Posted by adityaathalye 12/23/2025
https://www.costco.com/p/-/berkshire-life-heated-throw/40001...
I was very skeptical until my partner plugged it in, turned it on and put it on me and was like holy cow this is amazing.
My best book of 2025 was Dungeon Crawler Carl, the entire serious.
Otherwise I guess it'll be the seven seas for me which I really don't want to have to do
For sleeping, I have the opposite problem. I always overheat.
> our Tree Napper is the perfect choice for those that sleep hotter than most. It’s made from Tencel
I find that sticking one leg (and sometimes one arm) out from under the blanket helps to solve that issue.
While trying to find the actual power consumption of the Costco model, I found this very useful comment on the Costco site: "The power consumption is not listed anywhere - product packaging, website, or included manual. I went ahead and made the purchase and hooked it up to my battery unit once I got home. I can confirm, the blanket uses an average 99W regardless of which mode it's in. I left it in each mode for about 5 minutes. There's no difference to the touch of the blanket and there's no difference with the power consumption. In other words this blanket has one heat setting and it's not very warm."
So disappointing.
Can't speak to the power usage, but levels 1-3 are warm-ish, but level 4 gets nice and toasty.
Also, that video is really making me want to get an OP-1 haha.
From experience, I get you. There are many videos on the internet that do the same.
I bought one and found it... a little constraining for my taste. My observation was that most of the music creation was 'live' (i.e. you had to play something perfectly, to time, and record that) and for what is fundamentally a computer, it has very limited 'sequencing' ability. Also, a lot of the cutesy interface ideas that are so charming on someone else's video grate over time. Luckily I bought mine second-hand and the residuals on these things are insane, so I made a marginal profit reselling it.
All I'd say is that before pulling the trigger, do some research (YouTube reviews especially) on the term "groove box" - there are many, that come with different abilities, strengths, and weaknesses. The OP-1 is cool but limited, and comes with the Teenage Engineering price tag.
Then there's the OP-XY which is even more powerful but unfortunately costs like 4-5x as much so I've not tried it.
The chart on page 24 gives the very first division of the US phone into area codes, many of which have of course remained unchanged today.
From page 82, when discussing automated in-band signaling on the phone lines:
> The signal component is a band about 100 cycles [Hz] wide centering on the signal frequency [2600 Hz]. [...] In the talking condition (tone off in both directions) the guard detector sensitivity is such that almost a pure tone is required to operate the receiver since other than signal frequencies will produce a voltage opposing its operation. The guard feature prevents false operation of the receiver from speech signals.
Of course in hindsight, the flaw in this is obvious. The guard band prevents accidental triggering of the signal mechanism by ordinary speech. It does nothing to stop someone from intentionally playing a pure 2600 Hz tone into the telephone handset, using e.g. a whistle from a cereal box.
* Nationwide Operator Toll Dialing, 1945: https://explodingthephone.com/hoppdocs/nootd1945.pdf
* General Switching Plan for Telephone Toll Service, 1930: https://explodingthephone.com/hoppdocs/gspts1930.pdf
* (Book) Engineering and Operations in the Bell System, 1984: https://bitsavers.org/communications/westernElectric/books/E...
* (Shameless plug) My book on the history of phone phreaking, Exploding the Phone, which has a lot of stuff on Engressia in it: https://explodingthephone.com/
Also, there is a documentary film coming up at Sundance about Engressia! https://festival.sundance.org/program/film/6932fad21a5535277... Very excited to see it!
Shameless plug: my favorite calculator "app" is wxMaxima. It uses similar techniques[1] as those described in the fantastic article at the top of this 2025 list. Implemented in Lisp[2].
[0] https://chadnauseam.com/coding/random/calculator-app
[1] https://feb.kuleuven.be/public/u0003131/WBT23/wxMaxima/wxM_i...
The link between gluten and my 2 decade long bad insomnia, on edge mind, and restlessness.
Simply cutting gluten changed many things. Now I sleep so deeply I sometimes need a brief reality check to know what year it is, where I am, and how long I've been asleep.
Probably not for everyone, but if you have similar problems, definitely go gluten free for a few days and check the impact.
Would you say it was actually noticeable in just a few days?
Thank you for posting this, btw. I've been feeling pretty hopeless about it and even if it ultimately doesn't work, at least I have a new avenue to try.
My mind wanted to jump to the wall, bounce off it to the ceiling, then the other wall, like a scene from a cartoon. Then I remembered this image from childhood.
I had to play beatsaber for half an hour to calm that down.
BTW, I'm not a native English speaker, and heard about "bouncing off the walls" after I told my friends about this mental image.
Pro tip for web designers out there: if someone wants a narrow layout they can always make their browser window smaller, but if you force it to be narrow that screws over the users who find that unpleasant. A wider layout can thus work for both types of reader, while a narrow layout only works for one.
https://www.thinoptics.com/products/readers-black-keychain-c...