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wjrii

@ wjrii @lemmy.world

Posts

42
Comments

685
Joined

3 yr. ago

3d ago

TIL that Jesus Christ was probably born in 7–4 B.C.
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4

wjrii @lemmy.world 3d ago

I think you’ll find pretty much all secular historians of the time and place will agree that there was probably an itinerant preacher by the name of Joshua going around in the area who was baptized by John, got in trouble with the local authorities, and got himself executed, but his followers eventually regrouped and built myths around him.
The gospels themselves, including the ones that didn’t make the cut in the Council of Rome, are a form of documentation, and Jesus is independently attested several other times within a century of his death and not always kindly. It’s pretty decent documentation for a non-elite of that era, though.
Anyone who claims much more than that likely is shilling for Christianity, but it’s wishful or even conspiratorial thinking to insist that Jesus was completely made up. Better to attack the notion of his being divine, because that actually is sky-daddy nonsense.

4d ago

The MacGyver maneuver

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wjrii @lemmy.world 4d ago

Richard Dean Anderson. Shitposts is leaking.

5d ago

What the humidity level in your area?

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wjrii @lemmy.world 5d ago

Dallas, I've never had an issue. Houston, I got all kinds of zits and pilling and was thinking about getting or making a filament dryer before we moved. Both can be pretty humid, but the difference between 60% and 90% is significant.

1w ago

My childhood right here

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wjrii @lemmy.world 1w ago

Just a little after my teen years, but HTF and Bawls (grabbed while in the checkout line at Fry's Electronics) bring up some memories. And... is that Pixie Stix? If so, the 60s through the 90s would like a word.

1w ago

What's something cool you've made?

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wjrii @lemmy.world 1w ago

Well, keycaps potentially got added to the list of things to design, but otherwise the basics are the same. There would just be an adjustment to the 2-D "plate" files you'd need to use, and you'd run into the complications from a printer build plate sooner (depending on printer and keyboard size). You might not need to go a full 20-25% though. Just 5 or 10 might be enough and then you could maybe still get away with "normal" keycaps. Different shape families of keycaps have different names, and the XDA (sold by every random reseller on Amazon) or ISA (made for one specifix brand, XVX) both have pretty large top surfaces that would help with making your fingertips comfortable and blunting the aesthetic hit of altering a dimension we're subtly used to.

1w ago

Permanently Deleted

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wjrii @lemmy.world 1w ago

I arrived when the API protest hit (rip kbin.social). I think I’m one of the few active Lemmings who’s also still somewhat active on Reddit. However, I was always pretty mindful of how I set up Reddit, only browsed my subscribed subs, and unsubscribed from almost all the big defaults. I have since unsubscribed from (I think) all of the defaults, but I still go there to see AskHistorians, keyboard, sports, and local subs.

None of those things have a really active flow of news and discussion here, and by and large I think I’m still mostly reading comments from real redditors. To be quite honest it’s not bad. However, the bigger communities there are well and truly cooked, and the vibe here for general interest and shitposts is much more my speed. It’s not as easy to find people whose interests exactly align, but people here are cool and interesting.

Ultimately, I accept that even “Small-Reddit” like I’m using is on borrowed time and will likely be dead internet before disappearing completely. When that happens, I’ll be a little sad but I won’t be surprised. I don’t feel like it’s quite there yet, however, and until I’m ready to cut all the toxic tech-bro owned companies out of my life, singling out Reddit when I still find some value in it felt like cutting off my nose to spite my face.

2w ago

What's something cool you've made?

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wjrii @lemmy.world 2w ago

For handwiring, Joe Scotto's videos on Youtube are excellent. For something a little more old school, but maybe more accessible theoretically, Matt3o's walkthrough from the before-COVID times is still viable.

If you want to design a PCB, KiCAD is quite usable now, and there are plugins for keyboard switch footprints and to take Keyboard Layout Editor data and place them perfectly. For me, with no EE background whatsoever, the biggest mental hurdle was understanding the design paradigm "electrical schematic first, physical layout next". I've been content to leave my PCB level at the point of making the entire keyboard PCB dumb and leaving the brains of the thing to a cheap and replaceable Raspberry Pi Pico (I like the clones that use USB-C). Physically, they're basically larger versions of this tutorial from adafruit, though I use more standard keyboard firmwares. The other benefit of a PCB is that the minimum order most places is five, so with a couple of design choices (e.g. include mounting holes and rounded corners) and some PCB standoffs, you can have two usable builds with no case at all, and a spare PCB.

2w ago

What's something cool you've made?

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wjrii @lemmy.world 2w ago

We have enema bottles full of mineral oil that I use to grease hinges and wheels.

Also the preferred food-safe finish for wooden cutting boards and butcher blocks!

2w ago

What's something cool you've made?

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wjrii @lemmy.world 2w ago

Electronics wise, this is absolutely an intro project if you do the PCBs how I did and leave a space to mount a Raspberry Pi Pico or similar. Then your PCB is basically structural support for some wiring and diodes, and all the actual electrical engineering is contained in a $5 dev board.

Generally the skills you need are a bit broad, but not deep at all, which suits my flighty mindset perfectly. A bit of investigating keyboard design rabbit holes (there are a surprising number of robust web tools for getting the alignment stuff for the keys), a bit of 3D printing, including assembling builds that are bigger than a build plate, a bit of CAD, a bit of PCB design (but again, ONLY a bit... there are pre-designed layout footprints for the microcontroller boards and for keyboard switches), and a bit of soldering, but generally of big and robust through-hole contacts that are hard to completely destroy.

I'm curious as to which part would be oversized? The number of keys? The spacing between them? The keycaps themselves? Any one of them would complicate things in its own way, but not ridiculously so, and potentially pretty trivially. If you're interested in following it up, making a macro-pad or numpad is a common first project, since the concepts are identical and the end result is still useful, but the investment and commitment are low if you screw it up or decide not to move on to anything bigger.

2w ago

What's something cool you've made?

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wjrii @lemmy.world 2w ago

So not launch a 90 kg projectile 300 meters? Pity.

2w ago

What's something cool you've made?

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wjrii @lemmy.world 2w ago

I've made a bunch of completely custom mechanical keyboards with my 3D prinnter and laser engraver, a few with PCBs that hold a Microcontroller dev board like a Pi Pico or Arduino, but for more of them, I hand-wired the switches directly to the microcontroller. My biggest and smallest.

2w ago

What's the most unforgivable sin done in media that you're still bitter about?

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wjrii @lemmy.world 2w ago

Even in Star Wars, the one he claims to like more, he sort of broke the fuzzy-time that Hyperspace travel seemed to take.

They were never explicit about travel times (and fair enough, Star Wars is what it is), but clearly in ANH they had time to come down from the adrenaline-dump of escaping the Imperials at Tattooine and settle in, such that Chewy was playing board games with the passengers and Ben thought it was going to be leisurely enough to kick off history lessons and lightsaber drills. Everything about that screams hours-long flight at an absolute minimum, and to my mind more like a few days on a tramp steamer. JJ turned it into "HERP DERP INSTANT LOLZ! The implied passage of time is BORRRRRING!"

2w ago

What's the most unforgivable sin done in media that you're still bitter about?

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wjrii @lemmy.world 2w ago

George undoubtedly said that. However, the idea that there was ever a single master vision that was fiddled with around the edges is kinda his own mythmaking bullshittery, plus wishful/rueful thinking from fans. Any time he was interviewed, that man just proclaimed what whatever he'd been noodling on in the last week, influenced by whatever was going on in his personal life, was always the plan from day one.

Certain core elements seem to persist, but shit like "how many movies," or "who's the central core to the narrative" or "exactly WTF are Whills" can go in 180 degree directions depending on the era in which he is discussing them. The analogy I've made for George is that all of Star Wars was his American-Graffiti-style garage hot rod. He fixes it up and mods it and rolls it out to show off and race every once in a while, but fundamentally it's his. He can change whatever the hell he likes, and it's your problem if you got attached to the red paint job from 10 years ago. This is what I think people are instinctively getting at when they say George doesn't understand his own creation.

2w ago

Hows the Fedi doing?

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wjrii @lemmy.world 2w ago

Yeah, people (including me at the time of APIpocalypse) thought a lift and shift of many communities from reddit made sense, when what we needed was general communities that would eventually poop out niche ones when their posts started to become distracting in the general community's feed.

2w ago

What's the most unforgivable sin done in media that you're still bitter about?

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wjrii @lemmy.world 2w ago

ROTJ was the first movie I recall having seen in a theatre; I loved it, and I still have a very soft spot for it. I can slough off criticisms of Ewoks without completely disagreeing that they were the beginning of the end and a backslide from ESB. I think I'm on the other side of the same cohort as Simon Pegg. He would have been 7 when ANH (aka just Star Wars) came out, and would only have been 13 when ROTJ came out. Unless you got into your teen ennui and "cooler than thou" mindset a bit early, 13 is still young enough to take it in with no judgment. Add another 16 years of livin', and George pushing things even a bit farther, and yeah, JarJar is not getting the same leeway.

2w ago

"Self-sealing stem bolts fall out all the time, the world is an imperfect place."

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wjrii @lemmy.world 2w ago

Young Kirk was referred to as “a stack of books with legs”

I've no doubt that this is true, but man-oh-man does that feel like something Roddenberry wrote down that Bill Shatner laughed at and threw in the trash.

Picard picked fights with Nausicans in his rebellious stage

Fair enough as well, you've sold me. I do wonder if that part of Picard's backstory was a wink-and-nod to how much different mature Picard was, compared to the popular perception of Shatner's Kirk.

2w ago

Jucika and the canning

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wjrii @lemmy.world 2w ago

That would track with what we've seen about how she works. She's always portrayed as determined and resourceful, to the point of breaking social norms by either subverting expectations about her age, class, and gender, or else leaning so hard into them that it circles back around into being unexpected.

2w ago

"Self-sealing stem bolts fall out all the time, the world is an imperfect place."

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wjrii @lemmy.world 2w ago

Interesting choice on Kirk and Picard, but maybe I'm just basic, LOL.

2w ago

Put it on the viewscreen

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wjrii @lemmy.world 2w ago

Sounds like you just lack the confidence to say anything to the genius science alien. 🤣

2w ago

Put it on the viewscreen

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wjrii @lemmy.world 2w ago

Just as an aside, it's funny to watch TOS and hear Spock alternating between US Customary and Metric seemingly every other episode. It's like he's just fucking with them but no one has the confidence to say anything to the genius science alien.