@Sal@mander.xyz

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Sal,
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Yeah, I found out only after choosing that domain name… This TLD also gets penalized by the automatic e-mail spam detectors (like SpamAssassin). I wouldn’t pick the “.xyz” TLD if I were picking today 😅

Sal, (edited )
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I ordered four of the simpler devices this weekend (LilyGO T3-S3 LoRa 868MHz - SX1262) and I have been reading about antennas.

Since I live in a city I am not super optimistic about the range. But I am still very curious about the concept, and I would love to be surprised.

After doing some search about antennas, I have decided to test the following combination:

I also have a vector network analyzer (LiteVNA) that can be used for checking antennas, so I will also try to build some antennas myself. I doubt that my custom antennas will approach the performance of the professional ones… But I just find it such a cool concept.

Have you already gotten to play with it? What is your experience so far?

Sal,
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Ah, cool! I got my 4 devices today and I have managed to play with them a bit. They are pretty cool! I was able to walk over to a park near my house and spoke with people across the world with no data in my phone :D

Sal,
@Sal@mander.xyz avatar

Sure.

If I make my own AI image generator and create a nice image with it, or use some AI engine that gives me full ownership of the output, I can choose to share it online with whatever license I want to share it with. I don’t see why the regular copyright rules for digital images and photographs would not hold… If someone shares their AI creation online and wants others to share with attribution, or not share at all, what is wrong with that?

I can take a ton of photos of objects with my phone, upload them to Flickr, and they are all copyrighted. That doesn’t mean that other’s can simply take similar photos if they wish to do so. The same with AI. One can decide whether to share with attribution, pay someone to let them use it, or to generate the image themselves using AI. It does not seem like a problem to me.

Sal,
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OTOH my understanding of the speed of light in a medium is that it’s the result of photons being absorbed and re-emitted, and the speed of any individual photon is always exactly c.

I am an experimentalist and so if a theoretician reads this they will probably tell you that I am wrong…

I think that the description of a photon being “absorbed” and “re-emitted” could be used to describe the picture from the point of view of quantum field theory (which I don’t claim understand), because within this theory the photon/electron and even electron/electron interactions are mediated by photons that are created and annihilated during those interactions. Whenever the “photon” exists it will travel with speed c. As light travels through a material it is traveling as a wave of electrons influencing each other, similar to how water waves travel through water, and since these interactions of the electrons pushing each other are formally described by the photons popping into and out of existence I think one could correctly use the language of “absorbed” and “re-emitted”.

But personally I think that it can be a bit confusing, because the absorption and emission of light by materials is often used to mean something very different… Absorption more commonly refers to a resonant interaction in which a photon is destroyed and a molecule (or atom, or crystal, etc…) comes into an excited state. The molecule that becomes excited can remain excited for quite a long time (usually picoseconds - microseconds), and the re-emission of the light often comes in a completely different direction and even a different wavelength than the original photon. So using the language of “absorption” and “emission” in this context can also generate confusion,.

Personally when I imagine the propagation of light through a material I think about it in terms of the polarizability of the medium. When the light propagates through a medium, you don’t need a “photon”. The wave is being carried by the electrons oscillating (these are very small oscillations - unless you are using powerful lasers, then you reach the beautiful world of non-linear optics). The speed of propagation of this wave through the medium depends on how far the wave can travel through the material with every oscillation. There is a nice description of this semi-classical process in the Feyman Lectures: www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_31.html

gravity moves at the speed of light in a vacuum

Hmmm… Always? Maybe some funky things happen as the wave passes by a black hole.

Sal,
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Whaaat! No way! I have been actively hunting for these, but no luck yet!

Sal,
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In the Netherlands… I have experience with www.homegreen.nl and I can recommend their cultures (From them I have bought Lion’s Mane and King Stropharia).

I have bought Cordyceps off Etsy sellers, but unfortunately I can’t strongly any of them, because I have had really underwhelming fruits that looked like what one would expect from and old / sub-cultured strain.

In the Netherlands we have a website to report different species found in the wild. For Cordyceps militaris I can see that October is the most common month to find them (waarneming.nl/species/16371/statistics/), and in the map I can see the areas in which they are most commonly found: waarneming.nl/species/16371/maps/?start_date=2023…

So I am planning to go to a few hunting trips these coming weekends and hopefully I can find one in the wild… If I am not able to establish a wild culture, I think I will order from a vendor in the US, as there are a few Cordyceps breeders with a good reputation there. But i will keep an eye on this post in case anyone can recommend an EU Cordyceps vendor.

Light sources for winter

Hi folks. I was wondering if anyone had recommendations for indoor light sources. I live in Colorado and we’re going to start getting snow here before much longer so I’ll have to haul my plants in. I was thinking about using a flexible LED strip for lighting over the winter. I just moved into this apartment a couple months...

Sal,
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Personally I use E27 PAR (38 degrees) LED lamps, 17 watt power. I have a mix of 3000 K and 4000 K. The reason for these specific lamps is that I found them at a discount and so I bought a large amount. It is nice that they are somewhat directional, so I can aim them at specific plants.

I have a few different ways of hanging the lights by the plants. Most recently, I have set up a rack this way:

https://i.imgur.com/Ea0B5Sr.jpg

The E27 clamps I bought 12 off Ali-Express: nl.aliexpress.com/item/4000793927858.html

The rack is a simple light weight plastic rack that I found in a discount store for $12.

Sal,
@Sal@mander.xyz avatar

I have a similar one and I also did not find it to be useful.

https://i.imgur.com/3KbIWLt.jpg

This week I received a few capacitive soil sensors. I plan to hook up this and other sensors to a few ESP32s with WiFi and see if I can make a simple site with temperature and soil humidity charts for some of my plants.

https://i.imgur.com/2GFk2gA.jpg

For pH I just use pH strips for doing simple routine checks. For soil I’ll add some soil to reverse-osmosis water, wait for the soil to settle at the bottom, and then stick the paper in. Not perfect but I just want to check that it doesn’t jump too far either way.

https://i.imgur.com/WKR9eq3.jpg

Sal,
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I did buy mine off amazon… But the Capacitive soil moisture sensor for arduinos you can find in many online electronic stores. If you are looking for some sensor that is already build and that you don’t have to interface with an arduino, I don’t have any recommendation, sorry.

If you are interested in potted house plants, my current opinion is that weight is the best way to figure out the moisture content, because there is a very noticeable difference between dry and wet substrate. So I walk around the apartment every day or two and give a slight push or pull to each pot to determine whether they need to be watered. It took some time and some dead plants to get into this habit, but by now it is almost automatic.

Sal,
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Thanks! Usually I see nice growth during spring and summer, but I find it difficult to get my more exotic plants through the winter. For this plant I want to make an extra effort. I can’t find much information about what conditions are optimal or even tolerated by this plant. So I’ll need some luck.

Sal,
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Thanks :D

Sal,
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Cool! It’s like an antler coral forest.

I’ll go forage soon and make sure to bring you some nice pictures :-) I think it’s still a bit early for mushrooms in my area, though.

I’m not sure what is allowed here (no sidebar content?)

Ah, I’m sorry, that’s my fault 😅 I created a lot of communities at once and I never came back to properly create sidebars for all of them. My goal when I got started was to define the scope by creating communities about topics I find interesting… I will try to make some time to improve some sidebars. But, generally, I would say that if one is well-intentioned and not completely off-topic pretty much anything reasonable is allowed.

That said, if volunteers want to help moderate or take over a community, I’m always happy to hand over the reins!

Sal,
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I thought about this and I decided that slants would be a better choice, but in practice I ended up using plates.

If you store a dish next to a slant for several months, you will notice that the dish eventually dries up. The slant remains hydrated for longer. Sometimes slants might also be more convenient to store or move around in a rack.

That said, as a small hobbyist I don’t really need to store strains for so long, and I prefer to refresh them often. So I just grow multiple plates at a time, do some agar to grain transfer, and stack the remaining clean plates in the fridge. This works fine, but I do refresh at least every 3 - 6 months.

I am more paranoid about liquid cultures and I don’t use them for long term storage. One excuse I can come up with is that if a contaminant reaches the liquid culture during long-term storage, it will mix throughout and it will contaminate the whole thing - whereas in the solid the contaminant might remain localized near the edges. I also have my crank theory about liquid cultures: I suspect that even if stored in the cold the mycelium will remain more active (and age faster) when suspended in a liquid than when resting on top of a solid medium. But this is pure speculation, I have not looked into the research, and maybe the mycelium rests just the same.

Sal,
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(Kind of a side topic) Since you mentioned mycelium age, I would guess that genetic degradation happens similar to cannabis. Granted, it can take dozens of generations for clones of clones to degrade in cannabis, it seems to me that mycelium might age faster? I dunno. That would make sense if it wasn’t for the prevalence of PE strains that have been around for years. (I am not a genetic scientist by any stretch.)

Oof, love this topic. Yes, mycelium ages and accumulates mutations. The extent to which it happens is species-specific, and I think the number of times that the cells have multiplied is more important than absolute “time”. So, usually you notice a culture aging as you sub-culture it, meaning that you will grow the fruit and clone the fruiting body. Cloning the fruiting body allows you to preserve a strain, but after a few cycles of doing this the strain begins to degenerate. So, that’s why one might want to keep a master of the strain under storage. Eventually, even that master may degrade, and that’s when you need to breed again from spores. One can grow fruits directly from a mixed population of spores, but the results can be varied. A strain is isolated when one wants more consistent results.

As I said, this is species-specific. I think Lion’s Mane and oyster mushrooms can do lots of sub-cultures. Psilocybin mushrooms can also handle a few before showing malformed fruits and losing their spores.

But if you really want to get into the cool stuff of strain degeneration… Cordyceps militaris. This is a mushroom that is becoming very popular and it is famous for its strain degeneration and the necessity to breed it - which is not so easy - this is a mushroom meant to grow as an insect parasite. If you are into the details of what is actually happening as this mushrooms is sub-cultured, I recommend this paper.

Here is a very cool image of what sub-cultures look like form that paper:

https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/f8563fb3-7a90-4a99-9431-e6ba179477db.png

Working with this mushroom is a beautiful exercise of sourcing. Because of its popularity, many vendors are selling it now… But they will give you a strain that fruits like Z4/Z5. If you want a strain to fruit like first-generation fruiters you need someone who either collects spores from the wild, is a breeder, or knows how to source them and store them well. A youtuber I like watching (Fresh From The Farm Fungi) made a series of experiments trying to breed this fungus. He is very experienced, and you can see that even for him it’s quite a challenge: www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRm859-mjhM

But… yeah, this is probably more than you wanted to know about ageing in mycelium… Sometimes when I’m excited about a topic I talk a lot 😂

Sal,
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Thanks for the info! I’ll look over that and let it stew for a bit in my brain and will probably want to chat more. You can see where my general curiosity is pointed now, so the cordyceps information is perfect.

Always happy to chat! At this rate, by the next time we chat you will be the one explaining me things :D

After my first batch of mushrooms a couple months ago with no failures/contam, it gave me a huge confidence boost.

If failures do come, which is very very likely, don’t let that discourage you. Failures teach you important lessons.

I dove right into some of the more complicated topics shortly after. FWIW, I am compiling a spreadsheet that I intend to share that is a combination of LC recipes, substrate blends and various quantity calculators. Every YouTuber and website author has their own preferences, so I am basically going to average their data out and combine it with information I find in various research papers. (Testing is going to be the fun part though.)

Sounds super cool! When you do publish your results, please post about it or at least send me a message!

FFTFF is somewhat local to me in the Denver area and have been following that channel. It absolutely get my thumbs up.

Ohh. I’d absolutely go visit his stand at the farmer’s market if I was in the Denver area! But, yeah, I really like his methods, and he has lots of very interesting projects.

Sal,
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I can’t reproduce that. And I don’t see any indication of any connection to yandex through the inspector when I go to kbin.social.

Could it be that you have some malware installed in your PC? Have you seen this or similar download pop-ups in other sites?

Sal,
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Ah! I checked with my phone and I see this:

https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/e288a142-3eb4-42f7-b575-089f277cc24d.png

Maybe this pop up shows up like that to you?

Sal,
@Sal@mander.xyz avatar

But did you also see this pop-up? What I am thinking is that maybe your phone processed it diferently

Sal,
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I’m glad you could figure it out!

I followed the link and I see that network request too. I downloaded the file and it is the video.

https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/4a0d625c-cd14-40b5-8afe-932cbb95d645.png

Sal,
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I was surprised by their lack of smell, but I thought that the smell of the fresh flower might be subtle…

Eventually I figured out the disappointing fact that the scentless chamomile (Tripleurospermum inodorum) looks a lot like German Chamomile, and it is most likely what I have here 😭 So the quest continues… At least I know how to identify the real one now.

Sal,
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Thanks a lot!

Don’t worry, I am cautious about positively identifying anything before actually putting it near my mouth!

I will admit that I am a bit liberal with the touching and smelling, but I think I take an appropriate level of precautions.

Sal,
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Cool observation about the hair! Thanks

I will study more details about the wild carrot and hemlock and I’ll inspect the plant better next time I walk by.

Sal,
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Thanks! I will look into those! Quite exciting :D

I have foraged and eaten some stinging nettle, but I didn’t know it was good for making tea!

Is there a trick to making elderflower tea? The crushed leaves of elder have a very characteristic strong smell that I don’t find so pleasant - will the flower tea taste like that?

The blackberry and wild strawberry teas are made from the fruit? Or can tea be brewed from the leaves?

Sal,
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Betula leaves? As in, birch trees?! Their leaves can be used for tea?!

Thanks a lot for sharing all of this info! Wildplukken looks awesome, I’ve just placed an order :D

Sal,
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Cool! I’ll read about it.

Tilia tea I’ve tried, but I think I used Tilia americana. I remember that that tee might possibly help to sleep.

The Alliaria petiolata I do see a lot around where I live! There is also a park nearby that has carpets of Allium ursinum, which also taste like garlic. I really like them.

Achillea millefolium is suuuuper common now and easy to find. Such a great list! Thanks again :D

Sal,
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I have some herb butter I made with it in the fridge now!

Mmmmm, sounds delicious!

Sal,
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Interesting - so maybe these pigments showed up in response to strong light?

Sal,
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Thanks!

Sal,
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Thanks! I got very excited because I thought it might be Chamomile and there is a ton around here now. They do smell very nice… Apparently they were used to brew a tea to kill off internal parasites in the past, but I am not sure it’s a good idea to prepare that as a tea.

Sal,
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All fungi are magical ;)

The mycology community is more general in scope. Psychedelic mushrooms are not excluded, but there can be so much specialized discussion in that sub-category that is worth it having a more specialized community.

There is also the first community !uncle_bens dedicated to growing, but it is not very active.

Sal,
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Sure, what’s wrong with bird seed tech?

Sal,
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Ah, actually, I responded thinking that you meant the /c/mycology community.

I’m not the creator/mod of the uncle_ben’s community, and the sidebar says “A community for the uncle ben’s mushroom growing technique.”, so I am actually not sure. I think it would be fine… Sorry!

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