At the weekend, I decided to make some cocktails (this one, in case anyone is curious).

I don't make cocktails very often, so I don't have very expensive gear. I've been using a protein shaker. It's not pretty, but it gets the job done.

So it was around 1am on Saturday night when I decided it would be a great idea. I got everything ready and started shaking. A few seconds later, the bottom of the shaker breaks and I splash sticky passion fruit all over my kitchen. We're talking walls, windows, fridge, chairs...

It was during that fun clean up that I decided it was probably time I invested in a decent shaker!

Can anyone in Europe recommend a decent Boston shaker? It seems all the recommendations online are for American brands that don't sell on this side of the pond.

I live in a hard water area. Until now, I've been using a standard water filter like Brita, which has worked fine, but I could never achieve the clarity I was looking for in my coffee.

So last week, I dipped my toe in the world of water recipes. I got myself a zero water filter, read up about remineralisation and made a few litres of coffee brewing water.

I wasn't sure what to expect or if it would make a difference, but man was I surprised! The difference is insane. It was the missing piece to tasty coffee that I had been searching for for so long. Needless to say, I'm sold now and theres no going back for me.

What concerns me us how much of a pain in the ass it is. I have to have a bottle for the mineral water concentrate, a filter jug for the distillation and another jug for the remineralised water. I don't know if I want all that hassle every day for the rest of my life.

So the question now is how can I streamline this?

I live in a rented city apartment, so space is limited and I can't make any big changes like under-sink ro installations. I have looked at countertop ro units, but they're very pricey

Is there anyone else here who makes their own water? How do you manage this? Any advice for someone who is just starting out?

Please check out my previous post here.

I'd like to say thank you to everyone who helped me with my last question. Hopefully you can help me again...

I had a look at my setup, and the system actually has 70 lamps. That implies that each one likely draws 0.1W (if I understand this correctly) given that the transformer has a Max output of 9W.

I'm having a hard time finding lamps that fit this spec, so now I'm wondering if I could simply change the transformer. Do I risk melting the wires or burning my house down doing something like this?

A couple years ago, I bought a string of led festoon lamps. This was a cheap purchase from a Chinese seller on Amazon, who is no longer actively trading. The strings came with a couple spare lamps, but now they have all been used up and I need to find some new ones. The issue is that the packaging has no indication of their spec, and the lamps themselves have no markings on them, so this is quite tricky.

I tried getting these. They fit in the socket, so thats a good start, but they don't light up.

Before I go out searching for something again, can someone help me figure out if it's a lost cause and I should just buy a new string or if it is possible to work out what type of lamp I require. The picture is of the plug/transformer. It's the only info I have to go off...

I received this from a coffee newsletter. The summary of this study from the email:

The tl;dr of the paper is this: Measuring brewed coffee using refractometers has limited use, because you only know the total extraction and not the quality of the extraction. This paper argues that by passing a voltage through the liquid coffee, you can create a kind of profile. Once you've established a profile of a good-tasting extraction, you can then measure the quality of the coffee by seeing whether or not it closely matches your desired voltage profile.

Does anyone know if it's possible to achieve this? Possibly with an external service that syncs the two?

Basically, the last feature immich can't do that google does is to share albums. Sometimes my family wants to have albums after events, and my ones live in a silo.

I'm looking into setting up https for my local services. Everything is currently set up using the official caddy docker image.

I want to use now connect caddy to cloudflare to resolve the DNS 01. It looks like this is possible with a drop in replacement for caddy from either https://github.com/CaddyBuilds/caddy-cloudflare or https://github.com/serfriz/caddy-custom-builds

Is anyone here using these builds? Are they reliable? Is there an alternative I havent considered?

Ive been using pangolin for a couple weeks now. So far so good. All my publicly exposed services work like a charm.

I'm now trying to set up some private resources and this is where I'm struggling a bit. I can set up a client on my phone through the android app and one on my laptop through the CLI.

They connect fine until I create a private resource. The second I have a private resource, the clients fail to connect and just throw timeouts.

If I delete the private resources, they clients connect again without issue.

That kind of makes the VPN side of pangolin unusable. Has anyone else seen this?

My first attempt at a quenelle... Needs practice, but not a bad go

Just got news that my electricity company had a data breach and some of my personal info has been stolen. This includes government id and bank details...

What can I do to protect myself from harm?

Wondering if anyone here can recommend vegan protein powders. Frequently the texture is awful and the flavours are bland.

I have found vegerose and allnutrition who make a pretty decent tasting shake. What other brands are worth trying?

I've been using hetzner for a good long while now. When I switched over to them, I think they were the cheapest around, but it seems loads of other companies are popping up offering dirt cheap VPS's these days. I'm now considering a migration.

Is anyone here using a different provider? Would you recommend? Are there any I should definitely avoid?