Linux gamer, retired aviator, profanity enthusiast
I forget why, but Picard and Riker are away, Data is in command with Worf as his first officer. Data wants to be analytical and consider all options, Worf wants to fire all phasers and die in glorious battle. Data comes to a decision and gives orders, and Worf says "Finally!"
Data asks to see him in the ready room, and then dresses him down for talking back to him in front of the crew. They hash out what they expect the role of second in command is supposed to be, and with the military shit out of the way, Data then acknowledges that this dressing down may have damaged their friendship, and Worf replies that no, he was out of line so it was his fault, that he acknowledges that he was out of line and if we can overlook this incident he'd like to continue being friends.
Stated problems, voiced objections, addrressed objections, no personal slights, no raised voices, actual accountability expected and accepted...manliest conversation ever filmed.
I will FEED HIM.
Okay so let's strike a couple out of that list:
I would also rule out AutoCAD because isn't it like, architectural software? And like, OLD? AutoDesk's engineering CAD was Inventor for the longest time, and they've been working on replacing Inventor with Fusion360. I'm personally done with AutoDesk, they've chafed my taint a few too many times so I wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire.
OnShape is actually cool tech, but it's drawbackware. In the words of Lando Calrissian, this deal's getting worse all the time.
I personally use FreeCAD, it could be better in a lot of ways but it's not commercial. It's made by the kind of people who are very good at programming computers, but they get full body diaper rash from cornhole to corneas if they try to think about software usability. It's why every concept is replicated 2-4 times in various forms of incompatibility. May the dread god Nyalathotep smite thee should thou chooseth to make a Clone instead of a Link. It's also developed in English by mostly non-English speakers. So you go to their forums and ask "If I need to make two mirror images of a part, what is the correct way to model the left one and then mirror it to get the right one" and they can't get past the grammatical puzzle you just spun for them to answer the technical question.
In conclusion, learn to use a pencil.
I'm reliably told three times a day that my someteen year old cat has never once had a meal in her life. Not even the one I fed her hours prior.
I don't know about that. I tried using both ChatGPT and Gemini to brainstorm for ideas for the name and branding of a woodworking Peertube channel. They both struck me as similar yes men with little to no imagination. Both suggested things like "sawdust and smiles." And they would both, ALWAYS start a response with something like "That's a great idea!" "That's a wise approach!" "Your concern is very valid!' Such brown nose, very kiss ass.
It doesn't seem to be too useful for this particular use case, either.
My father once told me of an old IBM machine, I think it was the System 3 model 15D or one of its contemporaries, or maybe the original System 38. It had some amount of memory, like 32k of memory (I'm going to get these numbers wrong), and to upgrade it you could spend many thousands of dollars to have IBM come install a control board to upgrade it to 64k. The memory was already physically in the box; they manufactured and delivered it to the customer, and sold the memory control board as an exorbitant cost option, when it was the RAM (it might have even been core storage) that was the expensive part to make.
To a lesser degree, I've been hearing about cars that install cost options on all models, but they don't hook them up on the lower tiers. Like apparently all Lotus Exiges have power mirrors, they've all got motors in them, but they don't give you the switch unless you pay for it. You can go to a Ford dealership, buy the right switch and just pop it in and it'll work. I suppose it can make some sense to reduce part counts, but it's getting to the point where it's "we installed the option in the car, it's hooked up, it's perfectly functional, we've already put in the expense, and we'll allow the software to turn it on if you pay for it.
Let me clarify this part of my thinking: That line has moved a lot since the lifetime of Thomas Chippendale.
When you think about what it would take to build an ornately carved mahogany highboy with a high gloss varnish in 1750 versus today, including logging, transporting exotic wood around the planet, the actual woodworking...hell, just compare applying a shellac french polish versus spray lacquer today.
I could run a fairly decent woodworking racket given 10 cubic meters a year. Does that include branches and such?
Ten cubic meters of free wood a year. Huh. That's an oak or two.
I think my top favorite business card simply said
John Doe
Legitimate Businessman
When it comes to rich people, pretty much yes it is.
On my main desktop I'm using Fedora KDE. Arrived here by process of elimination.
Linux Mint Cinnamon didn't run particularly well with my hardware, I was looking for a distro with decent Wayland support so I could run my high refresh rate monitor properly. So that pretty much meant a switch to KDE. So who's implementation of KDE?
I've spent much of my time on the Ubuntu side of things, but Canonical has been pulling so much diet Microsoft shit that I'd rather not use any of the *buntus themselves, so Kubuntu is out. Neon? Kubuntu again. I'm not terribly interested in the forks of forks of forks of forks, I've been around long enough to go "Remember PeppermintOS? You don't, okay." So I'm looking for something fairly near the root of its tree.
I've never really seen the appeal of Arch and every time I've tried running Manjaro it failed to function, so forget that. I don't know shit about SuSe, that basically left Fedora. So here I am.
Then you've got the Hallmark movie they've remade 90,000 times now, where the women are usually some kind of lawyer or executive or something, who travels to a small town likely where she was raised for some contrived reason only to find what she really needs: Some stuffed flannel with designer stubble.
Wait a minute! What tools? You're supposed to be doing theory! You're a field psycho-ornithologist, aren't you?
Yeah, see: when you're looking at these highly ornate antiques, it's not the wealth of the craftsman on display; it's the wealth of his customer.
Are you yourself a craftsman?
I have been rendered incapable of seeing beauty in ostentatious displays of wealth.
Check my understanding here: It's not that they're scarce, but there's no geological process that concentrates them like copper or gold. There aren't any neodymium seams the way there are gold seams, there's a very little amount everywhere. So you might as well sift the entire Mojave.
Cleaned up my shop
After several small projects, it was time for a cleaning and organizing. Spent like 3 hours and the place is still a disorganized wreck. I've just got too much shit in a little building.
I also dropped a clamp on my foot, -2hp.
But, the place is somewhat less dusty now.
When you see it, you'll swear too.
god. dammit I have to table saw this butcher block apart.
I asked Google Gemini to create a dimensional drawing of a night stand with one drawer.
What it came up with is too good not to share:
The Best Food-Safe Finish May Be None At All - Fine Woodworking Article
Seri Robinson, a professor of wood anatomy, agrees with the marketers of "food-safe" finishes that bacteria-especially salmonella, listeria, and E. coli-are a threat to human health. But, Robinson says, those finishes can undermine the natural antimicrobial properties of wood. If an unfinished woode...
Conventional wisdom regarding finishing cutting boards and other food prep surfaces is to coat them heavily with mineral oil and/or a food safe paste wax to "seal" and/or "condition" them. Seri Robinson asserts otherwise, her research has shown that any finish applied to wood decreases its natural anti-microbial properties.
I'm getting kind of sick of my dental implant button
I had dental surgery like, a month ago. Posted about it here. Instead of a front tooth I've got a metal (titanium I think?) cap sticking out of my gums. The tip of my tongue constantly touches it and I'm really over it.
The weirdest part is every time I brush my teeth it feels cold for like an hour. The button has a female drive to it (I think it's Torx?) and it holds onto toothpaste.
At least I'm off my no biting things diet. There's stuff that's still impractical to eat but I can have sandwiches now.
Anyone else getting Nicoled a lot lately?
I've gotten several of the text-in-image variant lately from accounts on SJW over the last few days.
Recommendations for home media infrastructure esp. software?
So here's the state of things right now:
I've got a Synology NAS with stuff like my movie collection stored on it. I think at some point I'll move my music collection up there, too. It's an ARM powered 2-bay thing, I'm not particularly interested in using any of Synology's software, and there's some stuff that won't run on that box because it's ARM instead of x86. I don't really have a "server" box running.
A few years ago I bought a "commercial TV" aka one that doesn't have Roku or whatever. For awhile, I ran OSMC (basically Debian Kodi) on a Raspberry Pi, which...I had enough problems with that it's unlivable. I'd rather just not have a television than continue to use OSMC.
In the meantime, I built a new gaming PC for my desk, the old machine (which happens to be in a Fractal Node 202 case so it already looks like a TiVo) has been moved into the living room. It's a Ryzen 3600/GeForce GTX-1080 machine with a bit over a terabyte of SSD and 16GB of RAM. It's still kicking bubb
Standing around in my driveway in the middle of the night
I finally caught a lunar eclipse. like five of them I missed due to weather, it's clear tonight.
Cleaned the house, not that you'd notice
Did a lot of things like emptying the bathroom trash can, got rid of some packaging that was holding nearly nothing, put some stuff in some drawers, folded one load of laundry and loaded another. The place is technically better in a way that isn't apparent.
Bench plane tuning question
So I've got a goofy issue tuning my block bench plane. It's one of the Pony Jorgensen #4 smoothing planes they're selling at Lowe's in the States. Works pretty well with one exception: Moving the frog forward to bring the iron closer to the mouth also advances the iron.
I can't get it anywhere near as closed as you're supposed to with a smoothing plane before I can't retract the iron sufficiently. The mating surface in the sole that the frog rests on is slightly angled downward, so the frog is lowered as it is moved forward. I can't realistically bring the iron any farther on the chip breaker than I've got it.
As I had it apart, I noticed the finish on the bottom of the frog, the surface that mates with the sole, was as cast, it isn't machined or lapped. Should it be?
End table drawer with secret compartment
I posted these end tables here awhile ago.
The carcasses turned out pretty well but I was never happy with the drawers. I implemented them as the world's worst piston fit drawers, they had like a quarter inch of slop so they were less drawers and more boxes that fit in a hole.
I had some time on my docket so I remade the drawers, converted them to side hung, fitted them better to the space provided, and lengthened them. I had just enough poplar to make an additional drawer back, so I implemented @[email protected] 's suggestion and added a secret compartment. I haven't made the stops yet so it will just pull right on out but I've made a piece of furniture with a secret compartment in it. Now I need something cool to put in it. Maybe a smallish bottle of scotch and a pair of glencairns?
Miss Chiff got rotated
Sometimes gravity pulls her wrong.
Help me identify a saw contraption I thought I saw on Youtube
Probably several months ago I watched some woodworking video on Youtube, and the video was sponsored by this strange saw contraption that I'm having no luck googling. Maybe I dreamed it up and I've got something worth patenting, I don't know.
The most concise way I can explain it is, imagine if the table saw had been invented, but power tools and circular saws hadn't. Or, think of the journey you go on when making a circ saw into a table saw, and then go on that journey with a frame saw.
This is a stationary tool that holds a straight blade in tension, the blade doesn't move, the stock is secured to a guide which slides on rails, and can be positioned to make various different cuts.
I thought "huh, I'll look that up later to see if it's worth a damn" and now can't find it again. Might have dreamed it.
Worked a lot in the wood shop and had a hot meal
Bit of a marathon session today in the wood shop finishing a computer stand I'm building for my father. Did most of the construction of a drawer box. Had to do some tuning on my dovetail jig, it's not as definite as I'd like it to be, but the drawer box turned out okay.
Worked up some fatigue, my cat Izzy helped me take a nap on the couch. If you don't have an air purrifier, I highly recommend one.
Woke up hungry, made a stir fry. Still missing a tooth so a stir fry is a great way to get an actual hot nutritious meal in me. Thoroughly enjoyed it, too.
Sticky monitor edge is driving me nuts
Running Fedora KDE, I've got two monitors side by side. If I move the mouse slowly from one to the other, it seems to catch on the edge between. It makes interacting with things near the edges of the monitor a pain in the ass, if I overshoot with a large gesture to move the mouse to that region and then some unseen force prevents me from precisely moving the mouse back.
I can't find anything in the settings menu that sounds like it would turn this off. How do I turn this off? It needs to be turned off. I intensely hate it.
What's a good email provider?
Thinking of starting media creation, want to have an email address dedicated to that purpose. Don't want to go with Gmail as I'd like to phase Google out of my life, amd Protonmail seems incorrect for this because it largely wouldn't be encrypted mail.
Recommendations?
I forgot to run my dishwasher last night
My favorite pan for making pancakes was used to make pancakes so I'm waiting to have breakfast until the dishes are clean.
Do the old Greek, Norse or Roman gods take godhood of modern concepts?
Like, would Hephaestus be the god of magnetos, distributors and capacitor discharge ignition systems? Or does that count as lightning and thus be Zeus' problem? Is Oden the god of whiskey because it necessarily must be made in oak barrels, or being booze would that fall under Dionysus? Is Mercury the god of SMS?
Vexed about starting a business ABANDONED IDEA
This may not be the right community to post this in; it's at least obliquely involved with woodworking.
I intend to hang a shingle as a furniture maker. Yes I know I know "Beware turning a hobby into a job because it'll suck the joy out" before the pandemic I was working in a custom build shop, about the only thing I didn't build for customers was furniture, and I kinda miss the pipeline.
In fact, I'd kind of like to find several other craftsmen of various flavors and open an "artisan shop", where, say, a table I built is used to display vases the potter made, and so on like that.
I got, or rather built, that custom building job at a makerspace in the city, and I could get this venture off the ground with a quick message to the General Slack channel. Not only was the place full of craftsmen and artisans but it was plugged into the entrepreneurial world, people would pour out of the woodwork to either join up or point me to resources. Where I'm at now there's just none of that.
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