Welcome to this week’s casual kōrero thread!
This post will be pinned in this community so you can always find it, and will stay for about a week until replaced by the next one.
It’s for talking about anything that might not justify a full post. For example:
- Something interesting that happened to you
- Something humourous that happened to you
- Something frustrating that happened to you
- A quick question
- A request for recommendations
- Pictures of your pet
- A picture of a cloud that kind of looks like an elephant
- Anything else, there are no rules (except the rule)
So how’s it going?
Hey Dave, how much storage space is this lemmy instance using out of interest?
The main VPS drive is currently using 330GiB of storage. Onsite and offsite backups are extra.
This is largely the image storage (266GB) and that’s partly historical (Lemmy used to keep full size images indefinitely as “thumbnails” and currently has no way to delete them). The database itself is around 25GB.
Thats less than I thought, considering how much content goes through this server each year.
A couple of versions back there were some changes to images. The current set up we have is to proxy all images and save none. Previously thumbnails were stored forever and other images were loaded direct from source (e.g. if someone on Lemmy.world uploaded a meme, everyone one looking at it on every instance would always load the image from lemmy.world). Proxying is optional in Lemmy but I’ve enabled it. There is still some tweaking to do because certain sites don’t work well (from memory I think Imgur and Youtube are two big ones).
The proxy is currently configued to store images for 3 days after they were last accessed. So if no one on lemmy.nz looks at a particular meme for three days then the cached image is deleted. The image is re-loaded on demand, so if you go to look at something from a month ago and no one else has looked at it recently, then the lemmy.nz server will re-download it and then proxy it to you. If you browse All with order set to New you’ll see this in action, as the brand new posts take a little while for the images to be downloaded and provided to you.
Posts from before we turned on proxying don’t use the proxying, they just have the thumbnails stored in full resolution and kept indefinitely. I did previously use a tool for deleting old thumbnails which also helped.
Long story short, it’s been a struggle to keep the hard drive use that small 😆
OK so I think I’ve got black coffee going alright with my espresso machine. The grind, tamping, extraction time and volume of espresso seem right.
But I am seriously struggling with a milky coffee. I can froth up the milk with the steam wand fine, and heat it until the jug feels quite hot, but when I put it into the mug the coffee just isn’t that warm. I have tried heating it like crazy and it doesn’t seem to keep the heat. I always end up having to microwave it for 20 seconds.
Anyone got any tips on how to make a hot milky coffee? Should I be heating the mug?
Heat the cup first.
How would I do that. The steam wand?
At home I typically just warm it with (our very) hot water from the tap. Fill it and leave it for a minute.
At work I do the same with the fancy boiling water tap thing.
Your machine probably has a hot water thing, for long black/Americano, you can use that.
Ok thanks, I’ll give that a go 🙂
My mum always insisted on a warm cup and us kids would make fun of her. But now I’m drinking coffee I appreciate how it makes the coffee stay hot that little bit longer!
Are you fully submerging the steam wand into the milk to heat it through or just keeping it near the surface for bubbles. That would make a difference in the overall milk temp. And because metal conducts heat really well, it’s probably getting hot before the milk. I think for properly warm milk it’s supposed to be almost to hot to touch (although my old memories from working in a cafe may be lying to me)?
I’m heating the milk by fully submerging the steam wand after creating the foam.
I have tried heating the jug until it’s so hot I can’t touch the bottom, and the end result is still a not-hot-enough coffee. My theory is the cup absorbs the heat. Did you pre-heat the cup when you were working in a cafe?
