I used to be ride or die for Makita as an electrician, but they’ve gone downhill lately and their battery prices are insane! Used to be a Makita could fall off a ladder onto the chuck and bounce. Last year my crew had two drills newly bought that year CATCH FIRE and one strip the gearbox. Embarassing performance.

I’ve pivoted to Ridgid with their dirt cheap batteries with lifetime warranty. And I have a couple Ridgid->Makita adapters to use my new collection of Ridgid batteries with my tough old Makita tools. Battery adapters will free you from that lock-in.

Honestly I’ve been impressed with the Ridgid tools though, same manufacturer as Milwaukee and Ridgid has always been a big brand with plumbers. The brushless tools I’ve bought have been powerful and robust so far. No regrets

Really annoying is when recent devices don’t respect the DNS you’re advertising or allow configuration (Android…)

My site is behind CGNAT on IPv4 with recently added fully routed IPv6. There are legacy control devices all over it that don’t speak IPv6, with local DNS records that allow them to be readily accessed while walking around with a mobile device… Allowed them to be accessed that is, until IPv6.

The Android IPv6 stack ignores the RA for my local DNS and also resolves via v6 by default, forwarding local queries upstream and returning no results. Then it doesn’t bother to fall back to v4. Unrooted Android has no exposed configuration for IPv6 of any sort to modify its behaviour, no hosts file to override or any way I can see to fix this. I can’t even disable IPv6 on my phone.

So to access my local devices from Android I need to use their full IPv4 address or VPN back into my own network… Oh wait, the stack is so broken that despite setting DNS in Wireguard, it still tries to resolve through upstream v6 first!

Apparently recent smart TVs are doing similar even on IPv4, hard-coded to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 to dodge ad blocking, which is plain malicious and ignores all standards…

So anyways this is why DNS is dragon #3

For free tier, Google Cloud is more transparent about what you get than AWS IMO.

The only catch is to make sure your persistent disk is “standard” to make it totally free as it defaults to SSD.

However if you do mess up the disk you’ll still only be paying $1-2/mo. Been using GC for years, and recently they finally started offering dual stack so you can do your own 6to4 tunneling or translation if you want, depends on your usage case.

AirVPN also are legit and will let you forward ports to expose your local services if you’re worried about DMCA type issues.

I finally got IPv6 here through Starlink, it’s nice to have full access to the internet again after a decade behind CGNAT

Probably an AI created image or just a shoddy stock photo drawing

The sad thing is, the kind of peaked-in-highschool voter that voted for Trump and can be swung absolutely will care about how he smells. I can hear it now, “I’m not voting for some stinky old man” “I thought the diapers thing was a myth”

This kind of low blow absolutely will have effect if they can make it stick. A sad day for democracy? Definitely. But that’s the media environment of today.

Also it gives opponents a chance to needle dick him in debates which will cause him to fly into a rage and embarrass himself. God only knows what TMI he might rave about, his bathroom habits etc. Even tiny jabs like “do I have to be the guy to sit next to Trump” have huge rage potential.

Thanks for sharing your experience, stranger. This is one of the reasons I like Lemmy though I do still hang out on Reddit, more serious discussion, less memes and trolling. Well… unless you count the front page, I guess.

I can see the cliques issue being a big one especially if you were an outsider from a different community, and came in at the middle school level. That sounds brutal, honestly.

My daughter is lucky to be young and already have friends in the school, girls she grew up and went to daycare and earlier grades with. They still hang out on weekends and chat with their kid messenger app all the time, so that’s a foot in the door for sure. In the school she goes to now, there is already bullying and violence so I figure it can’t really be worse. On the upside I guess it’s already made her tough, we put her in Taekwondo after school and she took to it like a fish to water, she’s a little scrapper and her kicks are really mean for a 9yo girl. She already wants to integrate her boxing skills into an MMA style and they’re like no, you can’t spar like that with the other kids as they aren’t expecting a right hook!

The religion class issue sounds odd. It implies that those courses like CAD and coding are only available to those who give up the religious component? But those are premium courses that you would think they want their Catholic students to be able to take. Or am I misunderstanding the way it works?

I grew up with some guys and had some other friends who went to Catholic schools and it seems their opinions were similar to yours. Either they loved it and made friends for life, or they hated it and felt excluded from groups. Nothing in between. However even those who hated it said the same thing looking back, they were glad that they went there for the future opportunities it gave them.

The public school won’t allow an end of semester transfer out (probably because they lose the funding) so there’s plenty of time to confirm this is what I want for her before next school year, and I’m doing a lot of research and talking to a lot of people.

Yeah it’s… Pretty bad here. I used to be proud to be Canadian but when I look at what I wrote, it drives home how our country is just a shadow of the place I grew up in. The average Canadian is barely getting by, and quality of services is degrading rapidly.

Sounds like you’re in Europe. I’ve often wondered what it would be like, if we could start a new life somewhere civilized.

I’m electrician and electric motor systems technologist by certification, systems integrator, programmer, millwright and machinist by skillset, CTO is my current job title. Wife has degrees in physics and controls technology, used to work oilfield engineering, now teaches science and math at post-secondary level. Daughter is a 9yo Linux desktop user and Python programmer, deserves a better future than this country has to offer. Got her an Arduino robot kit for Christmas.

Any market for people like us over there? I would love to abandon this sinking ship.

So here in Canada (at least on the Prairies) we’re lucky enough to have Catholic school as a publicly funded option. There would be no additional cost to me.

The thing is my kid is doing great for now (grade 4) and I’ve taught her a ton of science, engineering and math from my own knowledge. She’s bright and engaged… At home. But the standard school system is trying their best to change that.

In her class at school they are still counting blocks and doing 2-digit addition. And they need to do that, because there are kids in her class who can’t count. And can’t read! In grade 4!

The teachers say she’s top of the class easily, but how do they quantify that, just that she seems smart? There is no scoring, no grades, no discipline. It’s nothing like school when I was young. There’s this little shit in her class that likes to scream so they gave everyone else earmuffs to use when he does. He’s not disabled or anything mind you - just a spoiled disruptive little shit.

It’s a trash environment that’s hard on smart kids. I taught her how to box and also how nice girls only ever hurt someone by accident. So far she’s knocked out a kid who likes to push little girls down the stairs and took another bully’s teeth out. She told me “but they were gonna fall out anyways. It was an accident!” Good job, kid.

More parents have been pulling their smart kids for the Catholic school and she lost 2 of her best friends there this year. Most of the other kids left aren’t really decent company… They are dumb as a load of rocks honestly. The selection pressure to the Catholic system and to private schools has taken its toll.

So I went to visit the Catholic school to see what it was like and it was night and day. The kids were all lean, healthy looking and bright eyed. No fat kids. No scrubs. No screaming brats. No tablets or phones, at recess everyone was playing sports and games and laughing and smiling. Looks like the kind of company I want my daughter to grow up with, honestly.

The principal was horrified to hear my stories from public school and promised that they teach kids individually with extra projects and enrichment for kids who are ahead. Which is great because often my daughter tells me she wants to just stay on the farm with me “Because there’s no point in going to school, I’ll learn more working with you”

They have sports, they have clubs, everything from knitting and choir to lockpicking and hacking. They have a full band program and an entire supply of loaner instruments! A huge and well kept library full of mostly secular books. All the stuff that a school should have, but mostly it’s what it doesn’t have that I’m interested in. Otherwise she’s going to fall off the rails and spend her highschool days like I did - bored to death and getting into drugs, drinking and causing trouble.

My wife teaches at a local college and is very concerned that the quality of incoming students seems to drop every year and yet their attitudes get more and more entitled. The Catholic district has won industry awards for their mentorship and job placement programs, the public district… Well… They don’t even have them.

This is how you exist as an institution for thousands of years, yes

Honestly as Christianity goes the Catholics are fucking moderates these days. Which really is saying something.

Also the Pope has like, the world’s best hat.

We’re a non-religious, casually Christian affiliated family and we’re seriously thinking of sending our daughter to a Catholic school just for the far higher quality of education. (No concerning priests or nuns btw, these are government run schools)

I never would have even considered it as an option 10 years ago. But they really do seem to have their shit together, terrible acts in the past notwithstanding

With Trump’s rabid base guaranteed to turn out, a third party vote is a vote for Trump.

I agree it’s a time for a new direction. I don’t agree that either party is Nazis, that’s stupid hyperbole. And right now, with a second Trump term on the line, is not the time to push for a new direction. That would definitely be one of the worst things America could do to itself

Ballsy? He’s an outright copyright troll and anyone celebrating him here in the comments should read the article…

He wrote a knockoff book and then tried to claim Tolkien’s characters as his own and sue his estate? Does nobody remember the days of BS software patent trolls trying to claim they invented “the app” or “method for clicking on things with the mouse cursor?” Do we remember how mad we were at those shysters?

This guy deserves whatever he gets.

You don’t even need to watch the sequel to see that, as genies being bound by specific rules is the whole point of tricking him into becoming a genie.

Though after Aladdin wishes for the Genie’s freedom, it really opens a can of worms as to what that means. Sure, I guess he’s free to roam the earth, and no longer bound to grant wishes. But at the same time, has he now lost that power?

Because Disney ending aside, you would think an unbound genie with his full powers would be something that only ends badly.

Personally I live in a very rural location and I farm, so I can spend a lot of time on the road or in my tractor. 1gb wouldn’t get me through a day in the field, so I have a pretty big collection with a lot of variety. We don’t even have reliable FM radio here, so it’s bring your own music or listen to the diesel roar.

We’re talking about replacing lost content here though. And as such you can use the streaming services as a “backup” by re-ripping your whole collection if you lose it.

I’m actually doing this now as part of a library cleanup. Zotify + beets are a great combo to pull down vast quantities of music and properly sort and tag it.

Then I stream it to my phone in my truck using ampache and ultrasonic, which does have a local buffering option.

However if you have some exotics that you ripped from rare discs, demos or prerelease, live recordings with sentimental value etc. I would suggest keeping those properly backed up. I don’t have many of these, but the ones I do have are backed up both cloud and offsite.

The reason everything is on a touch screen now is that it’s cheaper than physical switches, as ridiculous as that seems. And yes, I greatly prefer physical switches.

Buy and wire multiple switches on every car, requiring wiring harnesses, ECM IO pins etc. or pay an intern a minimal sum once so he can put “designed Chevrolet in-dash console” on his resume. Then never update it even though it supports OTA updates and is a glitchy mess, Chevy

This is the same reason so many products come with a stupid Bluetooth app now rather than more than one button. Pay once rather than pay on every unit.

Good point. I run a lot of old equipment and compared to what new stuff could handle, I absolutely abuse it.

My flatbed “1-ton” F350 used to be a grain truck. 1 ton of grain wouldn’t even fill half the box.

I can put 4 round bales on the deck, well over 2 tons, and the overload spring pack isn’t even touching the mounts yet. It was overbuilt, all right.

The craziest thing to me is they didn’t have any sort of CAD, 3d printing or other rapid prototyping tech. Most of these things wouldn’t work if made from a cheap sample material either, due to the torque they needed to handle. So really the only option was to put a ton of effort into design, make a few prototypes and start manufacturing. Iterative design could take years to get results back from users.

The classic example to me is the square bale knotter. A collection of cast iron sector gears, cams, jackshafts, blades and hooks with grippers, flung through their complex cycle in 1/4 second in dirty field conditions. Using arbitrary twine and tension, variable drive speed and a product that can vary from 10lbs to 80lbs per volume. For tens of thousands of cycles with minimal maintenance aside from pumping grease into the grease points.

And mine is still working perfectly today after 60 years or more! This year it didn’t miss one single knot of thousands. Incredible engineering.

Everything will seem to be be going great, but to actually gain access to the castle you’ll have to compare your situation to successful rescues to find the undocumented drawbridge control

You want the real sleepless experience, forget about Minecraft, go for broke and stay up all night in Don’t Starve