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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • Fwiw, soulseek’s usability is not horrid. I have about 8500 albums, mostly downloaded from there and bandcamp. I also combined libraries with a few friends over the years, which is always fun to just bring over a hard drive and share.

    Yes, it’s more work but with things like Plexamp I have all the music I could ever want and it works wonderfully when remote, even does the whole “radio” suggested artists thing within my own library.

    Another friend of mine has 38k albums. Sometimes I’ll change the source to his and bop around.

    What good is piracy unless you’re amassing a huge server full of all your favorite media



  • My favorite was for a job installing cable for some subcontractor for Comcast and there was a bunch of talk about how much money I could make I just had to “hustle” and “get my numbers up” and I could “make my own way as my own contractor”. Red flags all around but I was like 20 and just getting out on my own and before I got serious about doing real electrical work as a career.

    Anyway after orientation that included the guy telling us “don’t have sex with any clients this isn’t like those pornos where she bangs the cable guy”, I go out in a van with a dude. He was basically like “listen man this job pays jack shit. If they don’t have enough work for you you’re gonna be sitting in the van making minimum wage. I would honestly plan for your pay to be around that for your first year”

    I basically quit on the spot. Got to go up on a telephone pole though, that was cool I guess.


  • I know what you’re sayin but AWG doesn’t use fractions. A good equivalent would be like shirt size. Small, medium, large, extra large. It’s just that size wire and that’s the end of it. You don’t need to know the diameter or cross section of conductor or whatever.

    And even fractions are more of a feeling for us I guess. If you work with tools you can spot an inch, quarter inch, foot, etc. It really does come down to a “feeling” in a way that’s difficult to put in words.



  • I like using metric for measuring with a tape measure. Feels a bit more accurate and easy to remember as you go.

    But wire size I think AWG (American wire gauge) is far superior than metric. Easy to remember, 18 16 14 12 or 10 AWG. Compared to metric which just lists the outside diameter. So those same sizes in metric are 1, 1.5, 2.5, 4, 6 mm²

    I’m sure if I used it every day it’d be different. And the larger sizes in AWG are kind of a mess. It’s even numbers til 1 AWG, then there’s technically a 0 AWG, then it goes 1/0 to 4/0, then 250 - 1000 MCM (but also some people call it kcmil?)

    Still just “feels” right to me after using it for so long



  • Are PVC pipes like that common for water lines in the UK? In the US they’re illegal in some parts of the country and are typically seen as “not if but when” they’ll fail. I’ve seen them just randomly explode and dump full pressure water into somewhere.

    Might be slightly different in the UK but the way they’re installed in the US is gluing the different CPVC pieces together. This is different than PEX which is the more modern method and is crimped water lines.


  • I am extremely focused on industrial electrical work as a career and have done it for about 12 years. To be quite honest, I can’t picture myself ever doing anything else.

    As a hobby though, I love working with wood. I’ve been slowly building my new kitchen and enjoying it quite a bit. Woodworking may be in my future. A good friend of mine has a membership to a shop that’s close by


  • Side note but I really don’t know that drill. I’ve used Linux since 2010 and only begrudgingly dual booted in the years before proton was a thing, but now have used it as my only OS since Valve started developing it.

    Highly recommend trying it out if you like to tinker. Modding things like Bethesda games is possible, but it’s been a while since I played one so I can’t remember all the specifics.

    Achievements are cool sometimes. I did some challenge runs on Factorio like “there is no spoon” which is launching a rocket in under 8 hours. There is almost always a mod that turns achievements back on for most games fwiw





  • I took a keyed industrial switch home from work that I have the power cord ran thru which also has a CT wrapped around it hooked up to a little ammeter screen and it gives accurate power draw info (volts, watts, amps)

    It’s cool but I have to turn the switch to put power on my PC which every time I do I see something flash on the motherboard and it posts three times before booting and does this weird power cycle thing so I hope I’m not fucking up the caps or something LOL.

    I’ve been meaning to re-wire it so the PC stays connected to the wall and I just use the switch on the case to turn on and off. Then keep the CT and ammeter connected and those turn on only when I turn the switch because I don’t want that screen on when I’m tryin to sleep.

    I also have a little light controller in the box with the switch, ammeter, and 120v light that’s like this old school bay accessory from 2006-ish that’s supposed to hook up to lights in your PC case but I took some multiconductor cord and terminal blocks home from work and strung them around under my desk.

    I realize all this is like an unhinged setup lol. I also have a remote start button in my living room so I can turn the PC on when I’m chillin in there and interact with it via a KVM.





  • Like most of the US, we had a weeks long cold spell with average temperatures around 5-10° F. It started to really affect my psyche. It was followed by a sprout of really mild winter weather, getting up to 60°. It snowed a bunch last night but it’s supposed to warm back up this week.

    I couldn’t even get up my street for most of the cold weather due to a foot of snow that wasn’t melting. So I was parking under a bridge and walking like 5-10 minutes each way thru the woods every time I went to work, which has been 7 day weeks lately.

    I finally got some crucial insulating done at my house but there was some bad drafts and stupid shit I found behind the walls of just holes out to nothing. Which the house is right up against a story tall retaining wall so it was almost impossible to see from the outside. There’s like maybe a foot between the wall and the house.