids grow up, what do they do then? No jobs, no decent higher education, lots of heroin, etc. Their options will likely be leave or fail unless something dramatically changes in the next decade. This might not really apply to Texas or the southwest but I’m on the east coast.

And the amazon result is some unknown Chinese brand with 5,000 suspicious 5 star reviews

I worked at Starbucks for way too many years. I have never heard of a “10 minute rule”. That’s absolute nonsense.

We’ve had a good balance the past couple days. I like both.

This sounds too stupid to be real but I was working for one of the largest corporations in the world during this period and we were congratulated on 20% growth even though we did nothing. Of course we didn’t get an extra bonus or anything but they acted like we had an incredible year when we really just had an average year with a massive tax cut.

Then the next year, our goal was to grow at 20% again and when we missed it by 17%, no one got a bonus or raise.

This timeline is the stupid one.