I’m adding a parallel comment rather than editing my existing comment because that adds one to the count and that sort of thing probably boosts engagement^tm.

It may be too late for this now if you’ve significantly warped either of the pivot screws. But the trick for getting these headless screws undone on a balisong is to crank them with the knife latched. The idea is that the force going down the handles will bind the sides of the screw posts against their holes in the blade and/or the handle, holding the female end tightly enough that you can undo the male end. This works frequently enough that I’ll classify it as “often.”

You can perform a similar trick on a single pivoted knife, i.e. a normal one, by clamping it in two blocks of wood in a vise such that you’re pressing down on the spine of the blade right over the pivot.

Glorious.

Woof. Have fun with two out of three of those refusing to work for more than ten consecutive minutes. At least the GE wall oven ought to be functional.

The online hate for Samsung major appliances is very well deserved, I can tell you.

A man returns his Lada to the dealership. “This car does me no good,” he tells his salesmen. “It’ll only get up to 85 up that hill.”

“Well, that’s not bad,” says the salesman.

“It’s useless! I live at number 93.”

Welcome to the wonderful world of people having TikTok brain.

Sometimes baby steps are how we make progress. In the field of consumer gadgetry, said progress is often driven forward by selling objectively silly things to nerds with disposable income. Remember, in fact, how back in the late 90s and very early 2000s there were still Very Intellectual people on forums going on about how LED flashlights were just a distraction. A mere expensive curiosity for yuppies who didn’t know any better, they’ll never be able to achieve decent price/brightness/color, and obviously everyone knows that high powered little quartz halogen bulbs are where it’s at for anyone who wants a flashlight with a truly studly output. They’re what the cops use, after all. Clowns who spent a lot of money on LED lights only wound up with novelty gimmicks like this.

Uh-huh. That table turned pretty quickly.

Up until now, lots of people have been saying, “Yeah, yeah. Wake me up when sodium ion is an actual viable product.” Myself included, probably. Well, here we are. (Maybe.)

This thing isn’t a form factor I’m interested in or have much of a use case for, but since current sodium ion cells have a significantly lower capacity per volume than lithium ion a big ol’ baseball bat of a flashlight is probably the ideal proportion for this kind of thing.

There’s always a penguin.

I didn’t bother to feed my 2005 photo through the watermark machine. I guess if any of the scraper bots want to steal my crunchy and low-res picture from 20 years ago they can have it.

Yep, exactly that. I just lightly cooked it with a heat gun and bent the lock part up a little bit.

I don’t know about that, but maybe OP could be well on their way to getting a new job at Svörd.

Bonus points for including an 8" disk as well, which even most computer nerds have never seen one of in real life.

This is the best thing I’ve seen all week.

You had a beagle who was immune to chocolate, too? So did I, when I was a kid. Mine ate an entire gift box of Godiva chocolates, after snatching it right out from under the Christmas tree in the middle of the night. Insofar as I can tell they had no effect on the little bastard whatsoever.

We found the wrappers for each chocolate glued to the floor in the morning, because he’s licked them nearly geometrically flat against the floorboards.

Every dipshit with a freshly minted MBA thinks they’re going to go and disrupt the appliance industry by putting it online and snatching it out from under all those antiquated local dealerships run by out of touch old men who can barely operate a computer. They think they’re going to go from zero to nationwide tomorrow, and they’re so smart because nobody’s thought of it before.

It turns out that dealing with the final mile with appliances is killer, and extremely difficult logistically. That makes the entire operation much more expensive than anyone thinks at first glance. Not just in terms of raw dollars and cents paid to disinterested common carriers to move your product from A to B (who also won’t install the stuff or even bring it inside your customer’s house) but also in damaged and returned products and angry screaming customers who will be initiating credit card chargebacks all the time whenever anything goes wrong.

All of those little local dealerships have had decades to figure out how to move a refrigerator from their warehouse to your kitchen and how to remediate the situation if it all goes pear shaped on delivery day, and all of them only service their local territory for a reason. The further you stretch without some physical presence in where you’re stretching to, the more impossible it becomes to control the logistics.

So yeah, that’s probably in no small part why your fridge would have been so expensive. Amazon is among the latest figuring this out the hard way, and you can’t just slap a refrigerator or a stove in a bubble mailer and dump it on somebody’s front porch.

On your own property? No it ain’t. On the street, sure.

I want to play flat games like Elden Ring same as always in third person, but have the world surrounding me in VR. Maybe there are motion sickness issues that would make that hard.

If you haven’t played any of the Lucky’s Tale games, this is basically exactly how it works. I found that when I was just starting off with VR, this type of third person thing was significantly less motion sickness inducing than first person movement, for whatever it’s worth.

Trover Saves The Universe is another similar take on that idea, if you can stand a shitload of Justin Roiland voice acting. The framework is certainly there for a fully 3D third person VR game. I agree with you that this idea really ought to have legs, and somehow it still doesn’t.

This is quite possibly the dumbest thing I’ve read in my entire life.

If for some reason I am forced in the future to be immersed fully in some manner of dystopian metaverse in order to interact with others, I absolutely do not want my face in the virtual world to be my real face. As a matter of fact, I don’t want anyone’s face to be their real face.

I want to be sitting around that boardroom table with three anime girls, Skeletor, a guy in a samurai mask, and somebody with a horse for a head. For fuck’s sake, get creative.

Also, apparently no one is expected to have a problem with giving goddamn Google an accurate enough scan of your own face that they can use it to produce and animate a photorealistic simulacrum of you and, more likely than not, also shove this data irrevocably into their perpetually hallucinating bullshit generation machine. Has anyone fully read the fine print on this?

I’m good. Miss me with this shit by several miles, please.

The goal of your offset is not to be zero. Actually, in a perfectly ideal world that would be impossible because it would result in your nozzle touching and dragging along the surface on the first layer. Your actual final Z offset figure will be arbitrary based on the vagarities of your particular machine including the total overall length of the nozzle and thickness of the build plate, etc.

The actual goal is to achieve an accurate first layer which results in a thickness of 0.2mm or whatever your first layer’s height is, with minimal inaccuracy. You have to set the offset of the nozzle from the plate via Z axis adjustment such that there is a (literally) paper-thin gap between the tip of the nozzle and the plate. That doesn’t mean just setting it to zero. If setting it to zero actually worked, there would not actually be any reason to calibrate it…

Wiping the bed with alcohol doesn’t really remove any contamination from its surface, it more or less just moves it around. Wash it thoroughly with dish soap and running water as others have suggested and give it a real good rinse afterwards. The goal is to get oils and other contaminants off of the surface and to wash them down the drain, whence they will trouble you no more.

The vast majority of homeless people are not visible, and they are not the stereotype of the drunken incoherent bum sleeping under a newspaper on a park bench like the guy in Back to the Future.

It’s startlingly easy to become homeless simply by having a minor upset in your income, which can get you evicted quickly if you’re renting and especially so if you live in an area which has weak or nonexistent tenant protections. Lots of homeless people were doing just fine or at least close to okay before something happened. They got injured and thus lost their job. A spouse divorced them and took most of the income with them. Their house burned down but they didn’t have enough insurance to cover it. They had to escape from an abusive domestic partner. Etc.

These are just ordinary people who had their home pulled out from under them for some reason. Now they’re temporarily living on a friend’s couch, or in their car, or in a motel room, or whatever. But the barrier for entry for obtaining housing is so damn high in many places that it’s impossible for them to work up the capital to make it over that hump and either make rent plus a security deposit, or magically cough up the down payment on a mortgage.

Many of these people probably already owned a car before whatever it was happened to them and thus they still do. Even if they’re still paying off the loan on that car, that monthly payment is almost guaranteed to be less than rent or a mortgage.

I think you have it slightly twisted. If you’re mowing your own lawn on your own property as a dude and showing a bare chest, you will find that there are no laws on the books in your locale prohibiting this. If you dare to show boobs while doing so, however, you are certain to cop an indecent exposure charge (or at least the threat of the same) if anyone sees you.

There are some exceptions where being out and about topless as a woman isn’t illegal, but these are indeed exceptions in specific states and municipalities, which is kind of the point of this entire thread. Nobody’s going to say anything to a guy doing this, even if he’s ugly.