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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: December 13th, 2024

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  • Yes, so, basically what I said. Be careful and understand what you need.

    If you’re thinking from the mind of someone who understands current, of course you wouldn’t use 26 awg wire for speakers. When you’re giving advice online though, you have to think from the mind of someone who doesn’t have your same knowledge. OP telling someone “just use a vacuum cleaner power cable” isn’t specific enough, because they don’t have the knowledge OP has to understand what that means.

    I completely agree with OP that speaker wire is generally a rip off, and using any suitable wire is fine. I just want OP to also say that you need to know what you’re doing, or you could start a fire.

    I’ll give you an anecdote to hopefully illustrate my point. A while ago I was hanging out in a friend’s backyard on a chilly night. She wanted to provide some warmth for the guests, so she brought out two space heaters and a power strip. She plugged them in and turned them on and they ran for about 30 seconds, and the circuit breaker tripped. She went over to it and flipped it back on, and then about 30 seconds later it tripped again.

    I’m not saying this to disparage her, but to illustrate that many people don’t understand current, and don’t realize what is and isn’t dangerous when it comes to electricity. It wasn’t unreasonable for her to assume that would work, and it wasn’t unreasonable for her not to understand why it wasn’t. The breaker is there for exactly that reason. When you’re talking about making your own wire, it’s too easy to get it wrong if you don’t know what you’re doing, and that could cause a fire.




  • For most of those services, you’re looking at a few days to assemble and set up a server. For email, plan to spend the next month learning and troubleshooting.

    You can run all of that on basically any computer. If you have an old desktop, that would work great.

    Email often isn’t possible to self host because many ISPs block outbound connections on port 25. But, you can host it on some VPS providers, like DigitalOcean. The IP they give you will almost certainly have a terrible reputation and result in a lot of your mail going into people’s spam folders. So, you’ll have to spend some time contacting IP blacklist providers.

    Another option is to host the inbound SMTP servers, and handle outbound through a relay server. I’m not gonna recommend any, because I’m not too familiar with them.

    I know a fair bit about running email services, because I created and run https://port87.com/, a fairly new email service. I had to learn a lot about email to build it.





  • People really misunderstand a lot about diving.

    1

    • SCUBA is an acronym that stands for Self Contained Underwater Breathing Aparatus
    • SCUBA specifically refers to the gear with a tank, and not gear that uses an air hose connected to a boat
    • Tanks are usually filled with just regular air, nothing special about it
    • Oxygen becomes toxic at depth, so if you were to dive with 100% oxygen, you’d die at a fairly shallow depth

    2

    • Your flesh and blood absorb nitrogen from the air
    • The amount it absorbs is based on the pressure of your environment/the air you’re breathing
    • When you come back up to one atmosphere (1 bar) of pressure, your body slowly releases the nitrogen it has absorbed at depth
    • This is a physical process, not one your body has any control over
    • If you stay down for too long or come up too quickly, the nitrogen will become bubbles in your flesh and blood (the bends)
    • That’s painful and can kill you
    • A hyperbaric chamber (hyper-more than normal, baric-atmospheric pressure) can help by forcing the nitrogen bubbles to dissolve back into your flesh and release slowly
    • You can use a special mix of air with more oxygen and less nitrogen than normal to increase safe dive times, but this also decreases maximum depth, because of oxygen toxicity

    3

    • Another danger is if you ascend without breathing out, your lungs can pop
    • Humans don’t have any sense to tell us our lungs are too full
    • This is called lung over-expansion and can also kill you
    • It is also treated with a stay in a hyperbaric chamber

    4

    • Another danger is nitrogen at depth can induce an intoxicating effect like alcohol
    • This is called nitrogen narcosis and can cause you to act carelessly and get yourself killed
    • If you experience this, the correct course of action is to ascend a bit (like 15 feet) and wait until it subsides before you attempt to descend again
    • You can use a special mix of air with helium or a special mix of just helium and oxygen to reduce the risk of narcosis on deep dives

    5

    • Regular diving gear has two second stage regulators, your main and your octo
    • The name octo comes from how it makes your gear look like an octopus
    • It’s a backup for you and for anyone who might need it
    • The hose is yellow to make it easy to see

    6

    • The vest you wear (not everyone uses one, but most divers do) is called a Buoyancy Control Device, or BCD, or just BC
    • It fills with air from your tank when you want to ascend to increase your buoyancy
    • In an emergency, you can drop your weights, which should make you positively buoyant and cause you to ascend

    And last, but not least:

    • Diving is incredibly fun and an experience I’d recommend to everyone who is even remotely interested

  • I don’t remember his name, but there was a guy who collected sex dolls. He had like over a hundred of them. I think his wife left him because of it. I wanna say I saw him on My Strange Addiction, but I don’t remember.

    Edit: I looked it up and it’s not the guy from My Strange Addiction. He “married” a doll, but I think he just had the one. I don’t know where I saw about the other guy.







  • Yes, kitchen appliance usually means powered by gas or electricity, but if something is powered by gravity, it’s still an outside power source. So that’s what I would say the difference is.

    A mortar and pestle is powered by your own movement. A filter pitcher is powered by gravity. So I would say that it’s an appliance because of that. A sieve and a slotted spoon are a harder delineation, since they both are partially powered by gravity. I would say that because they have no moving parts, they are not machines, and so may not be considered appliances, but that’s only my own thoughts, not a dictionary definition requirement. Topologically, a sieve and a filter pitcher are basically the same thing. So that’s a conundrum.