What I did was bought a “commercial” television that’s intended to either be put in a waiting room and tuned to Fox News all day, OR used as digital signage. It’s not quite an Arby’s menu board because it’s still obviously a television, has a tuner and such, but it has no “smart” TV in it and the backlight isn’t as “won’t survive a run of Breath of the Wild” like the TCL televisions my parents own. Then I slapped a Raspberry Pi 4 on the back with OSMC on it. Meanwhile I did replace my small form factor desktop gaming rig, so I have a Ryzen 3600/GTX1080 rig sitting unplugged under that television waiting for me to build up the gumption to switch over to it.

There’s a surprising amount of modern Christian lore that actually comes from The Divine Comedy, the granddaddy of all ascended fanfic.

True story, you’d have to sell those at the vegan commune or something.

But you can get decent flavor out of a round red tomato. I know, I do it every year.

Long shelf life and/or physical durability. Alton Brown made this point in an episode of Good Eats by clamping a supermarket tomato in a bench vise.

You don’t need permission to make someone pissed off, you do need their permission to make them pissed on.

I’m sure it’ll piss someone, somewhere off. Literally everything does. Watch, I’m about to post “I’m sure it’ll piss someone, somewhere off. Literally everything does.” on Lemmy, and it’ll piss someone off.

I was kind of wondering how long that project would last.

Good old Thingiverse. You’ll get a great education in now not to design things for 3D printing wading through that slurry pit.

Yes, consider a 3D printer useless if you don’t know how to use 3D modeling software.

So, FreeCAD. It’s a beautiful hot mess. There’s a 1.0 in beta right now that’s bringing some much needed changes.

FreeCAD has a lot of parallel capabilities; it has an architectural workbench for drawing buildings, a Drafting workbench for more traditional 2D drawing, the Part workbench for a weird kind of boolean approach, and the Part Design workbench for a more typical sketch-and-extrude parametric modeling workflow like Fusion360, Inventor or OnShape.

The workflow is you create a sketch and draw a 2D shape, and then extrude (FreeCAD uses the word Pad) it into 3D space, then you can draw further features on that to design the shape you want.

The basis of how it works is somewhat unintuitive at first. “Parametric” means you draw using rules. There’s a piece of software out there called OpenSCAD that is a very pure implementation of this because you “draw” by typing code in a kind of programming language. FreeCAD lets you represent rules by drawing things with the mouse. Rules like “this is a straight line. It is parallel to the X axis. It is 5cm long. The leftmost endpoint is 3cm from the X axis and 4cm from the Y axis.” There’s only one way to draw that line. Those rules may be called Constraints or Dimensions. The powerful part is you can later change one of the rules, like “Did I say 3cm from the X axis? I meant 4cm” and it’ll redraw the whole part for you. Get your head around that concept and CAD software will unlock.

The UIs are different, but the general concepts are similar for FreeCAD, OnShape and Fusion360, sometimes tutorials for one will be useful for learning the others.

I do know that Linus is on record with low opinion of C++. I have heard of him compare the cult-like following Rust has with the whole Vim/Emacs tribalism thing.

I could be a lot happier with Synology. Honestly. When it’s time to replace mine I’m just going to build one.

I’ll allow it (my authority: some jerk that doesn’t even have an account on this instance).

Part of Reddit culture was hyper narrow focus on the topics of subreddits. I wouldn’t be surprised if the mods of r/samsung_galaxy removed “Overall I like my Pixel better” for being off-topic, even if it was a reply in the comment chain “I have both a Pixel 5 and an S22 and the S22 has the better camera.” “Other than the camera which of the two phones do you like best?” 7 day ban, rule 4: mentions another brand of phone without also mentioning a Samsung.

That doesn’t happen here on Lemmy as much and I don’t mind it. While a NAS isn’t necessarily directly a piece of gaming hardware, I think a lot of gamers might have one. Any who stream might save video of their play sessions to a NAS, etc. So I think this article is of peripheral interest to PC gamers.

While I’m sure the statement “some Americans just don’t want a female president” is true, I think the vast majority of them were going to vote Republican basically no matter what.

To paraphrase the conversation that took place on the left:

“The DNC isn’t doing well among young straight white men and it’s getting worse. Barack Obama polled at 66% favorable among that demographic in 2008, and that number has fallen every election until now Harris is polling in the low 40s. There’s a lot of them, and we’re losing them.” A hot mic caught Kamala herself saying exactly that. “We’re losing men.”

Responds the feminists, “Look at the pathetic men throwing a fit because they’re not fully in charge. Something something privilege something something patriarchy. Be better.” I’ll note this didn’t come from Kamala’s campaign, it came from the faceless rabble. The people who said “Yeah no we should probably also talk about issues that are important to men” got shouted down. So white men see that as “The people who vote for this candidate hate me no matter what, and yet they demand my vote no matter what.”

Kamala started this race as Biden’s running mate, then Biden showed up in “mummified during the 6th dynasty of the Old Kingdom” condition at that first debate. No time for a primary, Biden’s out and Kamala’s in. Now she needs a running mate. They put out an APB for a white guy preferably from the south but the midwest will do. There was some brief discussion of North Carolina governor Roy Cooper, well-liked lame duck democrat from a former confederate state, ticks all those boxes. But we landed on Tim Walz. As far as I can tell he was a genuinely solid choice; I’d never heard of him before he was announced as a short runner for Harris’ running mate. Every headline I read about the guy was some new and exciting way he was a saint. Almost suspiciously so. He’s still the only one on the campaign trail who I’d lend a lawnmower to.

Problem #1: We heard the APB as it went out. Here’s my turn to get shouted down: This works on women, muslims, and a significant number of black men, because those demographics have an automatic in-group dynamic. You see posts talking about “My boyfriend was talking to me at the gym and a woman I’ve never met before comes up to pretend to be my friend. I see u gurl.” So both Hilary and Kamala had the white chick vote sewn up just for existing while female. Obama, to a slightly lesser extent, had a similar effect among black men. That doesn’t work on white guys, or at least, the white guys that does work on are very reliable Republican voters.

But, credit where credit is due, Walz seems like a solid guy. If they hadn’t announced out loud they picked him to identity pander I wouldn’t have noticed.

Problem #2: The next time I saw Walz, he was on a commercial cosplaying as a straight white man. “Governor Walz here in a camouflage hat with a dog. Watch me perform a minor repair on an antique SUV.” They ran ads that literally said “I bet you’re tired of hearing how much white guys suck. I mean, some of them do…” That same ad says “They’re really talkin’ to guys like us.” No they weren’t.

They ran ads talking about “I’m a REAL MAN and I’m MAN enough to vote for a WOMAN.”

I didn’t see Tim Walz talking about “The boys who played on my football team are struggling to afford homes. They’re choosing not to get married or have children because for an increasing number of young men it’s just not in the cards.” No I heard a doughy guy dressed like a cowboy say “I eat carburetors for breakfast.”

Among a male loneliness epidemic they ran an ad that said “Women will withhold sex unless you vote for Harris.”

Obama polled well among young men because he engaged with them in their spaces. At the time, Facebook and Twitter were where the young people hung out, and he showed up there to talk to us, which was a welcome change from George W. “An internet” Bush. Obama campaigned on messages of hope and progress. I don’t recall Kamala herself really doing much actual reach-out, and her campaign messaging was either lazy attempts at pandering or naked feminist grievance airing. “We need you to show up and vote for us for the second decade in a row even though we’ve done nothing at all to measurably improve your lives in that time, when we had the power to do so we pissed it down your leg, and we’re okay saying out loud that we thoroughly hate you” has proven to be a losing campaign message.

Turns out there are more straight white men than feminists and queers in the United States voter pool. Hilary proved it and Kamala proved it, pandering exclusively to the former while demanding the support of the former will lose an election to worn out diaper hitler.

Never mind, the solution is to close my father’s Amazon account.

Go work at Coffee Stain or their ilk. They’re a games studio employing multiple developers working on a few games at a time, and they’re not baby punching evil.

You know what? Developers that work at studios that are baby punching evil don’t need to eat. I’m not feeding any of them.

That’s the sound a tennis ball makes.

“That you can self-host” Does a budgeting tool need to be a service that’s constantly running and not an application? I struggle to see how having it running as a service on some box somewhere is going to help. “It’s so you can access it on your phone elsewhere.” Oh great. It’ll have a garbagepuke mobile UI.

There are thousands if not tens of thousands of distros. Wikipedia has a really cool Linux family tree.

If you think of the Linux ecosystem as a whole, a distribution or distro is just someone somewhere took various options and put them together. I want this GUI, this init system, this package manager, this set of default apps. Then someone else says well I want this GUI and this init system but I want that package manager and the other set of default apps. Often they have specific use cases in mind, some specifically target gaming, some are meant for workstation use, some like TAILS are specifically for covert communication, some like Hannah Montana Linux are entirely for fucking around.

You have a selection of GUIs to choose from, some like KDE or Cinnamon are more feature rich and the vast majority of tasks can be done through a GUI settings menu, others are more minimal because some folks prefer just directly editing config files, or so that the software is smaller, lighter and faster. The choice is yours.

I might suggest, if you want to take computer tinkering to the next level, learning a little bit of Python, or maybe playing with the Godot game engine. These work on Windows as well as Linux and turn out to be handy tools.

As for whether you should use Linux? Try it out and see.

If you are where I think you are, I have a 7 storey rotor/stator factory there, despite the arches.