Uncle_Brumpus

My 2019 Subaru has a red 7-segment LED clock below the touchscreen that has 2 physical buttons right there that change the hour and minute. It's a luxury I don't think I'll soon take for granted. I changed my battery recently (the original OEM battery finally got too tired), so I've set my clock twice in the last week, taking about 10 seconds and 1/2 second to accomplish respectively.

I just logged on for the first time in a couple days and saw a grey link. Hm, I wonder what link I've visited in the past that is gaining traction now?

Glad to see I was ahead of the curve. Having used this tool for a while, it's really spectacular.

In a similar vein, I've been using https://brutalist.report/ for a while just to browse headlines. All the links lead to the full regular pages, so the articles themselves aren't "lightweight" like the CNN Lite version is. I still like how it lets me quickly peruse many headlines from lots of different categories and only click through onto something I'm genuinely interested in.

I wasn't aware of CNN Lite, I will add this to my news bookmarks.

I do agree that there is a small minority of people who greatly benefit from delivery services due to disability, hardship, or otherwise, but the thought of tax dollars paying to deliver Tom's crunchwrap supreme because he's a little high and really wants taco bell grinds my gears in a particular way.

I'd have no problem with a subsidized service for those that NEED it, but for those that just WANT it? Nope. But then you get into the sticky messy world of how to determine need.

sorry, I guess I forgot my /s.

Remninds me of the texts my brother and I used to send each other back in the earlier days of Android, write one word then spam-click the center word recommendation a bunch and blindly hit send.

I saw "512GB" and knew deep down it means RAM, but SURELY nobody needs the same amount of RAM as I have total SSD space on my desktop, right?

...Right?

My second monitor is a 11" beige VGA LCD. I'm ready for the regression.

I am a HUGE sucker for Mac os8/9. I currently have a PPC Mac Mini and a Powerbook G4 that I tool around with occasionally for nostalgia's sake. I used slew of various G3 computers running OS9 as my main personal computers picked from the scrap bin at my dad's job (graphic imaging company) from ~2004 until I went off to college in 2010. I had some kind of modified Mozilla browser (Classilla I think?) that had modern-ish web support.

I've been on the lookout for a good condition G3 beige desktop, that was my first ever computer that was "mine" and I really want one just for the sentimental value.

In 2024 I sold a 2010 MBP that still worked. I beat the hell out of it in college dual booting and cooking the cpu playing Trackmania for 12 hours at a time or running Solidworks, then after I graduated it sat closed behind my stove sharing its wifi connection (my neighbors unprotected wifi) out the ethernet port and into my own managed router for about 4 years. Up until the last days it was running Windows as a host for controlling my old not-network-connected 3d printer. I definitely got my money out of that machine, someone paid $150 for it.

I have several use cases for micro USB, and was slowly running out of cables as they broke or degraded over time. I was going to point out that Ikea has some very nice feeling Micro USB cables, which is a rare thing to find these days, but they don't appear to be on their website anymore. I bought 2 last time I was in-store a few months back, I'll have to swing by and see if they are still there and buy a bunch more, they're probably discontinued.

The ones I got are light blue colored (easy to identify in the cable drawer), very flexible, with solid smooth rubber connector housings.

Mmmmm, tasty $75 pi zero

Re: development - I've started shooting film for the first time recently and have been developing B&W film in my kitchen using Caffenol, a mixture of instant coffee, washing soda, and vitamin C tablets, all things you can get at the grocery store. https://www.caffenol.org/recipes/ (I've been using the standard "delta" recipe, I don't do any temperature control, whatever my room temp has been has been fine)

I 3D printed a film development tank, and bought some "glassware" at a thrift shop to mix things up. The first couple rolls I did, I put a towel tightly over the window and closed the door and used my bathroom as a darkroom. I've since gotten one of those little "dark bags".

You still technically need a real fixer, but B&W fixer isn't all that bad compared to the whole slew of chemicals needed for color processing. I'm using the powdered Kodak Professional fixer.

Here's some of the shots off my first roll (Ilford HP5 shot on an Olympus Pen EE2) https://postimg.cc/gallery/fL5HvXV This was my first time using the film scanner I got, and I had the settings ALL wrong, they're too bright and too low contrast. I've since figured it out and scans look way better now, I just don't have any of those on my work computer.

I can't help with the film costs, though...

There is somebody that I am having to work with right now that will not respond to a single thing I ask unless it is on a live phone call.

I will ask a relatively simple question via email, and then he will call me back an hour later and leave a voicemail just saying "Sorry I missed you, call me back" instead of even answering my simple question. I'm almost never at my desk, always running around out on the production floor (manufacturing engineer). I'll get his voicemail, call him back and leave HIM a voicemail re-iterating my question, and then I will also send an email again re-iterating my question.

We will go back and forth like this until EVENTUALLY we catch each other at the right time, then it's a quick 2-minute call. It takes days and days, sometimes over a week, to get one single answer that takes 2 minutes to talk over.

He is an external consultant I am working with, so I can't even just walk over to his desk. Absolutely infuriating. As soon as this project is done I am never asking him another question again, I'll find someone else. (I inherited the project and don't have the resources to find another consultant right now)

This sounds bad for me, a person who just purchased their first SDR yesterday. What unfortunate timing.

I'll giddily await the moment when a Waymo gets swallowed by a random sinkhole.

I was visiting my brother there shortly after the bus-hole happened, and the winter market had several vendors selling bus-hole related merch. I regret not buying any.

I would be incredibly interested in learning more once you've got something working.

EDIT: Would it happen to be Meetable? I just stumbled across that serendipitously an hour or so after commenting.

Your rental car comment reminds me of the time I looked like an idiot trying to open the fuel door on a rented Kia K5 for almost 20 minutes. I don't have a smartphone and didn't have my laptop so had no way to look anything up. Ended up finding this video on the gas station employee's phone (she came out to see if everything was okay. It was not okay.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e7lZmbjtNo

If you have to release a tutorial video to open your fuel filler door, and that video includes the one easy piece of user interface to do the thing getting thanos-snapped out of existence, I think you did something wrong.

The cause of my problem was I opened the driver's door before turning off the car. The rental didn't have push-to-start like my personal vehicle, and I don't have "turn and remove key" on the mind when exiting a vehicle. Even locking and unlocking the door didn't unlock the fuel door, I had to turn the car back on, lock the doors, turn the car off, then unlock the doors. Why is opening the fuel door so complicated? There doesn't seem to be any way to do it mechanically, so good luck when the solenoid dies.

See that's the problem, you live IN the city, and you're not afraid of the city, so you know how it really is.

I've gotten the "Parking is too expensive and hard to find" from friends when I try and get them to come into the city to hang out. No, come to my apartment, park in the plentiful free protected street parking right out front, and then we'll walk the 5 minutes to the center of downtown.

Just some personal anecdotes: I've come into the orbit of a local "no phones" meetup group in my city. I discovered it by seeing a black and white printed scan of a hand-drawn flyer on a pole by my apartment. Currently it's just organized by one guy who sends out random Signal pings for stuff to do like a potluck picnic, group trip to some free instructed yoga at a park, craft night at a local bar/bookstore, etc., and usually there's ~4-15 people that show up. I organized a World Postcard Day postcard writing party last week, found a venue that would host for free, donated some of my own dollars to provide free official WPD postcards to attendees, and had 7 people come write postcards with me, I convinced 4 of them to sign up for Postcrossing, it was a great time.

If anybody else is looking for change, try setting something like this up. It has so far been free, easy, relatively low stakes, and I think by virtue of the main focus being "no phones", you get some great people who are all tired of the same algorithmic churn.

I became very good friends with someone who I met at one of the meetups and we've done all kinds of things just the 2 of us and have had some really interesting conversations, which is something I haven't done in a LONG time.

There's a team who live-stream their dives with a deep-sea ROV, and being along for the ride when they discovered a whale fall in 2019 will always be something I remember very fondly. They returned in 2020 to document the changes to the carcass. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvSNgwIqvrM

The falls in this article though seem so different due to their depth and age, and especially surprising to me is the sedimentation rate in that area, ~less than half a centimeter per 1000 years. I always imagine ocean sedimentation to be substantial and uniform, but it makes sense that currents and local ecology would play a huge role.

It was with the first generation of unibody macbooks in 2008, if I remember correctly. I have a Powerbook G4 with a nice matte screen, and I distinctly remember the first generation of non-unibody MBP also having a similar matte screen.

So it's been a while. 18 years with glossy screens.

I tried renting a uhaul very last second a couple years back at the rental location. I was standing in the office, just me and the one single employee working that day.

As part of the rental process I had to give my phone number. At some point the employee says something like "You should get a text message with a link in a couple seconds, click the link and fill out the form and you'll be good to go."

To which I responded 'I don't have a smartphone, I can't click a link. How else can I fill out the form?'

Apparently there was no other way. He thought about it for a minute, then just took a picture of my license and handed me the keys. It's been 3 years and I never heard anything about it, so I figure I got lucky. I just know that if I ever find myself in that situation again karma will catch up with me and it will be a big issue.

What happened to the days of signing some papers on a clipboard?

I guess it makes sense that there's an elevator of the year award, though it's never something I'd have thought of.

The photo of one of the brake assembly components mounted to a welded tubular skid, bolted to a large structure of I-beams, bolted to another I-beam skid which is bolted to the floor, is tickling me as slightly humorous.

I read on the original Openbook lite, which despite only accepting .txt files, is still a great little device. I'm excited to get the touch and not have to pre-format massive files in a text editor.

I definitely didn't have to wonder if my career choice would be invalidated by AI by the time I graduate.

I drove ~3 hours to the Vermont-Canada border... and then drove 14 hours home. I'd also do it again in a heartbeat.

I almost signed up for a live-work program for a big music festival happening in Iceland, but the flights (the only thing not covered) were astronomically expensive and I had already made plans with my dad last weekend, and he's getting older so I really didn't want to bail on him.

I would love to sit atop the Rock of Gibraltar (with 47,000 other people) for the next one, Aug 2 2027, but that is likely also a pipe-dream, because NORMAL flights to Gibraltar are already too expensive for me.

I'm currently reading Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days by Alastair Reynolds. In the second book, there's a water-world where there are airships, and a whole city held aloft in the air by "vacuum bladders".

I'll admit when I first read that detail in a description of the blimp-like airship the 2 characters are riding right at the beginning of the book, it took me a second to realize exactly what it meant. My understanding of airships like blimps and such hinges on something being in the gas bladder... But yes, nothing is certainly lighter than something! I haven't yet encountered any technical description of how the bladders are constructed, which I look forward to reading.

I think the 2 funniest I found here are "TT Firebird Ribeye" which just sounds like an incredibly specific steakhouse menu item, and "Privacy II", which I just think is a bit on the funny-ironic side that we're all now looking at their vessel data and violating their privacy.

I've done some pretty stupid things in my day relating to various activities far* from civilization (my dumbest being an offroad motorcycle trip by myself for which I was not nearly experienced enough, dumped the bike several times, crossed a bridge that definitely wasn't designed to hold a motorcycle, etc.), but I both applaud and receive second-hand anxiety from their massive commitment.

*technically not remote at all in this context as they all took place on trails