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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It’s always hard to decipher poor English, but that does seem possible. If you have a multimeter, plugging the socket into a cable would at least allow you to verify the ground and +5v easily. The data etc pins should be doable too, by using a USB A to C cable, and doing a continuity check to the pins inside the USB A side, which would be easy to look up reliably.

    As far as swapping the wires around in the plug, that’s one of the easiest plugs to do it with. If you do need to, you’ll be able to.



  • The fact that phones haven’t been able to to this easily/natively/what have you is wild. Similarly, the fact that you can’t use old tablets as external monitors without, in my experience of quite a few, significantly buggy software that’s got significant lag in the best of times, is pretty wild. Sure, the technical hurdles aren’t small, but damn.

    I’ve got a reasonably high end newish tablet (Galaxy S7+) that I can use miracast to use wirelessly as an extra PC monitor. It works quite well… if I’m near to a high quality new router. But can I just plug the tablet in and use it as a monitor with my laptop? Not remotely well.

    It’s been a year or two, maybe I should check for new software again.


  • Depending on context, value is also often required. That can be in the form of nutrition, taste, flavor, preservation, or appearance. Take edible gold leaf, sugar free fairly nutrition free candies, spices, or hot sauce as examples. Their ingredients too, there’s wood fiber derivatives used as fillers sometimes.

    On the flip side, a gold wedding band can pass through a digestive tract quite safely, and is materially identical to edible gold leaf. Generally not considered edible though. A sheaf of printer paper? Not edible. Some small paper wrappings, often edible. Similarly a marble would pass through with no danger unless chewed. In many ways safer than a very strong hot sauce or some baking ingredients. And yet…

    Edible is quite a wiggly term.


  • This is a delight piece of work, and well worth the research needed to make it.

    Sometimes you have to draw a line in the sand about strange low-stakes terminology opinions you’re passionate about.
    I had a similarly passionate “what counts as a jumpsuit” debate not too long ago. The key difference in opinions was about sleeve length.

    I will begrudgingly call a jumpsuit with short sleeves a jumpsuit, but once it has no sleeves at all it cannot hold the title anymore. Jumpsuits were designed as full body garments for jumping out of planes, fancy dress overalls just aren’t jumpsuits, regardless of the slow bastardization of the term fashion has allowed. There’s no great title for it, overalls shares a similar niche but not quite. Romper also comes close, but requires shorts, not full length legs.

    Thanks for the rant.





  • While there is a certain level of innate technical mindedness that people have… Being willing to try to fix it, and the lessons you’ll learn from either fixing it or not is huge. Regardless of outcome hopefully the experience will be somewhat fun and pay dividends in terms of being able to recognize where vacuums get bound up with clogs, hair, etc. Occasional deep cleaning will make all the vacuums in your future live longer and suck harder.

    Projects that are ‘either it gets fixed or tossed’ are great, there’s so little pressure, and so much you can learn.

    Feel free to ask more specific questions if you get deep inside it and come up with them!



  • I actually own and use drones for these things:
    Scouting out roads/hiking-biking trails/camping spots/photog raphy spots. The drone has saved a good bit of time, and kept me from going down some real nasty roads for no payoff or just regular roads that dead end somewhere that has no view, or already has someone parked at. Similarly my ebike is also helpful for scouting out roads to see if it’s worth taking the van down. Yes, I’m conscious of drone laws and how obnoxious they are, I do my best to minimize noise and am careful about not bothering people, people deserve to hear nature in nature.

    Figuring out if I have to clean the gutters again.
    Make friends.
    One time I used it as a birds eye view with VR(ish) goggles for fun. It was fun, it was awful.
    Take pictures of a friend’s van’s solar installation for insurance purposes.

    Things I do that aren’t weird:
    Take aerial photography/videography.
    Fly around and have fun.

    I may use a drone for the following, but have yet to:
    Get a different view to see if I’m gonna run the van into tree limbs, rocks, etc.
    Fly a cup of sugar to a neighbor who would like to borrow some.
    Have an outdoor “ceiling” light.

    If you have any questions, ask away.



  • I did that once, albeit walking, not driving, and the drone had no auto flight programming. It was really hard to do anything more than walking on flat ground. Bumpy ground, difficult. Try to grab something on a shelf, difficult. This was a few years back, so tech is better, having auto follow would free up some brain power, but it’d still be real rough.

    There’s a video of a bunch of soccer players trying to play using VR and a camera above the field, it’s got some funny moments.