You can turn the entire freeway system into a grid and it will still suck - Los Angeles

I treat my persona on the internet like it is an extension of myself. I do not mask my complexity, my identity (if anyone cares to dig), and I hold myself to a universal moral standard that is entirely my own. If someone is rude, I delete my comments, block them, and move on just like I would if I met them elsewhere. I want to be helpful, to engage, but also to just be myself. I’m disabled, and in a lot of pain. I need the chance to think out what I am saying and to do this social engagement in between projects and other tasks. When I feel my limitations, I think about Stephen Hawking and what it must have been like with ALS. While other people’s problems do nothing to help with my own, I still find it helpful to keep in mind that it can always be worse until the day it can’t, and nothing really matters once you’re gone. So you might as well remember today for the glass half full before the rose colored glasses in your future force the perspective on you later. I try not to focus on the negative any more than this.

I just got lucky with the RadioShack unit having been the most convenient option and a 900 series iron. I got into electronics long before 3d printing. The hot knife attachment mixed with Xacto blades has some uses and the attachment is nice for a way to add a longer threaded stud for other custom stuff.

In a pinch, it might be possible to add a single threaded turn to a sharp conical tip, especially if you can find the cheapest copper ones without the hard plating. Before I learned about the 900 series tips from McMaster, I had a couple of conicals that I used a die to cut a single thread into. That thread is enough to save the insert, but the ones from McMaster make the task more precise in a press jig that can pull too. There is a decent chance of getting an insert out methodically and saving a larger print with the threaded removal tips, you’ll just need a larger diameter insert if you can get the old one out cleanly.

Half joking… In absolute terms, - convert it to beer. Earliest forms of beer were basically leftover old bread left to ferment. It’s not great by itself, and the natural CO² smells green about like rising bread. You’ll realize the effects of bittering agents like hops in commercial beer, but if you simply grind up old bread and either a wild ferment or add a little yeast to an air tight container with an air lock valve or sealed and burp it a few times, you can still access a significant chunk of those calories months or years later.

So when does the breakup happen. So glad I live in California instead of Alabama now.

The wall isn’t to keep people out. It will be the other way around. The Right states will look like Afghanistan. Gone will be the imperialist foreign interventions. The world will change drastically elsewhere, especially in places with less geopolitical significance and unstable governments. It will be a shattering into feudalistic fragments on every stage. This will be the official end of the democratic era. We will see a use of a major nuclear weapon within our lifetime in this dystopian version of the future. The instability all but guarantees that reality.

Karma in action.

…

Finally, Poland Can in Space

Slowly over time you learn what you need when you need it. There is no hand holding. Under the surface, this thing is very complex. Every aspect of Linux is public. You do not need to understand most of it, but this is the realm of many brilliant developers and most computer science students, especially those studying operating systems. Everyone is welcome here, but be aware that all levels are present.

The vast majority of Linux is not related to desktop users. Linux is more common on servers and embedded devices like routers, cars, and industrial/enterprise equipment. People are happy to help you learn when you hit a wall, but no one wants to be your tech support.

Distros are not brands or marketing. They all have a specific reason to exist and specialties. Learning what these specialties are and how to leverage them for things like documentation for any specific task can make a big difference in your overall experience.

It is quite common for people to call it Linux, but you are unlikely to interact with kernel space very much. Your actual experience is mostly limited to the desktop environment and applications.

Since you are on a Debian > Ubuntu derivative, you are on a distro that may have outdated dependencies in some cases, especially with outlier software. Terms like outdated and stable/unstable are not at all what they seem at first intuitive thought. Windows is a stable OS, which really means it has outdated dependencies in most cases too. Distros like Fedora or Arch are kept up to date with the latest kernel and dependencies. If your software you want to run is actively developed and kept up to date, these are the best distros to run. If your software is static, these distros may break it and create headaches. By contrast, if your software is kept up to date but you are on a stable distro, either the distro packager may keep the needed libraries up to date or you need to go to the extra effort required to update stuff yourself by adding a PPA to your Aptitude sources list. This is important to understand because, if you are following documentation for some package using the internet, that documentation may be for a much newer version than what is available in the distro natively. This mostly applies to edgy software when you’re doing something specific that is not super common. The practical way to think about this is that Debian stable is primarily created as a way for developers to create some device that will be used online for a specific task and uses many high level software packages. Once the thing is working, the developer knows that the packages they used are not going to get updated arbitrarily and break what they created, while the device is still going to receive all the needed security updates to remain online safely for as long as the kernel is supported by the Debian team. This is beneficial for small one off devices and subcontracted types of development without a full time dev. Understanding this paradigm will massively improve your overall experience. I had a lot of frustration before I understood that much of what I was using was outdated and why when I first started using Ubuntu over 10 years ago.

correlation ≠ causation

It is amazing how many people fail at this basal logic even in the present era. There are entire political parties that exist in this cognitive void. Perhaps this radical enlightenment was an attempt by evolution to remedy humanity’s limiting cognitive orbits

You can’t do a lot of things with other irons like you can with a 900 tip, especially with 3d printing. There are hundreds of specialties. Like I have tips for ribbon cables, a Xacto blade holder, common heatset inserts installation tools, but also the specialty threaded removal tools from McMaster. That is in addition to all of my specialty soldering tips.

I’ve been tempted in the past to go to a faster heating setup for my rework station, probably a T12, but instead I made my own circuit boards for mine. I have the old digital soldering station from RadioShack. It is a 900 series clone from Atten that uses a 2 wire element with the thermocouple in series with the element. I mase circuit boards that offset the element to contact one side of the tip and adjusted it to extend closer to the end of the tip bore. I also modified my station to have dual irons so that I do not need to change tips often, I just swap irons with a switch.

I think a case for a different setup can be made for soldering, but for 3d printing, there is no replacement for the number of options available for crafting extras and heatset inserts options. Like I wouldn’t do iterative designs with heatset inserts in many cases if I had no ability to remove them.

• “Look what authoritarianism built at the expense of better lives for the average person when the rest of the world was far more egalitarian.”
• “Giant extinct humans played with big building blocks. Come see what they made.”

hmmm…

In Minecraft no less

Not any more. I use an offline open source LLM first quite a bit now because it is better than their junk. It may only be accurate 80% of the time, but that is a far higher percentage than any present search engine.

People complain about web scrapers, but scraping is the only practical alternative for finding info and sources now that the web crawlers are worse than trash.

Soldering is nothing like welding. Neither task is particularly hard, although welding takes a bit more coordination. Soldering is about as hard as using a hot glue gun or microwaving a meal, or scrubbing a toilet.

When you’ve never done it before, it is easy to build it up in your mind. Here’s the things that matter:

• acid core solder is only for pipes in a home
• flux is important and the mess it makes is not
• for just a small job, any soldering iron is fine, as is any solder
• wet everything you’re joining with flux and the solder will wick into place
• the tip of the iron should be shiny with solder before you start, and this may involve a good bit of solder added to the tip and then removed by a wet sponge or wire ball made for the task

An adjustable iron is nice, and you’ll likely find that eventually you will use it for threaded inserts in prints. There is a lot of marketing about irons and junk, but it is hard to beat the value of one of the Chinese 936 Hakko clone irons. Most of the marketing junk is to try and obfuscate the value and availability of these clones. The Hakko 900 series tips are the defacto standard and there are many extra accessory options available that are only possible with this tip/iron type. Last time I checked a 936 clone is usually under $40. The actual circuit board required to build one is under $5 on AliEx while the iron handle and lead are ~$8. You don’t need this for a basic job, but an adjustable soldering iron is a lifetime useful tool to have on hand.

Good solder makes a big difference on bigger projects when you’re doing this a lot. However, if I was in a zombie apocalypse, I could easily make a single solder connection by heating the tip of a screwdriver in a candle flame, use some resin from a pine tree, and a chip off of the pewter candlestick holder to solder a button to a circuit board.

Buttons can be a bit challenging with 3d printing design. It depends on your goals, but clearances and textures matter a lot more than it may first appear. It is possible to get something that just works, but is loose or crude. Getting a button like the inserts that go into a typical video game controller are quite challenging to clearance and develop a consistent tactile feel. I’ve done this in practice and it took a lot more iterations than I expected.

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Dry with pickled onions and some chicken.

I absolutely hate salads, but that is what I ate 5 days a week when I worked for a chain of bike shops. It’s how I lost my last bit of weight to get under 7% back when I was racing. Going from 350lbs to 220lbs wasn’t super hard while just commuting to work, and training/racing casually. Going from 220lbs to under 190lbs was super hard for me. Eating something I could barely tolerate meant I only ate what I absolutely needed because I was freaking starving… So, to me, while I hate salads, if I’m eating one, it is for a specific reason, and if I’m objective about that reason, I’m going to fit my opinion to what best meets those goals. Therefore, my favorite salad is the one I can only barely tolerate and will eat, but only as much as I absolutely must. Like seriously, I brought my lunch into my office and would eat a few bites over the course of hours. That too is a major aspect of real weight loss. How much you eat at any given point in time is very important.

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I consider anyone pushing anyone over Biden as part of the Trump campaign. This is a two party system. Creating indecisiveness like this is a very viable and practical subversion tactic and with Trump’s Kremlin backers as the Russian candidate as Putin’s puppet, anyone that fails to recognise this ploy is being foolish and falling for their nonsense. The Platonic sophism tactic is hard for the simple minded to see through. Unplug from the news cycle and think for yourself outside of the sophist spin doctor nonsense. Ask your own questions and seek out those answers without distraction and exercise skepticism about all sources. If your general media leads your thoughts, you have no real thoughts of your own.

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Go to war -

He should start with the supreme court if he has an ounce of worth.