Who else is talking to them?

Mouse. Singular. Cat.

It’s actually funny going back and watching early episodes of The New Yankee Workshop and hearing Norm brag about the “new” glues that were coming available. “This is a one-part glue, you don’t have to mix it up, it’s ready to use in the bottle, it’s water proof and it cleans up with water! I wouldn’t have even tried doing this myself without these modern glues.” They avoided showing brand names and such on the show; Norm was usually careful to hold the glue bottle with the back facing the camera, but he’s clearly holding a bottle of Titebond 2, with it’s blue cap.

And I mean, yeah. imagine building furniture without PVA glue, you change how you think.

Okay so let’s strike a couple out of that list:

• LibreCAD is a 2D-only DXF editor. I think it’s a fork of an old version of QCAD, which is also a 2D-only DXF editor. Not very helpful for 3D printing.
• Sketchup is kinda useful for going “what would my room look like if I laid out the furniture like this?” It produces horrible 3D models. When I used to work at the job shop, I could tell the model had been designed in Sketchup because it had holes and reversed normals and other shit that wouldn’t print.
• Blender. Blender is a 3D sculpting and animation program; Be your own little Pixar, just add talent. It can be used to make models for 3D printing but it isn’t very good as an engineering CAD package.

I would also rule out AutoCAD because isn’t it like, architectural software? And like, OLD? AutoDesk’s engineering CAD was Inventor for the longest time, and they’ve been working on replacing Inventor with Fusion360. I’m personally done with AutoDesk, they’ve chafed my taint a few too many times so I wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire.

OnShape is actually cool tech, but it’s drawbackware. In the words of Lando Calrissian, this deal’s getting worse all the time.

I personally use FreeCAD, it could be better in a lot of ways but it’s not commercial. It’s made by the kind of people who are very good at programming computers, but they get full body diaper rash from cornhole to corneas if they try to think about software usability. It’s why every concept is replicated 2-4 times in various forms of incompatibility. May the dread god Nyalathotep smite thee should thou chooseth to make a Clone instead of a Link. It’s also developed in English by mostly non-English speakers. So you go to their forums and ask “If I need to make two mirror images of a part, what is the correct way to model the left one and then mirror it to get the right one” and they can’t get past the grammatical puzzle you just spun for them to answer the technical question.

In conclusion, learn to use a pencil.

I don’t know about that. I tried using both ChatGPT and Gemini to brainstorm for ideas for the name and branding of a woodworking Peertube channel. They both struck me as similar yes men with little to no imagination. Both suggested things like “sawdust and smiles.” And they would both, ALWAYS start a response with something like “That’s a great idea!” “That’s a wise approach!” "Your concern is very valid!’ Such brown nose, very kiss ass.

It doesn’t seem to be too useful for this particular use case, either.

My father once told me of an old IBM machine, I think it was the System 3 model 15D or one of its contemporaries, or maybe the original System 38. It had some amount of memory, like 32k of memory (I’m going to get these numbers wrong), and to upgrade it you could spend many thousands of dollars to have IBM come install a control board to upgrade it to 64k. The memory was already physically in the box; they manufactured and delivered it to the customer, and sold the memory control board as an exorbitant cost option, when it was the RAM (it might have even been core storage) that was the expensive part to make.

To a lesser degree, I’ve been hearing about cars that install cost options on all models, but they don’t hook them up on the lower tiers. Like apparently all Lotus Exiges have power mirrors, they’ve all got motors in them, but they don’t give you the switch unless you pay for it. You can go to a Ford dealership, buy the right switch and just pop it in and it’ll work. I suppose it can make some sense to reduce part counts, but it’s getting to the point where it’s "we installed the option in the car, it’s hooked up, it’s perfectly functional, we’ve already put in the expense, and we’ll allow the software to turn it on if you pay for it.

I could run a fairly decent woodworking racket given 10 cubic meters a year. Does that include branches and such?

Ten cubic meters of free wood a year. Huh. That’s an oak or two.

On my main desktop I’m using Fedora KDE. Arrived here by process of elimination.

Linux Mint Cinnamon didn’t run particularly well with my hardware, I was looking for a distro with decent Wayland support so I could run my high refresh rate monitor properly. So that pretty much meant a switch to KDE. So who’s implementation of KDE?

I’ve spent much of my time on the Ubuntu side of things, but Canonical has been pulling so much diet Microsoft shit that I’d rather not use any of the *buntus themselves, so Kubuntu is out. Neon? Kubuntu again. I’m not terribly interested in the forks of forks of forks of forks, I’ve been around long enough to go “Remember PeppermintOS? You don’t, okay.” So I’m looking for something fairly near the root of its tree.

I’ve never really seen the appeal of Arch and every time I’ve tried running Manjaro it failed to function, so forget that. I don’t know shit about SuSe, that basically left Fedora. So here I am.

Check my understanding here: It’s not that they’re scarce, but there’s no geological process that concentrates them like copper or gold. There aren’t any neodymium seams the way there are gold seams, there’s a very little amount everywhere. So you might as well sift the entire Mojave.

The plot of the fourth movie, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, is a slightly off the wall plot.

A giant alien space probe arrives in orbit of Earth making weird noises, it sucks up all the power from ships in orbit and power grids on the surface and starts evaporating the oceans. Turns out it wants to talk to humpback whales, which in this timeline were hunted to extinction in the 20th century, so there are no humpback whales on earth for the probe to talk to, and it’s literally tearing up the oceans to find them.

Meanwhile, Kirk and his crew of main characters are on Vulcan (Spock’s home planet) in possession of a stolen Klingon warship which they’ve been preparing for the flight back to Earth to face court martial, because of the events of the previous movie. They learn of the problem before they reach Earth, they figure out that the probe wants to talk to whales. “can we pretend to be whales?” “we can make the sounds, but we don’t speak the language.” So they just casually decide to time travel by doing a high speed lap of the sun. No shit they just fly really fast around the sun and arrive in the 1980’s, where it just so happens the Bay Aquarium has a breeding pair of captive humpback whales on display. Meanwhile, the trip through time ran them out of fuel. Cue a LucasArts style multi-problem plot where they have to figure out how to refuel their ship, modify it to carry humpback whales, find and acquire the whales, and then get back to the future.

Spoiler alert: They do. They crash their ship into 23rd century San Fransisco bay and release the whales, which do this whole new age thing with the probe, which then goes “Understandable, have a nice day” sucks in its volleyball and floats away. Then that court martial scene which is actually part of the previous movie not this one ensues, where Kirk is punished with a reward.

TL;DR the main plot of the fourth movie involves the Enterprise’s crew, but not the Enterprise, going back in time to bring humpback whales back from extinction.

The plot was originally written as a plague that could only be cured with a plant that’s extinct, but they went with the whale plot because it’s more visual.

Well I currently own a Synology NAS and it officially will be my last.

Honestly that particular business model already pretty much works the way I’d want it to.

The T-shirts are made in tremendous quantities by the likes of Hanes or Gildan with a tag in the collar that shows the company name/logo and country of origin. Quite often the artist or IP owner of the printed art will include a trademark or copyright symbol as appropriate into the artwork. The printing company often goes uncredited.

Possibly my biggest adult fear moment was when my cousin was in the hospital having had a brain bleed.

I was going back to school in a dumbass bid to alter course in my career, it was the last day of the semester, lunchtime. I was sitting in my truck eating lunch with my girlfriend at the time, I get a call, it’s from my oldest cousin. “Hey, [middle cousin] is in the hospital. Duke hospital. In the ICU.” That was a rough winter, spending a month watching someone you grew up with as their brain very gradually reboots. She survived, by the skin of her scalp. She lost some vision, has near constant headaches, had aphasia pretty bad but that’s eased a bit. At first it was like the nouns fell out of her dictionary. My uncle said to her “What do you want for dinner, babe?” And she said “Oh I want the, you know the, with the, ugh!” and she got up and started boiling some spaghetti.

The most certain I was going to die was one night when I went up for a night currency flight.

Some of the rules pilots have to follow are weird; pilot’s licenses in the US don’t expire, but you have to log certain recent experiences to be eligible to fly solo or to carry passengers. To carry passengers at night, you have to have performed 3 takeoffs and landings to a full stop at night. I was 18 or 19, I took off to do exactly that, just three quick trips around the pattern…it was windier than I’d ever dealt with. I took off and that Cessna bucked in ways that I’d never experience before, in the pitch black of night. I remember thinking “I’m going to die tonight. I’ve always wondered how, now I know.” I did make it to downwind, basically training had kicked in, I was going through the motions, and I noticed out ahead of me in town some flashing blue lights, and I thought to myself “Uh oh, someone’s getting a ticket down there.” And that little moment of casualness allowed me to re-center. I thought about it for the rest of downwind, came in with 20 degrees of flap and a LOT of left rudder for a textbook upwind wheel landing. Taxied back to the ramp, tied the plane down, then sat in the cockpit until my hands stopped shaking and I could write down the hobbs and tach times.

N64 be like that. There’s a track in Mario Kart 64 that has a big display board that shows a picture of the race, and in emulators it’s blank because they used a unique feature of the N64’s hardware to achieve that effect.

| but you should need to disclose what you did and didn’t design/build.

A specific example I have in mind: James Wright of youtube channel Wood By Wright did a video comparing like 24 hand planes, from a bunch of different brands and sources from Ace Hardware to fucking AmazonBasics. He noticed that there were basically 3 manufacturers; Jorgensen seems to offer a unique product, and then everyone else were offering slight variations on the same two designs. So there’s a manufacturer somewhere in China that churns these out, and will stamp your brand on them plus you have the option of plastic handles, aluminum or brass thrust wheel, etc. to fine tune the price point you want to hit.

That’s what I want to kill. In this case, if it’s made by Happy Clappy Fun Time Shenzhen Co. Ltd. it needs to be branded as such. Jury’s still out if I’ll allow things like the iPhone that are “Designed in Cupertino California, Made In China.” A product that is designed by a company for that company but then they contract out the manufacture.

Product segmentation? I’m fine getting rid of a lot if not all of that. All cars are luxury cars now. And what good does it do us allowing SB&D to have DeWalt and Craftsman? “We have two brands (actually four, with Porter Cable and Black & Decker) of cordless tools with very similar yet mutually incompatible battery standards and not quite equivalent product lineups, for no reason that benefits the customer.” Perfect, yeah, get on the hobbling wheel, you can explain why we should let you keep doing this between screams.

| I’m not confused when I buy a ATHEOTS or whatever BS brand they come up, I know I’m buying cheap knock-off stuff.

There’s one of two possibilities here:

1. Happy Clappy Fun Time Shenzhen Co. Ltd. is doing it themselves, registering trademarks, selling goods with that brand just long enough for the public to catch on, and then dropping that brand and coming out with another. This should be illegal and impossible. Like the mechanism by which the trademark system works should not be able to function this way.

2. Some Fuck In His Apartment is ordering out of Happy Clappy’s Shit We’ll Rebrand For You catalog. So Reginald Q. Flybynight registers APOWEDG and sells mousepads and shit for a few weeks on Amazon. This…doesn’t need to be a business model me allow. If Happy Clappy wants their shit sold on Amazon, they can list it there themselves. We don’t need the illusion of competition or market choice, we don’t need prices elevated by Some Fuck Who’s Also There…Trademark law is there to guarantee the source of goods. Reginald Q. Flybynight isn’t the source of the goods so he has no need or right to brand the goods. All that does is obfuscate who to sue if the goods are faulty or dangerous.

I’m sick of living in a world of “Someone somewhere made this I think.”

I would still keep patents at about 20 years. There’s some nuance that needs to change to prevent, say, Nintendo from retroactively patenting Pokemon after Palworld comes out, but yeah patent law needs a colonic.

I’d be okay with 20 or even 30 year copyright terms on complete works, but I would be more open on derivative works and fair use.

I want stricter trademark law. Trademark should be about knowing where your products come from. A manufacturer gets right of way over a mark so that they can defend their own reputation, and I’ll help them defend that mark because I want to know where the goods I buy come from.

It should not be legal to buy a commodity item and slap your brand on it. I see this a lot in the tool market. There seems to be two 6" jointers in production in the world today, the one JET makes, and the one everyone else sells. Wen, Craftsman and Porter Cable among many others sell the same 6" jointer. Speaking of Craftsman, that brand is now owned by Stanley Black & Decker, who also owns Porter Cable, DeWalt, and several others. Most of what they use this for is to sell mutually incompatible yet functionally similar power tools so you have to buy more batteries. They might design or build some of their tools in-house, but many of them they buy from some other company and just put their stickers on. Is it, or is it not, a “Craftsman”?

Then you’ve got Amazon, Temu, AliExpress and other Chinese dropshipping platforms. They make a whole bunch of shit and then register nineteen or twenty bullshit trademarks to sell the same thing under. I would make that illegal; if you have a brand that is suitable for selling a given item, you’re not allowed another for that purpose. Trademarks are supposed to reduce consumer confusion, you’re using them to increase consumer confusion. If I am elected dictator, that kind of behavior will earn you a public trepanning.

I don’t want to own a chinchilla, I have no idea how to care for them, but I’d like to meet one someday.

I just finished my third and fourth cutting board this week.