Pure Evil

Why you do this!

*sigh*

I guess there may be some chemichals that could help here? But gaffa tape to the rescue — by dabbing the offending area a couple thousand times with tape, you can eventually lift all the tape parts. This only works if the surface can take some manhandling, but this tea kettle is pretty sturdy. Life hack!

Behold! Success! It only took like ten minutes! Thanks, Le Creuset. One star.

Anyway, I’ve always used electric kettles — they’re so much faster for boiling water than a stove with conventional burner plates. Some years back I got an induction top, but it never occurred to me that that meant that I could get rid of the electric kettle until I watched this:

Why don't Americans use electric kettles?

Earlier today I repeated the experiment: Which would be faster, the electric kettle or the induction top? The induction top handily beat out the kettle, even though the electric kettle is 2.4kW.

So I ran out and bought that green thing up there. Which is pure evil, as you can see! But it brings the water to a boil about 30% faster than my electric kettle. (I timed.) Which… sounds totally reasonable, since the induction top is 3.7kW, I think. *does math* Yes indeed.

Of course, the electric kettle is convenient in other ways — it turns itself off by itself, and it has a thermometer, which is important when I need the water to cool down to exactly 80C before using on green tea, but… More counter space is more counter space.

Dead Internet Theory

It occurred to me the other week that I should prune RSS feeds on Gwene (which is an RSS to NNTP service that’s been running since errr I want to say 2008?). Because polling feeds that are long dead is a waste of resources.

So it’s now been collecting stats, and I whipped up some scripts to parse those stats, and, tada:

I.e., there are 22286 feeds signed up at Gwene, and of those 10515 are (now) dead.

That’s not as bad as I’d have guessed, actually? More than half of the internet is still alive! Rejoice!