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@captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works avatar

captain_aggravated

@captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works

Linux gamer, retired aviator, profanity enthusiast

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captain_aggravated ,
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Both of those statements are categorically false.

captain_aggravated ,
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Fun thing I discovered: A lot of DVDs check which region the player is from and play a different warning at the beginning. VHS is analog and linear so that FBI warning is just baked into the video but DVDs can shuffle video on the fly. Fun fact: That's how they got the theatrical edition and the extended edition on one side of one DVD, if you play the standard edition it just skips the added scenes on the fly.

captain_aggravated ,
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Way back when I still lived at home, my family had a little game, someone would put in a movie and the first one to guess which movie it was "won." I could often do it from the previews. DVDs spoiled this with their menus. Well, most of them did. Some of them do just start playing the film (or start at the previews).

I recently ripped my whole DVD collection to my NAS because, well, optical drives are going extinct. And I noticed some patterns. DVDs of contemporary movies from early in the format's history were often special events. They had specially designed one-off packaging, lots of extra features, extravagant menus, etc. As you went later in the format's run, packaging became standardized, and especially older pre-DVD movies that were being re-issued on DVD would often just auto-play the movie when inserted. They often had menus that had no animation or music so you could chapter select or toggle the subtitles on but you'd have to stop the movie to see them. Also, TV shows on disc suffered way more from disc rot than movies, I'm guessing the discs themselves were cheaper/worse.

captain_aggravated ,
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Okay, who downvoted this? The MPAA?

captain_aggravated ,
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Minor suggestion: Do it in winter. Transcoding video like that is a CPU intensive workload, if you're going to pump that much heat out of your PC case you might as well want it.

captain_aggravated ,
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A lot of things made it a Winter project for me: wanting to assist my furnace rather than fight my air conditioner in the Carolina heat was one thing, also my work slows down a lot in winter, not as many projects to do, so I had plenty of time to mess with it over winter. Plus, in summer I keep my house at 74, in winter I keep it at 70, It's amazing how much that makes a difference in CPU temperatures.

Netflix Windows app is set to remove its downloads feature, while introducing ads (www.techradar.com)

Netflix has managed to annoy a good number of its users with an announcement about an upcoming update to its Windows 11 (and Windows 10) app: support for adverts and live events will be added, but the ability to download content is being taken away....

captain_aggravated ,
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I could imagine a technical limitation if they use some proprietary audio codec to send compressed surround sound that the browser somehow doesn't support, but on the other hand why the fuck am I giving a big tech corporation any benefit of the doubt?

captain_aggravated , (edited )
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Oh is that like bankofarnerica.com or whatever, hoping the r and n look enough like an m for at least some people to click?

edit: under absolutely no circumstances click on the above link. Your bank will be robbed and your foreskin soldered shut. To very don't.

captain_aggravated ,
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sigh would you look at all that stuff...

captain_aggravated ,
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Remember OLD Youtube? With a 10 minute upload limit? Which is why the original Red Letter Media Mr. Plinkett review of The Phantom Menace, the work that basically invented the modern long-form video essay, was broken into 9 parts?

Google's call-scanning AI could dial up censorship by default, privacy experts warn (techcrunch.com)

A feature Google demoed at its I/O confab yesterday, using its generative AI technology to scan voice calls in real time for conversational patterns associated with financial scams, has sent a collective shiver down the spines of privacy and security experts who are warning the feature represents the thin end of the wedge. They...

captain_aggravated ,
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better idea: shut down the phone network entirely.

captain_aggravated ,
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It's more like pfffff rather than brrrrrr but yeah.

captain_aggravated ,
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I did want to kneecap the idiot that decided to use a leaf blower to blow the sand off the parking lot of the apartment I used to rent in. Was kind of tempted to send the manager a bill for a new clear coat on my car.

captain_aggravated ,
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You have to click? I turn on my networked printer and every Linux machine on my network sets it up whether I wanted them to or not.

captain_aggravated ,
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An Epson XP-830. Full disclosure: When it was brand new it was a severe pain in the ass because it wasn't supported by CUPS yet, I had to go out to Epson's website and download a driver in .rpm fromat and install it with alien. Bought it a couple months before I abandoned Windows for Linux and had to make it work. After about a year CUPS suddenly knew what to do with it and it's Just Worked(tm) ever since.

captain_aggravated ,
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Your terms are acceptable.

captain_aggravated ,
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Well like, I am a woodworker. I haul several barrels of sawdust to the dump every year, and I'm only going to make more as time goes on and I start selling my work. I'm thinking of installing a pellet stove in my house and making my own wood pellets, which would save me a couple hundred bucks a year on gas AND the $30 or so I spend at the dump every year hauling out sawdust. I could further detach myself from the fossil fuel industry and the evils therein. This would require purchasing a machine that cost about what my table saw did, or about my take from the sale of one Morris chair.

captain_aggravated ,
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Aluminum can gang represent.

Apple crushes creativity and its reputation in new iPad ad (www.theregister.com)

The ad itself depicted a mechanical crusher destroying artifacts of human creativity. A trumpet, guitar, sculpture, piano, drawing board, paints, a metronome, several analog cameras, a turntable, and hi-fi equipment were among the much-loved items yielding to the machine's unstoppable force.

captain_aggravated ,
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In 2007 I had a Gateway convertible computer. This thing was like 14 or 15 inches screen size, it had to have weighed 5 pounds with the battery attached, closed and without worrying about the battery's additional thickness it had to have been an inch and a half thick. The thing is, it worked fine.

The Dell Inspiron that replaced it has one of those soft shell lithium batteries that inevitably bulge and stop the trackpad from clicking, there's a fan that scrapes its housing because of how tight the clearances have to be...all so the thing can be about a half inch thick? Why?

EA wants to place in-game ads in its full-price AAA games, again (www.techspot.com)

EA has tried this before, with predictable results. In 2020, EA Sports UFC 4 included full-screen ads for the Amazon Prime series The Boys that would appear during 'Replay' moments. These were absent from the game when it launched, with EA introducing the ads about a month later, thereby preventing them from being highlighted in...

captain_aggravated ,
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I cannot buy fewer EA games. The last EA game I bought ran on the Super Nintendo.

captain_aggravated ,
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Does that refresh take place across the entire eye simultaneously or is each rod and/or cone doing its own thing?

captain_aggravated ,
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The two-by-fours at your local home center are not 2 inches thick or 4 inches wide...not anymore at least. They spent several weeks at that size though. The sawmill cut them to that size to stack and kiln dry, and then when removed from the kiln they are then milled straight and square. Used to be they would sell the rough stock to carpenters who would do the milling themselves, but then they figured out that the railroads were charging them a fortune to ship a lot of wood that was going to be ground to sawdust anyway, so they started milling the boards before shipment. Same amount of construction lumber arrives at the construction site and it took less fuel for the locomotive to deliver it.

captain_aggravated ,
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Factually incorrect; the board is 2 inches by 4 inches (or whatever the marked dimension is) when rough sawn. After kiln drying and milling, it will be 1.5" thick and 3.5" wide. It still took 2 by 4 inches of the tree to make so that's what you pay for.

captain_aggravated ,
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I'm going to guess they can get away with this because 2x2s aren't intended for structural use. I've never built one into a floor, wall or ceiling.

captain_aggravated ,
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Construction lumber, especially pressure treated lumber, is sold so wet I don't think it really matters. I've actually never tried to calculate wood movement for construction lumber because who the fuck cares? But for furniture lumber which is dried to between 6 and 14% moisture, there is a formula:

width of the board in inches x percentage of moisture change * expansion coefficient for a particular species.

Yellow pine (extremely common construction lumber) has an expansion coefficient of .00263. A 2x4 (actual dimension 1.5" by 3.5") that undergoes a 4% moisture content change will grow/shrink 3.54.00263 = 0.03682 inches, or just over 1/32". That's in width; it'll vary by less than half that in thickness. Wood basically doesn't move along the grain; the board won't get appreciably longer or shorter.

captain_aggravated ,
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A yellow pine 2x10 might move a tenth of an inch, not a full inch.

captain_aggravated ,
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Absolutely sure. It's not really a factor in construction because of how the structure is engineered, but woodworkers have to constantly think about it.

Wood expands and contracts across the grain, but not so much along it. If you take a board that has been in a dry environment, put it in a humid environment, and allow it to acclimate, it will increase in width and thickness but not in length. At the microscopic level, wood is kind of like a bunch of ropes glued together with sponge, as it soaks up water the sponge wants to expand but the ropes don't let it expand along their length.

Us woodworkers have to think about that when building things like doors, which might fit fine in the winter and then stick in the summer. It's why we build frame and panel doors like this:

https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/f8a2c5a8-f125-4bcb-b5e7-762b054a795f.png

The large panel in the middle can expand and contract so much that it might be a problem, so we literally put it in a box. The outer dimensions of the frame are made mostly of the length of boards so it won't expand and contract much, and the panel rests in a groove in the frame, not nailed or glued in place so that it can safely expand and contract as it wants to.

Attaching wide boards end-to-face can even present a situation where the boards want to move in different directions and they'll eventually break each other.

You can even calculate the amount of wood movement given the species, of the wood, the dimension of the board and the amount of moisture change, you can read about it here.

captain_aggravated ,
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The consumer doesn't need to know the dimensions at harvest. But the lumberjack and the sawyer do. They care about how much of the tree was needed to make a particular board, not how much board the customer ended up with.

captain_aggravated ,
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I think if I was you I'd go have a talk with your sawyer, talk about "man if I wanted my wood this wet I wouldn't have broken up with Meagan. Is your kiln in working order?"

captain_aggravated ,
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Would you call that a "structural use?"

captain_aggravated ,
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Okay, are we talking about "boards sold as 2x10s might vary in width from board to board?" Because I took you to mean that a given dried and milled 2x10 might move up to an inch, which it had better fucking not. Because yeah, the likes of Georgia Pacific are going to be a bit sloppy with the final dimensions of 2x10s, because it rarely matters that much for what that board is going to be used for.

I'm a woodworker, I buy rough sawn lumber dried over a period of months, I shop dry it for a couple weeks then mill it myself. I can predict with a fair degree of accuracy how much it will move.

A sawyer is an occupational term for a person who operates a sawmill. My sawyer's name is Bill.

captain_aggravated ,
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From Wikipedia:

Sawyer is an occupational term referring to someone who saws wood, particularly using a pitsaw either in a saw pit or with the log on trestles above ground or operates a sawmill.

Operator of a sawmill = sawyer.

A 2x10 can move a half inch while drying? Sure. It shouldn't be "while drying" while the construction crew is installing it.

captain_aggravated ,
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The word "Sawmill" from my quote was a link. This is the first picture on the page it links to. Hell of a hand tool that guy's using.

You're not only stupid, you're dishonest. I bet you vote Republican.

captain_aggravated ,
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Which is why I buy stock rough sawn and mill it myself.

captain_aggravated ,
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Maybe, if you ask the sawyer nicely.

captain_aggravated ,
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if you own a thickness planer, you don't immediately need a jointer. You can flatten a face with a sled and shims in the planer, and joint edges a frillion different ways. I have a jointer and sometimes I use my router table for edge jointing.

captain_aggravated ,
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Pretty sure that's called a baculum.

captain_aggravated ,
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There is a business in my town. There's probably one like it in your town. They rent power equipment. Anything from pressure washers to bobcats to bouncy castles. And as a man who has needed to drill precisely 8 holes into a concrete slab in 37 years, there is a genuine value proposition in renting a hammer drill for an afternoon compared to buying one.

captain_aggravated ,
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Having built a number of Repraps, "nearly everything" is highly exaggerated. I have seen 3D printers with an almost entirely printed frame, but using off the shelf T slot rails is a lot more time and cost effective.

It is currently not possible to print the control board, wiring, sensors, hot end, motors, heaters, bearings, slides and rails necessary for a 3D printer. Some of the mechanical parts and a lot of the bracketry that holds the frame together can be 3D printed.

captain_aggravated ,
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I'm hoping to have bought my last engine. maybe there will be another ICE car or motorcycle in my future, I don't think I'll ever own another airplane and I'm 100% done with gas powered lawn tools. I've got a set of electric lawn tools that do a fantastic job and they don't pack their sinuses with their own shit all winter so they work when it's time.

And my father has fought me tooth and nail the entire way. "You sure you don't want the gas one? It's slightly bigger! Let's get the gas one." Dad, why are we here for the second year in a row buying a string trimmer? "We can't get the old one to start." Wrong. We're buying a new one because we can't get the almost brand new one we bought last year to start. Now what chemical did you consume in the 60's that makes you think a nearly identical one we buy this year will be any different? "Ohh come on." This one works almost exactly like a power drill. When's the last time you put a battery in the power drill and spent an hour failing to get it to start drilling? "Sigh I guess."

It's lighter, quieter, runs on a battery system we're already very invested in, starts every time, requires less maintenance and fueling is a lot more convenient. Every electric lawn tool we've bought bar none works great.

captain_aggravated ,
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Windows constantly says "this could harm your computer." Just about any time you install software it does.

Remember when Linus Sebastian blew up Pop!_OS? As a Windows user, "This is likely to break your computer, do not do this unless you absolutely know what you're doing. To proceed, type "Yes, do as I say."" is something to walk right past.

captain_aggravated ,
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I've done big forensic write-ups of it in the past and mapped it to the FAA's accident chain model. It just so happened that he was using a distro with a weird forked DE (Pop!_OS) and just so happened that the version of the Steam package in the apt cache from when the install image was made was bugged in such a way that it would uninstall Xorg, and it just so happened that Pop!_OS didn't run an apt update when launching their GUI app manager.

When Linus saw "failed to install Steam" he turned the petulant child up to 11 and started bitching about how you always have to use the terminal in Linux, and instead of googling the error message to find out "do an update and try again" he found a page that told him how to sudo apt install steam. Most instructions like that tell you do to an apt update before an apt install, so I don't know if he either aggressively skimmed, deliberately ignored the update command because he's used to how painful Windows updates are, or if he found a source that didn't include it.

APT spat out a lot of stdout about all the packages it was going to remove, with a highlighted plaintext warning at the end which he failed to read or failed to heed.

Linus' bad attitude was a major contributing factor to the incident.

captain_aggravated ,
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I think it played a part.

captain_aggravated ,
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There has to be a level of "competently trained user" in there we can strive for. I think we were getting there about the time I was in high school circa 2003, where every last one of us could format an MLA essay in MS Word and do an autosum in Excel.

Something that put me off of Microsoft products for a decade before I switched to Linux was their constant rearranging of the UI, requiring users to re-learn how to do basic tasks that worked just fine.

captain_aggravated ,
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I ran a poll a few years ago on Reddit asking people what event made them switch to Linux from some other platform. Interestingly enough it was not the EOL of a preferred version of Windows or MacOS, but the introduction of a dreaded new one. In other words, according to my poll, more people quit using Windows not because Win 7 support ended, but because Win 8 was released. Which was counterintuitive to me.

captain_aggravated ,
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The story I heard was 9/10ths of the women on the platform had "I don't message first, you message me first" in their bio, so it was functionally a display case for morons.

captain_aggravated ,
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anything with mutual friends

I don't have any of those, they all knocked each other up in their 20's, their personalities died and now they're all underpaid zombies with diaper bags and minivans who never text, and in car-centric America there is no mechanism for meeting more.

co-ed sports

Illegal in the South for the same reasons that you can't buy beer on Sunday morning.

Community events such as at a local library or whatever

My town hosts regular community events and distributes a list of upcoming ones every month as part of a newsletter included with our water bills. 100% of them are for ages 6-12 or 65+; About the only event I'm aware of that might allow normal no adjective adults to attend is the occasional First Friday event, which plays music you could hear from geostationary orbit. I mean seriously the music will rattle my windows about as hard as a freight train and the stage gets set up 4 blocks further away than the tracks. Should I call OSHA or something?

Meetups for interests

All of my interests are some combination of near total sausage fests, have no support/community in my area, or any support for them died during the pandemic.

often hosted at some local business

Buy shit! Buy shit buy shit buy shit!

captain_aggravated ,
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Adapting and overcoming the death of society itself is not something I'm interested in doing.

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