A plague of locusts seems totally on-brand along with everything else happening in the US, to be honest.

TIL I have to actually do stuff to make sure my pawpaws get pollinated properly. I have several trees and haven’t gotten huge numbers of fruit from them, but it never crossed my mind that that wasn’t just how it was supposed to be.

Welp, time for Sea Shepherd to get busy.

That’s also what concrete delivery guys use to stop the mix from curing in the hopper when their truck gets delayed or breaks down. (Well, more specifically, soda – not sure if the carbonation is also significant.)

The answer is because patriots aren’t willing to defend them by force.

Horse latitudes are where the tropics meet the mid-latitudes. The intertropical convergence zone is the one at the equator.

The difference is that the ITZ is often rainy because of the rising warm moist air, while the horse latitudes are often sunny because of the falling cool dry air. You’ll get becalmed and have to eat your horses in both places, though.

That has fuck-all to do with the guy’s complaint, which was about it failing to provide the simple ability to use the advertised features of the machine from the machine’s control panel, not anything to do with privacy.

I dunno about comments, but they are heavily doing the “give influencers a free printer” thing. I watch a bunch of maker/DIY stuff, and it feels like half the channels I watch got a Bambu printer lately.

IIRC Slic3r and all its derivatives are copyleft though, not permissive. Is Bambu doing a GPL violation?

I’m wondering how I might try to build a PCB under such circumstances now.

I imagine a realistic post apocalyptic scenario would involve going back to wire-wrapping, or possibly even point-to-point construction.

AFAIK when people talk about modern bikes being less maintainable, what they mean is that there’s been sort of a proliferation of more proprietary parts (especially headsets and bottom brackets) in the last decade or so, along with a Gillette-razor-style arms race of increasing numbers of rear sprockets (with correspondingly narrower/more delicate chains). Frankly, it’s probably not that big a deal: you just have to get the right kind of tools to deal with the kind of parts you have, and replacements might be a little more expensive than if they were more standardized.

However, if you really want maximum ease of maintenance – or especially if you’re going to be, say, doing bicycle touring in some developing country where it’s hard to get fancy parts – IMO you can’t go wrong with a plain old threaded square-taper bottom bracket (don’t go so old-school that you end up with ashtabula, though), cup-and-cone threaded headset, 26" wheels, and a rear freewheel or cassette* with 8 sprockets or fewer (so you can use “normal” chains). Basically, all the stuff you’d find on an old '90s mountain bike.

(* I should probably have an opinion about freewheels vs. cassettes to go along with the rest of the opinions, but I don’t know enough.)

I could probably improve on that even more by using a pressure cooker. (I’m stalling on buying one because I boycott InstantPot due to the fact that they have a closed source phone app exclusively in Google Playstore; it’s optional but InstantPot buyers are still financing that. I should probably get a 2nd hand manual pressure cooker).

FYI, new manual pressure cookers are still a thing. A recently-made used one is fine, and obviously best in terms of minimizing cost and manufacturing and such, but it’s better to resort to buying new than to get a really old one with a less-safe design.

Electronic pressure cookers made by companies other than Instant Pot are a thing too, by the way.

Which is one reason I like the electronic pressure cookers: I can set the pressure cooker outside.

Another way to accomplish that would be to get a portable induction burner and set a manual pressure cooker on top of it.

A lot of that is because of production shifting from coal to natural gas, though. It’ll be news when solar + wind production exceeds all fossil fuel production put together.

Conservatism isn’t what you think it is. Conservatives not only are, in fact, the enemies of liberty, they always have been.

Paying for energy you don’t use because ‘boo-hoo company profits’ is probably the most blatant late stage capitalism bullshit I’ve seen all month, and probably up there with a handful for the year.

I agree, and considering some of the other contenders (like Musk suing an ad industry group for choosing not to buy ad space from Twitter), that’s saying a lot!

In other words, that was the previous coup.

Nature intended my yard to be mixed hardwood forest.

I wish I could find a good intermediate reference that picked up at the level of detail the books you mentioned leave off.

For example, I’m framing a wall for the first time and although every book will tell you “put studs 16” on center," it’s hard to figure out that the spacing gets measured from the left edge of the first stud. They also don’t tell you things like where the seam should fall when the wall is long enough that you need more than one board for the top plate, or what to do if you want to locate an electrical box halfway between two studs, or (in a lot of the books) even something as basic as how to detail a corner connection.

For bicycle repair, sheldonbrown.com is my go-to, along with YouTube.