Yep. It’s a touch longer than I like as a walking around leans but it’s well within reason.

Also, as a heads up don’t worry about crop / equivalent too much outside field of view. 35mm full frame isn’t like some ideal of photography, it’s just a handy reference point. Sometimes you see people talking about equivalent depth of field and focusing distance and it’s all just silly.

Normally I would recommend a 50 or a little higher for portraits but if it’s going to be your only lens 35 isn’t a bad choice (on aps-c).

The 85 or 100 might be nicer to use for macro not because of the 1:1 but because of the farther working distance. But they are going to be borderline useless for day to day portraits. For studio portraits maybe it would work but I definitely wouldn’t want it as my only lens.

If you’re specifically worried about magnification on the 35, consider grabbing some extension tubes. They’re really cheap, and you don’t need an enormous set if you’re starting at 1:2.

Part of me wants to say get the 24 macro and the 50 1.8 which is like the cheapest lens they make and would be a pretty good portrait lens, but wide macros are weird, and 35 is such a do everything length it’s hard to go wrong with it.

Yeah, I think the ones my friends have are about that size. I wound up with the next size up and it’s just obnoxiously large so I try to warn people, lol.

On the other side of the coin, large electric pressure cookers get kind of enormous. If you use your immersion circulator to do large batches, like 30 individual cheesecakes for a party or large cuts of meat, you’ll run out of room very quickly, which means batches which would take forever. Whereas an immersion circulator can be stuck in a cooler or even the bathtub and cook a lot of food at once. A small pressure cooker and an immersion circulator is a lot less space than a large pressure cooker. If you only ever cook for a few people a combo unit would be fine, but I find myself pulling out the immersion circulator much more often for events.

I say this as someone who bought a large pressure cooker because it was a really good deal and now struggles to store it, lol.

The 18-150 is a super zoom, so it gives up some image quality to give you everything in one lens. It goes from reasonably wide to very telephoto in one swoop. Optically, that much zoom means they have to make compromises somewhere, so it’s not the sharpest lens, and at the 150 end it’s not exactly what I would consider bright - but most people only use that outside in the daytime when it doesn’t matter. They’re really popular for people on vacation or who want very little kit, and if you’re just posting pictures to the web you probably won’t notice the flaws.

If you’re buying used damage is pretty much always a concern unless you’re buying from a reputable used dealer who has checked out the lens for you. Especially since you’re a beginner thats probably your best opinion. If you’re buying personally you’ll want to inspect the lens thoroughly for issues, and it’s best if you can meet in person and try the lens on your own camera and look for flaws in any images you shoot. If you’re buying online just make sure they have a good return policy and that they seem to honor it.

Small list:

• Make sure it zooms smoothly, and if you hold it with the lens pointing down the zoom doesn’t creep from where you left it. (Or doesn’t do it too bad, some lenses do that brand new)
• Make sure the focus motors work ok - there’s a lot of variance in how different motors sound, so finding a review with audio of them can be helpful.
• Make sure the aperture works properly.
• Make sure the filter threads are ok, as well as any hood bayonets.
• Make sure the mount is ok, all the contacts are ok, and it communicated with your camera properly.
• If the lens is supposed to have seals make sure they’re in place and in ok shape. If they aren’t check if they’re user replaceable, and negotiate accordingly.
• Make sure the front and back lens elements are clear and free of scratches. Sometimes there can be tiny minor scratches in the coatings that are only visible in some light, they often don’t have a large impact on image quality but negotiate accordingly.
• When you look down the lens it should be clear and clean. If you see any cloudy areas or mold run away.
• Find a better list than this online, there has to be one this is just the basics.

With all that said, I have a few lenses that I’ve bought knowing they have issues and like 90% of the time it’s hard to notice in actual photos.

Honestly the best advice is to just get out there with something and start learning. Don’t spend too much money and don’t commit until you know what you want.

That sounds like a job for the kit lens. The r50 should come in a kit with a 18-45, which is worth using for a while. If you have to buy something the 18-150 is a tad on the slow side (f stops wise, not actual speed) but it should be able to do most things reasonably well, and it should fit in your price bracket. You could get a wide and a longer macro, but you’d be looking at the real cheap prime manual focus lenses (which I like, but they’re not exactly beginner friendly).

It’s really worth really double checking if you can find a used one though. Kit lenses are incredibly common, and way cheaper on the used market because of it. They’re a great starting point until you have enough experience to know what you really want, and a couple hundred USD can go a long way toward something like a fast portrait prime lens or whatever you decide on.

To be fair, if Lemmy’s discoverability wasn’t trash you could probably have both. I would love to have a bunch of small instances that were focused on individual topics, like Star Trek or anime or knitting or gardening or whatever and just jump between them. It feels like that’s what federation was built for.

But because Lemmy is so small right now and discoverability is so bad it seems like almost every instance is either intentionally a tech / general purpose one or so adjacent it might as well be. As long as there’s just one community for that thing that people can find that would be great, but instead there are like 10 spread around 3 different instances and 8 of them are dead and 1 just bot reposts the subreddit - and it’s really hard to tell which is which. Like, if everything was actually on one instance at least you could just list everything.

https://optimizeyourbiology.com/light-bulb-database

I almost always recommend the Phillips Ultra Definition bulbs, but they only do 2700k and 5000k. If you want something in between you might get stuck paying quite a bit more for a specialty one.

That’s basically what computers do.

The rule is a holdover from monospaced type like from a typewriter. On a computer with a decent font and renderer it will generally make the spacing a little larger than an in-between-words space, but not a ton like double spacing would. Basically typesetting is way more complicated than people realize but since we solved most of the problems computers have with it in like, the 70s, most people don’t tend to realize it unless they have design training.

The follow up post is significantly more interesting to me, as it basically mirrors the comment section.

https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/price-of-snark/

They don’t show the labels because the brand didn’t pay. If you see a label with a brand on it they probably paid.

For a cooking show it’s probably not going to be worth the time and effort to get a contract in place for every ingredient, so you only see it occasionally.

From a technical level you should use something lossless in this situation, but it really quickly becomes impractical. Actually lossless 1080p60 is going to be something like 500mbps, so if you’re playing for an hour I hope you have a spare 2tb drive laying around. The artifacts in really high bitrate compressed video are so minimal that they basically don’t matter. Often codecs do noise removal first thing so whatever minor artifacts still exist will get smeared over by that anyway.

Also when you are testing make sure there’s some movement in the video. AV1 especially has modes for presentations and things that basically make a PowerPoint, so sizes might be unrealistic if you’re just recording your desktop. I don’t think that gets enabled in handbrake but it’s been a while since I looked.

If you’re seeing any artifacts in the original video, you probably need to re-record in a higher bitrate. It needs to look identical to uncompressed. Your later encodes will be trying to encode all the artifacts in the original video, which could be why the file sizes keep getting bigger - you’re giving it noisier video than the original.

50mbps for recording as an intermediate like that is well within the realm of normal. You can try having obs record in 264 with a quality setting instead of a bitrate setting, which can save space when things are more static - something like cq 6 or lower can do pretty well.

Unfortunately, yeah finding the sweet spot does take forever. One thing I would recommend is once you have an idea where you want to land, try a few much longer videos and see what the differences are. Slower paced sections might compress much better than the fast action stuff in one codec or another. Again it’s all kind of a balancing act on where you want to be.

In the third screenshot, preset is on 7, change that to 4. That’s the speed setting - 7 is trying to do it in close to real time, 4 will take much longer but be much more efficient.

Can you post a screenshot of your Handbrake settings? You should definitely be getting better efficiency than that.

Because it’s just for personal archival, I would recommend recording in super high bitrate 264 or 265 depending on what your card can do in real time, then compressing that file later using either av1 or 265, depending on which works better for the content.

If you’re playing in 1440p165, then you should record that to start although if it’s an option I would play and record at 1080p120. 1440 is a bit of an odd duck resolution that some stuff doesn’t really like, but it’s getting better all the time so it’s not a huge deal. More important is 120fps because if you decide to go down to 60 or even 30fps they split evenly, which is important since it means the extra frames just get thrown out. There’s no 82.5 frame so it either has to blend two together or pick one that’s at the wrong time, and neither looks good.

Record in OBS using like, 25-40mbps in whatever your graphics card can do realtime, with all the audio tracks in something lossless like FLAC. High enough it might as well be uncompressed.

Once you have your gameplay recording from OBS, use either Handbrake or FFMPEG to convert it to your long term storage format. Since this is such a big project I would make some samples using cheats to get an idea what the bullet-hell-iest parts will look like, then try a few different handbrake or ffmpeg settings, and see what gives you the tradeoff of file size and quality that you like. It’ll also give you a ballpark idea about how much long term storage you’ll need.

Non-realtime encoding like ffmpeg and Handbrake is much more efficient than realtime done by your graphics card, like on the order of like half the file size for the same quality - that’s why you want the two step process. It also allows you to play in 120fps for that responsiveness, but watch at 60 or even 30fps to save some file size.

When you set up handbrake, you’ll have a few settings to play with and make samples from - encoder, quality level, speed, fps, and rescaling.

Encoder is probably the most important. Use either x265 or SVT-AV1. In my experience, they’re close in terms of efficiency, but AV1 pulls ahead in certain situations. AV1 is more efficient about large static sections and when it breaks up it just looks blurry. 265 is better at retaining texture, but when it fails its gross digital blocks. 265 is faster than AV1, but when you push AV1 and it takes 1000 years it does a better job. Basically, run a lot of tests and then decide.

Scaling is where you go from 1440 to 1080 and is probably the least important for file size. I honestly wouldn’t bother with it, but you can try. Like I said, technically some TVs don’t like 1440, and everything supports 1080, but I wouldn’t worry about it too much.

FPS I have the least experience with. My guess is that going do something lower is going to save you some size, but its really going to depend on the codec and the content.

Quality level is the most important setting - just set it to what you think is watchable. It doesn’t use a bitrate, it adjusts the bitrate to get a constant quality level, so it’s much more efficient. It’s important to note that they aren’t exactly the same at every speed setting, so be careful.

Lastly is the speed. 265 goes from very fast to very slow, and AV1 goes from 9 (fast) to 0 (stupid slow). Personally I use slow or very slow for 265 and about 4 for AV1, but if you have a lot of video to crunch through you might want to crank that up a bit.

For audio use OPUS. 96 is the default “bitrate” and I find it to be enough. Some players don’t like it but if you’re thinking about using AV1, anything that would support AV1 supports opus.

The main thing will just be doing a bunch of video encode samples and finding the settings and workflow that’s right for you.

Something actually changed and now there’s a carry-on not included tier ticket. I wrote more in my other comment in the thread.

After having to fly United a bunch of times this summer, they changed the names of the tickets and invented a new “no one wants that” tier.

There’s now standard economy which is what everyone’s used to and gives you a “personal item” (i.e. a backpack or a purse) and a “carry on item”, and basic economy which only includes the personal item. They mention it on their website, but on third party websites its not quite as obvious which ticket you’re getting.

It has been a nightmare - on every single flight there’s a crowd of people pissed that they aren’t allowed a carry on with their ticket, with them having to run halfway across the airport to upgrade their tickets or pay 3x as much for a bag they thought was included.

If you’re being charitable, it’s a roundabout discount on checked bags to fix the problem they invented by charging for checked bags and then sucking at handling them. Every single flight I took had them asking for people to check their carry on for free because the bins were going to be overloaded, and it seems like they want to incentivize actually checking a bag again.

I started instantly asking them to gate check my carry on (for free) because honestly, the airport experience is way nicer when you don’t have to deal with your luggage all the time. If you check 1 bag as a couple you might even save money, and if you’re alone it might be worth the difference to not have to worry about only having two pairs of pants on your three week trip.

More realistically they want to normalize having to pay for carry on the same way they did checked bags, and they are trying to sneak around that by starting with only their new BS economy tier. Wouldn’t surprise me if they got rid of “basic” and just made carry on a “business class” or whatever amenity.

The way I’ve been thinking about would be to have the “meta community” be a separate thing from each individual community. Each individual community would opt in to joining, and would retain their own moderation and users, but the posts would be sort of cross posted to the meta community. The meta community mods largely just deal with removing posts that don’t fit. All the comments go on the original instance of the post and are moderated there, so the meta community mods might be allowed to moderate those comments on an opt in basis.

The idea is that it’s for very similar communities across different instances, but because it’s opt in there are probably other uses. The hope would be that each individual community could retain their vibe, while the meta community would have more of a firehose of content, and possibly filter some of those topics back down for more in depth discussion.

I’d also love for individual users to be able to group communities for themselves, and for those to be shareable, which seems much quicker to implement.

Oh no not this again. These articles pop up all the time and they’re kind of awful when put in context - like yeah solar panels aren’t perfect, but they’re pretty dang close honestly. It’s great that they mention the stuff at the end about laser welding, but the rest of the article is kind of just fear mongering.

Firstly, panels don’t really go bad - the article mentions this. But that doesn’t mean they have to be thrown away. Yeah, it makes sense to put 300w/m² panels on your solar farm and replace your old 200w/m² panels. But those old panels are generally still producing power, and can be sold as used for projects less focused on absolute peak efficiency. The old three Rs tell us, Reuse is generally better than Recycle.

Secondly, panels don’t randomly leech heavy metals. They sometimes have lead based solder, and contain small amounts of cadmium. If the panel is in tact in a pile or deployed it’s all locked up within the panel and doesn’t just jump out. It can leech out if you put ground up panels in an acidic landfill that leeches into the ground water - that’s bad so we shouldn’t do that, but we already don’t and have even more regulation coming.

Panels are mostly glass and aluminum by weight, they’re not like 20% lead or anything crazy. Recycling them safely is not some kind of crazy future tech, just a matter of regulation and economics.

Moreover, the amounts they contain are miniscule compared to what fossil fuels produce. As Nickelback says, look at this graph:

from here

Or this North Carolina paper:

Every GWh of electricity generated by burning coal produces about 4 grams ofcadmium air emissions.21 Even though North Carolina produces a significant fraction of our electricity from coal, electricity from solar offsets much more natural gas than coal due to natural gas plants being able to adjust their rate of production more easily and quickly. If solar electricity offsets 90% natural gas and 10% coal, each 5-megawatt (5 MWAC, which is generally 7 MWDC) CdTe solar facility in North Carolina keeps about 157 grams, or about a third of a pound, of cadmium out of ourenvironment.

from here

And as far as total landfill waste its dwarfed by what fossil fuels produce, even just general consumer trash:

from this paper via this blog

For most panels it seems like the most polluting thing about them is that they are produced using our current grid and not other solar panels.

5 KILOwatt hours is a typical laptop battery? Aren’t they more like 50-100wh?