So I play guitar. I had a problem where I would sometimes drop my pick. Then, one day, I had an idea. I took some copper wire and attached it to a pick through a small hole I burned into it with a needle. I wrapped the wire around my finger. Now I physically cannot drop my pick.
By vectron’s creaky ankle that’s a great video!
Be careful where you drop your pick, by Vectron!
Seen it before… watched it again anyway. Praise Vectron!
I bought a pack of thumb picks out of curiosity and I actually really like them. I don’t use them every time I play but they’re nice to have.
“I laugh in the face of ground faults!”
I used to do this with a piece of thread
You just made these things obsolete.
I’ve got one of these. They’re great for if you accidentally drop your pick.
They are not, however, a goddamn pick souvenir dispenser! No, you can’t have a free pick you skeezy little jerk! Get off my stage!
I thought that’s so you can throw picks at the audience
Actually they are just for looking like a big rock star that can afford to throw away a fistful of picks every night.
I’ve had the same picks for about ten years but I was always under the impression you could get like forty or fifty of the aesthetically-pleasing ones for like three bucks
What could a pick cost, 20 dollars!?
That’s without counting the extra money spent on replacing strings, I’m sure using this kind of thing regularly would seriously shorten their lifespan.
Buying & steeping loose leaf tea instead of bagged garbage. Higher quality, lower price, actually tastes decent with multiple steeps. If I don’t finish the leaves, I fill the teapot with water to have cold brew the next morning. If you get into it, an electric kettle that lets you set the temperature is essential since you can avoid burning leaves much easier & unlocking more delicate leaves that require lower temperatures. Last tip which should be obvious: no milk or sugar & if you think it tastes bad, why do you keep buying black tea instead of something good?
Email management. Like at all. Set up filters and use the archive. There is a key to do that. And holy fuck 2432 unread emails? You should be ashamed of yourself
Mask. N95 or better. My wife and I never stopped, and she never gets sick despite being immunocompromised. I work in a place where illness is common due to the environment and I’ve been sick once in the last year, meanwhile all of my coworkers come in sick like twice a month. Apparently they’d rather be sick and miserable all the time than wear a mildly uncomfortable thing on their face.
Getting sick occasionally is good for your immune system if you do not have a condition like your wife.
Key word being occasionally, and also not with a disease that causes serious health complications, cognitive decline, and that itself damages your immune system.
COVID linked to 65% of new onset cognitive impairment, dementia
Every COVID Infection Increases Your Risk of Long COVID, Study Warns
SARS-CoV-2 infection weakens immune-cell response to vaccination
Yes, Everyone Really Is Sick a Lot More Often After Covid
Cognitive performance of post-covid patients in mild, moderate, and severe clinical situations
Covid is a retrovirus. It destroys your immune system.
The level of sick for which this is true is below the threshold of what we normally call “getting sick”. You’re always fighting off something. That’s what’s good for you. Not the getting overwhelmed and having to stay in bed amount.
Being outside is good for your immune system. Being near other people is unnecessary.
Don’t we need viruses to build resistance?
Exposure to one virus rarely leads to a resistance to another one. That’s why they have a new flu vaccine every year even though they’re all closely related. Cow pox immunizating against small pox was a fluke
It’s more about being exposed to everyday bacteria, pollen, and hot/cold cycling that gives your immune system exercise.
I was much more susceptible to sickness after wearing a mask for years on end during Covid.
Where did you live? I always wore a mask around other people, but I also live in a rural area, so I didn’t need to wear a mask for that many hours comparatively.
Also in a more rural area. After Covid was over I got pretty sick 4-5 times from just normal colds. What used to be a slight headache had me bedridden. This happened a few times but gradually improved.
Now years later my immune system is back up and running again.
Agreed. We have kept wearing masks in specific places (public transit, crowded events, airplanes) and it really does make a difference. I never get sick from airplane trips any more, which used to be a fairly regular occurrence.
I will say, I was never able to figure out how to stop a properly fitted mask from giving me a terrible headache after 8 hours of use so I’m glad I work from home and don’t need to make the choice of mask vs comfort at work.
Yes yes yes! I work facing the public and I interact with people from all over the world. Me wearing a mask just feels like a basic courtesy. I could potentially spread diseases around like mad.
I’m glad it’s more accepted now, but I have had a lot of people “looking out for my safety” to put it mildly. That’s what they say they’re doing. Really, they’re just confronting me and demand answers to personal questions as they “educate” me.
I like having a face for expressions
Do ypu have kids? No masks, also barely ever got sick. With kids I’m sick 5 or 6 times a year. Could be the same for your coworkers.
My sweet friend with two childs is CONSTANTLY sick. My partner and I mostly WFH and have no kids and have gotten sick twice since 2020.
My oldest just started Pre-K so we’re now having a fresh plague circle the house for the second time this month. Hopefully within a year or so we’ll have developed enough immunity to enough children’s plagues to not get sick as frequently
I do not have kids, and I don’t know about all of my coworkers, but I know the overwhelming majority of them do not have kids either.
Ok, but i have a question.
You want us to wear it all the time? Beacause i also use a mask when i use the metro or any other means of travel in which i share a communal space.
But being a social animal as we all r, wearing a mask all the time is a fast way to get ostracized.
I would like everyone to wear them until the pandemic is over, at least. After that we can reassess the situation, and preferably during flu season. To me it seems cruel to not mask for that seeing as it would greatly reduce the number of preventable flu deaths.
I think if all, or more realistically enough, of us were masking, that would eliminate the social stigma surrounding it. Personally, I don’t receive much pushback about my mask aside from the occasional staring anyways. What’s far more ostracizing to her, I, and several other people I know, is the fact that all of the social gatherings and hobbies we used to participate in are no longer accessible to us because not a single one is taking any acceptable precautions. In fact, I can think of exactly two social events I wanted to participate in this year that still “required” masks, and neither actually enforced the rule. This is sadly not a new problem for disabled people either. Many, if not most, are alienated from society and forced away from any participation in social activities due to a blatant disregard towards making those activities actually accessible to them. I cannot stress enough how painful this is for those people on the receiving end of this ableism. So, frankly, I have little sympathy for those who fear ostracism from choosing to wear a mask. If they really care about people being ostracized, they should do what they can to make their social circles safe for everyone, not just those without disabilities.
At the hospital I worked at there were no transmissions of COVID from known infected patients to providers wearing N95 masks (at least in the first 2 years, I didn’t keep up with it after that). So if you are wearing N95s you should feel quite confident that you are protecting yourselves without requiring behavior modifications from anyone else.
It’s always reassuring to hear more evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, that the N95s work. There’s definitely still at least some risk though, my roommate is currently recovering from Covid themselves despite not going out often and always masking when they do. I believe it’s the only time they’ve been infected, so the masks have made a difference for sure, but still. We’ve thankfully been able to isolate and avoid giving it to each other at least.
Our behavior is still pretty limited by others behavior though, too. For instance, I can’t go drinking or out to eat with friends because I won’t take my mask off. At work it can be very difficult for me to even eat lunch safely because of this. Swimming is another thing, or concerts, I used to like going to punk and metal shows, but with how rowdy they are and how much close contact and heavy breathing there is, it’s just far too risky even with my mask on. Lots of things like these add up. I also feel it’s really unfair to those who are unable to mask, like for instance there’s a lot of homeless people in my city who definitely cannot remain masked all the time or even close, shouldn’t we be taking precautions to protect them, or people like them who can’t protect themselves?
While wearing a mask is never a bad idea, it is absolutely not necessary to not get sick. I am also immunocompromised and I have stopped wearing a mask. I wash my hands very often and never eat handheld food without washing first. Zero issues since getting covid back when I was wearing a mask religiously.
We’d rather not take risks. Plus, we’d like to not accidentally contribute to the spread of disease ourselves if we can help it.
I thought masks wouldn’t protect against a virus (being tiny) but might help slow the spread to others by stopping spittle/moisture filled with virus from covering real world objects.
How do they help you if no one else is wearing them?
Because the virus is transmitted via spittle/moisture from other people not wearing masks. The virus doesn’t just hang out in the air on its own; it’s suspended in aerosol particles.
This is somewhat misleading. Here’s a section from near the beginning of a scientific review I linked in my reply to @ChuckEffingNorris@lemmy.ml:
To reduce spread of respiratory diseases, we need to understand the mechanisms of spread. There is strong and consistent evidence that respiratory pathogens including severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), influenza, tuberculosis, and other coronaviruses such as MERS and SARS-1, are transmitted predominantly via aerosols. Infected individuals, whether symptomatic or not, continuously shed particles containing pathogens, which remain viable for several hours and can travel long distances. [Emphasis mine.] SARS-CoV-2 is shed mainly from deep in the lungs, not the upper respiratory tract, and the viral load is higher in small aerosols (generated in the lower airways) than in larger droplets (generated in upper airways). Whereas large respiratory droplets emitted when people cough or sneeze fall quickly by force of gravity without much evaporation, those below 100 µm in diameter become (bio)aerosols. Even particles tens of microns in diameter at release will shrink almost immediately by evaporation to the point that under typical conditions they can remain airborne for many minutes. In contrast with droplet transmission, which is generally assumed to occur via a single ballistic hit, the risk of airborne transmission increases incrementally with the amount of time the lung lining is exposed to pathogen-laden air, in other words, with time spent indoors inhaling contaminated air.
Respiratory infections may theoretically also be transmitted by droplets, by direct contact, and possibly by fomites (objects that have been contaminated by droplets), but the dominant route is via respiratory aerosols. The multiple streams of evidence to support this claim for SARS-CoV-2 include the patterning of spread (mostly indoors and especially during mass indoor activities involving singing, shouting, or heavy breathing), direct isolation of viable virus from the air and in air ducts in ventilation systems, transmission between cages of animals connected by air ducts, the high rate of asymptomatic transmission (i.e., passing on the virus when not coughing or sneezing), and transmission in quarantine hotels when individuals in different rooms shared corridor air but did not meet or touch any common surface.
The sentence after the one you emphasized seems to be saying what I was: the virus is in aerosol particles or potentially droplets, which are what your mask protects you from.
Oh, okay, I think I misinterpreted what you said before, but rereading it now I understand.
Masks and respirators for prevention of respiratory infections: a state of the science review
I recommend giving this a read when you have the time, it should hopefully answer any questions you have and better than I can.
An assumed droplet and contact mode of transmission leads to prevention policies that center on handwashing and surface cleansing, maintaining 2-m physical distancing, wearing medical masks (whose waterproof backing is designed to stop droplets) within that 2-m distance (especially when attending an infected patient), using physical barriers (e.g., plastic screens) and providing health-care workers with higher-grade respiratory protection only when undertaking AGMPs. However, if the virus is transmitted significantly by the airborne route, different prevention policies are needed, oriented to controlling air quality in indoor spaces (e.g., ventilation and filtration), reducing indoor crowding and time spent indoors, wearing masks whenever indoors, careful attention to mask quality (to maximize filtration) and fit (to avoid air passing through gaps), taking particular care during indoor activities that generate aerosols (e.g., speaking, singing, coughing, and exercising), and providing respirator-grade facial protection to all staff who work directly with patients (not just those doing AGMPs)
This is why I specified N95 respirators in my first comment. If you are unfamiliar, N95 is a NIOSH air filtration rating, which is used to describe the ability of a respirator to protect the wearer from airborne solid and liquid particulates. The review I linked goes into more details on this as well. I recommended N95 or better specifically because Covid is the illness I’m most concerned with avoiding, and the evidence suggests that they provide meaningful protection over lower grade respirators or surgical masks. Another quote from the link above that stood out to me:
The certification of surgical masks for particle/bacterial filtering efficiency (P/BFE) does not reflect equivalence to respirators as the filtration is typically compromised by poor face seal. The ASTM F2100-21 P/BFE certification, for example, requires at least 95% filtration against 0.1-µm particles and at least 98% against aerosolized Staphylococcus aureus, but this is on a sample of the mask clamped in a fixture, not on a representative face. In terms of filtering aerosols, N95 respirators outperform surgical masks between 8- and 12-fold. The effectiveness of certified surgical mask material against transmission when used as a filter was demonstrated in a hamster SARS-CoV-2 model. Infected hamsters were separated from non-infected ones by a partition made of surgical mask material; when the partition was in place, transmission of SARS-CoV-2 was reduced by 75%.
In addition to protecting the wearer, respirators provide very effective source control by dramatically limiting the amount of respiratory aerosols emitted by infectious individuals. In one study, risk of infection was reduced approximately 74-fold when infected, and susceptible individuals both wore well-fitting FFP respirators compared to when both wore surgical masks.
As for one-way masking, well, it is unfortunately significantly less effective (from what I understand), and is a big part of why I’m so concerned by others not masking. I simply cannot avoid being around others all the time, and their lack of effort is directly endangering me and my wife. If it really all came down to personal choice, I wouldn’t care if people wanted to risk their health. Still, while I don’t have any studies or anything to link you at the moment specifically on the effectiveness of one-way masking, all I know is that I mask and don’t get sick, and they don’t mask and do get sick. It’s anecdotal, sure, and I’m certain the mask is not the only thing affecting this, but as far as I can see it’s the largest difference in our behavior. I’ve heard as well that wearing a respirator will reduce viral load should you be infected despite the filter, and so your sickness will be less severe, but I don’t have any evidence on hand for this.
My only dislike about the mask is that it sucks for people with glasses… If it wasn’t for that I would be using it all the time.
I liked to be allergy-less in my work lol.
I feel like most intelligent people are now on the bidet bandwagon, but it still blows my mind how many people I know that still resist using one (even when readily available). Quit being fuckin disgusting!
Some of these same people wonder why their sex life is mediocre at best. Maybe it’s your hygiene. Just sayin.
This is high level trolling, very impressive sir
Wow, I’ve never seen someone try to link bidet use to intelligence before. It’s almost impressive.
You clearly haven’t met a Southern European. We divide the world in civilized ass washers and uncivilized smelly barbarians
This comment is slightly ambiguous. Who are “we” and who are the barbarians?
We: Italians, Spanish, Greeks, Arabs, Turks, Vietnamese, South Asians, Japanese.
Barbarians: everybody else, especially the French
Nor I to a better sex life
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I was using a shower after every shit to wash properly.
During my first trip to Japan I was reluctant to use it.
My manager was traveling with me and he bought one to take home and he already had one from a previous trip and he kept talking about how life changing it was
I finally decided to use the bidet on my last day of the trip and it was a life changer. I had to go back to Japan a month later and I got a nice Toshiba that unfortunately died early this year but now you can find bidets easily on Amazon or Costco
wow. shitty attitude is shitty lol
You’d understand if you had one
we have tons of them here lol
Using password managers. All of my friends and family refuse to use them but always complain about getting locked out of accounts due to forgetting login details. I leave them too it now.
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using an ad blocker. personally, i use ad blockers for years and when i work on a friends laptop im shocked how much ads there are actually. i cant count on a hand how mucn i told my father he should use ad blocker browser and extenstion. and he wont do it. recently, i changed the DNS server on a router level to nextdns, where it blocks ads and trackers. he told me its amazing how smoother the experience is now
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password managers. as an IT specialist i have about 300 login details for many services, personal, work and clients. every login has its own password and eventually email too. and i know sooooo many people who forgot their passwords (they have about 3 very similar ones but ok) and try them all until they find out they had to creat a new for that specific service. and they are so unaware about the dangers (for example fishing, SE, …) with this method.
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I saw a similar thread on Reddit about 12 years ago and one of the suggestions near the bottom that didn’t have any comments on it is something I’ve incorporated into my daily life and it has made a huge difference: Adjust your car mirrors so you have no blind spots.
Most people have their side mirrors adjusted where they can see a portion of their own car in the mirror. This leaves you with large blind spots. To adjust them where you have no blind spots, sit in the driver’s seat and lean your head over to the left as far as you can (basically putting your head on the window), then adjust the driver’s side mirror to where you can just barely see your car in it. Then lean your head over to the passenger side about the same amount and adjust that mirror.
When adjusted properly if you can see a car in your rearview mirror, you shouldn’t be able to see that car in your side mirrors, but as soon as a car is no longer visible in the rearview mirror it should be visible in one of your side mirrors. Then when it is no longer visible in your side mirror it should be in your peripheral vision.
It takes some getting used to, but once dialed in and you’re used to it then it makes changing lanes a breeze. It also helps at night if someone behind you has bright lights because you’ll only see them in one mirror instead of all 3.
Knock your knuckles against your car door to zap static electricity on something less sensitive.
Using curbside pickup at Chick-fil-A. The line is a mile long, people. I’m in and out in 45 seconds.
Use those paper toilet seat covers so you don’t sit right on someone else’s butt cheek grease
I actually saw those once! Was so confused what they were at first, I was visiting the USA at the time and they had them in some of their public toilets.
But then they also have a huge - intentional - gap in the doors on those cubicles, so that people outside the cubicle waiting to use it were just watching me poop.
It was really fucked up, and not just a one off design mistake, this was EVERY public bathroom. Mental.
No one was watching you poop, Americans don’t look between the cracks, we know better.
Using an ad blocker
Fact checking.
So many people just believe anything they see or hear if it agrees with their worldview.
Open a banana from the seed end and not the bunch end. It’s much easier.
Cancel subscriptions when you sign up, fuck auto renewals and save some money if there’s a gap before the next time you need or use the service, and gives you a chance to consider if it’s worth the money or ethical concerns when manually renewing subs.
If you need to put in your card details its not free
Years ago, a family member (who was on my mobile phone family account) was getting charged monthly for some mobile game. I would point it out every month, and they were like “Yeah…I need to cancel that…”
It took over a year for them to get around to canceling it.
My credit card offers virtual credit card numbers AND the ability to auto-lock the virtual numbers so you can set a date and after that the number will not accept new charges.
I make sure to use a virtual card number for everything subscription based, then I immediately set the auto-lock feature to expire in a few days (give the initial charge time to clear but still plenty of time before the subscription would otherwise renew).
Some subscription services make it super tough to cancel. This method fixes that issue for the most part. Some subscription services terminate immediately once you cancel the subscription, even if you still have “time left” otherwise. This way you don’t really have to formally unsubscribe. It’s easy peasy pumpkin breezy as the common folk like to say.
