don't use distilled water in a coffee maker
I learned this one the hard way, but fortunately I didn't wreck my coffee maker.
One would think that using distilled water would be better than tap for brewing coffee, right? That's what I thought. I was wrong.
While I do grind my own coffee beans, I'm not exactly what you'd call a coffee snob since I just buy the cheap whole bean stuff. I'm mentioning this for a reason. A few weeks back, I was in the supermarket and noticed some mid-grade coffee had been discounted. It was cheaper than what I regularly buy, so I said okay, I'll try this stuff.
After getting it back to the house, I ground some of the beans and brewed a cup. It did not taste that good, so I threw it out. At the time, I had a jug of distilled water, so I said screw it, let's try brewing this with the distilled and made another cup. The coffee then tasted better. Not great, but better. Then I said to myself okay, this coffee has been bought, I have some distilled water, and I'll just make coffee this way until I run out.
Not smart.
Here are the three reasons why distilled water is bad for brewing coffee with:
Distilled water is by its very nature tasteless. This is fine for cooking, bathing and of course drinking straight, but not-so much for brewing. Water with some mineral content in it does make for better tasting coffee. Some coffee snobs call that mineral content "notes" in the flavor. Take out the minerals and those notes are gone.
Distilled water can literally mess up the coffee brewing process. When using distilled water, this can cause coffee grounds to swell more, which in turn slows the water flow. What's the result of that? Bitterness from the water not getting through the grounds fast enough.
Distilled water can actually damage a coffee maker. When the water doesn't get through fast enough, the coffee maker works harder to brew. If that happens enough times, you end up with a dead coffee maker.
So what's the best kind of water for brewing coffee with?
Tap or filtered tap. And I suppose water labeled as "spring water" counts too as that has mineral content in it.
Ultra coffee snobs and professional coffee people condition the water used to a very specific ppm (parts-per-million) for "optimum" balance of minerals that brings out the best flavor...
...and I am absolutely not going to do that. All I know is "distilled bad, mineral good" for brewing coffee.
What I learned is that the fact that mid-tier coffee I acquired tasted slightly better using distilled water means it was bad coffee out of the gate. Decent coffee will taste correct with tap or filtered tap water. If it doesn't, that either means you just don't like it, or the coffee is outright bad. And that may be exactly what happened in my situation. That coffee must have been on sale for a reason.
I'm back to my old whole bean coffee and using tap water to brew with. Every coffee maker agrees with it, and the end result is that the coffee tastes good, just how I like it. I won't be swayed by on-sale stuff again, and just stick with what I know works.
i'm glad arcade machines are somebody else's problem
One time in my life I had an arcade machine in the house. It was a video arcade game, Mortal Kombat 3. I think I had it for a year or maybe slightly longer, then sold it. I've no regrets about that whatsoever.
Once or twice a year I'll go play some arcade machines. I enjoy the games, but I am VERY glad I don't have to maintain these things.
Back in the '80s when I was a little kid, there was a television show, Silver Spoons. A large chunk of that show took place in the main living room of a house. In the background on that set were a few arcade machines. Some were video, some pinball. I saw that, and thought wow, how COOL would it be to have arcade machines right there in the living room.
Well, I actually found out. Sort of.
I had that MK3 machine as I mentioned before, but I also saw games in other people's places too over the years.
In the '90s while attending college, I went with a friend to visit his friend that lived in an off-campus apartment, and in there was a Centipede machine. I thought hey, that's cool, but wow, that's really taking up some space. If I remember correctly, the guy who owned it even complained he couldn't run it too long because it would literally heat up the apartment too much.
I'd also periodically visit places (usually a friend-of-a-friend's home), and there would either be a room or a finished basement with a pool table there. That's not a pinball nor video game machine, but it's still something usually only seen in bars and arcades. Any time I saw one of these in a house, it was always unused. There would either be a cover over it, or if uncovered, there was always dust accumulated.
At this point I have zero desire to actually own an arcade machine, and it's not just because I briefly owned one before.
There are two realities when it comes to arcade machines, pool tables and other games like that.
The first reality is that the games were never built to last and specifically designed to be rented. A company would stock the games, rent them out to businesses for a few months to a year (usually with a service contract so a tech can be called in to fix a machine when it breaks), and that's the way it worked.
If you bring one of those games in your home, you have no service tech dude you can call for when the machine breaks. You are the tech. No thanks.
The second reality is that the games were made to be used in public spaces with people in them.
Something I found out with my own MK3 machine is that when you're playing an arcade game alone in the house, it sucks. You get this depressing feeling of emptiness. And yes, that was one of the reasons I sold the machine.
If you've ever been anywhere with arcade machines and the place is totally empty, then you know the depressing feeling I'm talking about.
For example, a few years back I was in an airport. As I was walking through the terminal, I saw a room with 5 or 6 arcade machines. Nobody was in there and I had free reign to all the games. I thought cool, I'll go play for a little bit. That lasted for maybe 5 minutes, because I felt that same depressing empty feeling kick in. I walked away from the machine I was using while still in play, thinking yep, this is no fun. I'm out.
Dedicating space in your home for an arcade machine and/or a pool table is a bad idea. The game won't get used, it will collect dust, it will fall into disrepair. All of that will happen.
Whenever I feel the need to play pinball or a video arcade game, that's something I go out to do. In the home, the only "arcade" machine I have is a Ms. Pac-Man mini. I find this far easier to deal with compared to a full size video arcade machine. The full-size stuff is somebody else's problem, and that's fine by me. I just play the machine and have no interest in putting that big thing in my house nor fixing it when it breaks.
And yes, they still make these if you want one. Fun thing to have, and takes up very little space. Very nice.
how to get a super short physical address
Navigation is wrong, and often. This is how to make it right, and also make it very easy to store locations for retrieval later.
Common navigation problem: You can't trust a physical address
It used to be that once a physical address was established, it was very rare that it would change. Whether the address was for somewhere residential (ex: a house) or commercial (ex: a business, government building or whatever), you used to be able to punch in an address and your navigation system be it Garmin DriveSmart (I use the 76 model), phone app or infotainment would get you to the right place.
These days, when you punch in an address, the nav system either a) won't find it, or b) find it, but direct you somewhere that's on the wrong side of the street and/or wrong parking area.
Two examples of this are mall stores and apartment complexes. In a mall, when trying to get to a specific storefront, you don't want 1234 Main St, but rather 1234 Main St Suite #567. In an apartment complex, you don't want 1234 Main St but rather 1234 Main St Apt. 567 - or - 1234 Main St Apts 500-600 so you can at least arrive at the correct building to find the apartment you're looking for.
Common navigation problem: Your favorites a.k.a. saved locations or travel history disappears
To note, this doesn't happen on a Garmin, ever. This is mostly a phone nav app problem.
On a phone nav app, it used to be that you could easily go back through your travel history to find places you've been before. You could also save locations easily.
These days, you truly have no idea if your travel history or saved locations will be there tomorrow. One little glitch is all is takes, and that valuable info is GONE with absolutely no way to get it back.
Solution: Short form GPS coordinates
This is how short it can get:
N28.0542 W82.4049
or
28.0542,-82.4049
If you copy/paste either of those into a map web site, you will see it takes you to the Museum of Science and Industry in Tampa Florida.
Any location can be shrunk down to 12 or 13 digits.
Here's an example of a 13-digit:
N33.8126 W117.9273
or
33.8126,-117.9273
That's the location of the entrance sign to the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim California. And again, you can punch those coordinates in and be taken directly to that spot.
What's the point of using these?
These are short enough to easily send in a text message, write down on a little piece of paper you can keep in your car, or remember it in your head outright.
How to get the coordinates? Right-click on the spot you want to save using Google Maps or Bing Maps, then round up the numbers.
Looking at that Anaheim location again, the actual long form of that is this:
33.81260308822693,-117.9273000751936
This is ridiculously long and you'd never remember it. But you can remember 33.8126,-117.9273 or send that to yourself as a text message or write it down.
The best part: Coordinates do not change
Street name changes? Doesn't matter. Business name changes? Doesn't matter. Building changes? Doesn't matter. Roads around the building changes? Doesn't matter.
Your super short 12 or 13-digit set of coordinates will always take you to the right spot, every time.
Is a coordinate set an address you can mail something to? Technically, no, but in practice with whatever nav system you have, yes. Consider it a "good-for-humans address". Short, easy to remember, easy to store.
When addresses fail - and they do - use coordinates instead. They always work.
when 512GB is actually 476
To this day I see negative Amazon reviews from people who bought computer media storage and believe they got scammed - except they didn't.
One of the more common ones are people who buy a 512GB flash drive, plug it in to their computer or phone, see a total storage limit of 476, and immediately think they got ripped off. Wrong. The number is accurate.
The confusion exists because an operating system reports the total available space in binary, but most (all?) computer media products for sale state the available space in metric.
It's standard practice to list total storage using metric on packaging and binary within operating systems.
When in Windows, if I examine the properties of my Samsung 512 GB EVO SD memory card when attached, "Capacity:" states 476GB. You'd see that 476 GB and think you got ripped off. Nope. Directly to the left of that 476GB, the total bytes are shown, which is 512,057,409,536 bytes total. In GB, that's 512. In GiB, it's 476, or to be technical, 476.890625 GiB. That's actually supposed to round up to 477 GiB, but 476 is stated. Whatever.
In Linux, same thing, I see the 476 GiB.
The way to get the exact output in terminal for total GiB capacity for Linux is this:
lsblk --output SIZE -n -d /dev/sdX
Want it in bytes? Add a -b:
lsblk -b --output SIZE -n -d /dev/sdX
The "sdX" part is whatever path your drive is assigned to.
battle of the image formats (jpg jxl webp avif heic)
I recently did a massive reorganization of all my backups, which included thousands of JPG files I had to move around.
The JPG image format has been around for over 30 years. Yeah, that long. JPG goes all the way back to 1992. As old as it is, it's still the best image format. However, I wanted to see if the newer formats available were any good, so I did some tests, and here's what I came up with.
I'll first note that I had to hunt around to find the right tool that would support ALL the newer formats for mass conversion. I found one for Linux with the command line tool vips. This is also available for Windows and Mac from libvips.org.
Even though vips supports conversion from JPG to JXL, WEBP, AVIF and HEIC, one of them didn't exactly work correctly, and I'll detail which in a moment.
I need to explain a few things first.
Why switch formats?
There's only one answer, to save space.
When you start filling up a memory card on a phone or digital camera with hundreds of images that turns into thousands later, that cumulatively ends up being gigabytes of data that you have to move elsewhere at some point. And never mind video, because this is just photos I'm talking about.
It's always a good thing whenever you can size data down without losing anything, and that's what I'm concentrating on here. The less space photos take up, the less often you have to buy more storage.
What are these formats?
JPEG XL is developed by Joint Photographic Experts Group (yes, that's where JPEG comes from).
WebP is a format developed by Google.
AVIF is AV1 Image File Format, developed by the Alliance For Open Media a.k.a. AOMedia or just AOM. The founders of AOM are Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla and Netflix, and they're headquartered in Wakefield, Massachusetts.
HEIC is High Efficiency Image File Format. This was developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group, a.k.a. MPEG. If you use an iPhone, you probably recognize HEIC since Apple has had support for this since iOS 11.
The test
I took three photos from a Canon PowerShot ELPH 360 HS I have, and using the vips tool on the command line like this:
vips copy image.jpg image.avif
...converted the original high-quality JPG files. I did a run of each for JXL, WEBP, AVIF and HEIF (HEIC would be the same thing).
The test results
This is what happened:
The total size of the 3 original JPG files was 20.4 MiB (21.4 MB).
HEIF got the total size down to 4.9 MiB (5.12 MB).
JXL got the total size down to 2.9 MiB (3.04 MB).
WEBP got the total size down to 2.5 MiB (2.62 MB).
AVIF got the total size down to 1.2 MiB (1.26 MB).
Said another way, HEIF reduced the 3 file sizes combined by 76%, JXL by 86%, WEBP by 88%, and AVIF by 94%.
Yeah, AVIF blew all the other formats out of the water. And bear in mind this is using the stock vips 'copy' with no adjustments. Nice.
HOWEVER... as with all things, there are pros and cons.
AVIF performed the best but was the slowest to process.
This is an example command of what I used for batch conversion:
for i in *.JPG;do vips copy "$i" "${i%%.*}.avif";done
The slowest conversion time was JPG-to-AVIF, and the fastest was JPG-to-WEBP. So while AVIF saves the most space, it takes the most time to convert. Also, WEBP by far blows everything out of the water for speed of conversion.
BUT HANG ON, there's more.
Let's talk about the EXIF data. As in that stuff in an image that states the camera used, camera settings, maybe GPS coordinates if the photo contains them, and so on.
With the vips tool, JPG-to-AVIF kept all the EXIF stuff. JPG-to-HEIF, also a yes. JPG-to-WEBP, again, yes. But for JPG to JXL, no. With JPG-to-JXL, all of the image was there, but the EXIF data got wiped out.
Yes, there is a thing called ExifTool where you can extract the data out of a JPG, save it elsewhere, then place it into a JXL later. I'm certain this could be automated using a Linux script but didn't bother to try it.
What I wanted was a one-liner solution on the command line that did a mass conversion from one image format to the other and kept all the EXIF data. Vips does that for AVIF, HEIF and WEBP, but not JXL. Why? I have no idea.
Due to the fact I don't have a one-liner way of convert-and-keep-EXIF for JPG-to-JXL, I can't use JXL.
In my specific situation...
...the two best image formats for me to convert to if I wanted to save space would either be AVIF or WEBP.
Which to choose? That's a tough call, but for the way I use images, AVIF is the better choice even though the wait time for conversion is longer.
And then there's the whole video clip thing
Being I've been using the internet a long time and I run a web site, sometimes I like to use animated GIF clips.
Both AVIF and WEBP can act just like animated GIFs.
I made a 300x168 10fps video clip from a video I recorded with my phone. FFMPEG was used to convert MP4 to AVIF and WEBP.
WEBP first, AVIF second:
The WEBP is 262,840 bytes and the AVIF 25,390 bytes. Not a typo.
Obviously, AVIF really shines here. Both the AVIF and WEBP are the same clip, same length, same frame rate, same dimensions. But the AVIF is much smaller.
AVIF should be replacing the ancient animated GIF right now because it is just that much better.
To put this in perspective, I had to shrink the dimensions for the GIF to be the same file size as the WEBP.
Here is the same above clip as GIF with reduced size to achieve the file size of the WEBP (not down to the byte but close):
That GIF already looks terrible, but I had to shrink it down a crazy amount to get it to the file size of the AVIF.
Same above clip again as GIF with size reduced more to match the file size of the AVIF:
At that tiny size it's not even worth bothering with.
For those that know GIFs, if you're thinking "just reduce size and frame rate", that barely helps at all because the end result is still terrible.
If I reduce size by half AND reduce frame rate by 50% to just 5fps, this is the crappy GIF you get as a result:
...and it's 88,617 bytes. And no, reducing colors doesn't help either. No matter what, it's still nowhere near as compact as an unoptimized AVIF.
What's an optimized AVIF? I can get the original video clip converted to AVIF with a final file size of 13,318 bytes and it still works.
Here it is:
That is what I mean by an optimized AVIF. I could get the file size even smaller but then the frames start to "mush" together too much.
You may be thinking there's no way the image above is just 13,318 bytes. It is. Sure, it blurs a little bit, but the point is I can reduce file size without decreasing colors nor frame rate nor image dimensions.
AVIF just rules the roost without question. It not only beats GIF but obliterates it.
Worth it to convert image formats?
It is where storing photos is concerned because the storage space savings cannot be ignored.
I look at all the JPG files I have (which is many), and think wow, I could cut the file size down by... a lot.
I was able to get a 90%+ reduction in file size for high quality digital camera photos easily. But I did one better. I purposely created a crusty JPG at 30% quality, ran a vips JPG-to-AVIF conversion, and was still able to shave off another 30% of the file size. This is impressive to me because the conversion with file size reduction will even work on already-compressed-to-hell crusty JPG files. Yeah, the image will still be crusty after conversion, but look the same and with smaller file size.
The only thing that sucks is that conversion has to take place before backing up image files. Everything I use to take photos with all write files as JPG with no option to choose anything else. But that's a minor annoyance at best considering the space saved by using AVIF.
I've not made the decision whether to switch to AVIF for my backups, but I might, because yeah, it's that good.