I just bought a house from a guy who had been renting it out for thirty years and I’m now in the process of fixing all the shit he neglected during that time. I can’t believe that anyone was willing to rent this place for any amount of money, let alone the $1300/mo he had been getting for it. The kitchen ceiling was sagging down a foot in two places and held up literally only by the paint and caulk, thanks to mice - I got showered with mouse poop and urine-soaked ceiling tile material when I demo’ed it. The electrical outlets were all partially blocked by the baseboard radiators, which was probably a good thing because they were all ungrounded 1940s-era receptacles with the hot and neutral wires hooked up in reverse. One light switch caused the circuit breaker to trip as soon as I flipped it. Not a single door in the house could actually be closed (not even the front door) so I had to reset the hinges; one door looked like he had tried to fix the problem using a beaver with dental problems.
He sold the house as “rental ready” and I’m five months into the renovation now. I like to think the house appreciates my being here.
I always thought the word “ginormous” (a portmanteau of gigantic and enormous) was totally modern, but then I read a book published in 1943 by a Battle of Britain Spitfire pilot which had “ginormous” in its glossary section.
I bought a batch of that shit once that had been dyed green - you could tell because most of the green pigment ended up concentrated at the end of the fat stems. Nastiest shit ever, I’m probably lucky to be alive.
I know cords are a bit of a pain, but rotating batteries and keeping them charged is also a bit of a pain, and at least the pain of cords ensures that you always have a tool to use when you need it. Also electrical outlets have been standardized for more than a century now.
I was browsing the tool section at a Home Depot once a couple of years ago when a very attractive young woman came up to me and started asking me about my project. I’m not so dense that I thought she was hitting on me, but I couldn’t figure out her angle and I thought maybe she was a prostitute or something. Turns out she was a Milwaukee sales rep and she was trying to encourage people (men, rather) to buy some Milwaukee cordless tools.
I’ve gone through a skoolie (school bus converted to an RV) project and now most of a house renovation with one 1/4" Ryobi drill and one 3/8" Harbor Freight drill and they’re both somehow still going strong after five years of hard usage. I had bad opinions of both manufacturers before but not any more.
There is a canadian Youtuber that I stopped watching because he turned out to be a Canuck Trumper type, but he did a lot of videos where he broke down power tools with various price points and showed why they cost what they cost and where manufacturers do or don’t cut corners. Interesting stuff.
I saw a duck at a park once with an arrow (like, a hunting arrow rather than a toy) stuck in it. I tried to catch it to see if I could remove it; probably best that I couldn’t since those barbed arrows do more damage coming out than going in. The duck really didn’t seem bothered by it, but it was probably just trying to put on a good face.
Fun school bus fact: school buses have a prybar as standard equipment, and if you call it a crowbar you lose a point on your CDL examination. Why that matters is a mystery to me.
I love watching Youtube videos of native Italians eating at Olive Garden. It’s not just that they hate the food because of course they do, it’s that they get so incredibly angry at the very concept of someone daring to call that food “Italian”.
I’m a school bus driver and some modern buses have the switches for operating the doors and the 8-ways (the amber and red flashers at the top corners) on the steering wheel and they drive me up the fucking wall. The problem is that you often have to stop for kids after making a sharp turn one way or the other, so the wheel is not in its normal position and you have no idea where the switches are and have to look down to see them. If they’re on the left fixed panel (their “normal” location) you can reach for them without having to look.
One thing I always liked about Blackberries aside from the physical keyboard was the scroll wheel. People joke about them but they worked really well and smoothly (before the actual ball got replaced with a bullshit push sensor round about 2009 or so) and you could dial in on a specific pixel easily - something you just can’t do with a touchscreen - which made the tiny screens a lot more practical than they otherwise would have been.
"How do you know" by War and Peas (i0.wp.com)
Source: Website -RSS
The system is broken (lemmy.zip)
Snackish (lemmy.world)
EDIT: I THINK I STAND CORRECTED (lemmy.zip)
I considered deleting the post, but this seems more cowardly than just admitting I was wrong. But TIL something!
fr fr ong (startrek.website)
The four houses dads belong to. (lemmy.world)
Help him... (slrpnk.net)
Fellow landchads of Lemmy. Don't you hate when this happens? (lemmy.world)
The sword in the dome (lemmy.world)
Archaeopteryx 🐦
" Pass the beernuts.” (lemmy.world)
Why is this so hard (lemmy.world)
They shipped him in from Italy (startrek.website)
What is a nifty little feature modern gadgets have lost? (lemmy.world)
For me it’s the notification light you used to find on older phones, was particularly good to know if your phone was charged without picking it up