FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

actually, this is cool enough to post on main, so, I will

a weekish ago, my water pitcher broke, and because I hate all the companies that make these, I decided to not get a new one. but, I already had ordered a new filter to come in the mail before it had broken, and I figured I might as well disassemble it for science reasons

and… the result was not what I expected, but what I should have expected

a bit of background: the two main components of a good water filter are activated carbon and ion-exchange resin. both of these can be obtained very easily in bulk, coarse variants, but the tricky part is putting them into a filter that works purely by gravity alone. if the water just falls down past them, it won't actually filter enough, so, you need to make sure it's hindered enough it gets filtered, but not so hindered it takes forever to pass through

activated carbon, or activated charcoal, is charcoal that's been treated with superheated steam to increase its surface area. it's called carbon/charcoal interchangeably because charcoal is effectively just carbon: you burn something so hot it can get rid of the ashy stuff (everything but carbon) but you don't expose it to oxygen, so that the carbon can't be converted to carbon dioxide when it burns. (this is why the carbon usually goes away when it burns, and leaves the ash behind.)

the reason why activated carbon is good is because its high surface area makes it very easy for all sorts of stuff to get trapped in it, from big organic particles to even elements like iodine and chlorine. its one weakness is that it can only draw out non-charged or weakly-charged particles, since water tends to strongly hold onto charged particles.

to get out the charged particles, an ion-exchange resin is used. this is the same sort of weird chemical structure that's used inside cells to regulate their internal chemistry, and it's called ion-exchange because it literally exchanges out charged particles for each other: positive ions of heavy metals like calcium, iron, lead, and mercury get replaced with less dangerous sodium and potassium instead.

like I said, these two parts can easily be bought in bulk as coarse powders or beads, but running water through those won't really filter it unless you let it sit through. so, I was wondering how a standard gravity filter would stop the water. I figured that it probably just had a bunch of the coarse stuff packed in a tube, then some fine mesh at the bottom to ensure it slowly drains through

…nope! the charcoal and resin is the mesh. it's ground down finely and woven into this spiralled-up cloth. it makes perfect sense, since the thing that is slowing down the water is also the thing that is interacting with the water and filtering it, ensuring that the water is constantly up against what amounts to almost the entire filter at once. this also makes sense when you consider that this filter is rated to actually remove heavy metals from water: since any amount of lead or mercury is bad, you'd better be sure that any amount of it has every opportunity to interact with the filter instead. since the charcoal and resin effectively get "used up" as they filter stuff, either by filling up all the holes or using up all the ions to exchange, you want things to be used up as uniformly as possible, to ensure nothing gets missed. this all makes perfect sense.

anyway, now all this is making me wonder even more if you can just buy this filter mesh and use it yourself instead of having to get some sort of weird plastic casing. I really would like to have my own version, to avoid having to deal with proprietary nonsense, but we'll see

to explain the picture below: the filter housing is about 4cm across, and I unceremoniously sawed through a bunch of the plastic welds with a knife to get it open. there were two thin, fine cloth filters on the edges between the plastic and the carbon-resin mesh. I was shocked when I saw the mesh so I cut it in half to verify it was uniform, and it was

a capitalist would look at the doujin art scene that has sprung up around Touhou, encouraged and cultivated by its author with his permissive licensing, and say that, despite ZUN being famous/beloved and easily making enough to live off of, that he's a failure, as he hasn't turned Touhou into a paperclip maximizer

but if your goal is the enrichment of culture and the arts, upholding storytelling traditions and inventing new ones, of inspiring and bringing together the next generation around a shared medium, then Touhou and ZUN have succeeded beyond all expectations, in its own niche way

capitalism is a thought-terminating cliche that cannot fathom people valuing things other than monetary growth

ZUN's author notes of Touhou 19: Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost are, once again, inspiring

in a world that demands perfection and efficiency, imperfection and the flow of creativity within art scenes amount to an act of rebellion

#touhou #antiAI

I just peer-reviewed a forensic analysis in a case.

The suspect mailed a package with a hidden Apple AirTag in it to a victim's old home address.

The package was forwarded to her new (and formerly safe) address....

Might be good to warn DV victims of unexpected mail.

@SwiftOnSecurity Just

When you are a Wikipedia editor, sometimes you have to help out your fellow contributors who struggle to maintain an encyclopedic tone

People who design APIs. I am begging you. It doesn't matter how "simple" or "intuitive" or "elegant" your API is. You need to include sample code.

Are you guys ready for the buck-wildest agriculture story I've ever heard

I keep forgetting that some women have vaginas

City of Damocles - a 1-bit art commission I did for Cohost user belarius, on a 1986 Mac Plus, with a trackball and a paint program that doesn't support layers. #art #retrotech #commission

1679: piracy is on the rise, King Charles is deeply unpopular

2024: piracy is on the rise, King Charles is deeply unpopular

a CEO can never be held accountable therefore a CEO must never make a management decision

How do people use Windows??? Wife just spent several days troubleshooting webcam drivers; today I look at it, the event log mentions a problem during camera initialization, and just some numeric code. I look for that code and a Lenovo page tells me to see if the camera is not disabled... with the F8 key.

I press F8 and the camera fucking works again.

you know when you mess with your binocular vision by letting the axes of your eyes diverge a bit, and the illusion of it being a single image breaks, as you see two images simultaneously? this is z-fighting, to me

date idea: we hook up dial-up modems together and go eeeeeeeeeeyyyyyyyzzzzzshgshhshshshshshaaaaeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

so @Elizafox claims it is possible to get to portland from seattle using nothing but public transit. no amtrak, no greyhound, no flixbus. just public transit.

so we are going to be testing that today. and coming back on amtrak tomorrow.

#funny