If you use it often, sure. If you don’t smoke and just occasionally need to light fires, get a butane conversion. It’s a replacement for the wick, which pops into the Zippo shell. It doesn’t evaporate over time since it’s sealed.

Yeah, Ryobi had a bad reputation for a long time, because they’re old (dark blue) tools were hot garbage. But when they were bought out by TTI (and they changed the color to the bright green) all the tools started getting made on the same production line as Milwaukee (also owned by TTI). The QA is a little looser on the Ryobi stuff, but it’s all sourced from the same place as the (much more expensive) Milwaukee tools that many people swear by. If I remember correctly, TTI also owns Ridgid.

It’s basically the Lexus/Toyota thing, where they’re both owned and manufactured by the same parent company, but the Lexus brand is much more expensive just because it’s marketed as luxury. You can get a Toyota for half the price of a Lexus, and find the same quality as a Lexus. And for the insanely cheap price and wide range of available tools, it’s hard to go wrong with Ryobi. The Ryobi may not stand up to the same level of abuse as other (more expensive) brands. But the average person isn’t a construction worker using and abusing their tools for 9 hours a day. The average person just needs to occasionally drill a hole in the wall, or cut the occasional piece of lumber. And for that, the Ryobi is the way to go. Hell, even if you’re a hobbyist in the garage, Ryobi will likely be fine for what you need.

Just avoid their larger power tools, like the vacuums and lawn mowers. From what I know, those have a range of issues that haven’t been worked out yet.

Also, it means you can easily repair/modify the hardware for whatever reason you might come up with.

The ironic part is that you’d need a second soldering iron to do that.

If you’re a musician or audio tech trying to get started, the Shure SM58 and SM57 are the first two mics you should grab. 58 for vocals, and 57 for anything that doesn’t need a screen (like an instrument or guitar amp.) Both have the exact same mic capsule, but the 58 has a larger filter that will make it a little warmer and less prone to popping on plosives.

Are there fancier mics out there that sound better, or are made for specific purposes? Yeah. But there’s diminishing returns on audio quality, you can’t use them for as many things, and more sensitive mics are also more fragile. For $100 each, you can get some mics that will be passed down to your grandchildren. If you’re trying to cover the widest possible range of uses, the 58 and 57 are your go-to mics.

Whenever you think of a stereotypical 🎤 microphone, you’re 100% thinking of a Shure SM58.

I use an Altoids tin for my first aid kid, for similar reasons. The damned things are basically indestructible as long as you’re not going out of your way to crush them. The one in my pocket right now is probably 5 or 6 years old. I prefer the smaller form factor, because I typically only pack for a few blisters or scrapes; Anything larger would be referred to the full first aid kit in my car.

Here, I fixed it:

A group of people Nazis carrying Nazi flags demonstrated outside a community theater performance of “The Diary of Anne Frank” in Livingston County, Michigan, in a display of antisemitism.
Several masked men Nazis showed up waving Nazi flags and reportedly shouted antisemitic and racist slurs outside the American Legion Post 141 in Howell on Saturday during the play, according to CNN affiliate WXYZ.
“People were shocked. They were appalled,” Army veteran Bobby Brite told WXYZ. “Everything you would expect.”
Brite said many of the 75 people who watched the play were afraid to leave the building and had to be escorted to their cars.
“Nobody in America should feel like that,” he said.
Demonstrators Nazis were also seen in the nearby town of Fowlerville, according to eyewitnesses.
Alex Sutliff and his wife were driving home through downtown Fowlerville when they came across a group of masked men Nazis waving Nazi flags.
“They were saying awful antisemitic things that I don’t even feel comfortable repeating myself,” Sutliff told CNN on Tuesday.
Sutliff, who filmed the brief encounter, said the group of Nazis “all stuck their hands up” and chanted “Heil Hitler, Heil Trump.”
Sutliff’s interaction with the demonstrators Nazis took place at a stoplight, and when the light turned green, he drove away before things could escalate.
He and his wife called local police to report what they saw, and then circled back to let the demonstrators Nazis know that authorities were on their way.
“The second that they heard that they were on the way, they all packed up their stuff and ran away.”
CNN has reached out to the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office for further details.
The Fowlerville Community Theatre, which put on the production, said in a statement the play “centers on real people who lost their lives in the Holocaust” and added the cast and crew “endeavored to tell their story with as much realism as possible.”
“On Saturday evening, things became more real than we expected,” the group said. “The presence of protesters Nazis (this one I may be willing to let slide if it’s a direct quote) outside gave us a small glimpse of the fear and uncertainty felt by those in hiding.”
“As a theatre, we want to make people feel and think. We hope by presenting Anne’s story, we can help prevent the atrocities of the past from happening again.”
Citing the sheriff’s office, The Detroit News reported the demonstrators Nazis left after being told to vacate the legion post’s parking lot, then ensued in a brief exchange of words with patrons while across the street.
The Anti-Defamation League’s regional office in Michigan said on social media it was “disgusted by the far-right extremists Nazis (again, this may be a direct quote?) who praised Hitler and waved Nazi flags outside of an American Legion hosting the play.”
The county has faced similar displays of racism this year. In July, White supremacists Nazis marched through Howell, located roughly 40 miles northwest of Detroit.
Threats to Jews in the US tripled in the one-year period since the deadly October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, preliminary data provided to CNN by the ADL showed. In the weeks following October 7, reports of hate crimes and bias incidents targeting Jews, Muslims and Arabs all surged.
“The Diary of Anne Frank” was published posthumously and has been translated into more than 70 languages in more than 60 nations, with several film and stage adaptations. Her diary is often a teen’s first introduction to the horrors of the Holocaust caused by Nazis during World War II.
She and seven others, all Jewish, hiding in a secret annex above a canal-side warehouse in Amsterdam for nearly two years were detained and deported in 1944. Anne later died in the Bergen Belsen concentration camp at age 15.
Growing fears of antisemitism remains a present issue – including in Amsterdam. In July, a statue of Anne in a local park was vandalized with the word “Gaza” scrawled in red paint. More recently, people were beaten and injured in violent clashes between fans of an Israeli soccer team and counter-protesters in the city over the weekend, which Dutch authorities condemned as antisemitic.

“Demonstrators” is some really soft-handed phrasing, CNN. There’s a better word for people who wave nazi flags: “Nazis”.

The Kobo and Kindle are functionally identical in terms of hardware, except for a few things that are specific to Amazon. But Amazon has been increasingly hostile towards Calibre in recent years. It used to be supported almost natively, but it seems like each update from Amazon locks down something that used to be accessible, or breaks existing functionality.

For instance, you used to be able to edit collections directly in Calibre, but Amazon broke that because they want everyone to use their collections (which are only included on books purchased directly from amazon) instead. So for instance, if you uploaded the entire Harry Potter series, you used to be able to tag all of them with the series and they’d be added to a collection together. You can’t do that anymore, and have to add them manually one by one on the Kindle’s laggy touchscreen.

They have also started breaking included cover art, because the Kindle automatically polls Amazon to download art instead. And when it doesn’t find any, (because the book isn’t from Amazon,) it wipes the included art instead of just falling back to it. Luckily this has a fairly simple fix (just unplug your kindle, let it index and break the cover art, then plug it back in so Calibre can push the cover art back to the Kindle,) but that means you need to actually take the extra time to do that every time you upload something new.

The Send To Kindle email functionality has recently been broken to where every .epub file you email just gets sent to Documents instead of Books or Newsstand. So if you have Calibre set up to grab news every Sunday, or to send new books to your Kindle, they won’t actually land in the News or Books sections like they’re supposed to. The only way to fix that is to plug it in and upload them via USB. Additionally, they have the same issue with broken cover art. So you need to plug your Kindle in to update the cover art, even when emailing your books. Which kind of defeats the purpose of emailing them, because you’d most likely do that if you don’t want to plug your device in every time.

The kindle’s indexer also has some weird issues, where certain books will just crash it and new books will stop appearing entirely. And there’s no way to see which book is the issue. So if you uploaded a bunch of books to your kindle, you’ll have to play guess-and-check to see which one is the issue. This may not be exclusive to the Kindle, but I haven’t experienced the same issue on the Kobo.

Alternatively: people have gone out of their way to foster a space where LGBTQIA+ people feel comfortable. In a world full of heteronormativity, this is a bubble where they can truly be themselves. It’s one of the few places where a gay dude can flirt with another dude, without the fear of being punched in the mouth just for being gay.

And then a straight guy walks into the gay bar, and starts a fight when another dude tries to flirt with him. He starts ranting about how it’s not okay to assume he’s gay, and that he feels oppressed for being straight. He wants the heteronormativity to extend even into LGBTQIA+ spaces, despite the fact that he could go to literally any other bar in town and not have this issue. Instead, he has chosen to make a scene at the gay bar, because he’s upset it’s a gay bar.

You got a few downvotes, but you’re not wrong. Another issue is if you have tags for everything except being straight, then it sort of implies that being straight is the default “normal” option, and everyone else has to go out of their way to designate themselves as not normal. It’s something that should be left up to the users to choose, instead of having a default.

Sort of like if you had race tags for everything except “white”, it would imply that being white was the expected norm, and everyone else has to mark themselves as outside the norm. Or for a more forced-binary example, what if a game had a “woman” tag, but no other gender tags? It would heavily imply that the expected default is “man”, and every woman (or really anyone who doesn’t explicitly identify as a man) has to self-select.

That being said, it’s a queer game made by queer devs for queer people. They can do whatever the hell they want with it. Not every space is meant for straight people; Queer people have often been required to go out of their way to form their own communities and spaces to avoid judgement from straight people. Demanding a “straight” tag feels a little like a straight dudebro walking into a gay bar and getting pissed when dudes flirt with him. No dudebro, you’re the one who is wrong here, because you have literally every other bar in town to go to instead. You don’t need to encroach on the gay bar, because it’s likely the only place gay people have that is truly “their” place.

There is no ReVanced or uYouPlus for iOS. You have to sideload that shit, cuz YouTube is too far up Apple’s ass for them to allow something like that on the App Store.

Ironically, they allow Vinegar. But only because it’s a Safari extension (and Apple likes when people use Safari more than they like the money from YouTube.)

+1 for Vinegar. My only real complaint is that I use Firefox as a daily driver, and Vinegar only works with Safari. Even though Firefox is using the Safari engine under the hood on iOS, (because Apple doesn’t allow third party browser engines like Firefox’s Gecko, and forces everyone to use WebKit instead,) it doesn’t support Safari extensions.

I’m fine with switching to Safari to watch YouTube… But since Firefox is my default browser, YouTube links automatically open in Firefox. There isn’t a way to specify that I want everything except YouTube to open in my default browser.

Amazon is increasingly hostile with Calibre, especially within the past year or two. Things like intentionally destroying included book covers/thumbnails for books uploaded by Calibre, intentionally breaking Collection editing via Calibre so you have to do it on the Kindle directly, and not allowing users to download their Amazon-purchased books into Calibre.

Worth noting that the one exception for every e-reader is the screen. E-ink screens are very sensitive to pressure, and can be damaged internally even if the surface is totally fine. It’s not something that any one model will do better or worse, because it’s simply due to the way e-ink screens work. Fixing the issue would require inventing new e-ink tech.

Get a folio cover, with a hard/stiff fold. This will more evenly spread any pressure out across the entire screen, ensuring that no damage happens to the underlying e-ink. Nothing worse than pulling your e-reader out of your bag and discovering that it was resting up against something pointy while you walked around, and is now damaged.

That being said, the Kobo’s waterproofing is no joke. I take mine when I go camping, because I’m not worried about it getting wet at all. I could read in the middle of a monsoon, and it would be totally fine.

Yeah, I love everything about my Kindle except for the fact that it’s tied to Amazon. Calibre goes a long way in bridging the gap, (I have a fairly large personal library that isn’t tied to Amazon), but it’s no replacement for native support. If you plan on using Calibre, you should seriously consider a Kobo.

I’ve heard of similar things. Boss wants to see who is the least busy, so they do something like open an employee gym. Then anyone who uses it is fired, because “if you have time to use the gym, you’re not working hard enough.”

Harris currently has like 64M votes. This same time 4 years ago, Biden had +80M.Democrat voters didn’t fucking show up.

Almost as if running a centrist platform to try to pick up republican votes was a bad idea, and only disheartened democrat voters. Only 4% of registered republicans voted for Harris, the same as Biden. Hopefully democrats learned something from this, but that’s doubtful.

Yup exactly this. Republicans tend to vote early and be in areas that get counted faster; It’s easier to count 1000 rural votes than it is to count 10000 urban votes. So he’ll take the early numbers and declare victory, then send it all the way to the SCOTUS when the blue votes begin to catch up. And (unless something drastically shifts and there is a major upset in the court) the SCOTUS will hand it to him.

Unless you’re designing the speakers’ circuitry, testing mic element response curves, designing the mic housing, etc, you’re not an engineer. You’re just a technician. This is like saying IT Help Desk is staffed by software engineers. They may have one or two actual engineers available, but you’re definitely not going to be talking to them for the daily “I don’t know the difference between rebooting and turning my monitor off and back on again” issues. IT Help Desk has techs who deal with the actual operation.

The only boots-on-the-ground position that might qualify for an actual engineering title would be the system designer, who did the math (or at least plugged all the numbers into their program) to determine where/how to set up the line arrays for adequate and even coverage throughout the room. At least they dip their toes into acousticians’ territory, so they may qualify as an engineer if you stretch the definition a little bit.

Source: Am an audio tech; Not an engineer.

I also have issues with the fact that staging refers to lighting electricians as… Well… Electricians. In other industries, an electrician will have a journeyman’s license at least. They’ll have several years of experience under their belt, and will have done a full apprenticeship under a master electrician. But in staging, an electrician is just someone who plugs lights in.

Here’s a harsh reminder that Trump is farther ahead in the polls than he was with Hillary at this same point in the election. The polls showed a landslide win for Hillary by this point, but that obviously didn’t happen. Now the polls show a much closer race for Kamala, which means (if the same thing happens again) then Trump has a very real shot at winning again.

Though to be fair, it looks like Kamala has learned from Hillary, and avoided the “we’ve got this, no problem, don’t even worry about it” attitude that Hillary had early on in the race. Hillary wanted to exude an air of confidence early on, like she had been working towards the presidential race for decades. That ended up being her downfall, because it meant a lot of democrats just fucking stayed home. Because if the person is saying not to worry about it, why do I need to bother voting? The issue is that when every person told themselves that same thing, it meant Hillary lost a lot of votes due to apathy. If you go back and look at her campaign, there was a very drastic shift in Hillary’s messaging a month or two before Election Day, when her team realized that democrat voters had become apathetic. It suddenly shifted from “we’ve got this” to “oh holy fuck please fucking please vote”