I’ve got a Prusa Mk4S on its way; I won’t be in the geezers club much longer.

I know, right?

That’s kind of my point. Google started that nonsense of making job interviews into lateral thinking puzzles, then all managers latched onto that to make themselves look hip.

I want to see competence and practical problem solving skills.

So, the oldest cordless drill I have is this old Black & Decker 12v thing, my dad bought it in like, 2002. It has a quick detaching chuck, and under the chuck is a 1/4" hex collet. So you can load a phillips or torx driver bit in that, then mount the chuck over it and chuck in a drill bit, then you can drill your pilot holes, pop the chuck off and drive screws.

And other than that minor innovative feature it’s crap. The build quality on even consumer-grade power tools has increased a lot since I was in high school; I’ve got some of the new SB&D Craftsman tools that are a lot nicer to handle; that old B&D creaks and squeaks as it flexes in your hand, it’s not overmolded and the bare ABS slips around in your grip, the controls feel like you’re twisting lego bricks, the batteries are long out of production and it’s the only tool I have that takes that standard, and it’s a 20 year old brushed motor 12 volt tool; it’s the size of my 20v drills but less powerful than my little 12v mini Bosch drill.

You know, we’re talking about how pointless a riddle it is. “Why can’t I walk into the room more than once?” I’ve heard similar hiring riddles about things like “You’ve got ten ethernet cables that run the length of a long hallway. They’re not marked at either end, what’s the most efficient way of finding out which is which?”

And you know what? If I’m hiring a networking guy, I don’t want him to deliver me an “ooh I know this one” answer to that, I want him to tell me he’s got a cable tester with several remote probes so he can figure that out in a small number of trips. Maybe show me how he can hook a couple together with a coupler and use the cable length function to shave a couple of trips off. Not recite a memorized brain teaser answer.

The “premise” is detecting that a now dark light was recently turned on by feeling for residual heat. “Hot” is a relative term.

I don’t need four power drills, I want four power drills.

Let me ask you a question: What does the pro version of Zorin get you?

Yeah that’s why I hate Gnome, they have ideas about how you should use your computer and those ideas aren’t yours.

I remember hearing something about Ogg vorbis being outmoded by some other Ogg? I don’t know I’ve moved from mp3 to FLAC personally.

Autodesk.

Wow, your mom sucks. Get her out of your life.

I have only ever seen the phrase “don’t chase, attract” used by women to peer pressure each other out of actively participating in dating. Reminding each other to never express enthusiastic consent.

“Playing hard to get” is taking that line of thought to the logical extreme. “Want men to want you more? Always turn them down!”

It’s the opposite side of the “women want assholes” coin, it’s an incorrect premise taken to an extreme.

I assert that terror is terror.

I think video games are good for terror. Subnautica for example, reaper leviathans are terrifying, but not horrifying. You encounter a reaper, and it’s a spike in adrenaline, but you don’t lay in bed that night staring at the ceiling about it.

dad bad is the new wife bad.

Abstract: I burned a pair of audio CDs three days ago for listening to in my cars. Two (nearly) identical discs, one for each car. I have largely moved away from optical discs but am making an effort to re-embrace them.

Full text: So when I went to build my PC, I wanted a Fractal Meshify 2 Mini case. I built my cousin’s PC in one, I wanted one too, but they had apparently been discontinued. I wound up with a Pop Air Mini case instead, which in many ways isn’t as nice, but it does feature a pair of 5 1/4" bays hidden behind a magnetic panel at the front of the PSU basement.

One of my little projects was to install one of those multi-format card readers and an old optical drive there, and I got it done a few days ago. I have a USB optical drive, in fact a couple of them, but an internal one is just a nicer thing to deal with. It is my understanding that no one is actually manufacturing those external optical drives anymore; that the ones you see on Amazon with god knows what branding are old laptop drives of whatever spec stuffed into a new case with a USB controller. They’re flaky, janky, and flimsy. Plus there’s never anywhere to put them; they come with short little cables so they’re invariably hard to plug in. So instead I ganked a blu-ray reader/DVD writer drive out of an old Dell I have lying around and installed that, and man is it nicer.

My inaugural project was to make a couple of audio CDs for the car. This project involved little to no piracy; all of the audio came from legitimately purchased CDs that I bought as directly from the band as I could. I want to fund the artists, not the sniveling IP hoarders. So I’ve got discs now that have my favorite 25 out of ~120 tracks I bought from them in my cars. I ripped the discs to FLACs the second I had them and have been listening to them on my phone, my precious originals safely stored in a CD rack.

I also bought a new spindle of CD-Rs, which is also getting harder to do. The ones I bought have inkjet printable labels. And it just so happens my old inkjet printer has a disc printing feature that I’ve yet to use. So I tried it out. Getting this particular printer going in Linux for more than basic features is a no-go; CUPS+Gutenprint is available for at least a thousand makes and models of Epson printers including the models above and below mine in the range, but specifically not mine. I chose to take that personally, but in the meantime I have discs to print. Funnily enough the printer can do this without a PC at all; it has a feature specifically for printing JPGs onto discs, and another feature that I have to assume is designed specifically for piracy:

My Epson XP-830 Expression Premium “Small In One” printer has a built-in feature to copy a CD from the scanner bed to the disc tray. That is, put a CD label side down on the scanner glass, put a printable CD-R on the disc tray, and it will figure it out and copy it. I can think of no purpose for that other than to hand out copies of Now That’s What I Call Music 7 or Windows Vista Home Premium to all your high school friends. It’s useless for things like “File Archives 2011” or “Iron Butterfly Beach Party Mix” but it’s a very user friendly counterfeiting workflow.

So mostly I installed this optical drive for reading rather than writing. I can see a future where I replace this drive with an M-disc burner; I keep threatening to start a Youtube channel, and that might be how I archive video footage, but…I don’t know.

it’s the diet version of playing hard to get, and equally as bullshit.

I kinda like !woodworking@lemmy.ca

LED bulbs do get warm, not as hot as incandescent bulbs but they do emit heat. You might have to run them longer than a minute to warm it up enough to be immediate about it.