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.

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

The beauty of Linux is that you can use pretty much any distribution to game and they’re all equally suited for it since you can install pretty much anything you want.

You don’t have to use SteamOS although you can. Different distributions have a different philosophy and are different levels of beginner friendly. If you want something that just works, Mint is a good option. Mint is basically Ubuntu but with a lot of configuration out of the box. Ubuntu is a good option as well. But you don’t really need to worry about which is best for gaming.

Microsoft includes Ubuntu in the Linux subsystem for Windows. I don’t think they are involved beyond that. Doesn’t really mean anything except you can use Ubuntu (and some other distros) inside Windows. This is only really meaningful if you’re trying to do Linux work but your employer forces you to have Windows.

Nvidia supports Linux but they refuse to open source their drivers. I don’t have any nvidia hardware so maybe someone else can speak to this better. But I believe the proprietary nvidia drivers are notoriously buggy and out of date. AMD support is much better. There are open source drivers that work great. I’ve never even had to think much about my graphics card. People I know who use nvidia have more trouble. So this is good for you.

A good jumping off point would be to first choose a distribution and make a bootable USB drive with it. Most will have a “Live” version of the iso (the install file) that lets you boot in to it without installing anything. So you can boot in to it before installing abs poke around, see if you have any hardware issues before committing. If you want to proceed, Google dual boot Linux/Windows and follow guides. Make sure you backup any data on your computer case things go wrong. It’s possible to accidentally bork your Windows partition.

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.