If you want to carbonate water but don't want to buy a countertop carbonator or its overpriced CO2 refills, you can get a ball lock valve cap that screws onto 1L or 2L soda bottles for around $8-16.
That valve will attach to a standard female fitting, which you can put on the end of a hose coming from a pressure regulator, which will attach to a full-size CO2 cylinder available from a brewing or gas supply shop. CO2 refills are a lot cheaper this way.
Put cold water in the bottle with some extra space at the top. Squeeze out the air and attach the valve cap. Set the pressure regulator, connect it to the bottle, open the regulator's output valve, and watch the bottle that was slightly crushed by your squeezing expand back to its normal shape. Slosh the water around with pressure applied for maybe 10-30 seconds. Close the output valve and disconnect.
Voilà. Carbonated water.
IIRC, PETE soda bottles are pressurized to about 50 psi for retail shelves. I don't think they're likely to burst until well beyond 100 psi, and they'll deform before they burst, so if you're careful, you can go a little higher than 50 and make fizzier water than what you can buy in the store. I have used 70 psi many times.
Read up on precautions for handling pressurized gas before doing any of this. Wear eye protection. Don't turn your bottle or gas cylinder into an unguided missile. :)
Sadly, I don't have any info on microplastics released by this process. (Nor by countertop carbonators and their rigid plastic flasks.) I wish I knew of a suitable steel bottle to use instead.
I found it cheaper and much, much more convenient to get an adapter to refill the countertop carbonator's CO2 cylinders from a standard 20 lb CO2 cylendar. That way, you can carbonate from the much smaller and easier to use countertop unit, you can service multiple countertop carbonators from a single larger tank, and you can leave the larger tank shut off and away from living areas so that a leak doesn't pose a hazard.
> I found it cheaper and much, much more convenient
Cheaper? I don't see how. We're filling from the same CO2 cylinders, and my total hardware cost was less than that of a midrange SodaStream without the adapter you describe.
More convenient? Maybe, depending on environment and use.
But mine has advantages, too: More fizz, no counter space required, fewer fragile plastic parts, standard components that are easily serviced/replaced, and the ability to carbonate liquids other than water without worry of backspray gumming up a countertop machine's internal components. (Your unit's instructions probably tell you to use only water, for this reason.)
> you can leave the larger tank shut off and away from living areas so that a leak doesn't pose a hazard.
I close my cylinder's main valve when it's not in use, and the two additional valves downstream of it (at the regulator and ball lock fitting) also work, so I think a leak is very unlikely. Even if there was one, I would expect it to be noticed quickly or else too slow for the released CO2 to cause harm.
One advantage of standard tabletop carbonators is that you can get versions with glass bottles. I quite like the 0.7l glass sodastream bottles.
You could probably get them to work on a DIY setup with the right pressure regulator settings and the right adapter. But I'd like to avoid the flying glass shards if I get it wrong
I use SodaStream Crystal. There is the older Crystal 2.0 that uses the old generic screw-type CO2 cylinders, and the newer Crystal 3.0 which uses the patented quick-connect cylinders.
Looking at the Canadian website, neither is sold in Canada (1 for a link on the German website). There is the SodaStream Duo which supports a different type of glas bottle. Might be easier to source locally, but exists only with the quick-connect cylinders and is a bit expensive for what it is, at least if you buy it new
How's the durability of the Crystal? I had two of the original Penguin systems, and the seals broke down and the frame stretched. I'd prefer to go back to the glass bottles.
No issues with the Crystal so far. It's pretty sturdy. But that's the old 2.0 model, looking at the reviews the new 3.0 is a downgrade in terms of quality, in addition to the downgrade of being forced into the proprietary cylinders
Bummer. I loved the glass bottles in the penguin, but I got tired fighting the durability problems. I got as far as researching custom gaskets and shims, and gave up.
Search AliExpress, eBay, or Amazon for "SodaStream glass bottle adapter" and you'll find aftermarket adapters that allow filling the glass bottles from SodaStream models designed for plastic bottles. They're $5 to $15, depending on which store you get them from.
SodaStream carbonators are super common at all the thrift stores near me, so they're like $5 to $10. There's one on eBay right now for $25 with free shipping.
The refill adapter was $10 on AliExpress, but the cheapest regulator alone cost more than my entire setup.
Before the plague shut down the place I got my larger bottle refilled, I got a mid-size standard CO2 to SodaStream adapter from Ali Express. Saved me a fortune hooked up direct to the SodaStream, especially as sparkling water was intermittently surprisingly difficult to get hold of during those times. I should contact the gas supplier, see where the nearest point is now.
I’ve done this for years and never ruptured a bottle, I set the regulator to 60psi.
I’d like a metal bottle too but haven’t found one - I presume spraying some co2 into it would be enough to get the plain air out since you obviously can’t squeeze the air out.
I guess the definition of "overpriced" varies, but I pay 7 or 8 EUR for one bottle of CO2 and it lasts like 3-4 weeks for 2 people, just to put it into perspective.
I paid about 20-25 USD for my last 5 lb refill. That was a few years ago, and it's still providing. My prior fill lasted more than 5 years (maybe 6 or 7) serving one fizzy water fan and occasional guests.
Hmm... Those steel growlers look appealing, if a little pricey, but their 45 psi relief valves would prevent carbonating with as much fizz as I like. I wonder if the PRV could be swapped with a different one that holds more like 75 psi.
Thanks for the link. This gives me a direction worth investigating, at least.
Ask on the site, the company was responsive to my questions. I’d be curious to know also, as I usually run right at the limit (about 40psi to account for temperature changes. Fridge water cold holds much more gas than just tap water cold, particularly in summer
FWIW the counter carbonators aren't too bad if you use a third-party refill instead of the expensive branded ones. Also, you can just use dry ice to refill the bottles rather than swapping for new ones. If you don't want to geek out on a complete DIY setup, the countertop models are definitely a little more convenient.
What do you mean? You use the 5lb tank via the Aarke instead of the CO2 cylinders? Or you refill somehow the CO2 cylinders? If it's the first one this sounds like the best of both worlds with the convenience of the countertop device and the cost-efficiency of the bulk CO2. It would be great if you elaborated some more!
I bought a hose from Amazon where one end screws onto the 5 kg CO2 tanks (I'm in Japan so metric) and the other end has the same male nozzle as a SodaStream cylinder so you screw it in where a cylinder would screw in, so the tank feeds straight into it. Just need a place on the floor near your countertop to put the big tank.
> bazaar... Not sure what they were trying to solve there with git and forges already existing.
You are mistaken here. Bazaar, Mercurial, and Git appeared at about the same time, and I think Bazaar was released first.
IIRC, Bazaar tried to distinguish itself by handling renames better than other version control systems. In practice, this turned out not to be very important to most people.
(Tangent: It wasn't clear at the time whether Mercurial or Git was the better pick. Their internal design was very similar. Mercurial offered a more pleasant user interface, superior cross-platform support, and a third advantage that I'm forgetting at the moment. Git had unbeatable author recognition. Eventually, Git's improved Windows support and the arrival of GitHub sealed its victory in the popularity contest. But all of that came to pass well after Bazaar was released.)
Lightweight branch model of git mapped so much better to the way that actual development processes of medium to large projects really work(ed).
Named branches vs bookmarks in hg just means bike shedding about branching strategy. Bookmarks ultimately work more like lightweight git style branches, but they came later, and originally couldn't even be shared (literally just local bookmarks). Named branches on the other hand permanently accumulate as part of the repository history.
Git came out with 1 cohesive branch design from day 1.
That's a fair criticism for some workflows, and I like the lightweight model, but we should keep in mind the context of the time:
When these DVCS appeared, Git's branch design departed from what "branch" meant practically everywhere else. That added to its already significant learning curve, creating more friction for people trying (or being asked) to adopt it.
Meanwhile, Mercurial's "branch" was closer to well-established norms. This was one of several factors that made it the easier of the two to learn, which was was important when already asking people to uproot from their familiar centralized systems and learn the ins and outs of distributed version control. I suspect it also made repository migrations more straightforward, avoiding the impedance mismatch presented by Git's branches.
I work on a mercurial hosted project right now. What ticks me off is all those unnamed heads you need to handle every time you pull other people's changes. Yes they're more flexible. Most of the time that just means extra operations for no good reason.
Yeah, agreed. I liked the idea of Mercurial branches better than git's — in principle I prefer more rather than less metadata in history — but they genuinely had a scaling problem. I can't recall the numbers, this being more than a decade ago, but I tested with a realistic number of branches for a team of developers using short-lived branches for a while and you could easily see Mercurial slowing down.
Back when I was testing bookmarks were available, but Bitbucket was pretty much the only forge that supported Mercurial and their tooling didn't support bookmarks, so that made them a non-starter for many users.
That is very different from my experience with git. I know that the kernel uses branches a lot, but that's probably because of git's history with the project. At every company I worked git is used exactly the same way as CVS or SVN was used many years ago: you make some local changes, you push these local changes to the central store, you forget about it. Branches make local switching between tasks easier, but apart from that nobody cares about branches and they're definitely not treated as an important part of the repo. In fact, they're usually deleted immediately after the change is merged.
I think you have it swapped around. This is exactly the kind of workflow that git provided better support for - lightweight branches, not integral part of master history, deleted after merge.
> I will click the green "Play" button, it will change to a blue "Stop" button, as if the application was running, then shortly after silently switches back to the green Play button again, without any visible error and without actually starting the game.
You might want to enable Proton logging and have a look at what it says is going on.
> Honestly, don't use debian for gaming, as it is too far behind. Gaming stuff needs a bit more bleeding edge packages.
Please stop spreading this misconception. There are only a tiny handful of packages that a Debian gamer might need to update, and those are generally available in Debian Backports. It's not what I would call a beginner distro for any purpose, but gaming on it is perfectly viable.
I'm having a good time in games, still getting other computing tasks done, and enjoying Debian's low-maintenance respect for my time. AMA.
This is true, but you may be missing out on performance and compatibility improvements from recent ("bleeding edge") drivers. You need recent hardware for this to be relevant.
Generally speaking, you don't need rock-solid stability on a gaming rig or even a "workstation," since uptime isn't really a consideration. I run Debian on my home server, but my other machines, including a backup laptop, all run Arch. A good Arch setup is incredibly solid.
> This is true, but you may be missing out on performance and compatibility improvements from recent ("bleeding edge") drivers.
No, not missing out. Just waiting a few weeks longer than I would on a rolling distro, until the improvements arrive in Debian Backports. (If I'm really impatient, I can install something manually or make my own backport, but I'm assuming most people won't do that.) I have experienced cases like you describe, such as when I bought an RDNA3 GPU shortly after the platform was released, but they have been infrequent in my experience, and never so urgent that I couldn't wait a few weeks.
> you don't need rock-solid stability on a gaming rig or even a "workstation," since uptime isn't really a consideration.
System uptime is a consideration whenever I need my computer for something immediately, but my choice of Debian is not only about that. It's also about my time. Debian generally requires attention less often than other distros. Less time spent troubleshooting when things break. Less time re-learning things or adjusting workflows when new software versions change their behavior or interface. Fewer annoying interruptions. A low-maintenance system leaves me more time to get work done, or play games.
Also worth noting: These days, a lot of the components that games use are provided by the likes of Steam or Flatpak, which means they will be at exactly the same version and updated exactly as often on every Linux distro.
> System uptime is a consideration whenever I need my computer for something immediately, but my choice of Debian is not only about that.
Maybe you should try Arch on one of your machines. I have a lot of experience with both Debian and Arch, having used both extensively on all kinds of hardware over long periods of time, and have found Arch to be ideal on desktop. Having access to the latest software and drivers is a huge plus with recent hardware. I have never encountered breaking changes.
Your computer's bluetooth module could be the source of the trouble. Some people have found that using a different dongle fixed their wireless controller problems.
Are you sure? Bluetooth dongles these days can be smaller than most low-profile USB drives, barely protruding from a laptop's exterior. It might be worth browsing the available models.
> The "Nvidia on Linux compatibility" issues are something I wonder if I have side-stepped somehow either by lucky choice of GPUs, or lucky choice of Linux distros.
It could also be lucky consequence of what games you play and what else you do with your computer.
I was a long-time Nvidia user, and had plenty of problems with their drivers. They ranged from minor annoyances when switching between virtual consoles (which some people never do) to total system freezes when playing a particular game (which some people never play). It would have been be easy for someone else to never encounter these problems.
Since switching to AMD a couple years ago, I have been much happier.
I wish the sample text included _underscores_, since I have occasionally found that they disappear with certain combinations of font + size + renderer.
And a run of all the numeric digits 0123456789, to show how their heights align.
And [square brackets], to show how easily they are distinguished from certain other glyphs.
And the vertical | bar, for the same reason.
...
Adobe Source Code Pro and Ubuntu Mono were my finalists. I think my preference would come down to window and font size, since Ubuntu Mono seemed to be narrower and leave more space between lines.
(Also, I kind of rushed the first few comparisons, so it's possible that I prematurely eliminated a typeface that I would have liked more.)
Man-in-the-middle and gatekeeper of (large parts of) the web.
It's getting harder and harder to participate online without being subject to their surveillance and/or approval.
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