Alt account of @Badabinski

Just a sweaty nerd interested in software, home automation, emotional issues, and polite discourse about all of the above.

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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • Man, that’s cool! Concrete is a heck of a lot cheaper than epoxy granite resin and is perfectly suitable for a low-precision tool like this lathe.

    I do hope that he finds a way to shield those bearings. You really don’t want metal chips or sawdust making its way in there. Any damage they sustain will cause runout, which will lead to increased chatter and parts that are out of spec. Plus, a matching pair of tapered roller bearings can be quite expensive!

    EDIT: to be clear, I mean no disrespect when I say low-precision. Not every lathe needs to have slides and handwheels. I have a little Sherline lathe that I’ve used like this in the past (using gravers, not tools in a tool holder). It’s great to quickly turn something or to put nice decorative details on a part. Precision is possible with a lathe like this, but it requires fairly strenuous effort.







  • Flashlights that use the open source Anduril v2 interface are… tolerable, I’d say. It’s not good, it’s not intuitive, but it does at least make it easy to just turn the damn flashlight on and off.

    1. Click once to turn it on, once to turn it off
      • While it’s on, hold the button down to change the brightness
    2. Click twice quickly to put it in turbo mode, click twice quickly to take it out of turbo mode. One click turns the light off
    3. Click twice and hold your second click to turn the light on in turbo mode. Once you let go of the button, the light turns off. I actually really like this mode
    4. Strobe is three clicks, but it’s not the discotheque-ass crazy strobe, it’s usually an SOS pattern. One click turns it off
    5. Click four times to lock the flashlight. This stops it from turning on in your pocket. This is a big deal for some flashlights because they’re bright/hot enough to burn you if left on in an enclosed space. Four clicks takes it out of lock mode

    The interface gets way more complicated after that, but I don’t bother with any of that shit. Luckily, it’s hard to accidentally activate the crazy bullshit.

    There are also lights that mimic this pattern, but differ in a few key ways. The Wurkkos FC11 is a great option that’s relatively cheap. The 4000 K version is $35 and is bright with a nice neutral color temperature (I find it much easier on the eyes.) It follows the interface rules I outlined above except that it’s missing number 3 and the strobe is of the flashy hold-a-rave variety. Still, you have to specifically press the button 3 times in a row pretty quickly to trigger it. I never have accidental raves with mine.





  • I haven’t seen it mentioned here, so I’ll rep for Noita. It’s an amazing rogue-like with great atmosphere and a really compelling world to explore.

    There’s a chemistry/alchemy system in the game that is really detailed and fun to explore. The game’s tagline is “every pixel simulated,” and it’s not an exaggeration. Noita is like those falling sand games that were popular in the early 2000s, where each particle of sand could interact with other particles. Imagine that, but you’re a badass witch flying through the world and blasting motherfuckers who try to get in your way. Your wands can set things on fire or freeze them or melt them with acid or blow them up or other crazy shit.

    The wand mechanics are incredibly deep. Like, it’s not “turing complete” levels of deep, but the rules for spells interact in incredibly interesting and exploitable ways. The feeling you get when you discover a powerful combo of spells is incredible.

    The devs also have a cool policy of turning bugs into gameplay mechanics. I really can’t say much about this without spoiling things, so this one is hard to talk about. Basically, if someone finds an exploit, they oftentimes won’t “fix” it. Instead, they’ll take it and tweak it to add consequences for using the exploit, or they’ll balance it a bit to make it harder/remove a bit of the benefit. It’s a really cool approach and has lead to a great relationship between the devs and the community. They don’t take our toys away, they just make them work better in the world.

    I played the game completely blind until I got my first win (it took about 80 hours of playtime), and I’d highly recommend that approach for folks who are willing to tolerate failure and who like to experiment. If it’s too frustrating then that’s okay, there are a lot of guides out there to help out new players without giving up too much. Many people describe your first win as you beating the tutorial, and there’s some truth to that.

    It can be gruellingly difficult at times, but it’s just so damn good, and there’s so damn much of it. I have around 600 hours in in that game which is twice as much as any other game I’ve played.


  • I love Simple Audiobook Player+. The UI is super minimal (and really maxes out the whole OLED black thing if you choose it) without compromising on features that are kind of essential for audiobooks (e.g. delayed pause/sleep timers, speed settings, volume boosting, an EQ). My favorite thing is the “undo seek” button. I’m an oaf who is constantly inputting accidental touches. When I was using Audible, I’d have to manually find where I was after accidentally hitting the next chapter button or moving the dot on the progress bar. SABP lets me just undo that shit.

    It hasn’t been updated in a while, but it doesn’t need updating when it does its job so well. There are no ads, no marketing notifications, just books. It’s like a program from coreutils in app form. It might be a bit ugly or outdated looking, but I’m about that.


  • Yeah, it’s really not too bad. It’s mostly boring. I brought headphones to my last root canal because I don’t like the sound the tools make (there’s some bone conduction going on, so the headphones let me drown that out) and that made the whole experience much nicer for me. I’m particularly sensitive to sounds, so sound has always been the worst part of any dental work for me.





  • I definitely haven’t been shouted at in any of the European airports I’ve been in (from memory, KEF, HEL, AMS, MAD, BCN, NCE, and BER, so not super representative of the continent), so to me, it seems like an American phenomenon. I haven’t been to Canada enough to know what it’s like there. It’s also somewhat recent. I’ve been flying for 25ish years now, and I feel like the yelling has only been happening for the past, I dunno, 5-7 years?

    As others have said, I don’t think it’s that we like being shouted at. We just have a large number of people who are, uh, “ruggedly individual,” to put it in nice terms. Those people don’t really think about others enough, so you have to yell at them to get them to pay attention to the world around them. I’m the type of person that looks up the rules before I leave and makes sure I have all of my shit out of my pockets before I even enter the security line to ensure I don’t reduce the efficiency of the security checkpoint. I often feel a bit exasperated with the people who don’t think about others in those situations.

    As a means of dealing with it, I’ve found that smiling, making eye contact, and nodding at the TSA agent doing the yelling makes them less likely to yell at me while simultaneously making me feel a bit less frustrated—expressing nice feelings and trying to show some common humanity with the people I’m interacting with makes it harder for me to feel angry. Not saying that’d work for everyone, but it’s helpful for me.