Exactly. I’m not a psychologist or biologist but from what I read, while we are alive, our bodies tend towards homeostasis, a chemically balanced state. Simply, you cannot be in a high-dopamine “happy” state all the time without going back to a neutral or down state afterwards. Even without drugs, highs are usually followed by lows. Not trying to be happy at all times but accepting that sometimes, there are hardships, will help you having a fullfilled and content life.

Anyway, that homeostasis does not mean that everyone is equally happy/unhappy on average. On the one side there are people with depression and on the other side people whose lives have many happy moments. What helps for me is connecting with friends and family, going into nature and seeing animals, doing exercise and having off-screen time, mindfullness and generally having some work-life balance. Which I admit not everyone can afford and I am privileged to have. Doing or having those things helps me having a happier and more fullfilled life, but sometimes life still sucks, there is no happy-all-the-time.

Finally! I had been installing the Prereleases APK’s from github for a while for the new V3 scheduler support. But due to their nature the prereleases sometimes crashed and updating had to be done manually, so I am very glad for an official new release. Now that scoped storage is implemented, new releases will hopefully be faster. Anki and AnkiDroid are among the most active FOSS projects I know, really exciting to follow.

Definitely the opposite of “light”, but you mentioned chess and if you’re into something similar but very different, you might try learning #Go together on online-go.com. That site has a very short introduction into the game under the Learn tab, but it only covers the very basics and initially you will have no idea what you’re doing. The rules are simple, but there is a lot of complexity that arises from that and professionals study the game for years. But even as a complete beginner it’s fun. Full on 19x19 games can take a long time, but games on a 9x9 board are fairly quick, comparable to a chess game.

Still, this would be a journey. If you want something not turn-based and relaxing to play while chatting maybe try something else but I can’t give any recommendations.

I only need three touches, using the MessageEase English with Symbols layout ln thumb key. That layout shows the single quote on the alpabetical “front” layer, while it is hidden behind a symbol layer in the default layout. Tou can find the layout list in the settings.

I suggest trying MonkeyType for deliberate practice.

Thumb-Key is aiming to be a FOSS replacement to the now unmaintained MessageEase. Like MessageEase, it offers a 3x3 touch-and-swipe layout. It takes time to learn, but allows to type fast and accurately, thus getting rid of the dependence on prediction/auto-correction, without which QWERTY on small touchscreens would be unusable. Many people report typing more than 50 WPM on MessageEase and the same should be possible with Thumb-Key. It’s a young project and is still missing many features and gestures of MessageEase, but it is active and has a community here at thumbkey@lemmy.ml.

I only recently switched from GBoard to MessageEase and ThumbKey, and I still around 25 WPM, but I found that I stopped making mistakes when typing out the long master password for my password manage on my phone, because this is one of the areas where auto-correct couldn’t help.

But I am still far away from reaching the speeds of swiping on a QWERTY-keyboard without word prediction. So if you don’t mind that and don’t want to spend your free time learning alternative layouts, stick to QWERTY layouts, but if you want a keyboard layout to type exactly what you want, try one of these 3x3 boards. To be honest, if you want to give it a shot, out of the two I would probably still recommend MessageEase, as Thumb-Key is very alpha, but that might change. I have both with the same layout and switch back and forth.

I often share (“boost”) lemmy posts on mastodon. I would like to be able to add hashtags to the boosted post, because on mastodon I rely on hashtags to find content that interests me (e.g. I follow certain hashtag. Lemmy doesn’t need those because the general theme and topic is often obvious from the community context it was posted in, but this context is lost when sharing on mastodon. For example, when I post something in c/baduk@lemmy.ml, for lemmy users it will be clear that this post is about Baduk (the Korean name for the game of Go). But when I boost the post on my private mastodon, it’s not obvious anymore that this was posted in a Baduk community and the Baduk-interested people on mastodon will never see the post except if they follow me or the lemmy comunity. All solutions that come to my mind seem a bit awkward, are there any best-practices for that?

This only my second home-made batch overall, and I didn’t taste this one yet, so will speak from memory from my first batch. Also I have not much “tasting” expertise, so I can’t give a sommelier-style description. Makgeolli has this fine sparkling going on, a smooth mouth feel and is quiet sweet. Compared to other alcohols it’s maybe similar to Federweisser, a fresh, still sparkling white wine. Home-made makgeolli is surprisingly similar in taste to the one you get in the store, but has a bit more of a sour note. I did the variant where in addition to nuruk I added some brewer’s yeast which contains different yeast strains. If I remember correctly it might get even more sour and less alcoholic if you omit that, but not sure, never tried.

To be honest I never tried any other rice wines, makgeolli is my first brew after mead, and I like how simple it is, no need for aging or fermentation caps, no temperature control. Also due to my Korean girlfriend I’m very interested in Korean culture and its cuisine, especially its richness in fermented products.

Sandor Ellix Katz in the “Art of Fermentation” also describes a variant of Makgeolli with sweet potatoes, I might also experiment with that in the future. Surprisingly, in his book he has rice wines in the same category as beers and not as wines, because both are done through fermentation of grain using enzymes to bread down starches. Which in beer is done in a distinct fermentation step, but for rice alcohols usually happens in parallel to the alcohol fermentation.

I made some #Makgeolli, a milky white Korean rice “wine”. It’s made by fermenting steemed rice with the “nuruk” starter culture, which contains both the enzymes to break down the rice starches into sugar and the yeast cultures for turning the sugar into alcohol. I used the Danyangju recipe from A Primer on Brewing Makgeolli.

The most difficult part is finding the Nuruk online. I found it in a Korean online store as “Powdered Enzyme Amylase”. And you need a steamer that fits 1 kg of glutinous rice. But the fermentation is done in a single step after just around 7 days at room temperature.

Today I filled it into plastic water bottles. Not pretty on pictures but the store version is also sold in plastic and it makes it easier and safer to gauge the pressure, as it will contiue to ferment and make CO2 (though slowly after refrigeration).

I first tried Makgeolli in Asian supermarkets, but the exported one is pasteurized and not alive anymore, which is why I wanted to mak my own. The homemade one is much stronger in Alcohol than the store one, so usually I dilute it before drinking, and thus the 2L brewing yield is not that little.

Bin Fan von Immersion, daher French Press oder Aeropress wenn ich den Kaffee nur für mich mache. Benutze die Rezepte von James Hoffman, er lässt sich Zeit, und dafür bekommt man konsistent gute Extraktion, bei relativ simpler Zubereitung. Die Kaffeebohnen male ich selbst und wechsle zwischen Lavazza und ähnlichen Supermarktbohnen und Spezialitätenkaffee.