To add to the confusion: For 2 weeks/year I help out the local ballet studio with stage crew. We have this big white backdrop curtain, and colorful lights are pointed directly at the curtain to make dramatic and moody changes to the background during certain dances. When I heard the name of these, I assumed it was the “psyche curtain” and “psyche lights” because that’s how it is pronounced.

Turns out the box is marked “Cyc.” I have to assume that the people that sold the curtain are way less amateur than I am, so I would like to add this third potential spelling.

Just today, I was at a birthday party talking to a stranger. She said her husband uses a sauna daily, but they have an apartment… So he has a pop-up sauna in the kitchen. She said he uses it, wipes it down, and folds it away.

If you’re stuck in a parking spot, and you can’t seem to rock your car out, turn OFF your traction control! (It should be a button with a car and wavy lines that you probably have never pressed before). The traction control takes power away from slipping wheels so if they’re both/all slipping, you get wheels that barely move as you’re stepping in the gas.

Just remember to turn it back on once you’re free

I hadn’t done a bath in years, but at one point we were fixing some of the tile in our bath/shower. To minimize how much water got into the unprotected wall, we had to take baths for about a week.

It was inefficient for time, but maaaaan was it nice. I promised myself I wouldn’t allow myself to lapse like that again. Unfortunately I don’t think I’ve done a bath since.

It’s made from the blood of orphans but still worth it for a good B.M.

Aw man! That’s by far the least interesting.

I was hoping for “Nate n”, “nation”, or multiply them together to get “9 n”

Yup, good read, she’s grandmothering BIG TIME.

My Mom was recently diagnosed type 2, but I think she was completely asymptomatic. I mean, she’s 71 and has lots of symptoms but also plenty of other causes to attribute all of her problems to. When her routine blood work came back with a type 2 diagnosis she said, “shit, I probably should’ve seen that coming. Damn now I have to get really serious about losing weight. I don’t want to be diabetic by this time next year.”

All the time. When people start talking about how the FDA and legislators are all captured by industry lobbyists. YES! And the regulations they wrote don’t actually help protect people. YES! So we should skip vaccines and drink raw milk. NOoooooooooo!

So close but the answer I was looking for was abandon FPP elections so we can have a multi-party system that actually represents us and maybe has a chance at overturning citizens United and all that stuff. I don’t know, I’m not a poly scientist, I’m just pretty sure pasteurization isn’t the root cause here.

I also knew nothing about self hosting, but wanted to move away from Google photos, and that eventually led me towards self-hosting and immich.

Most people recommend using something like Tailscale so you can access your server from anywhere. That wouldn’t necessarily work for me, because I wanted to be able to share links to pics and videos with friends/family who wouldnt be a part of my Tailscale network.

I ended up purchasing a cheap domain, and using cloudflare to allow me to share links broadly. (Because my family deserves better quality videos of my adorable children than the compressed crap that comes through in a group message between iOS and android. I have tried SO hard to convince them to move our group chat do a different platform but I have failed.). It’s probably ill-advised for somebody who knows as little as I do to go this route, but I’m filled with the un-earned confidence of a middle-aged white man.

I just set up a new computer that was deemed unworthy of Windows 11 on Linux Mint. I don’t believe I opened the terminal at all, except to do ssh-keygen stuff for my server, which I would assume you skip on grandma’s computer.

The wifi, wireless printer, etc all just worked.

When people are over my house I usually offer them an “adult beverage” but now I’m totally replacing that with “ethanol”

I have done that in a pinch but disliked how it made my hair feel. For me, shampoo bars are a good compromise because the feel/smell nice but one bar lasts me like, a year.

I have tried a lot of things including pre-boiling, ice-baths, baking soda, and air-frying. In the end it just made me appreciate how good and easy restaurant fries are even more.

Yeah, my 1st car died a rust death due to its winters in Syracuse (basically a Canadian climate). I’m 40 y/o and my 2nd car is still going strong (much to my wife’s dismay)

I feel like Indonesian is a decent start. There are already a lot of people speaking it, and it’s REALLY easy to learn.

There’s no conjugation and no cases/agreement. I’m a native English speaker and picked up a functional amount of Indonesian in a matter of months, just from reading a couple books before we went.

In undergrad, our engineering 101 course had a team project/final to use the Lego robotics kits to make a robot “mars rover”. There was a play field, and we got points based on the ability to touch ping pong balls, carry ping pong balls, and return ping pong balls to the collection area.

Points were deducted from teams based on “material cost” (each Lego had a price) and “labor” (time to build your robot). Scores were doubled if your robot was autonomous, which was mostly achieved by following black lines on the white table, because the Lego kits included light sensors.

We got to the last day , and realized that what we had was NOT going to work. We scrapped the whole thing, and made a tiny car that just ran straight out, hit a ball, and ran straight back.

On the mission day, they moved the table out of the sub-basement and into the classroom. The change in lighting jacked up everybody’s pathfinding, so everybody’s guidance failed. We failed the cheapest and won the day.

Still can’t figure out of the test was a catastrophe or if we learned the EXACT lesson that he was trying to teach.

Texting 911 is a thing? I had no idea, I never thought about it.

Dang…now I kinda’ wanna’ see that art.

People I work with were shocked to learn I share a toothbrush with my wife. This being a work chat, I had to settle for, “Wait till you hear what else we share”… But I like yours way better.