I sort of feel bad about raining on the parade of the person distilling isopropanol in his garage earlier, but it really is dangerous.

But most of us chemists also need to be reminded of it. To the point that someone had to write a paper whose entire point is “don’t distill isopropanol”.

Please, don’t do this thing.

The issue with isopropanol peroxide formation is that exposing it to air – even when just using it, like when you’re cleaning parts – starts the process. The air in the head space of your containers is also enough to form them over time. You don’t necessarily need to see solids in the containers for it to be dangerous, since they’ll crystallize out as you concentrate the solution during distillation.

It’s also a numbers game. It probably won’t explode the first time you do it. But there’s a chance each time. Do it enough, and you’ll have an incident.

There are chemical reductants that can clear peroxides. For industrial scale isopropanol distillation, I’m not sure what they use. It may be that they just never distill down to the point that peroxides concentrate to a dangerous level.

I love EnF. But I assure you, organic peroxide formers are scarier.

No no no no no.

I’m a chemist. Organic chemistry PhD, now a process chemist in the industry. I do this for a living. Do not distill isopropanol that’s been exposed to air for any meaningful length of time.

Isopropanol slowly reacts with oxygen in the air to generate peroxides that, when you concentrate them down, EXPLODE. Source. Sorry, not an open access journal. But please take my word for it.

Unless you have a way of confirming the peroxide levels in your isopropanol are near zero, do not concentrate it down by distillation. You’ll blow up your glassware, which will probably expose what you’re distilling to your heat source, which will generate a secondary fireball.

PLEASE do not do this.

Hopefully not as a bunch of really good question posts full of mod-deleted answers.

The labrats subreddit was kinda fun. I’m a chemist, but the chemistry subreddit was overwhelmed by people asking for homework advice, showing off bad caffeine tattoos, and getting upset when they couldn’t talk about drugs or explosives.

The axe forgets, the stump remembers

I’m late to the party but I use a WhamBam build surface on my Ender 3 V2. Absolutely a game changer. Wipe it down with high-percent isopropanol or acetone between prints and it works every time. Sticks like glue when hot and just pops off with zero effort once it cools down.

Not affiliated, just love the thing. https://www.whambamsystems.com/products/235-x-235-kit-with-pre-installed-pex-build-surface

It’s a consequence of the terminally-online brain rot idea that if you do not explicitly state that you are against a bad thing, you must be actually a huge supporter of it. Or that if you do explicitly state that you are against a bad thing, the fact that you didn’t mention a different bad thing means you are a huge supporter of it. Ad nauseam.

A single AA battery is going to discharge itself just sitting on the shelf over a decade

NetNewsWire on iOS and the Mac. Pretty great, and it’s FOSS to boot. Still working on a decent front end on other OSes, the web client is okay-fine but could be better.

I went with a self-hosted FreshRSS instance, it has its issues but it works well with the client apps I use.

This is commonly known information

My least favorite thing about these tools is that they are great at providing information that people don’t feel the need to look at critically.

“ChatGPT generated this, and it pretty much lines up with what I already thought, so it’s good to copy and paste” is not great for making conversations better.

I appreciate your thorough response, but I think it’s clear that “maximize individual freedom” is a BS marketing phrase given how much nuance you had to use when rejecting the “freedoms” I proposed.

But also. No problem with coercing workers to do 80 hour weeks? I don’t think you’ve ever been in a situation where someone had that kind of power over you.

And selling junk but “safe” medicine is as dangerous as selling cyanide labeled as aspirin. Or are you content suing the drug company after your kid’s asthma rescue inhaler was actually just full of nothing and they asphyxiate to death?

You’re forcing a black-and-white dichotomy where one does not exist, which is a nice oversimplification that’s the exact sort of thing I’m talking about.

Everyone loves freedom! Like the freedom to:

• pay a child to work in a mine
• schedule workers for 80+ hours a week
• drive without speed limits
• use as much water out of the local river as desired
• dump waste into that same river
• sell unregulated, untested medicine

So obviously there are “freedoms” that mainly serve to infringe on the actual freedoms of others. Those just happen to be the ones that libertarians don’t talk about so much but are really what they’re after.

No, don’t you see, in an impossible hypothetical situation, they assume you’d do something against your stated values. You’ve been pwned by a person of logic and intellect, I’m afraid. I’m sorry, but you agree with them now.

Libertarianism is a theory espoused to those with good intentions by people that have bad intentions.

It doesn’t work for almost anyone. But it super works for some. That’s the point.

It is infinitely remappable. To anything you can program in with a Shortcut, which is a ton of non-trivial stuff. Which they said explicitly.

So many people in this thread saying “who cares it’s just a button” without having any idea what it actually does.

Want the mute switch behavior? Well that’s the default thing the button does and you can use it without looking at it.

Want to program the button to do like literally anything? You can do that. For example:

• Launch the camera app, or any other app
• Control your smart home accessories
• Toggle Do Not Disturb, or another focus mode
• Run a command on a remote server via ssh
• Start recording audio in case you’re around cops doing cop stuff
• Or anything else you can program in with a Shortcut