If you reverse the polarity of lots of things, you get a fire starter.

I suppose I’m afraid that having a dog myself would be like a magnet for other dogs while on walks that I might be uncomfortable with or that my being nervous could make a normal meet and greet go poorly.

Yes. Also, your dog will pick up on your nervousness and either get nervous themselves or become defensive, neither of which are ideal and could make for a bad situation if you’re ever at a park or out for a walk. Dogs are little copycats when it comes to mirroring their owner’s anxieties and behaviors, and even if you deal with your anxiety, the dog may have adopted it in the mean time and you’d have to work to repair that damage.

Basically, you’re smart to be asking these questions before taking on the responsibility of adoption. I’d recommend waiting until you’ve worked out your issues before potentially passing them on to your four-legged friend.

You mean the one from the obvious troll account that was obvious?

I don’t really consider blahaj as an “identity politics” instance, but I think I know which users you’re referring to (or at least their style). I’ve probably had those blocked for a while now.

Edit: A few of those have older hexbear alts which kind-of explains things.

Don’t want to start any drama by listing specifics, but basically any instance that advertises itself as “a space for {insert flavor of identity politics here}”.

I was surprised by that, too. When I went looking for a way to decode them with RTL-SDR, I assumed it wouldn’t be parsing the audio but a narrowband data stream. TIL also.

Edit: It does kind of make sense with it being AFSK encoded in-band, though, or maybe I’m just so used to it being that way. I always thought the screeches were there to demand attention (and also be something that headend equipment can pick up and respond to). So it’s interesting they’re doing double duty as both an unmistakable audio cue to pay attention as well as containing the actual alert data.

Plus there are NOAA stations all over the country rather than centralized like the time signal transmitters. It was probably cheaper to do it in band at that scale.

I don’t want to repeat what others have already said as that’s all pretty accurate. As a rule of thumb, just look at the site sidebar for various instances and just avoid any that base themselves around any form of identity politics. Sadly, that’s a lot of them, but life is better without those kinds of attitudes in your face all the time.

Just got around to this one and finished it last night. Thanks for the recommendation. Was definitely different and fun. Kind of a “breather episode” compared to the high stakes of the rest of the ones I’ve been reading.

Yeah, I may have to settle for woodworking. I could set that up in my basement safely enough but definitely can’t be welding or have other fire hazards.

Only limitation with woodworking in insufficient ventilation if I want to paint or varnish or something.

Metalworking. It’s not so much beyond my ability so much as it’s out of my price range to get into it. I just don’t have any of the necessary tools nor an appropriate workspace, and I’d basically have to build a workshop and start from the literal ground up.

They kind of do, or at least used to.

If memory serves, they would take higher-end chips that didn’t pass QA for that product line, disable some cores or whatever, and sell it as a lower-end chip.

I’ve always observed them to be the largely the same thing but on different ends of the ideological spectrum (libertarians holding a more right-wing stance to anarchism’s left-wing stances). Otherwise, they’re both essentially petulant toddlers stamping their feet and saying “I don’t want to, and you can’t make me”.

If the artist is constantly in the news reminding me what a POS they are IRL, then no, I can’t enjoy their works because that’s always in my mind. Otherwise, if they just fuck off into obscurity, then I can enjoy the works independently for what they are.

Last fall I bought a 1 KWh Anker power station, and I’m loving it. It charges from 800 watts of solar and powers all kinds of random stuff around the house each day. Useful for power outages, too.

That’s what I’ve done for years. Makes managing things much easier, and I run multiple APs (all with the same SSID/PSK) and you can just roam to the best one. One upstairs, one downstairs, one in the weird dead zone in my office, and one on the back patio (it’s not hardwired and uses the mesh connection for uplink).

These are all old Aruba APs running OpenWRT but that’s the plan for this Cudy Model. I may pick up a few more and just replace all of my trusty but very old Arubas.

I bought this one last month when it was on sale for $39: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BRK3CYY3

Haven’t deployed it yet, but it’s fully supported by OpenWRT. I would only be using it as an access point, though. My router is a USFF Optiplex with an extra NIC and runs OpenWRT.

I downloaded one and I still want to support the author so I have no issue with buying it on sale.

Same. Not with A Stitch in Time but two of the PIC tie-in novels weren’t available without DRM. So I bought them full price and “Rules of Acquisition’d” DRM-free versions from elsewhere. My conscience is clean.

Yeah, A Stitch in Time was what started the search. Just over $100 seems like a bargain when I was seeing the used paperbacks listed over $200 on Amazon lol. So I went with the ebook copy.

https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/book/136175/a-stitch-in-time/andrew-j-robinson/

I think I paid $10.99 for it last year, and it’s $8.99 now. If you are interested in more, create an account and add them to your wish list. They will randomly go on sale with no notice. I got several that were normally like $12.99 for $1.99 just by catching them on sale when I checked back on my lists.

I’ve been getting all of mine from there. If the title is available without DRM, it’s noted in the listing, and you can straight-up just download a clean epub file once you’ve bought it. That’s everything I’ve always wanted from an ebook store.

It’s like reading an extended episode of ST.

Very much that. Mine are all ebooks but I’m starting to build a nice collection. Thankfully I can get most of them DRM-free so they’re actually mine. Best I can tell, the publisher will release them DRM-free approx. 5 years after they’re published.

USS Equinox

Nova Class :)

The Bajoran Solar Sailor anyone

For a pleasure cruise? Yes, please. I forgot about those, but they are gorgeous. Practical, though? Probably not unless you plan to sail through a tachyon field lol.