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From examples I found, it's not usually that periodic, but some mantis species make a very scratchy sound when threatened, sometimes repeatedly, but at more irregular intervals.

My yard is full of praying mantises, but they are usually dead quiet, I've never heard one make a noise (I try not to bother them). It's definitely not a common trope sound like crickets.. I was hoping there was some nature documentary that aired in the early 80s that featured a mantis sound that Larson might have seen, that could have inspired this cartoon idea, but so far can't find a specific one. There was an episode of Life on Earth from 1979 (presented by David Attenborough of course) about insects that featured some mantis stuff, and lots of insect sounds in the background, but not a specific mantis sound (they seem to play a cricket sound during the mantis scene in the background)

There was also a song "Praying Mantis" released in 1985 by Don Dixon that featured praying mantises in the video, but can't connect that one of the strip either :)

I suppose it's also possible that is supposed to be a cricket rather than a mantis.. or that Larson didn't really differentiate between them or their sounds, and it might have been as broad as "insect interested in insect sounds"

Edit: I had an alternate thought - maybe the mantis wants to eat a cricket ! :) But then the connection to his master's voice is weakened.. oh well, dissecting jokes really does kill them...

Praying mantises make sounds that sound a lot like a record scratch.

The water heaters are usually gas here though, so electric system doesn't really matter. Tankless heaters have become a lot more common over past decade or two, both gas and electric. For electric ones you just use a 240V circuit. Most electric appliances that need a lot of power run on 240V here, 30A and even 50A or 60A circuits are common and provide enough power for household needs.

I live in the US and every dishwasher I ever owned had a heating element, and was capable of heating its own water as needed, depending on what cycle was selected.

Same with my washing machines, my current one even has a steam cycle.

I feel like if dishwashers without heating elements were ever a common thing here, it must have been many decades ago.

It's a Bell 548A jack to be more precise. It's compatible with both 283B (the older square shape) and 505A (the later round shape) plugs

It was 67% in 2022, so it fell to 62% in 2023. It was never below 60% between 1997 and 2023, but then hit 58% in 2024.

Back in those times, fruits used to be quite seasonal, only available during certain times of year. It was very common for many families to preserve fruits in glass jars at home, either as jams, or whole - my family used to do it (as well as make sauerkraut out of cabbage, in a large ceramic crock)

The joke is that Jucika is carrying all the jars to do her preserves, and realizes she has no room to buy the actual fruit, the most important part of the whole thing! But being resourceful as she is, and inspired by the old lady, she comes up with a clever solution, using her hat.

MoCA is honestly really great. I've been running 4 MoCA nodes (2.0 and 2.5) in my house for 10 years now, over pretty shitty RG58 cabling and a bunch of splitters, quite long runs too, along with 1 gig DOCSIS 3.1 modem sharing the same cabling, and it has been absolutely bulletproof and reliable (especially compared to the powerline ethernet I was using before, which was absolutely terrible). Plenty of bandwidth for full duplex 1 gig - really the only downside compared to 1 gig ethernet is a few extra ms of latency.

Running ethernet cables everywhere would be very expensive in my situation, and while I considered it a few times to get more bandwidth between my main computer and the NAS which sits in my homelab in the basement, I still find it hard to justify the cost. If I were to pull the trigger now, I think I would go with fiber (or maybe both) - but I would have to replace so much stuff to get up to 10 gigs, all my homelab equipment is 1 gig only, server nics, NAS nics, switches, etc.. it would not be cheap, beyond even just the cost of running the cables. So I am just sitting back and waiting to see how the technology evolves for now.

New Age

What kind of battery did you put in ? A standard alkaline battery has different voltage discharge curve compared to the recommended rechargeable NiMH batteries (example)

You can't really measure the capacity of a battery directly, all you can measure externally is the voltage, so the logic has to make some assumptions about the type of battery being used when calculating percentage. Since they recommend the LADDA rechargeable batteries, which are NiMH, they probably set the 100% threshold lower - perhaps as low as 1.2V, so as long as whatever battery you are using is above this voltage, it will show up as 100% - it might take longer for an Alkaline battery compared to NiMH rechargeable, but later you might have the opposite problem, when the reported percentage will start dropping faster for Alkaline vs NiMH, due to the different discharge curve characteristics.

More sophisticated devices can sometimes have a learning function, where they observe the voltage curve over a full discharge cycle of a battery, and then adjust the % reporting to more closely match, but since every battery can be different, this is still not always accurate. The discharge curve can be affected by temperature as well, further complicating the issue.

Since these sensors are supposed to last up to 15 months on single charge, and it actually wouldn't be too unusual for a device like this to report 100% battery for up to the first 1/3 of its battery usable life (especially if using Alkaline batteries), 3 months is probably still within reason. There is often some intentional padding as well by manufacturers, as they don't want customers to see big drop in battery percentage early on, as this might cause people to make ultimately incorrect predictions about total battery life, and complain or return the product.

Pioneers were basically modeled after Scouts, just replacing the religious aspects with political ideology. Usually Pioneers were only for ages up to 14 however. After Pioneers, you were expected to join the Young Communist organization (DISZ and later KISZ in Hungary) which was for ages 14-26.

Like the other Jucika camp comic, this one also more likely references the youth labor camps usually run by DISZ/KISZ.