While I know it’s easy to hate on everything MCU these days, I do still absolutely love the Milano from Guardians of the Galaxy 1 and 2. The design doesn’t feel practical at all, but it’s still a really fun to look at and agile ship, which is something a lot of sci fi doesn’t really depict very well.

It’s a prank riddle. Basically you make two statements about building bridges. They can be from anywhere and to anywhere else. My nose to your forehead, Baltimore to Seattle, it makes no difference. In one sentence, you use the word “okay” and in the other you don’t. The sentence with “okay” in it produces a good bridge. The sentence that doesn’t, doesn’t.

When you ask a person to build their own bridge, if they say “okay” in the sentence, it’s a good bridge. If they don’t, it’s a bad bridge and it falls down. This setup is built to make people frustrated because “okay” is one of those filler words that people don’t really pay attention to in sentences.

I’ve also heard of a similar setup where a person hands an object to another person (again, the object doesn’t matter) and says “This is a bean, okay?” And if the recipient says “okay” then they have done the task correctly and can pass it along to another person, declaring the object is something else. If the receiver doesn’t say “okay,” then something went wrong and one of the people who is in on the joke interrupts and starts the process again. with a new object.

Okay, so if I build a bridge from X to Y, it’s a great bridge.

If I build a bridge from A to B it’s a terrible bridge.

Do you want to build a bridge?

(If the person says Okay as a part of their bridge proposal, it is good. If not, then the bridge is bad)

This is a great way to make everyone at a gathering hate you.

Every day when I come home from work, I kneel on the top step of our stairs and call our dogs over. They sit on the landing and put their front paws on my shoulders while I scratch their sides and pet them. My wife has taken to calling this ritual “motivation.” The dogs really love having a couple minutes of solid attention when I come home and it’s a good way for me to switch gears into home-brain, since my work is very stressful and tends to take over.

When I’m talking about leaks, I’m not talking about the extra energy required to constantly run vacuum pumps. I’m saying that HSR infrastructure needs inspection and occasional repair, but not nearly to the extent that a vacuum tube based solution would. Any savings made via efficiency are pissed away by having to pay more maintenance crews and material cost to maintain the infrastructure. The tubes are also much less likely to be able to be automatically inspected like rails can be using inspection cars because any train moving through the tube can only inspect the interior walls. Besides, rail already exists across much of the US for use as freight infrastructure. These same rails, if inspected and tested properly, can be used for high speed rail much more immediately than waiting for tubes to be built. Besides all of this, more aerodynamic trains can and have been built, but are not in use in the US. Instead, we send bricks down the rails. The “immense” efficiency gain from 0.5 atmospheres of air pressure is likely significantly less impressive when compared against well designed trains with regards to aerodynamics.

All of this is also completely ignoring how dangerous tunnels are for fires. Even with proper safety precautions, fires in tunnels are exceptionally dangerous. By venting out the smoke that kills people, you increase the intensity of the fire that also kills people.

Sure on a small test track. As soon as it was meant to be scaled up, every attempt has been whittled down. Either it fails completely (Look up Brunel’s Atmospheric Railway) or has been so expensive and impractical that it gets reduced to cars in tunnels.

If you are most concerned with efficiency, then building the cheaper HSR infrastructure to get freight off of roads and passengers off of planes as fast as possible should be the first priority. Holding even a partial vacuum in tubes hundreds of miles long just to eke out a little more energy efficiency is laughable. Everything leaks. Maintaining cabin pressure in a 73-meter plane is a completely different beast from maintaining vacuum in miles of tube. It’s likely that maintaining the tubes will end up costing so much that any efficiency gains acquired from the vacuum will evaporate.

Atmospheric Railway and Hyperloop bullshit all over again. Unless you’re in space, this isn’t feasible.

Link to what? The person is either pirating or buying digital copies of TV/movies and storing them on a server. Likely being served with Plex, Emby, or Jellyfin.

Cinnamon has an official Ubuntu flavor now. I would recommend that over Mint, since mint is LTS-only. You can also do KDE-Plasma, but my personal preference is Cinnamon.

My main desktop has 1TB of storage (NVMe, fast) but I have a whole separate home server that has one 500GB boot drive and three 6TB hard drives running in a ZFS pool. (ZFS is analogous to RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks. basically one drive can die and I won’t lose any data as long as I replace the drive before a second one dies.) This 21TB storage bucket holds anything and everything that doesn’t need to be on my primary computer. It holds all my documents, photos, music, movies, TV shows, backups, and all of my disc images and ROMs for emulation. The only things I keep on my primary PC are games I am currently playing or will play soon and programs that need to be installed or run locally. Everything else is loaded over the network as-needed. For most stuff, I can just point my applications at the network share by mounting it to a drive letter in Windows.

Have a method for your loved ones to access all of your important passwords. If you have a password manager, having a shared vault with a trusted partner or family member is important.

“Thanks for calling in to 102.5! You’re on the air! What is your embarrassing poop story?”

You force a bunch of people to move away from their home town to change the future and finally kill your nemesis, a rabbit.

Oh for sure. I no longer work in that industry and am much happier. I fix wheelchairs for a living now.

I once was working as an apartment maintenance guy for a property in Colorado. During the interview I made it clear that I wasn’t looking to move into a high responsibility role immediately and that I wanted to spend some time familiarizing myself with some more specific types of repair before going into any sort of management track. The interviewer seemed to like that answer given my previous experience and resume and I was hired.

A few months later, I made a mistake because I was asked to take a tech from the local utility around to every single unit on the property. Originally the property manager told me I’d have three days to do the work, but I was pressured to do it faster so that the tech could make a flight to his next job. We were installing batteries in water meters, which required the unlocking and opening of water heater closets on resident balconies. The residents did not have a key to their closet and were not allowed access. The closets did not use doorknobs either. They were held shut by the deadbolt locks. That night a storm rolled in. The resident called the on call service complaining that the wind was blowing the door open, but the on-call tech told them to put something in front of the door to keep it shut and that we would be by in the morning to lock the deadbolt. They didn’t do as they were asked and their pipes froze, causing a flood in the unit below them.

Later that day, I was asked to hand over my keys. As I was getting them detached from my personal keys, the property manager told me that she felt that she was “sold a bill of goods” that I hadn’t lived up to and that she had hired me because i had looked like “management track material.” I told her that in the interview with the maintenance manager I said that I wanted a learning experience and that I wasn’t ready for management. I told them I had never lied to them and left the property.

A week later I had applied for and was interviewing for a new job at another property. My phone rang during the interview. I silenced it and apologized to the interviewer but carried on. After the interview I listened to the voicemail that my old boss had left. “When we offered you the job I had you mixed up with someone else. We hired the wrong person.”

Honestly I just liked the icon and it didn’t seem like a shitty place to be. A smaller instance also basically guaranteed a username I would like to use was available.

In the last ten years, I haven’t ever sent a 7z to someone who ended up asking what the file was or how to open it. That was an issue back in 2005

A well stocked toolbox. Not just a random assortment of things but a well considered, well stocked toolbox with everything you need to tackle basic home repair.

To all those saying that tools are too expensive, they are not. Everything you need to tackle most home repair scenarios can be had under $100. Will you be turning screws by hand and adjusting wrenches? Yes. Will it be enjoyable work? Probably not, but you absolutely can have a good set of very basic tools for under $100 then add to it over time.

Get a hammer, adjustable wrench, angled pliers, razor utility knife, and 11-in-1 screwdriver. Buy additional tools as needed.