• 2 Posts
  • 35 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 1st, 2023

help-circle

  • So let’s say you want to buy a painting for your house. You’ve got a few options. You can go online, look at various items and choose to buy it. You could go to a gallery, look around and decide to buy whichever one suits you.

    But crucially, you get to what you’re buying before you commit to the ownership. You may not own the rights to the paintings (its probably a print), but you know what you’re getting. Why would I pay for a movie if I don’t know whether or not it’s worth it.

    Netflix, Hulu, amazon, etc. Are like galleries. They have an entrance fee and that’s ok. But what most of them don’t have anyway for me to actually buy a copy. Netflix movies require you to pay month over month to maintain access. So you are forever required to go to their gallery.

    Like your friend, I’ll pirate to watch a movie and if I like it, then I’ll buy it. I try to buy physical discs, but they are becoming more and more rare. I pirate because I want ownership. Subscription models work because they are more convenient than physical purchases. But that convience is getting smaller every day.

    There is a few reasons why I want physical copies. License deals expire and thus the content may disappear from the service it’s on. My internet may be out. Yes, I can download, but that requires inconvenient forethought and you’re always limited in the number of downloads and quality of those downloads. Having a large collection of movies in my home means I’m never without option.

    Basically, I pirate because I’m not going to buy something that I don’t know if I want it, and because I’m a doomsday prepper who has no other option 90% of the time.





  • The best beginner guide I’ve found is bcae1. It’s just some dudes blog, but he made it up as a basic electronics lesson plan with a focus on car audio. It’ll help you to get a really good idea of how everything works together. I still regularly use the site as reference.

    On YouTube, there’s a channel called Car Audio Fabrication . He explains alot of stuff very well and will give suggestions on what equipment to buy. He puts a lot of focus on making a build look clean and professional.

    For home stuff, parts express is the defacto DIY audio store. They have a lot of resources on their site from blog posts, how to guides, and even customer projects.

    Crutchfield is easily one of the best sources for both home and car. Excellent customer support, virtually unbeatable. Lots of resources like parts express (maybe more). They do tend to carry more mainstream products. Which is fine. It’s all quality products, but I do find that you’re often paying more for Crutchfield. Both because a lot of their products carry name weight and are more expensive because of that, and because their customer support is good enough to warrant a little extra.

    For car stuff, since I do competition grade builds, I like sounds solutions audio and Down 4 Sound. D4S’ owner is very active on YouTube and Instagram.

    Well, that’s a lot of good places to start. Electricity is magic. Don’t fool yourself into thinking it’s not. Even after you “understand” it, it’s still magic. The last link up give you is for Sparkfun. They’re a retailer like parts express and Crutchfield with excellent guides/resources and community showcases. They’re focus is on low voltage electronics like arduino and raspberry pi.

    Anyway, have fun learning. If you have questions, feel free to DM me. I love talking about this stuff.


  • Nights absolutely. With 2 weeks off, I easily stay up till 5 in the morning without even realizing it’s that late. I’ve always found it hard to sleep at 10pm like other people, and I won’t start get tired until 3am.

    Unfortunately the shift I’m on right now is 12 hour shifts, which means I’m up till 8-10am. Which is a little later than I like, but I still feel better than waking up at 6am. Working 6am-6pm is way rougher on me than 6pm-6am


  • I don’t know if I have the same disorder, but I definitely feel this. It’s so much nicer at night. A lot of people fuck up their sleep schedule on the weekends. I keep the weekends the same as my work week and have no problems being sleepy.

    But I’m considering applying for a new position at my organization which will mean I have to shift back to days. I’m not sure if the promotion is worth the headache of early mornings and the commute.


  • I build loudspeakers, both home and car. But, mostly car subwoofers, amplifiers, head units etc. But also home speakers for home theaters.

    I absolutely love it. Music is a big passion of mine (despite never learning to play an instrument). I love it because every project has so many challenges. I love electrical work and designing a system from scratch and then getting to see it actually work iis awesome. It’s like little engineering challenges all throughout. Very engaging for me.

    There’s also a lot of wood working involved. Making a functional piece of furniture and getting to expirement with different techniques is a lot of fun.




  • Ologies by Allie Ward!!

    She basically interviews scientists about their job and asks all the dumb questions you wish you could ask. She has a huge number of episodes on everything from black holes and dark matter to squirrels to Emojis. And it’s all from the perspective of “the study of”.

    One of my favorite episodes is “Ferro-equinology”. The study of iron horses. Trains. I knew trains were cool, but had no idea how cool they really were until that episode.

    Her energy is addictive too. Great personality. If you are a part of her patron (which I am) you’ll get a heads up before her interviews and she give an opportunity for you to post questions that she’ll ask the Ologist.


  • Downvoted unkind discourse.

    Upvote is for quality. No vote is for noise/disagreements. Downvote is for hate.

    In theory, the lower a score, the less people see something. If I disagree with something that’s said (like a civil political opinion), then I won’t ‘like’ it. That takes away one potential point. But if someone is being unkind to others (mean, rude, trolling, etc) then I’ll downvote, which I see as removing two votes. The one they could have had from me, and one from someone else. Hopefully, that means they won’t get as much attention.

    If it’s really bad, then I’ll also report





  • When I delivered pizza in 2012, if you gave a 5 I’d always be happy. The thing with delivery is that the service is the delivery, not making the food. So it doesn’t really make sense to be percentage based. Whether you ordered 2 large pizzas and a coke or just some cheese bread, my labor was the same. Of course, if you order 30 pizzas then yeah, tip more. Or if you lived far from the store. If you were literally two blocks over, a dollar is fine.

    Think about how much time you’re taking up. If you’re 15 minutes away, it’s also 15 minutes back. Assuming it’s not Friday night, you may be the only delivery on that route. Which means, I could only make 2 deliveries an hour. Papa John’s only paid me 2.50/hr while driving and 7.25 while in the store. So with those assumptions, I’d only make 12.50 that hour. And that’s not accounting for gas, which I paid for myself.

    It really varies a lot. But if you tip 5 bucks, I’d be at least making more than minimum wage. Less than 5 and it’s not even worth leaving the store and wasting my gas.


  • Here’s the thing with electricity: it’s invisible.

    If you’re using a power saw, you can see the blade. You can see other cars (obviously there’s blind spots). You can see a burning flame on your stove, or maybe hear/smell the gas.

    You may have a box and know that there’s electricity inside, but you have no idea if it’s wired correctly. You have no idea if the breaker is shut, or if there’s batteries inside. We’ve engineered a lot of controls to keep things safe like LEDs to show it’s on and ground wires on all the metal bits (thank you underwriter laboratories). But all of those can fail and you can still get shocked because electricity is essentially invisible and requires tools (multimeter) to inform you that it’s dead.

    None of your senses will let you know if something with electricity is safe. It’s a gamble every single time you touch something electrical. You can be seriously hurt with voltages as low as 30v, assuming worst case conditions like you just finished swimming in the ocean.

    Using electrical equipment is like walking through a construction site blindfolded while someone yells directions at you from afar.



  • There we go. This is what I was looking for.

    Prop 65 is definitely useless. But I don’t see that as a reason to move out of the state.

    The whole thing that prompted me to ask was that I was told some people left the state for Montana because of the “policies” but I couldn’t get a good answer on which policies they disagreed with.

    Homelessness is certainly a problem here that’s worse than most places. But it’s still a problem everywhere you go.