it's never instant because boiling water takes sooooo longgggg. apparently uk teakettles are faster due to voltage differences? i want to look for a usb-c solution sometime
The good news is that boiling water is not functionally necessary since the extraction was done up front. I drink it cold or with warm water. Boiling is hotter than I want to drink anyway.
If there's significant scale at the bottom it's possible it's making your kettle materially less efficient. If you put in like a cup of vinegar and a cup of water (you could probably dilute it more than that), heat it up and swish it around (it doesn't need to be boiling), it should all come off.
I found that 160F to 180F is enough for instant coffee, depending on personal taste and what you feel like at that moment. I have an electric kettle that has a several buttons for different temperatures, and heating only to 180F saves time over heating to boiling, plus I can drink it right away.
Yep, all the instant coffee jars I’ve seen have a note to use hot but NOT boiling water. And I’ve noticed that using too hot water can even spoil the taste a bit.
I usually turn off the kettle when the noise starts noticeably changing. This usually is something between 70-80℃.
Indeed. I have a Nespresso machine for when I need coffee quickly. As soon as I press the button, hot water flows in a trickle. It’s certainly not boiling but it’s an ideal temperature as a hot drink.
U. K. 240v vs. 120v in the U. S., twice the voltage == twice the amperage (EDIT: oops, wattage, for the same amps) == half the time to boiling. I will note that doubling the voltage will still not make it "instant". For that I think you need liquid oxygen[0].
or just use an insta-hot tap which is infinitely faster than an electric kettle. or a plain old kettle on an induction cooktop which will also be faster than a single purpose electric kettle.
Or boil a larger quantity and fill it into a thermos. Perfectly fine for instant coffee throughout the day. (And without the coffee stains in the thermos.)
Most people boil too much water. Get a kettle that can take a smaller amount of water and then boil what you need. If that’s not good enough, you can get a kettle that keeps water warm and then you don’t need so much energy to boil it (or figure out a routine or trick to turn the kettle on earlier, eg a teasmade). If you want to throw money at the problem USB-C is not the answer (how does that even make sense??) but you could (a) get a 240V socket (eg NEMA 6-15) in your US kitchen and rewire a 15A 240V European kettle to the appropriate plug. Or get an impulse labs induction hob set. Their whole selling point is using batteries to be able to put more power into boiling water than they can get from the wall.
I just made a cup of tea, here in the States[1], using science (which means I wrote it down).
I started with 300ml of water that I measured at 68.5F.
I dumped that into the Sunbeam Hot Shot[2] "hot water dispenser" that lives on my countertop (which is labeled as using 1450 Watts).
I pushed the go button and started a clock. It took 1 minute, 29 seconds to reach what I considered to be a rolling boil.
That's pretty good, I think. I could futz around with keeping a hot electric kettle going during the day and maybe save some time on everything after the first cup, but meh. This seems quick-enough, to me, and also avoids all chances of flash-boiling water in the microwave[3].
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But that's not the interesting part. The interesting part is the math.
At my elevation, I added about 100kJ of heat to the water over those 89 seconds.
If the input power is 1450W (I didn't measure that; I just read it from the back), then ~23% of it was lost. Wherever it went (heating the appliance itself, evaporative cooling, whatever), that power was not included the final state of the water. That's hugely inefficient as a percentage.
But if electricity costs $0.19 per kWh, then I only spent about 7/10ths of 1 cent to boil this 300ml cup of water. (I could add or subtract 23% and it would still be an irrelevant part of my power bill.)
The cheap store-brand black tea cost me $0.0218 per bag.
So a cup of hot tea was a bit less than 3 cents. Not bad!
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[1]: The freedom to use cursed units
[2]: The Sunbeam machine is no longer available, which sucks. They're simple electromechanical devices with no smarts at all and only a couple of moving parts, and I recommend one to anyone with 120v outlets who likes hot beverages one-cup-at-a-time.
[3]: I did that once. I reached into the microwave for a cup of hot water and it boiled explosively as soon as I moved it. It was very sudden and surprisingly painful. The first-degree burns healed up over the next couple of days. 0/10; worth taking extra steps to avoid.
Does it? It only takes like 2 min for my electric kettle to boil. If I was a more avid coffee/tea drinker, I’d get one of the always heated hot water dispensers that are common in Japanese households (def one of the appliances I miss since moving back to the US). Then you never have to wait.
In electric kettles or a microwave or even in a moka pot or another small container on a decent induction stove it's just 2-3 minutes. There was a video I can't find where they increased the voltage or something for a kettle and at one point it boiled the water in like 10-15 seconds.
It was another, shorter video, not by TC. Just different voltages (or maybe there were other variables) one after the other until the water boiled really quickly and afterwards the kettle blew a fuse or broke (can't remember).
I guess many people have tried doing something like this. But I'll watch TC's video, too - he hasn't disappointed me so far.
Edit: Watched it. Not the same video, but this one had a lot more info and troubleshooting than what the one I had in mind.
USB-C PD has far lower wattage than the wall outlet anywhere in the world. Now I want someone to build a kettle that accepts a J1772 connection (for charging electric vehicles). That’s nowadays more common than any 240V NEMA outlets.
For real instant: install a hot water tap. It has a small boiler under the sink that keeps the water at near boiling. I've got one and it's great - instant tea any time.
Of all the things I have cooked on my induction cooktops over the years, boiling water fast is what I miss when I travel and have to use electric coils.
I'm in the UK but I have a kettle that lets you pick the temperature. I usually just use 50C (122F) for instant if I'm having it black, or 70C (158F) for a splash of milk. Boiling water would make an already miserable experience far more miserable.
If you’re brewing from ground you really don’t want boiling 212F water as you’ll burn the grounds. I do my pour over at 185F and get smooth ready to drink hot coffee with no/low acidity.
Allow me to put on my tinfoil hat for a moment and propose that maybe DOGE did loudly what the Solarwinds paired with OPM breach did quietly years prior.
I suspect any cloud service without strong encryption at rest ala Protonmail will have insider threat issues. Hell there's an entire Wikipedia article entitled "Saudi infiltration of Twitter"[1] just to give one example.
This is anecdotal, but once when I worked for a well known NGO as an experiment I created a document outlining what our positions would be for a meeting with representatives from a certain country[2].
We in fact were taking very different positions, and using different points to support those positions.
The delegation was visibly shaken, surprised, and I daresay upset that they were completely unprepared for our meeting -- they basically refused to dialogue (the entire purpose of the meeting) and ran home to ask their overlords in the embassy what to say.
I am doubtful that they deployed zero day malware onto our network -- I suspect they had an insider at company whose cloud offering I used to create the false flag document.
Sometimes it surprises me, as someone who got my education in tech by reading Slashdot comments and researching the terms I did not understand, how trusting this generation of hackers is.
What banking tasks are you doing that other apps don't seem to handle -- are you trading stocks or something?
I basically never use a banking app except to deposit a check (which all the various apps seem to handle well now) or transfer money from the checking account that receives my direct deposit to the account I use at ATMS. (Love that air gap).
I've had good experiences with KeePassXC. In addition to being able to store your passwords, it can ingest TOTP seeds. And finally, it's open source and cross platform. (I originally stumbled upon it because it was the only KeePass implementation that tried to look like a native MacOS app)
This is a killer feature for me, since apparently iOS backups do not backup your TOTP generators in Google Authenticator, which I discovered after I wiped my phone and restored it thinking I was perfectly safe doing so given I had a backup.
I now encourage all the folks I mentor to set up a KeePass vault for the TOTP seeds.
There's even an option to generate one of those fancy QR codes that apps like authenticator can use, so the two are not mutually exclusive.
If you're an individual, not an enterprise user, I don't see why anyone would pay for a password manager.
I use both (for different purposes) and prefer the native app (and KeePassDX on Android), but note that it is a local app and doesn't sync. You need to use something else (eg. Syncthing or Dropbox) for that.
And what happens when someone under that age needs to anonymously ask for advice on the internet?
Most folks hit puberty at around 13. Imagine your parents have divorced -- your new stepfather is very religious. Your phone and laptop have spyways ("parenting software") on them. You manage to get onto a terminal at the public library. You've missed your period -- you're afraid you're pregnant, and not sure how much time you have to do something about it.
There are so many edge cases where the benefits of access to social media outweigh the harms -- but we've framed this as a discussion about selfies and sharing when it's really about free expression, and there are so many dark turns a young life can take that are made darker if they're left to their family and friends to rely on for help.
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>invocation of free expression as the supreme unbridled right even for teenagers who wouldn’t even understand what you’re talking about
i got into policy partly by reading eff's deeplinks in my very early teens, but hey, go ahead and assume just because you were incapable of nuanced thought when you were violating COPPA to participate in public life everyone is.
Sure there are disadvantages with almost any policy but as a parent of teens I’ll take those any day in exchange for a ban. Even in your scenario it doesn’t prevent them from researching online. And the sad reality is that they’re more likely to ask GPT for advice than on some forum.
why should your opinion matter more because you're a parent? in my experience, folks with the economic comfort to create children by choice tend to be extreme machavellian and justify said machinations by the fact they must provide for the children they have thrust into an overpopulated world. as a nonparent, i'm less biased towards the natalist mindset and thus my opinion should be weighed more, not less than yours.
100% if those are the alternatives, I would never trust the top results for google which we all know are seriously gamed. In a number of states librarians are mandatory reporters, and even in places where they aren't if kids start asking them such questions they are going to call either their school or the kid's parents which could cause a much worse situation considering they were avoiding asking their parents in the first place.
no solution will ever be perfect but social media is infinitely more net-negative for kids, period. just as your example paint a picture of someone in dire need of help outside of friends / family they get easily get wrong help and suffer severe consequences (“drink bleach and you won’t get pregnant”)
Not really. Applebee’s is still too food oriented.
Wetherspoons are definitely pubs. They just have a reputation for cheap drinks and cheap meals. But there’s still a significant proportion of people who go there for drinks only.
It’s more like a drinking warehouse with carpet on the floor and a menu of mostly beige food than a larger version of a cosy country pub with a roaring fire and a varied food menu sometimes involving vegetables that have not been deep fried.
It's the VA for survivors of the 1980s as it doesn't allow music or TV inside, so tends to get ignored by the soccer followers of a weekend and the younger generation entirely.
TBF their curry club and other food specials are basically subsidising old bachelors to the point of being an ersatz social service @ £8.45 to £11.45, including a drink, for 12 hours of service every Thursday.
Generally speaking, its best described as the RyanAir of pubs. It gets you there, cheaply, but the juice may not be worth the squeeze in terms of ambience and clientele.
no music or tv? that sounds fucked... why don't ppl just drink in a park? iirc public drinking is actually legal in the uk?
(I know in some countries it's actually not -- Bratislava being one surprising example, though some cops were really chill when I was like hey sorry, I thought this was allowed, it's cold out so I bought a pounder and I wanted to warm up on the way to my hostel I'm not trying to bother anyone... though maybe they may have been letting me slide mostly because they were amused by what a pounder is once I defined it)
(A pounder is a big can of beer that got it's nickname because American frat bros will "pound" (chug) it to get very drunk quickly in places where the sales of beer are looser than liquor)
Isn’t it a pounder because it’s 16oz (US fluid ounces) which is a (US) pound?
(Note a US pint is about 474ml compared to the UK pint which is 568ml).
Of course US fluid ounces are a different size to UK (Imperial) fluid ounces. Plus the UK has 20 (Imperial) fluid ounces in a UK pint whilst the US has 16 (US) fluid ounces in a US pint.
How does it go? “A pint’s a pound the whole world around, except the UK where a pint of water is a pound and a quarter.”
As for drinking in a park, it is either something you do in the height of summer, or something you do if you are a tramp. There’s not much middle ground.
I have been to a nice ones, like the one in Exeter (but the owner is from there so that figures); I forgot the other two that were nice. Not many nice ones but they do exist.
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