Programmer and sysadmin (DevOps?), wannabe polymath in tech, science and the mind. Neurodivergent, disabled, burned out, and close to throwing in the towel, but still liking ponies 🦄 and sometimes willing to discuss stuff.

  • 0 Posts
  • 252 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 26th, 2023
  • jarfil@beehaw.orgtoJokes and Humor@beehaw.org•The one mosquito in my room
    2·
    3 months ago

    Well, you mentioned they’re photo-taxic.

    ☝️😯… 🤦😂

    You can try a zapper, but the “partially” means they do react to light, but don’t go towards bright sources. Instead, they seek damp shadow during the day, then start flying during twilight in the general direction of the sky, looking for CO2 traces, and mostly stay put during the night, but occasionally may fly towards warm damp places emitting CO2, which usually means some animal.

    The problem with insect repellents, is that they just temporarily move the problem, they don’t fix it. A silent natural repellent would be a citronella plant, if you don’t mind the smell. The fan trick is also technically a repellent, with the benefit that eventually they end up flying in circles until they die of exhaustion. There are “ultrasonic” repellers, but if you have good hearing, they might drive you crazy (they operate at 18-24KHz, I used to hear past 20KHz).

    Now that I also have some tinnitus at a perceived frequency above 20KHz, a fan generates enough noise to kind of mask it, and it’s either that or playing some pink noise… so fan it is.

    My father used to catch mosquitoes by just waiting until they landed to bite, then slapping them quick. The trick is to pinpoint them by ear, then move your hand to catch them when they jump backwards. That was a useful solution when sharing a camping tent 😅

    Another supposed way is to build a “water, sugar, and yeast” trap in a bottle. It’s supposed to emit CO2, attracting the mosquitoes, then trap them in the bottle. Some assembly required. I haven’t had luck with that, though.

  • jarfil@beehaw.orgtoJokes and Humor@beehaw.org•oink oink
    11·
    3 months ago

    There is another video from an earlier fight of hers, where she seems to fake an injury to end a combat.

    Some other data points:

    • She was personally greeted at the Olympics by Georgia Meloni, the current Italy’s fascist populist far-right Prime Minister
    • The day before the combat, she tweeted asking whether it is fair for a MAN to fight a WOMAN
    • After the 46 second combat, she said to have dropped in the towel because she had “never been hit that hard”, but it “wasn’t for her to decide” whether that was fair
    • Then she changed the story to say she realized she wouldn’t win the combat, so she’d rather stop it
    • Then claimed she didn’t want to start any of the polemic

    The next in the classification, a Hungarian boxer, said that she didn’t care whether the Algerian was a man or a woman, and it was better for her if it was a man because she’s going to feel prouder beating him… and shared this nice meme, which she later deleted:

  • jarfil@beehaw.orgtoJokes and Humor@beehaw.org•The one mosquito in my room
    4·
    3 months ago

    Heh. I’m from Europe, each summer vacation we used to travel around and save on hotels by going camping.

    At Venice, and Milan, they had a bunch of the huge zappers near the entrance, to lure mosquitoes away from the camping area. We’d usually get back from sightseeing after sunset, and had to go straight through the mosquito clouds at their strongest. First time, my mom was talking… then coughing, then cussing. We made sure to kept our mouths shut after that 😁

    Other places, they’d have space heaters on cafeteria terraces, turned on for heat on cold days, and again on, to lure and kill mosquitoes in the summer after sunset.

    I also live on the ground floor, with some plants on the terrace. While cats tend to catch most of the pests, there is always a mosquito or two that manage to get inside. Sleeping with a fan set on low, blowing across the bed and spreading the CO2 from your breath away, is a surefire way to keep them from biting.

    Mosquitoes are slightly phototaxic, like most insects, but they mainly guide themselves towards CO2 sources for biting.