skybrian @skybrian@schelling.pt

nobody ever talks about the back and eye problems that wizards get from pondering orb at a desk 8 hours a day

Do you follow someone on Mastodon who does great posts but not-so-great boosts? Or maybe they boost too much?

You can mute just their boosts if you like:

1. Go to their profile
2. Click on "..."
3. Select "Hide boosts from"

This will not affect their own posts, which you will see as normal.

P.S. If you're new here, boosts are the equivalent of retweets or shares 🔁

#MastoTips #Mastodon #FediTips #Fediverse #Boosts

Woodworking Youtube is blowing up because a youtuber just proved - flat-out *proved* with machinery and controlled environments and numbers - that end-to-end glue joints are STRONGER than face-to-end or face-to-face joints, which is completely contrary to what we've all been told and assumed for... well, a LONG time!

What else have I been up to... I fixed a friend's air conditioner yesterday. It was running the compressor any time it was plugged in, so I figured a stuck relay and yeah, it was a stuck relay. Gave it a good smack and that got it to behave for a few cycles, ended up pulling the board and replacing the relay with a new one.

Swapping a five dollar part clawed back three hundred bucks from The Capitalists!

In case you weren’t aware, here’s one of the many ways unregulated electronics bought online can be dangerous. A regulation Australian IEC cable must have 3x 0.75mm²+ double-insulated stranded copper conductors. This cable appears to meet that requirement at first glance — it’s marked that way on the outside, and cutting in, the PVC colours are wrong but otherwise appear okay.

But then, scrape some of the copper, and it suddenly turns silver. It’s CCA, or Copper-Clad Aluminium. A sneaky and cheap but worse conductor. The aluminium holds up much worse to corrosion and bending, and will crumble to powder inside the cables over time. Through this process it will increase its resistance, turning into a fire-starter. Very dangerous and invisible without destroying the cable to examine it. #safety #psa

Partner: the pulldown hose for the kitchen sink has a bad leak. I'd like to replace the faucet, a similar model is $400

Me: how about $17 for a replacement hose and 15 minutes to fix it ourselves?

Partner: wait, that's an option?!

People talk about Right To Repair a lot, and it is important, but there's still a lot of work to do on Repair Culture. If people don't believe repair is a reasonable course of action, if their impulse is to replace instead of see if it's fixable, if they don't have the context and training and confidence to fix things, then repairs don't happen.

It's easy to be critical today, but the people who constructed buildings in the 1930s to 1960s using what they thought was a miracle fireproof mineral cladding were doing asbestos they could.