Get your daughter way from that kid as fast as you can.

| I don’t even understand if it’s an actual religion or one of those pay-to-level-up self-care courses.

yes, at about a ratio of 1 to 8. There’s a mythology that these people fervently believe in, but pay-to-level-up is the core tenet. Distilling this down a bit, they believe that any problem you have is a ghost of long dead aliens clinging to you, and with enough abuse they can be scared away leaving behind the pure human.

When first you encounter them they seem to be offering self help courses or books. “Having trouble quitting smoking? Buy our book, join our class.” For some these do genuinely help, if through no other mechanism than peer pressure. Then they pull out a bullshit device called an E meter and start talking about alternative therapies to realize your true potential, and then they’ve got you.

They are a high control group; they’re like Mormons on amphetamines. Your life is centered on the church, people are kept in line through threats of destroying their families and support groups. They’re particularly vindictive and are well documented to attack anyone critical of them.

Avoid these people with extreme prejudice, they are genuinely dangerous.

Men’s clothing sizes are a little dumb sometimes but I can usually take a tape measure to my waist and correctly order pants. Your guess is as good as mine what the difference between “boot cut” and “relaxed fit” are, and I would swear T-shirt sizes have shrunk since I was a teenager. As in, I can compare a Medium I’ve had since the Dubya administration to an XL today. But getting fitted for a suit, they measure me in inches and the clothing is more or less sized in inches.

Women’s clothing sizes have had two different ice pick lobotomies. Women come in a wider range of sizes and aspect ratios, women’s clothing is pretty much universally designed to fit tighter, but on the rack they’re given one meaningless size number. a 12 is bigger than a 10, who knows by how much, and there’s nothing on the girl you can measure with a tape to get that number, and there is no standard here at all. Why they haven’t revolted I have no idea.

Yeah I’ve got absolutely nothing for ya. Nothing works, you’ll never get ahead and it’s worse now than when I was your age.

Finally, an actual comic strip.

Amateur radio operators are indeed allowed to transmit analog NTSC television in the UHF band. It’s most commonly done on the 70cm (440MHz) band, and a normal everyday 90’s television is all you need to receive the signals. You’d tune to what would have been cable channels 57 through 61. The use cases for this have decreased in recent years; for example you used to see hams using amateur television to send video signals from RC aircraft or model rockets, now that’s done with compressed digital video over something like Wi-Fi and doesn’t require a license. But, it’s still legal for hams to do.

Businesses are greedy. They’re going to squeeze the turnip from every angle they can think of to get every drop of blood out they can.

Consumers are rock chewing stupid. They will choose fancy branding and ease of setup every single time because most of them are allergic to learning how the things in their houses work. People will sign their rights away in EULAs they don’t even bother to read because it’s too boring, they’re not going to stop watching Longmire or Stranger Things just because they added commercials.

We live in a world where fascism is on the rise. The Republicans want to jail or kill women who have abortions or miscarriages. Here in the smart phone age, women often use apps to track, record and predict their periods. These apps upload this data to a server somewhere and store it in a database. Wouldn’t the Republicans love to get their hands on that database to see if they can find women they can jail or kill? The solution: Get on Tumblr and ask men to download these apps and start uploading junk data to them, because getting women to switch to FOSS software that doesn’t upload their data to devices they don’t control is considered too much to ask. They won’t learn how to manage their own software and data to literally save their lives. They’re absolutely not giving up Netflix.

Captain Disillusion explains it way better than I ever could.

Nah I guess I’m gonna build shit until it’s time for a dose of buckshot.

Lemmings of Lemmy: What’s your blood type and eyeglass prescription?

I’ve been shaving with a DE razor for about 15 years now, and I haven’t found it any easier or harder to cut yourself with them than the modern “Mach 84 Spike TV Edition” cartridge razors.

“Normal people” sit all the way through ads and are having receptacles installed in their carotid arteries for Amazon to pipe petrochemical runoff directly into their blood-brain barriers.

Me? I don’t own a working television, I haven’t turned on a radio in years, and all of my digital devices run a FOSS operating system I installed on them with layers of ad blockers.

Do you use other social media? If yes, which services? What are your screennames and handles? What street did you grow up on? What was your Elementary School’s maiden name?

I think I’m more combobulated.

I’ve got DTIMO. Disappoimtment That I Missed Out. I had a boring grey one when it could have looked like a sports car. it would even go vroom too. faaaaahck.

Wait. They made ones that looked like cars? Dammit.

I used to love flying at night. Air is cool, dense and smooth, you don’t get cooked by the sun as much, and the red cockpit light is pretty cozy.

We got an apartment with deep pile carpets and a couple of paintings from Sears.

I was kind of wondering how long that project would last.

Good old Thingiverse. You’ll get a great education in now not to design things for 3D printing wading through that slurry pit.

Yes, consider a 3D printer useless if you don’t know how to use 3D modeling software.

So, FreeCAD. It’s a beautiful hot mess. There’s a 1.0 in beta right now that’s bringing some much needed changes.

FreeCAD has a lot of parallel capabilities; it has an architectural workbench for drawing buildings, a Drafting workbench for more traditional 2D drawing, the Part workbench for a weird kind of boolean approach, and the Part Design workbench for a more typical sketch-and-extrude parametric modeling workflow like Fusion360, Inventor or OnShape.

The workflow is you create a sketch and draw a 2D shape, and then extrude (FreeCAD uses the word Pad) it into 3D space, then you can draw further features on that to design the shape you want.

The basis of how it works is somewhat unintuitive at first. “Parametric” means you draw using rules. There’s a piece of software out there called OpenSCAD that is a very pure implementation of this because you “draw” by typing code in a kind of programming language. FreeCAD lets you represent rules by drawing things with the mouse. Rules like “this is a straight line. It is parallel to the X axis. It is 5cm long. The leftmost endpoint is 3cm from the X axis and 4cm from the Y axis.” There’s only one way to draw that line. Those rules may be called Constraints or Dimensions. The powerful part is you can later change one of the rules, like “Did I say 3cm from the X axis? I meant 4cm” and it’ll redraw the whole part for you. Get your head around that concept and CAD software will unlock.

The UIs are different, but the general concepts are similar for FreeCAD, OnShape and Fusion360, sometimes tutorials for one will be useful for learning the others.