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Fondots

@ Fondots @lemmy.world

Posts
2
Comments
671
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • How do you take notes?

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  • Couple different kinds of notes, but I think this covers most of my use cases

    I use google keep for small reminders, things I want to look up later, grocery lists to share with my wife, etc.

    I keep a couple field notes notebooks around in my car and bag for things I want to make a physical note of, especially things I need to sketch out (I am no artist by any stretch of the imagination but I'm a capable DIYer and I sometimes need to sketch out the thing I'm building/fixing) while I'm out and about before I forget about them. I like the size of them, and the dot grid lends itself well to the kind of notes and sketches I use them for.

    I also have some sketches of the rooms in my house in those books, list of some furniture dimensions, so when I'm out shopping with my wife and she asks "do you think this will fit in our dining room?" I can tell her definitively yes or no.

    It also has a list of the bulbs, tires, wiper blades, air filters, etc. that our cars use, so I can reference them quickly while out shopping, it's quicker to just flip to the back page of my little notebook than to try to look it up on my phone from the aisle at AutoZone or Walmart.

    I also have a rite in the rain notebook I keep with my tools, it's fairly rugged and waterproof, mostly ends up getting used for scribbling down a list of stuff I need to get from the hardware store in the middle of a project. Went with that one because I'm pretty likely to be using it when I'm wet or dirty, outside in the mud, under a leaking sink, etc. while I'm halfway through a project.

    I keep another one of those with my camping supplies.

    I have a pad of graph paper at my workbench, I like it for sketching things out, same as I like the dot grid in the field notes books, but this one doesn't have to travel around with me or pull double duty for written notes, so I could go bigger and cheaper

    We also did our kitchen cabinets in blackboard paint, so my wife and I can leave notes to each other on there, mostly reminders to empty the dishwasher and such.

  • If it is common knowledge that shutting a garage door with a running ICE vehicle inside will kill you, why do you think so many people think 1 billion ICE vehicles aren't bad in the atmosphere?

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  • Also worth noting another key issue with car exhaust in a confined space is carbon monoxide, you'll feel the CO2 build up and make it difficult to breath in your environment before it does any damage, the CO on the other hand will kill you quietly. CO breaks down relatively quickly in the environment by reacting with other substances in the air, so it's not really a long term pollutant concern.

    There's also other chemicals and particulates, but they're mostly going to be at lower concentrations that aren't going to kill you in a hurry, but may contribute to longer term cancer risks and such, but that's a little harder for people to wrap their heads around. You won't immediately die of cancer in your garage from breathing exhaust but it might give you cancer years or decades down the line.

  • How useful would amateur radio knowledge be in an extended power outage or natural disaster?

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  • Did you miss where I addressed that by pointing out how generators, batteries, solar panels, and vehicle mounted radios exist?

  • How useful would amateur radio knowledge be in an extended power outage or natural disaster?

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  • You realize that if you call Texas you can also reach someone locally.

    A lot of ham equipment can be run off of batteries, generators, solar power, vehicles, etc. for some hams, that's even a big part of what interests them- going out into the woods or other remote areas to see who they can make contact with from there.

    There are official policies in place for ham radio operators to work with local emergency services. ARES & RACES, for example. I know that my $20 baofeng can even be used directly on some emergency frequencies (depending on what sort of radio system they're using)

    As an example of how it might work

    If cell and landline phones are inoperable, you might instead have volunteer ham operators posted at various places around the community- probably schools, government buildings, hospitals, recreation centers, etc. places where people might gather, where aide is being distributed, that might have backup generators, etc.

    And you also have them or professional radio operators at police/fire/ambulance stations, 911 dispatch centers.

    Someone having an emergency would let the local ham operator know and have them relay the info to the station or dispatch center so they could send help

    Less efficient than just calling 911 of course, but better than nothing.

    I work in a 911 dispatch center, we have a small room full of ham equipment that we can send out or use for these sorts of situations (luckily we're not in an area prone to major natural disasters, so it's rare that we ever have to use it if ever, but we're prepared if it ever happens)

  • What car do you drive and why?

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  • 2007 Toyota 4runner

    I have a lot of outdoorsy hobbies and am an avid DIYer, so I need something with room for gear/lumber/etc. a roof rack to strap on my kayak or other bulky gear, a trailer hitch to tow small trailers or put a bike rack or basket on to carry a cooler and such when there's no more room in my trunk, and some space for friends and/or my dog. Some ground clearance is nice for when I find myself on shitty deeply rutted dirt roads, and 4wd for when I drive onto the beach to go fishing. I'm also an essential worker (911 dispatch) who has to be able to get to work in the snow, and I work a weird shift that sometimes has me commuting before plows have been through.

    I don't really go "off roading," I'm not going out looking for mud and Rocks to go driving over for it's own sake, but I do sometimes, in the course of whatever else I'm doing, have to drive off the road.

    I also sometimes camp in my car, and it's nice to be able to fit an air mattress in the back, it's a bit tight but it works.

    It's also the used car I could afford when my previous one got totaled on me.

    My previous cars have been roughly the same sort of midsized SUVs- 2000 Isuzu Trooper (I really loved that car) and 2006 Chevy Trailblazer (it did everything I needed to but I was less of a fan, nothing in that car was quite where I thought it should be) so I've kind of dialed in that that's the right size vehicle for me.

    Ideally I'd like to have a small EV for most of my daily commuting and errands, and then a (small) 4x4 pickup truck for when I need it. Something like the old ford rangers (the new ones are bigger than I need) with an extended cab (not a full crew cab, just some back jump seats) and a 6 or 7ft bed. The maverick shows some promise, I'm hoping they add a midgate when they refresh it in a couple years.

    But I don't have the parking space or budget for 2 cars, so the midsize suv is kind of the compromise I'm stuck with.

    My family has always had good luck with Toyotas, and I like my 4runner well enough, if I had the budget to be picky and needed a car, there's a good chance I'd be looking at 4runners, though unless my financial and parking situations get better my next car will probably be whatever 10+ year old midsized SUV comes my way when this one goes (still going strong though, slowly inching up on 200k miles and still no major issues)

  • What is your personal perception of people that like to listen to metal? Does that change based upon age?

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  • I listen to some metal among a lot of other music, wouldn't really call myself a metalhead but I have a lot of friends who are

    I'm in my 30s, been a lot of metalheads in my friend group since middle or high school, don't really see that changing any time soon. Overall I like metalheads, under the gruff-looking exteriors most of them are big marshmallows, and overall pretty intelligent people.

    There's a handful of assholes, racists, some people whose main interest in metal is that they like to be too rough in the mosh pit, etc. but the majority of metalheads I've met hate their guts. And like with all subcultures, fandoms, etc. there are some who are annoying pretentious pricks about it but are essentially harmless.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • It's more of a habit than an addiction.

    If I have pretty much literally anything else going on, I don't tend to think about or miss the internet.

    But if I don't have anything else going on, I'll probably reach for my phone or end up on a computer pretty quickly without even realizing it

  • What do you want for Christmas but you probably won't get?

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  • I'd like to skip Christmas, I get nothing out of it but headaches. I don't enjoy the family get togethers (individually or in small groups my family is mostly fine, but all of them at once is too much) I don't want anything that can reasonably be asked for or given as a present, and I don't have any space for the useless junk I'll inevitably receive.

    What I need/want is money. I'm not struggling, but I have projects and things I'm saving up for and whatever they'd spend on gifts if they feel like they need to give me something I'd much rather them just give me the cash or Venmo me. They're not going to gift me a new heater, deck, washer/dryer, paint for my living room, etc. the best I can hope for is some gift cards to Lowes, home Depot, etc. and inevitably the cards will all be to different places so I can't even use them all on what they're intended to go towards, and there's a good chance that once I've saved up enough I'll get the best price at a store I don't even have any gift cards for, so they're going to sit around collecting dust because I'll never remember to grab them when I need to go buy a box of screws or something.

    Just give me cash.

  • Please help resolve a disagreement in our home

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  • The only reason I don't have such a drawer, is an overall lack of drawers in my house, don't really have one to spare to be a junk drawer.

    Which is a damn shame because I could really use a drawer to throw some miscellaneous odds and hands that don't have any other designated place to live.

  • What is Pinterest for?

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  • I try to avoid the site like the plague, have never really attempted to use it, and when the internet inevitably dumps me there is my search for something I've never found any value in it.

    But I think the idea is that it's supposed to be sort of a brainstorming tool.

    Think back to the days when physical magazines and catalogues were more of a thing. When you were planning or designing or working towards some goal you might gather up a bunch of clippings, pictures, articles, recipes, your own notes, sketches, and doodles, etc. and pin them up on a cork board (sort of a "vision board") or maybe put them in a book or folder or something so they were readily available for you to look at for inspiration or reference as you go about your planning.

    I think that's what Pinterest was supposed to be. Sort of a place to save all your little inspirations and reference pictures for whatever project or goal you have in mind.

    And I kind of suspect that for that purpose it does its job well enough (though I don't really get what benefit it has over a folder full of pictures and word documents, spreadsheets, etc. saved to your computer or phone)

    And I guess maybe having a platform where you can share that sort of virtual vision board and get feedback on it and see what others are planning is maybe useful for some people's creative process.

    But it's also kind of like glimpsing into someone's personal notebook full of their illegible handwriting, half-finished sketches and doodles, and made-up shorthand. It probably makes lots of sense to that person, but since you don't know what was going on in their mind when they put it together and it was never edited for someone else to make sense of, it might as well be the ramblings of a mental patient.

    And since most of the rest of us only stumble onto Pinterest in search of a source for something - a place we can buy something, the recipe for food, an article or the context for a picture, a how-to guide, etc. it seems like a total waste of time because most people only share the picture and a couple quick thoughts or hashtags or whatever, it's basically useless.

  • Removed

    Let's say, hypothetically, that the real Matt Walsh was actually a progressive gay guy that just makes fascist propaganda for the money. What would it take for you to forgive him? (hypothetically)

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  • I'd say there's one narrow exception for people who espouse Nazi views in order to infiltrate and undermine the Nazis.

    That's outside the scope of the question though.

  • What object that you recently had bought really love?

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  • I had to buy a handful of components so I guess it counts

    Built my first PC recently. Mostly it's my wife's old components after a few years of upgrades stuffed into a new case, but it's new to me. Pretty much just had to buy the case, a hard drive, PSU, CPU cooler, and a couple fans.

    It's not a powerhouse by modern standards (though it was pretty beefy for its time when my wife first built it) with a pre-ryzen amd CPU, and a 970, but it's still running most of what I've been throwing at it (it helps that most of my steam library is 10+ years old)

    We're a little short on space in our house, nowhere to squeeze in another desk for a computer so I built it in a HTPC case and I've been gaming on our 70" TV with surround sound with our hue lights synced up to it, and it's been pretty sweet, and astonishingly it hasn't burst into flames from being crammed in my entertainment center with limited airflow.

    It's nice to be back to PC gaming, and I'm having almost as much fun tinkering with it and getting everything set up how I want it. Still a couple more tweaks to make, gotta figure out how I want to set up KODI, need to get a decent wireless keyboard and mouse, maybe a couple more controllers, find a way to enable HDMI CEC control so I don't need to fiddle with the PC and receiver volume separately, etc. and then maybe some more upgrades when budget allows

  • How Americans responded in 1955 when the invention of the polio vaccine was announced

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  • My dad remembers from his childhood occasionally seeing houses placed under quarantine for diseases like measles and then at some point thanks to vaccines measles pretty much just stopped being a thing in most of the US. He got his polio and smallpox vaccines back in the day, and has lived to see smallpox eradicated and polio nearly so.

    My grandfather was born a couple years after the 1918 flu pandemic, he had a brother born a couple years before him who died in infancy, he never talked about it much but the timing lines up that his brother was likely a victim of that pandemic. It was certainly something he heard talked about in his childhood just as we'll probably keep talking about COVID for years to come, and I think it definitely left an impact on him, he always was wary about passing germs along to his grandchildren, he always warned our parents against kissing us and never did himself, the only time he did was on his literal deathbed (cancer, nothing communicable) when he kissed my sister (in a non-creepy familial way) as probably one of his last conscious acts.

    He was never one to shy away from a fight, I would have loved to see the hell he would have raised against anti-maskers if he'd lived another decade or so. There are people his age or older still walking among us. These things aren't even out of living memory, we're barely a handful of generations removed from them.

    The chickenpox vaccine was introduced when I was in elementary school. I remember a lot of children's shows when I was growing up having a chickenpox episode where one or more of the main characters would get chickenpox, they'd take oatmeal baths and slather on calamine lotion to ease the itching, their parents would discuss having their friends over to get them infected early and give them immunity, etc. It kind of seemed like it was inevitable that many if not most kids would get chickenpox eventually, and at the time it kind of was. The vaccine was still optional at the time, and I remember a lot of discussion about it not being very effective, but a lot of kids in my age range got it, and the number of kids in my school who got chickenpox was probably in the dozens instead of probably hundreds just a few years earlier.

    There have been some missteps along the way, my dad had a small hepatitis scare when a blood test turned up antibodies (though no active infection) likely from exposure from reused vaccine needles when he was in the army. The US did a grave disserve to polio vaccination efforts by using them as a cover to track down bin Laden and increased distrust in the vaccine in the process. There have been cases where vaccines have used ingredients that have proven unsafe, where people have had adverse reactions, etc. but still overall, the fact that I have never met anyone who has had smallpox, polio, or measles and probably never will speaks volumes about how much more good than harm vaccines do when 100 years ago I would almost certainly have known people who had died or left disabled or disfigured by those diseases.

  • What do you think goes on in a dog's head when he's following you around?

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  • "I don't know what you're up to, but I am so fucking ready for it."

    She's a Malinois, and as far as her breed goes, she's probably just about the laziest one in the world, which still puts her high in the running in the list of most energetic dog I've ever met.

    I've never seen her walk when running or jumping was an option, she gives 110% to everything she does, even if it's just running up the stairs to go to bed. I'm fairly certain she has never touched half of our stairs because she pretty much just jumps from landing to landing.

  • Have you ever been an exchange student or known one? What was it like, and how did it go?

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  • My aunt and uncle hosted an exchange student from China.

    He was a bit of an awkward weirdo, I kind of got the impression he was somewhat wealthy, seemed nice enough, just weird, and didn't seem to have much interest in experiencing anything American except for buying clothes and such that I guess we're more expensive in China.

    After a few months, they noticed their cat walking funny and got him checked out, and found what looked like burns on his paws, and they weren't sure how it happened.

    They checked their security cameras, and saw the exchange student holding the cat to the hot stove.

    Sent him packing really quick.

  • Do you decorate your house/apartment for Christmas? Do you have a real or fake tree?

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  • If it were up to me, I wouldn't. But my wife likes Christmas so I do. I'm an atheist, she's Wiccan, we were raised Catholic and vaguely catholic-ish respectively.

    We do a real tree, if I'm gonna go through the trouble I'm gonna do it right. It also means I don't have to haul the damn thing up and down the ladder to my attic every year, I just strap it back onto my car and haul it over to my friends house for our next bonfire.

    We do a string of lights around our porch and put out a garden flag and that's about all of our exterior decoration.

    My wife also puts out a few interior decorations inside the house, stockings by the fireplace, etc.

  • How would you process the fact that a new friend of yours is a cop? (USA)

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  • First of all, I find your phrasing that he "is/was" a cop kind of interesting. Is he a cop or is he not? If he was but is no longer a cop, it could very well be that he left that career because he shares some of your same thoughts and feelings and you're getting yourself worked up over nothing.

    Anyway

    To me, ACAB means that all cops are bastards collectively

    It does not mean that each individual cop is a bastard.

    There are undoubtedly some cops that are good people, doing their damnedest to do the right thing, standing up for the little guy against the bastards, who are trying to make the system better from the inside, who understand the role that policing should be, etc.

    And there are of course some who are bastards, who abuse their power and do all of the things that make policing shitty.

    And there are cops who aren't actively bastards themselves, but also aren't doing anything to make waves and stand up against the bastards.

    It's a case of a few rotten apples spoiling the bunch. The apple barrel has a couple absolutely amazing apples in there that are everything you could ever want from an apple, a whole bunch of meh run-of-the-mill grocery store apples, that do the job of being an apple well enough, but aren't going to make you stand up and say "holy shit, that's a good fucking apple," and then there's a handful of rotten apples that will make you puke your guts up, and unfortunately you don't get to pick and choose which apple you're eating, you just have to reach in blind and take a bite, and since those rotten apples are in there, it's a pretty big gamble to make, you have to really need that apple for it to be worth it.

    However, entering into a friendship is different than other interactions you'd have with the police. You get a chance to inspect the apple before you eat it, to see if it's good, ok, or rotten to the core.

    I'd say don't dismiss him outright because he's a cop, but try to feel him out, see what his attitude and philosophy is like, don't grill him on it, but take note of how he reacts when different subjects are brought up, and if you find something problematic with what he says, try to explain how your views are different in a non-confrontational way, don't make it a fight or an argument or a debate, just try to explain your thoughts and feelings and try to understand why he thinks the way he does as well. With the right people around him, it's possible that you could help make him or keep him a good cop when otherwise he might go bad, it's up to you if you want to take on that task.

  • TIL "This machine kills fascists" is a message that American musician Woody Guthrie placed on his guitar in the mid-1940s, starting in 1943.

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  • *Arlo

    But yeah, the movie was pretty bad. It's based somewhat on real events but with a lot of made up shit thrown in that Arlo himself didn't like. The real-life Alice actually just died a few weeks ago.

  • How much easier would it be to create mods for open source games?

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  • I think in many cases a bigger issue is going to be how the game is designed, whether open or closed source.

    If your open source game is a mess of poorly-documented, barely-decipherable spaghetti code, held together by a bunch of tacky bullshit, that's going to be a nightmare to mod.

    On the other-hand, a closed source game may have absolutely phenomenal documentation and tools available specifically to enable the modding community.

    Similarly, you can have well-written, open-sourced code with built-in mod support with proper documentation, and you can have ridiculous bullshit closed-source code that no one is quite sure how or why it even works.