No, the goal is to sleep in silence. When I’m able to put aside my worries and truly rest I don’t need any noise or background hum to be completely out.

I only use a short video (under my pillow at mom volume so I can barely hear it) to get to sleep and then I’m usually out for a long time.

I’ve always felt that much of getting to sleep and what makes it easy to rest is training to some extent. Changing the ambient noise (especially if you move homes) can really screw things up until you get used to the normal noises of the new location. While that happens I’ll use something to fuzz the ambient sounds, but I’ll actively remove the white nose or background video over time so I acclimate to the new normal.

I consider it a worthwhile goal to be able to sleep without aids, if possible. Most of the real trouble is in my head (or a neighbor with fucking loud music at 2am to be dealt with), so when I have control I seek silence and a mental even keel when possible.

As a kid? Nothing. Just silence.

Today? My tinnitus, quietly humming away.

Now,.if I’m in a very weird mental spot and just can’t spin down to rest, I put on The Might Jingles’ World of Warships gameplay videos. His English voice just puts me out in moments.

I’m not hugely invested in the 3D printing world, but here’s my setup:

Printer: Creality Ender 3 pro v2 Filament: Mostly Matchbox Upgrades: just stiffer springs for the bed holder to help keep it level longer

Software: Cura for slicing FreeCAD for part design My kids also use Blender for making designs

As long as you check the bed leveling every so often (I don’t have an auto leveler) it does just fine. I make all kinds of technical parts and models along with other stuff for fun.

What can I say? It works and it’s a reasonably low maintenance setup.

Requiring someone to provide evidence to back up a claim is not the same as taking a position that the claim isn’t true. This is the root component of the burden of proof and the stance many people have towards a god claim: they aren’t convinced the god exists due to a lack of evidence provided by the person claiming the god does exist. Until there’s actual evidence it’s rational and reasonable to withhold judgement.

The unicorn (or other mythological beings) are used as a similar case to illustrate to a theist that they have the same kind of attitude towards the idea of a unicorn existing as an atheist does to any gods. They’re both neat concepts, but without evidence showing they actually exist, they’re nothing more than an idea for stories and art.

The crazy variety of weapons and their interactions was great. Almost everything was dangerous in the right situation.

Blob gun? Charge it up! Blue laser thing? Shoot the ball form and shoot that for a huge boom! Double pistols? Max DPS in the game with no bullet curve!

The best maps too for CTF. Yeah, I loved that game, especially for in person LAN parties.

There was a similar issue with Cities Skylines. When they tried to put a realistic amount of parking lot space for modern US cities in, the simulation would have the cities quickly decay and collapse. It was just too much room and distance required to support the parking area. It cost too much and the travel times were too high due to the expanded city distances.

They took out the real parking and made cute little lots instead so the game would stay viable.

Of course, our real city leadership most ignores this warning and says “let’s add more parking and lanes for those ever larger vehicles!” My city’s downtown is about 30% dedicated to off street parking and there’s moves afoot to increase the number of they can knock down a few more buildings to make space.

Oh, and we declared a parking garage an official city historical site. That one’s a little on the nose.

If the PoE is stable, then it’s a nice and relatively unique board. Not sure about the NPU support. There’s a ton of boards and chips coming out with those claims, but I’d like to be able to get clearer info on drivers and library compatibility.

Tom’s Root Boot.

One floppy disk, one Linux machine!

I haven’t had time to seriously game in a decade now (single dad killed my free time), so I’m by no means well versed beyond a few things. My kids do game a lot and most of them are on Linux machines. They use a combination of Steam and standalone installs to get things working.

I don’t run into a lot of complaints. They’re well aware that not all games run on their Linux setups, so they pick and choose games a bit more. I’m fortunate that they’re not always jonesing for the latest AAA games, but they’re also getting new ones with some regularity.

Our US city (pop 180k, metro 600k) is just about to lose the last downtown grocery store.

Generations of city councils have allowed (or encouraged!) the demolition of all housing in the city core to replace it with parking lots.

There’s almost no one left downtown so the city itself is dying. It’s just kind of rotting away. There’s currently at least some effort to reverse the trend, but the vice grip that car oriented everything has on people is terrifying to politicians.

It also does it so that you no longer hit the bootloader. My one last dual boot machine is normally a Linux setup, but every so often I have to use the real MS Office tools (some collaborator or publisher demands it), so I boot windows. Then windows patches and stops actually hitting grub so it acts like a windows only machine until I fix whatever Microsoft fucks up yet again.

It’s time to move to a VM for this garbage. I just don’t neet it more than once every other year so I never seem to get around to nuking it.

I am by no means the right person to ask about music instruments from a critical eye or critical ear perspective.

The one that picked up I got off of AliExpress and it is pretty reasonable for sound and durability. I’m sure there’such better choices for someone who wants to have a nicer one.

I hear you. I’m a ukulele player at times, so we’re in the same weight class.

It’s also very portable and basic ones are very inexpensive. It’s also nice to explicitly see the relationship between music and the notes when you’re learning.

Banjo’s got a general bad rap from it’s portrayal in many movies and shows. It is also a very different sound than guitar which a good number of people find discordant (it’s also easier to make it be loud and discordant, which happens with new players).

Well done banjo is just fine, but there’s a knee jerk negative response to its name.

I had a similar experience, but managed to hold it together long enough to make it out in 4.5 years (with some summer classes). Knowing how to do things, but not really able to stay steadily on track to achieve goals is a rough combo.

How about when peoples websites would put the sizes of linked images and files so you could estimate how long it would take to download a given image and such? Basically anything 30KB and above would have a size warning attached.

We’re moving to more of this for the whole household (there’s a couple kids at home still). They’re all able to generate meals and do chores. The requirements are being ratcheted up across the board. My wife and I are busier than ever trying to make ends meet, so the work is trickling down to the whole household one way or another.

Interesting strategy, and likely one that has some merit. Though, I’d point to similar problems in Japan where it’s not rare to have incredibly tiny homes/apartments, but a very high rate of youths staying at their parents’ places well into adulthood.

The US has reached around 50% of young adults continuing to stay with their parents beyond school. It’s up to a similar rate as the Great Depression era. We’ve priced our kids out of independence to try to satisfy a few billionaires’ desire to be ever richer.

It’s still early days on them being in a position to afford a place, and in the US healthcare is a fucking abomination, so it’s going to take some real effort to reach a point of independence.

We’re in no hurry to move anyone out. It’s still early enough that we planet of time to wire in work on skills and such. I’m mostly worried about the general attitude more than individual skills though. His sense of what it takes to keep yourself afloat in the world and little open desire to achieve independence is just worrying at this point. Likely I’m being too worried at this stage, but I’d rather turn the ship in a positive direction earlier and easier rather than later and with more difficulty.