@sxan@midwest.social
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

sxan

@sxan@midwest.social 

<span style="color:#323232;">       🅸 🅰🅼 🆃🅷🅴 🅻🅰🆆. 
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 𝖋𝖊𝖆𝖙𝖍𝖊𝖗𝖘𝖙𝖔𝖓𝖊𝖍𝖆𝖚𝖌𝖍 
</span>

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sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

I really like DeWALT. I think it’s a solid choice, and I doubt anyone who isn’t a professional will notice the difference in quality between those and Makita. Plus, they have some neat tools that have unusual features that make an unexpectedly large improvement in ease-of-use.

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

Hmmm. You may be right. I have owned no Makitas. I’m going by tear-down videos. AvE may have gone a bit off the rails, but he’s done some really good tear-downs of different tools, and looked at the quality of the materials, the casting, the motors, switches, and so on. He consistently was impressed by Makita’s build quality… but all of those videos are, like, 6 years old, or older.

It’d be too bad if even the “good” makers like Makita went the quantity-over-quality commercial route.

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

Yeah, this is like a game of, “one of these things is not like the other.” Ryobi is not in the same league as the others.

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

Quality-wise, Makita > DeWALT ≥ Milwaukee > Ryobi, at least, if you watch teardowns by guys like AvE.

Power tools are like cars; companies hold several brands and target them to different market segments, like Porsche and VW.

Ryobi is owned by the same company as Milwauki; it’s the budget line, Milwauki being their premium line.

DeWALT and Black & Decker are owned by the same company; DeWALT is their premium line.

The exception in this list is Makita, which is its own company. They’re also objectively more well-built than the others (here), and correspondingly usually more expensive.

The premium lines are better quality (not just more expensive) but also tend to have smaller battery-tool options. Despite being a budget line, I mostly own B&D because most of my tools these days are 24V and there are more tool options there. The few, select, DeWALT tools I have are noticably better quality.

I don’t use power tools enough to justify Makita, but also, their battery-powered line is comparatively tiny. As someone else said, there’s a lot of motivation to pick a (compatible) lane, whichever it is. For most home-gamers, the quality difference will probably not matter much. If I were made of money, though, I’d have everything Makita except for the things they don’t make.

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

Humans. Where is my snow?

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

It used to be, I’d start at DDG andwhen I didn’t find my results, I’d switch to Goog. Now I do this, but when I find even worse results on Google, I switch back to DuckDuck because query wrangling on DDG is more worthwhile. The starting results may not always be good on DDG, but they’re often better than Google.

However, very recently I’ve been starting on Searx on doing follow-up checks on Bing, and this has been working pretty well. I know DDG has to show ads, but lately they seem to take up the better part of the first page and aren’t helpful.

Google is completely out of the picture. Their results are just bad.

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

Scriptability.

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

I’ve been hoping that’s gravy. Hope… hope… hope…

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

Yes.

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

If a person has to work to pick fruit from a tree so they can eat and not starve, does that mean Nature is slavery?

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

I low-key wish I could put you and @deegeese in a jar and shake it.

In the nicest way.

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

Amen.

You can make pasta with flour, water, and salt. Add yeast, and you can make country loaf bread. Add a little sugar, butter, & milk, and you can make white sandwhich bread, or dumplings for soup. These are absurdly easy recipes, almost impossible to mess up. Change the portions, and you have sugar cookies, like you said! Splurge on chocolate chips and you can have chocolate chip cookies. Get some baking soda, and you can make crackers.

Flour’s about 80¢/lb. Salt is $10 for 26 oz, which will last many, many recipes. Yeast is $1.50/oz. For $25, you can make about 25 loaves of bread, and still have a bunch of salt left over.

Flour is the single best, and most versitile, calorie-to-dollar value food.

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

Buy yourself a couple of supreme court judges. They’re a bargain these days.

I'm so frustrated rn.

I have been distro hopping for about 2 weeks now, there’s always something that doesn’t work. I thought I would stick with Debian and now I haven’t been able to make my printer work in it, I think I tried in another distro and it just worked out of the box, but there’s always something that’s broken in every distro....

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

EndeavourOS is pretty good, too; also Arch-based with an easy installer.

The advantage to Arch-based-distros is rolling releases, and the Arch wiki instructions are more easily followed. And right now, the Arch wiki is probably the single best resource for Linux instructions and troubleshooting on the web.

Should I wait for the "Snyder cut" (director's cut) of Rebel Moon?

Hearing the movie is getting bad reviews. But Snyder says the director’s cut will be a completely different movie with a different vision. I admit Zack Snyder’s Justice League (director’s cut) was much better than the theatrical version and quite different (though I had mostly forgotten the original by then). Not sure if I...

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

I liked the quote from the historian who said, 300 wasn’t historically accurate, but the Spartans themselves would probably have loved it and approved of the representation.

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

Nearly every day. There was a time when I’d reach for Ruby, but in the end, the stability, ubiquity, and portability of the traditional Unix tools - among whom awk is counted - turned out to be more useful. I mainly underuse its power, though; it serves as a column aggregator or re-arranger, for the most part.

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

A decade ago (almost!) I had one of those HP swivel-screen jobs - a Compaq TC4200. Replaceable battery, dock, external attachable battery, resistive touch screen, fully user-serviceable… it was the best laptop I’ve ever had, in terms of feature set.

People often claim they don’t make 'em like they used to, but it’s true. Framework is a step in the right direction with servicability, but they still have a way to go to get to everything laptops of a decade ago.

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

You could do it in Wayland, too, it’s just that every single Wayland app would have to re-implement the rotation and rendering themselves.

Scraft161, to privacy
@Scraft161@tsukihi.me avatar

Hardware security key options?

I've been thinking about getting a hardware security key and have heard of yubikey before; but I want to see what my options are and if they are worth it in your opinion.
My current setup is a local KeePassXC database (that I sync between my PC and phone and also acts as TOTP authenticator app), I know that KeePass supports hardware keys for unlocking the database.

I am personally still of the belief that passwords are the safest when done right; but 2FA/MFA can greatly increase security on top of that (again, if done right).
The key work work together with already existing passwords, not replace them.

As I use linux as my primary OS I do expect it to support it and anything that doesn't I will have to pass on.

PS: what are the things I need to know about these hardware keys that's not being talked about too much, I am very much delving into new territory and want to make sure I'm properly educated before I delve in.

@linux @technology @technology @privacy

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

As to why thisisawayoflife recommends these products (over OP’s consideration of Yubico), probably because Solo and Nitro keys are open source hardware and firmware.

Nitro is a German company. Yubico is a Swedish company. I can’t find where SoloKeys is located. However, the OS nature of Solo and Nitro should make that a little less important.

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

Probably not testing, but rather demonstrating to potential buyers (the pig in the background). It sells better, and demonstrates the seller’s conviction that the product works.

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

Great write-up! I agree with all of your aesthetic picks. I first saw A New Hope when I was 11, and even at that age - having grown up on a cinematic diet of WWII films - the DLT-19 stood out as a wierdly familiar and out-of-place gun.

Enjoyable read, thanks!

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

Good catch!

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

The problem is in the “look forward to.” How depressing to get a globe and recognize a memory from your past. You wouldn’t even have that to look forward to.

sxan,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

Oh, they know. They know.

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