Random Joe, or should I say… GNU/Joe

  • 10 Posts
  • 146 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
Cake day: November 28th, 2021
  • Joe Bidet@lemmy.mltoMildly Infuriating@lemmy.world•All this produce is going to spoil at the food bank where I volunteerEnglish
    1·
    15 days ago

    hmm no big deal, but either i expressed myself wrong, or you are mis-informed about pickling :)

    there are several pickling techniques, the most common is lacto-fermentation and:

    1/ it doesnt require any boiling. you could be boiling your jars to disinfect them, but thorough wash with soap and/or vinegar is more than enough. so no “cooked food”, no license, thanks.

    2/ the labour is barely more than any other preparation of that food. actually much less, as no cooking is involved. cut the goods (sometimes even by hands with cauliflowers, no knife is needed for most of the job), immerse them in salt water and that’s it. it scales very well.

    3/ the cost of the jars can be minimum, by recycling existing ones, and/or investing in 10, 20, 50L crocs that can be used hundreds of time. their cost is thus divided by the number of fermentation cycling…

    4/ like for previous point, this is assuming that the people confronted with that question are not here at their first rodeo, and that they may face that problem again, so it’s more like an investment.

    5/ with a little experience of fermentation, you see and smell immediately if something went bad (mold), and discard those batches. the other do look and smell good and there is no way anyone gets sick. it has worked like this for centuries, way before fridges or the notion of microbiome were invented… I also imagine that people getting food for free have an expectation to use at their own risk, no guarantee, etc… but maybe everyone sues everyone in 'murica, i dunno?

    6/ for the taste of pickled cauliflower… well it seems you may never have tried it? like with anything lacto-fermented it is deliciously complex, sour, and goes with everything as a condiment, minced and mixed with other things, or lightly cooked like sauerkraut… it brings vitamins and probiotics that the body craves for, and usually rather tastes “woaa” or “hmmm” than anything else… even if you dont like cauliflower in the first place… do you think the “destitute” want rotten raw cauliflower, or no cauliflower at all, more than the pickled one?

    7/ pickling/lacto-fermenting is a practice of autonomy. the labour could be contributed by the people themselves who will benefit from it, who will thus learn a very simple and accessible technique that will enable everyone in the future to conserve food ie. deal with stocks in excess, when they are cheap, abundant, etc. and save them in ways that benefit the body for times when they are not. seems pretty compatible with the objective of anyone collecting and re-distributing unused food!

  • Joe Bidet@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.ml•What was Linux like in the 90s
    152·
    3 months ago

    friend told me “ah you like hacking at DOS and stuffs, you may be interested in that, it’s called ‘linouqse’ i guess…” so i gave it a shot.

    “Slackware”… it was something like kernel 1.3.12 or 1.3.13 i am not sure… it came on 6 or 7 floppy disks.

    from the boot already it seemed like nothing i had seen before: all (!) hardware seemed to be methodically enumerated, a bunch of esoteric commands and processed started their bizarre dance before my very eyes. looked already like i was accessing so much more information about the insides of my -then beloved- machine than ever?! this flashes very fast though and is a bit frustrating… then a rudimentary install menu, in text mode, asking a lot of questions.

    … trying all of this and failing many times, getting an old hard disk in a secondary bay to dedicate to the exercise… getting to it again and again (there was no Internet, where i was, then)… until finally, the thing boots up. a login prompt. i had remembered the password chosen upon install, that was it!

    … a shell? i had never heard of Unix before, 100% of my previous practice before was with micro-computing, from 8bit to 16bit to DOS PC and its laughable Windows 3.1 ™…

    … what am i gonna do with all this, now?!

    [fiddling…]

    [months passed]

    … “xf86something”…? what? some more configuration? some more esoteric? Where does that lead me? wait.

    … a graphical environment just popped out of my console?! with windows and shits??? this was there since the very beginning, like it was already there this whole time?!?!

    🤯

    Later on erring back on the side of Win3.1 because its “trumpet winsock” was the obvious, “easy” way to get connected to this new eldorado that opened up around (the year was 1995)… reading more about it on this new “online” helped me figure how to get back on that cool and hacky side, to finally (after months?) get the modem to connect, through PPP, to my ISP…

    This is when I decided it would be cool, someday, to make this my primary OS, and that i’ll work towards this end from now on. at the same time i heard for the first time of “free(libre) software” and that thing resonated within me as something i didn’t know was possible: a way to organize society, based on virtuous principles of sharing knowledge and helping one’s neighbor, through the same playful excitement of hacking that had kept me on my toes since i was a child? where do I sign?!

    3 years later i decided to never boot a Windows OS again, and here I am, ranting on lemmy like i am 275 years old…