If you want pseudo espresso grab a moka pot. You can snag them for like $20-50 and they make a good strong espresso style brew on your stove.

No one makes a 65+" oled monitor so before anyone suggests “just buy a monitor” you can’t, I have looked.

Up until last year, I would have said get a good quality projector but even projectors have started getting infiltrated with smart “features” now.

Digital signage was also an option but oled options are basically non-existent and they often have matte screens that make the colors kind of mushy.

From what I have read online, the Sony tv offerings seem to be pretty unintrusive and don’t really care if you hook them up to the internet. The smart software is android tv based and can potentially be modded/stripped of google services. I have to do some more research though so don’t quote me on the above.

Our current TCL/Roku tv is dying and has turned out to be really bad smart/privacy wise and has gotten consistently worse performance wise over time. I’m currently evaluating options for its replacement and the Sony 65" oled is looking like the best one so far.

I just learned about the vpn thing a few days ago and its annoying.

John Dies at the End is a good b/c/campy movie. It is absolutely not 1:1 to the books (which are good) but its a weird fun movie.

It would be funnier if there wasn’t a sizeable percentage of people who support the cheetoh. There is still a real chance of that demented racist pos winning come november.

It’s how you keep them passive while holding them.

Google made lots of stuff that I used and enjoyed, then slowly made them worse or outright killed them off. Hangouts was imo the gold standard of simple chat programs, their podcast app was excellent and ad free. Both are now gone.

They also have been ceaselessly working to wring every last cent out of their products at the expense of the user experience. The products and services were fine and they were making loads of money even with adblocking and tracker blocking in place but they knew they could make more money and most people would just accept the inconvenience so they said fuck em and ran with it.

The awesome thing is that those marks can be counterfeit and you only know by looking up the number.

I went the same route, it was significantly less expensive to get a nicer custom ring made by a local jewler I knew, to my spec/design then to get a commodity one from a store.

The answer is it depends on a lot of things, my answer comes from my current financial situation which is stable but not anything crazy.

If I have been working a lot and have money to use, I value my free time at ~2-3x my equivalent hourly wage. If the task is something I enjoy and I have time, I’d rather do it myself than pay someone else. If it is something messy, something I don’t want to do, or something I am bad at or might screw up, that is a problem that money can solve.

It shouldn’t be controversial to say this but humans deserve free time, we should have leisure and hobbies. You should not have to constantly fight/work to survive. We as a species are past that point and it is sad that society has not figured that out. Instead society chooses to keep the status quo where some people have to work 60-80hrs a week to exist.

No, I don’t have the answer on how to change that.

Yeahhhhhh, I used to recommend his channel to young engineers and techs because of how thorough he was at explaining the how and why of mechanisms. I don’t anymore which is a shame because he was knowledgeable.

The pikes peak international hillclimb is on the 23rd.

Its not beaming in, its beaming out.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18417-earth-calling-a-short-history-of-radio-messages-to-et/

Pinch and rule, don’t scratch

In Texas, your property tax is already somewhat two tiered. Your first home is taxed as a homestead and you get an exemption on part of the property tax. If you own a second, third, etc you have to pay the full amount and the annual increases are not capped. Im not 100% sure on the specifics as I don’t own more than 1 though.

The boss from Saints Row

We did formal typing classes in school starting from primary school up to middle school but that was not what made me a proficient typist. I got comfortable with a keyboard and more proper typing by actually doing it.

Some of that is on me for being a little shit in school, some of it is because the classes were shit. My point was that typing is a skill and there is more than one way to learn it and that a generation shouldn’t be judged from a snapshot at a relatively young age.

That said, a relatively large number of the younger engineers I work with ARE missing critical basic tech/mechanical/problem solving skills so I do recognize that there seems to be a generational difference in some areas. I didn’t get to work with a young engineer from a previous generation when they were a young engineer though so I can’t say that for sure.

I was born im 1990, grew up on desktop computers, and did the hunt and peck thing until I actively began using my keyboard for research papers, essays, etc. It is a skill that I picked up on with use, not from instruction.

Yeahhhhhh luthier-ing is a rabbit hole all its own… I am about to start on build 3, from a tree in my yard.