I'd rather ride in the shade. These are from my town and the neighboring town, which is only different in terms of lines on a map (and governence, obviously).

I'm going to have a fun story to tell about getting a bike shop in Chicago to accept bitcoin. I just have to wait until the story is over before I tell it. Things could still go wrong at this point...

Just put my 4th batch of #fruit in the #dehydrator. Three and a half dehydrators full of #peaches and a half load of #pears. Each load yeilds about 3 quarts of dehydrated fruit. How much goes in varies from one fruit to another, but for peaches, I'd estimate that to be about 14 lbs of peaches (¼ bushel). Plus about an hour and a half of labor per load. Oh, and it took two hours to bike over and pick them up from the orchard. And that, my friends, is why I don't sell dehydrated fruit. The math doesn't work. There's no way to compete with the mass produced stuff. To process a bushel of peaches, we're talking about 8 hours of labor, $54 in peaches (at $1/lb), and probably about $6 in electricity and some wear and tear on the dehydrator/knife/cutting board/mandilin/chef's glove (which I'm ignoring). All that to yield 12 quarts. At minimum wage, that's $15/quart (which is about ¼ pound). That's way more than what you'll pay in the store. There's no way I'm going to fetch that price and even if they could, I'm not interested in **marketing**, packaging shipping, etc. So if it's such a bad deal, then why do **I** do it? Because I don't pay for my own labor. That puts the cost at about $5/quart for me. That's cheaper than most things you'll find in the store, I build valuable skills, I know my dehydrated fruit has only one ingredient, I support our local orchard, we have AMAZING snacks all year long, and I get my exercise in the process. And for those doing the math along with me, yes, I am saying that a bushel of peaches (54 lbs) dehydrates down to about 3 lbs. It's crazy. #homesteading #business #diy

Just saw someone post something that inspired me to add another tool to my toolbelt in getting businesses to accept bitcoin. My current strategy is to ask if they accept bitcoin. I already know the answer will almost certainly be no, but it let's them know that there is interest. Most of the time they say I don't know, we use this and point to their credit card reader. But the new, additional method is to already be buying something and wait for the sales person (who may also be the store owner) ask you if anything else catches your eye. Tell them "not unless you start accepting bitcoin". Again, don't bluff. If they say, "OK", be ready to slap down the coins on more merch.

Do any registrars accept bitcoin?

It seems like, over on Mastodon, there are bots that will automatically boost anything that has a particular hashtag in it. I don't get it. What is threw point of this when you can just follow that hashtag? Who would follow those bot accounts? Make it make sense to me.

If you don't follow Crimeth Inc, you are missing out. There blokes don't mess about! They are the real deal.

Todon.eu

CrimethInc. Ex-Workers (@CrimethInc@todon.eu)

Attached: 1 image A Demonstrator’s Guide to Operational Security Fighting Back, Staying Free https://crimethinc.com/opsec How do police and f...

I can't find them on nostr natively, only via bridges to ActivityPub. @CrimethInc. Ex-Workers and @npub105j3...0yvz

Picked up a bushel of peaches from the local orchard. They were seconds, so the whole thing was under $40. For those who are new to orchard teminology, a bushel is about 54 lbs, and seconds are slightly imperfect looking fruit sold at a discount. If you are canning or dehydrating, it's great and IMO it's fine to eat fresh, bake in a pie or do anything else with for that matter. It's hard to even tell what's wrong with most of them!

Bloomburg is reporting that France's government is expected to collapse in the new few weeks.

Bloomberg.com

France’s Government Risks New Collapse, Weighing on Markets

Prime Minister Francois Bayrou called a confidence vote that may topple France’s government as soon as next month, prompting a selloff in French ...

One of the things I heard from someone in my Meshtastic class was a thank you for doing this because they would have never gotten through the process without someone there to guide them. We had trouble with gettitng the buttons to fit into the case because the tolerances with the Alley Chat case are way too tight. Sadly she didn't release the FreeCAD file, so it's difficult to modify the model. At any rate, that was the main difficulty that he faced that would have stopped him from being a #meshtastic user. My point is that there IS value in giving classes like this. Yes, it's all stuff people can read online. But think about it. If you've dedicated hours of your life reading about this, ordering parts, figuing out which ones *actually* work well together, printing out cases to figure out which ones have too sharp of edges, are too tall, fall out of the holster, and so on... and you can distill that knowledge down into a two hour presentation... that's valuable. So, if this sounds like you, consider reaching out to your local makerspace and seeing if they'll let you run a class. You can charge money for the class and give them a cut. They'll help spread the word, but expect that you'll have to do the bulk of the lifting there. Plan for an hour of setup time and another hohr for teardown. You could spend countless hours on content (slides, workshops, live demos, etc.), so watch out for spending 50 hours on that to end up making $50 giving the class. You can do that, but if you don't give the class multiple times, that's a recipe for getting discouraged about giving the class not being worth it. If you're doing it for the live of the game, then maybe this won't matter to you. I only suggest that you be mindful about it. Make it a choice, not something that you look back on and think wow I kinda spend more time than made sense for a class.

This month's Repair Cafe Urbana was a blast!

August Repair Cafe – Makerspace Urbana

It's effectively the second month we've existed. We're still figuring out how to make things run more smoothly. Just got connected with the international organization and got a bunch of great info from them. Should help us get more fliers put there, press release remplate to hit the traditional media, logos, suggestions on photos to post on the fliers... it just goes on and on.