Back in the day I recall finding lots of well curated and conveniently packaged ebook collections. Things like Goodreads choice 20XX, top 100 sci-fi of all time, etc. These days I know plenty of places generously providing individual books, but not where to find these nice collections. The ability to browse popular releases would also be nice. Ideally I would avoid needing to setup specialized tools, like readarr. But if something like its list feature simply blows away any other options I'd consider it; whatever gets the best results in the least time.

[–] [S] 1 point 1 month ago (1 child)

Varathane classic wood penetrating stain. Should be oil based. If I decide to strip again, any advice on how to tell when I've got it all? Because to the naked eye this thing was completely cleaned before I added stain.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 month ago

    I considered it on many occasions. Then I'd look at what a new solid wood table costs, sigh, and get back to work. I can swing some material money to sand and stain, but new furniture isn't happening. So it's make these work or don't have decent side tables.

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    A while back I was gifted some old classroom side tables the owner no longer needed. They came painted; I don't know what kind of paint it was, but it was entirely resistant to citristrip. After finally working that out I painstakingly sanded the paint out from every nook and crevice with a dremel until I was confident it was clean. I dried it out, sanded it, and prepared to finally finish up.

    Today I stained. Coat of wood conditioner, wait around half an hour, coat of stain. Maybe 3 more hours (instructions call for minimum 2) and a second coat. I was dismayed to find that while the top veneer stained beautifully, the legs came out splotchy. It looks like there was an invisible coat of primer on there or something that prevented the stain from taking. I am confident this is not the result of poor stain application; it was apparent that it wasn't taking while I was brushing it. The band around the top also came out significantly darker than the top.

    The band I know I probably can't do anything about. It's annoying but I can live with it. The legs are a different story. Is there anything I can do to make them take the stain more evenly?

    P.S. I also had an entirely different table made of some kind of hardwood that I did. It took very evenly but didn't color much even with two coats. I know with hardwoods that's somewhat inevitable. Any tricks to make it take more, or do I just need to be happy with it?

    [–] 12 points 1 month ago (5 children)

    Math! I'm a software guy and generally find STEM topics highly intuitive. I do fine with the stuff through middle school - PEMDAS, algebra, that kind of stuff. But the higher levels concepts like logarithms and derivatives; no matter how many times they're explained to me they just don't quite click. I can plug numbers into formulas and get the answer I need, but I don't understand what's happening or why that particular formula is what's needed.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago

    Don't know if it's an autism thing, but I get it too. I describe it as the difference between liking something and craving it. There may be something I think of as just ok but find myself reaching for all the time. That's a high craving food to me. On the flip side, there may be something that I really enjoy every time I have it but I never want it. Low craving.

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  • [–] [S] 12 points 1 month ago (5 children)

    I know that these groups exist. What I don't understand is, how do they get such successful companies to shoot themselves in the foot like this? Did they offer more money than the providers expected to make from the game revenue? What about the value of all the bad will they bought themselves for overstepping like that?

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    A couple years ago a bunch of credit card companies suddenly decided they wanted to dictate how people are allowed to spend their money. They issued warnings to game stores to delist all nsfw games or else. The credit card companies have an amazing racket going on and I struggle to believe they suddenly care about some morality over profit. Generally all they care about is that people spend as much money as possible. I also seem to recall them being notably silent on the much larger revenue streams coming from adult videos. So what was their actual purpose in these seemingly random strikes?

    [–] 5 points 2 months ago

    I think I put more good into the world than bad. Whether I put in more good than I've consumed, I wonder about that a lot. I've been very fortunate in life.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    What does a doorless shower offer that the same design with a door for that opening doesn't? I would think there's some accessible compromise that keeps the floor dry. Of course, the true holy grail would be the showers you sometimes see overseas where there's a whole compartment built on a drain pan so the open door isn't an inconvenience.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    In addition to the obvious, wasn't Homer not a person? I feel like I heard that it was more of a legend people collected stories under. May have that mixed up with something else though.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago

    Check out carbon steel. Very similar physical properties to cast iron and significantly lighter. Also, learn how to properly use your pans. With proper preheating and use of fat (oil) even naturally sticky materials like stainless steel can be a dream to cook in.

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago

    It depends on the nuance. Asking about basic, factual information? Yeah, that's what search engines are for. Asking about something with a fairly well defined answer but there are varying opinions worth a conversation? Sure, this is the place.

    Don't ask me what year Abraham Lincoln was born. But if you want to know how successful he was? There are plenty of statistics you could look up, but also a lot of opinions on what success looks like and how valuable his actions actually were. Worth discussing.

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    The android app just started throwing an error saying upgrade to version 3.7.0+ to sync. But the published version in play store and fdroid is 3.6.21. Was this mistakenly merged in from the dev branch maybe? And why would you break sync instead of making it backwards compatible? That could mess up someone with a selfhosted solution that can't conveniently update.

    Sync from linux desktop app seems to be working.

    Edit: at least one of the devs seems to be aware of the issue. I guess it isn't a quick fix, so they are suggesting android users manually install the pre-release package to fix this bug in the meantime. https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/issues/15753

     

    cross-posted from: https://lemdro.id/post/29751553

    My family hosts a modest Audiobookshelf server. When we tried to move from our old Plex server to ABS it was a nightmare. Our library had been built slowly over years and file organization/metadata was a mess. It took us several tools and many hours to get everything in decent shape. I was frustrated that nobody had made a single tool to scrub and clean up an audiobook library. So, I made one!

    Notable features:

    • Fetch new metadata interactively from Audible or Goodreads
    • Generate metadata files
    • Recursively find and process files
    • Combine chapter files into a single book file
    • Convert files to .m4b

    This is my first foray into an open source project. I know it's not pretty, and many of the features on my initial wishlist never got finished. But I have the core functionality working enough for my needs, which means I've been putting a lot less time into it. I decided to just release it to the world as is. May it save you much time!

    The link

    Ultimate Audiobooks is licensed under GPL-3.0

     

    My family hosts a modest Audiobookshelf server. When we tried to move from our old Plex server to ABS it was a nightmare. Our library had been built slowly over years and file organization/metadata was a mess. It took us several tools and many hours to get everything in decent shape. I was frustrated that nobody had made a single tool to scrub and clean up an audiobook library. So, I made one!

    Notable features:

    • Fetch new metadata interactively from Audible or Goodreads
    • Generate metadata files
    • Recursively find and process files
    • Combine chapter files into a single book file
    • Convert files to .m4b

    This is my first foray into an open source project. I know it's not pretty, and many of the features on my initial wishlist never got finished. But I have the core functionality working enough for my needs, which means I've been putting a lot less time into it. I decided to just release it to the world as is. May it save you much time!

    The link

    Ultimate Audiobooks is licensed under GPL-3.0

     

    I got a canon pixma tr4520 from a technologically challenged relative, who told me they couldn't get it to print and it was mine to try and fix. I worked out that it didn't have an ink cartridge in it (not even an empty), bought a replacement, and got it printing. But now it has vertical alignment issues and paper jams. I can't afford a new printer right now, and I would love to fix this one. My fear is that I'll sink half the cost of a new one into it between the ink I already bought and replacement parts, just for it to come out not working anyway. Is it worth my time to try and fix or should I cut my losses and start saving for a new unit?

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