You’ve chosen beautiful counters and floors!

I’m not sure if this helps, but my PayPal account has two sources configured. One is direct withdrawal from my checking account. The other is a debit card tied to my checking account. I have never had a merchant refuse it.

My city plows the bike paths at the same time it plows the emergency routes. We’re in Wisconsin, but a startling number of people still commute by bike all year long.

A bold adventurer!

This seems like a useful tool. Thanks!

I’m glad you found them! Different manufacturers put them in different places.

The most common place under Android is in a directory named DCIM/Camera/ on the local storage.

Maybe you should add a bit of lithium with the detergent.

I try very hard to buy everything on physical media. I subscribe to a few streaming services, but I never buy non-physical media. You don’t really own anything that can suddenly disappear because a company changes policies, get bought, or goes out of business.

Everything I buy is then ripped and stored on my local media server. That makes them more convenient and allows me to store the physical media out of the way. If something goes wrong, I can always re-rip.

It is worth noting that optical discs age and can become unreadable over time. If that happens, I can always go in the opposite direction and burn a new disc from my digital copy.

The best therapist I’ve known had a neat little cross-stitich on her lobby wall that said:

“Normal is just a setting on your washing machine.”

Every mode of human thought and behavior is represented by a spectrum. There is never a clear boundary between normality and mental illness.

Recorder is one of the easiest to learn. If you want something you can use to accompany yourself, guitar is the obvious choice, but it does require some cramped hand positions. If your joints are still recovering you may want to look into keyboards instead.

For what it’s worth, I’ve found leaving to read music for a particular instrument is easier than learning to read it more generally.

Best of luck!

This is definitely good news. The diamond industry has been a pit of human misery for most of its existence.

The world would be a happier place if everyone did.

I’m sorry, but I don’t see how anything can beat “Put down that chainsaw and listen to me”. It may be the best opening line ever sung.

Translation: Elon Musk desperately searches for buzzwords that will boost the stock of his failing company.

One of the worst things about depression is all the sneaky ways in which it reinforces itself. You can’t function at full capacity, which is a direct problem, but also makes you feel lazy. You sometimes don’t have the energy to deal with people, which isolates you and makes you feel like you’re offending them. You just plain feel awful and feel guilty about inflicting it on the people around you. It seems like everything hits you twice.

Therapy can help with both aspects, but I think it is particularly useful in helping you recognize and deal with the secondary parts of the problem.

This is a wonderful advance! And I hope it will eventually lead to a semi-sweet mode and a Baker’s mode as well.

Post Grape Nuts: USA

I am yet another fledditor. I think I looked at nearly all the alternatives and I liked the Fediverse the best.

I do miss the sheer volume of participation on reddit, but I that has been steadily improving. And the quality and tone of the conversations is generally much better.

Any forums with large numbers of participants is going to have certain problems. The difference is that reddit turned most of those problems into institutions while Lemmy provides better ways to deal with them and easier ways to avoid them.

Having worked in high tech for almost four decades, I have come to appreciate the advantages of not having everything controlled by a central authority. Sooner or later the leadership, however benevolent, will change into something repressive and exploitive. Once that happens, it will remain that way forever, because there is no financial or political incentive to move in that direction. Replacement has been the only thing that works, at least so far. The Fediverse provides an alternative to that cycle that seems viable.

It works quite well as a standalone. It was a prequel to the main Vorkosigan series, which is centered around the son of the main characters in Barrayar. The rest of the series is also well worth reading.