The inflation report that came out today specifically omits fuel and grocery prices because those are "volatile" categories. My grocery bill is double what it was two years ago and has been for six months. I wouldn't call that volatile.

I once was working as an apartment maintenance guy for a property in Colorado. During the interview I made it clear that I wasn't looking to move into a high responsibility role immediately and that I wanted to spend some time familiarizing myself with some more specific types of repair before going into any sort of management track. The interviewer seemed to like that answer given my previous experience and resume and I was hired.

A few months later, I made a mistake because I was asked to take a tech from the local utility around to every single unit on the property. Originally the property manager told me I'd have three days to do the work, but I was pressured to do it faster so that the tech could make a flight to his next job. We were installing batteries in water meters, which required the unlocking and opening of water heater closets on resident balconies. The residents did not have a key to their closet and were not allowed access. The closets did not use doorknobs either. They were held shut by the deadbolt locks. That night a storm rolled in. The resident called the on call service complaining that the wind was blowing the door open, but the on-call tech told them to put something in front of the door to keep it shut and that we would be by in the morning to lock the deadbolt. They didn't do as they were asked and their pipes froze, causing a flood in the unit below them.

Later that day, I was asked to hand over my keys. As I was getting them detached from my personal keys, the property manager told me that she felt that she was "sold a bill of goods" that I hadn't lived up to and that she had hired me because i had looked like "management track material." I told her that in the interview with the maintenance manager I said that I wanted a learning experience and that I wasn't ready for management. I told them I had never lied to them and left the property.

A week later I had applied for and was interviewing for a new job at another property. My phone rang during the interview. I silenced it and apologized to the interviewer but carried on. After the interview I listened to the voicemail that my old boss had left. "When we offered you the job I had you mixed up with someone else. We hired the wrong person."

A well stocked toolbox. Not just a random assortment of things but a well considered, well stocked toolbox with everything you need to tackle basic home repair.

To all those saying that tools are too expensive, they are not. Everything you need to tackle most home repair scenarios can be had under $100. Will you be turning screws by hand and adjusting wrenches? Yes. Will it be enjoyable work? Probably not, but you absolutely can have a good set of very basic tools for under $100 then add to it over time.

Get a hammer, adjustable wrench, angled pliers, razor utility knife, and 11-in-1 screwdriver. Buy additional tools as needed.

Clue (1985) starring Christopher Lloyd, Tim Curry, Madeline Kahn, Eileen Brennan, Michael McKean, Martin Mull, and Leslie Ann Warren. A murder mystery comedy based on the board game of the same name.

You never know how far you'll go to save a pet until it happens.

"Thanks for calling in to 102.5! You're on the air! What is your embarrassing poop story?"

I get the distaste, but language is a fluid thing. Plenty of words we use now do not mean the same thing as when they were first coined. I think Lame is a pretty safe word to use in modern times without people taking it poorly.

If you still have a distaste for it, then replacing it isn't going to be that hard. Lame isn't really part of my general speech, not for any particular reason, it just isn't. I would say something sucks instead. If something doesn't warrant the full suck to you, you could say "that's rough" or something. Lame as a word fits in many situations, but maybe not all of those situations warrant the same word.

When I was a kid, everyone (and I mean everyone) in my age group described things as gay or retarded. Over time I grew out of that language and met people who were genuinely hurt by it enough for me to change it. It took a while to do, but now neither of those terms is something I use negatively. I can't say that I consciously picked words to replace them with, though. Just being thoughtful about what language I used helped me remove those uses from my day to day life and the rest of language came in to fill the void more or less on its own.

Sync for Reddit was one of the more popular Reddit apps on Android. (Maybe even the biggest?) Now that Reddit has stopped being reasonable with their API fees, the developer of Sync has been working on a Lemmy client using the same name. It released a couple days ago.

Most of the other Lemmy clients on Android are free and open source, but Sync is closed source and will be ad supported unless users pay a $20 one-time fee to remove ads or pay for a subscription to get some additional features. Because Sync is closed source, there's no way for users to audit what data the app is collecting or sending out.

Many users are using Sync because it's familiar and has a high degree of polish and functionality thanks to being a fork of a very well established app. Its popularity, along with the issues I mentioned above have got a vocal portion of the user base railing against the app and another vocal portion of the user base defending it.

A lot of folks are talking about how a centralized repository would be a big target for governments, ISPs and rights holders, but I have a different angle.

Who is going to pay for all of that development and maintenance? We are pirates. We don't pay for stuff. It's kind of our thing.

Additionally, you are proposing an option with social features and algorithms. Both are a negative because they necessarily encourage users to explicitly say what they have been downloading or uploading in a way that is being logged and therefore is evidence against them should a media company want to push for legal action.

In the last ten years, I haven't ever sent a 7z to someone who ended up asking what the file was or how to open it. That was an issue back in 2005

Enemy and Jellyfin both have Android TV and Roku apps. I don't have an apple TV, but I imagine apps exist there too.

On some Mastodon clients you can block hashtags, and on Lemmy you can block communities, so we're already pretty close. To do more would require a lot of self-tagging of posts and not everyone will do that. Or it would require analytics and automatic tagging that may not be accurate and would theoretically be a privacy nightmare.

Promotional credits can expire. Gift cards that have been purchased cannot

Middle click (or command-click on Mac) will also open in a new tab in basically every browser.

While I know it's easy to hate on everything MCU these days, I do still absolutely love the Milano from Guardians of the Galaxy 1 and 2. The design doesn't feel practical at all, but it's still a really fun to look at and agile ship, which is something a lot of sci fi doesn't really depict very well.

Legally, yes it is wrong.

Morally? That depends on the person. I think asking a piracy focused community means you're going to get a heavily skewed set of answers that all veer towards various forms of "Not wrong" or "It's good actually. Don't even support the platforms that make the content legally available because DRM sucks" etc.

Generally speaking though, most older visual media releases no longer make money for anyone who worked on them directly. Use that information however you see fit. I know it changes how I think about piracy in general.

Oh for sure. I no longer work in that industry and am much happier. I fix wheelchairs for a living now.

Where I am at,ground beef is more in the $5-6/lb range, as a comparison. We have some dairy farms local so milk is a bit cheaper, but basically everything else is significantly more expensive, especially meat.

And is developed by ID software, not Bethesda Game Studios. Bethesda the publisher has different tactics when it comes to games not developed by BGS.

resources in the Megathread link pinned to the community can lead you there.

Every day when I come home from work, I kneel on the top step of our stairs and call our dogs over. They sit on the landing and put their front paws on my shoulders while I scratch their sides and pet them. My wife has taken to calling this ritual "motivation." The dogs really love having a couple minutes of solid attention when I come home and it's a good way for me to switch gears into home-brain, since my work is very stressful and tends to take over.

Except that the old PC is probably less efficient at a lower clock than an AR based consumer router. You'll get more performance and features, but it will be more expensive to run.

Https://5e.tools/ has a plugin for Foundry that lets you pull basically everything from every source into Foundry. Oh and you can host your own 5eTools instance just in case the site gets nuked from orbit by Wizards

Link to what? The person is either pirating or buying digital copies of TV/movies and storing them on a server. Likely being served with Plex, Emby, or Jellyfin.

Okay, so if I build a bridge from X to Y, it's a great bridge.

If I build a bridge from A to B it's a terrible bridge.

Do you want to build a bridge?

(If the person says Okay as a part of their bridge proposal, it is good. If not, then the bridge is bad)

This is a great way to make everyone at a gathering hate you.

You still need to scan individual plants resources or animals to get the Surveying perk upgrades, which gives you better zoom on the scanner, which can be useful sometimes.

It's not necessarily an issue with the brand, but rather the tier of the appliance. Builder's grade appliances are just made way cheaper. Bottom tier options from all brands are bad. They're bad enough that you can't even buy them at most places. Only contractors can get them by ordering directly from the manufacturer.

Absolutely agreed. The situation is almost never black and white. The reason I put this as my answer to the question is that we had a scare this weekend with one of our dogs. She ate something that gave her a blockage in the outlet to her stomach. In the end we spent around $4000 on the surgery required to save her life. Even though we chose to go forward with it, it was still a hugely stressful situation and one of the hardest decisions I've had to make. We were lucky that a local vet had time to rush her into surgery. If they hadn't been able to, the cost would have been over $13,000 and we would not have been able to afford it at all. As it is, we had to borrow some money from family to do the surgery. When I wrote this, it was up in the air whether we would be able to do it or not.

I'm currently using Sync but once some of the others polish up and catch up, I'll probably switch. All of the actively developed apps have a solid foundation, some are just newer than others.

Honestly I just liked the icon and it didn't seem like a shitty place to be. A smaller instance also basically guaranteed a username I would like to use was available.

It's a prank riddle. Basically you make two statements about building bridges. They can be from anywhere and to anywhere else. My nose to your forehead, Baltimore to Seattle, it makes no difference. In one sentence, you use the word "okay" and in the other you don't. The sentence with "okay" in it produces a good bridge. The sentence that doesn't, doesn't.

When you ask a person to build their own bridge, if they say "okay" in the sentence, it's a good bridge. If they don't, it's a bad bridge and it falls down. This setup is built to make people frustrated because "okay" is one of those filler words that people don't really pay attention to in sentences.

I've also heard of a similar setup where a person hands an object to another person (again, the object doesn't matter) and says "This is a bean, okay?" And if the recipient says "okay" then they have done the task correctly and can pass it along to another person, declaring the object is something else. If the receiver doesn't say "okay," then something went wrong and one of the people who is in on the joke interrupts and starts the process again. with a new object.

All of my passwords are in Bitwarden and important ones are shared with my wife who has her own Botwarden and has shared her important passwords back with me. If one of us goes, the other will have access to everything. I don't (yet) have any descendants to inherit anything of importance, so I'm not worried about anything beyond my passwords so that if something happens to me, my wife can manage all of the accounts for bills, banking, communication, etc.

If/when I have children, I will likely make a new plan that builds on what I already have, with directions to access my password vault that can be given to my brother and his husband and my parents, should they outlive me and my wife. With my passwords, everything else of import is accessible. Thankfully, my brother is very tech savvy, so if my wife and I both go, I can trust him to be able to log in to everything and pull important media down.

So far I have found that being on a smaller instance has been beneficial because most of the small instances don't get defederated as long as they aren't actively encouraging terrible behavior (or are abandoned) even if you primarily post at beehaw or something, having the option to find good communities within other large instances is nice. Reddit had some good communities even as the site was going down the enshittification route.

I don't really care about most of the communities on my home instance, but having access to everything else on lemmy within reason is nice.

Have a method for your loved ones to access all of your important passwords. If you have a password manager, having a shared vault with a trusted partner or family member is important.

A raspberry Pi is a very good emulation device using the RetroPie image. A Pi 4b can go up to PSX/N64 fairly easily.

On the handheld side of things, most of them that "come with" ROM sets will have them loaded on an SD card. These manufacturers often skimp on the cards though, so expect it to die quickly. You can usually just clone the whole SD to a new one and it's fine.

Most of these devices use RetroArch and software emulation. However, there is another option. The Mister project and devices sold by Analogue use field programmable gate arrays - chips that can change their structure according to software. This means running an NES game on one of these devices is more literally like running it on original hardware. For accurate emulation, this is the best option by far. However, it comes with a significantly higher price tag.

In general the easiest and least expensive startup for emulation is on the PC. With fairly modest hardware, emulation of everything up to PS2 is possible with some newer platforms also being very emulatable (notably everything Nintendo puts out is easy to run because their architecture is largely straightforward, their systems are lower power, and there is significantly more demand for their games)

If you specifically want something hooked up to your TV, a first generation (launch window, before they increased the battery life) Switch can happily run a fair amount of stuff, including everything up to N64/PS1. The (new)3DS/2DS is also a great emulation device and can run basically everything up to SNES/Genesis handheld.

Oh and one more option. If you have Android, you can easily install a variety of emulators and use a Bluetooth or wired controller with them utilizing a controller phone mount.

An invite would be amazing. Please and thank you

The last time I tried a Samsung phone I returned it the same day I got it. The competing OS elements from Samsung's ROM and the standard Android UI were really really off-putting to me. I can get an app having a unique style, but this was different OS elements looking and working differently.

TK is a journalism joke. In that field, placeholder headlines used to commonly be written in as "Headline TK" or "TKTKTK" etc. It comes from back when newspapers were typeset physically before set in lead to be sent to the printer. It is short for To Come. Many editing marks are misspelled on purpose to make them stand out from the final text. "TK" is an unusual pairing of letters, so it stands out.

Sure on a small test track. As soon as it was meant to be scaled up, every attempt has been whittled down. Either it fails completely (Look up Brunel's Atmospheric Railway) or has been so expensive and impractical that it gets reduced to cars in tunnels.

If you are most concerned with efficiency, then building the cheaper HSR infrastructure to get freight off of roads and passengers off of planes as fast as possible should be the first priority. Holding even a partial vacuum in tubes hundreds of miles long just to eke out a little more energy efficiency is laughable. Everything leaks. Maintaining cabin pressure in a 73-meter plane is a completely different beast from maintaining vacuum in miles of tube. It's likely that maintaining the tubes will end up costing so much that any efficiency gains acquired from the vacuum will evaporate.

When I'm talking about leaks, I'm not talking about the extra energy required to constantly run vacuum pumps. I'm saying that HSR infrastructure needs inspection and occasional repair, but not nearly to the extent that a vacuum tube based solution would. Any savings made via efficiency are pissed away by having to pay more maintenance crews and material cost to maintain the infrastructure. The tubes are also much less likely to be able to be automatically inspected like rails can be using inspection cars because any train moving through the tube can only inspect the interior walls. Besides, rail already exists across much of the US for use as freight infrastructure. These same rails, if inspected and tested properly, can be used for high speed rail much more immediately than waiting for tubes to be built. Besides all of this, more aerodynamic trains can and have been built, but are not in use in the US. Instead, we send bricks down the rails. The "immense" efficiency gain from 0.5 atmospheres of air pressure is likely significantly less impressive when compared against well designed trains with regards to aerodynamics.

All of this is also completely ignoring how dangerous tunnels are for fires. Even with proper safety precautions, fires in tunnels are exceptionally dangerous. By venting out the smoke that kills people, you increase the intensity of the fire that also kills people.