33/M
Interested in self-hosting, decentralization, and learning more about the fediverse.

I also do photography, but with digital cameras from the 90’s.

  • 0 Posts
  • 31 Comments
Joined 7 days ago
cake
Cake day: June 4th, 2025

help-circle
  • I used to be big into the foam-board electric planes a bunch of years ago. Loved building one in an afternoon, flying it, crashing it, fixing it, building another one out of $4 of foam board when the old one got too squishy… I used to fly almost exclusively the FT Bloody Wonder, I could almost cut a new one out by heart.

    I’m always tempted to fly again, but I just have SO many hobbies and so little space. I would have to hang them from the ceiling in my living room or something… Honestly wouldn’t be the worst thing.

    What airframe(s) do you fly?



  • My original choice was between the BRZ and an MX-5… I don’t have another car, so I needed just the tiny bit more practicality of the trunk and back-seat space. I HAVE in fact taken 4 people in it, though it’s only a last resort kind of thing… It was really tough, because I fucking love convertibles. If I had a more reasonable car, or even the space to park a more reasonable car when I was looking into it originally (I live in an apartment in a downtown metro with only 1 parking space), I’d have 100% gotten a convertible miat.

    And I’m only 5’10", but I think I just have a long torso. My seat is all the way down, and there isn’t enough head clearance for me to wear a helmet, which just saves me from the temptation to beat on it at autocross or something, so honestly a positive.


  • This week is and will continue to be a hobby black hole… Sunday morning I am going to a local tech flea market to try and offload a ton of superfluous crap I’ve accumulated since I went and sold a bunch of crap last year lol. Laptops, the spare 3D printer I don’t use, random electronic gizmos, the works…It’s all currently in a massive pile in my kitchen. It’s been a ton of work to curate and price everything, and I can tell that it’s going to come down to the wire.

    Once that’s passed, though, I want to get back to the art project I was working on, I want to try and print Moire interference patterns with 3-d printed "wood"block rollers. That, and working on actually starting up my homelab and diving into that world.



  • Piefed has a content filter to remove it. Signing up for piefed.social, one of the first questions it asks is “How tired are you of the Trump/Musk spam?”. I just checked my filters, and the only 2 words are “trump” and “musk”, and I have not seen a single lick of US politics in any of my browsing over the last week or so since joining. (EDIT: Lemmy doesn’t have content filters, I was looking at the wrong info, sorry!)

    I get my news elsewhere and I’m part of local political action groups. One of the reasons I left Reddit a couple weeks back was to get away from the constant dooming. Even after meticulously curating my communities, it was hard to get away from. There’s a time and place for worrying about news and politics, but anywhere and everywhere 24/7 isn’t it.

    I can see how it could be a problem if you WANT to see a little bit of it, though.



  • I drive a BRZ, lowered an inch and a half, and I’m tall enough that the seat needs to be as low as it will go so I don’t bump my head on the roof. Stopped at lights, I can look over at regular non-lifted pickup trucks and think “Huh, that guy’s asscheeks are at the same level as my eyeballs”.

    I’ve gotten over the feeling of being small while driving amongst traffic, but the stark differences while stopped close to other vehicles is hard to ignore.

    I really wish I could buy the new Suzuki Jimny. I saw one in person for the first time on a trip a few months back, and it’s so perfect.



  • I’ll also comment to say that the “cancel” part of this is stupid and should be reconsidered. (There seems to be a pretty thorough consensus on that). Isn’t the whole point of this to have options, to spread the resources out to as many points as possible to prevent a single point of failure, corruption, or censorship?

    I ended up at Piefed, because I’m interested in self-hosting, and I understand Python more than any of the other languages represented. That’s really the full depth of my choice, and I’m not sure there should be much more thought behind it other than “How does this particular software package perform and meet my needs?”


  • I was hanging out with some people this weekend, and we somehow got on the subject of fiber consumption, and how americans eat far too little fiber. Over the course of the day, we continued to joke about fiber, and built a made-up authoritarian town government based around maintaining healthy fiber intake for its citizens. Increased septic pipe diameters, Navy Bean distribution infrastructure, mandatory weekly stool scans, “fiber re-education” camps for failing a scan. When people die, their fiber will be reprocessed and returned to the citizens (like the sacred water in Dune)…

    When we all parted ways, later in the evening, one of them sent a link to the group chat they had been talking about earlier in the day. IMMEDIATELY someone responded “This isn’t fiber related :(”

    It’s been a long time since I’ve witnessed the birth of a stupid inside joke, it was providing smiles all day. “Hey Alex, I bet that tree bark has a TON of fiber…”


  • I was just talking about this with someone this past weekend. For me, it has been removing most “smart” features from my phone.

    • I’ve disabled Chrome, so I can no longer access the internet.
    • I’ve disabled the “google” app, so I don’t have a back-door to the internet, as that seems to have a browser built in. This also disables voice to text, which I never used anyway.
    • No social media, games, etc. of any kind.

    The only thing I use my phone now is calling/texting, navigation, music, a calendar, and a notes app. It’s taken me a long time to get here, almost 3 years at this point, but being able to take my phone out, use it for the one intentional thing I need, then put it away… It’s so liberating. I use Olauncher, which is a minimal text-based home screen, and it also tracks your daily screen-time and displays it on the home-screen. I’m down to around 30-45 minutes MAX of screen time per day. Most days its 15 or below.




  • Waking up feeling refreshed and actually rested was a nice change of pace this morning. I did a lot this weekend so I was supremely exhausted Sunday evening. Started watching some Youtube content about the recent GPU releases and fell asleep far before my normal bedtime. Woke up in the morning with YT still running on some absolutely unhinged niche rabbit hole about battle strategies of various skirmishes during WW2, which is completely unrelated to any content I ever consume lol.


  • As a chill person who likes to take things slow and deliberate, but is living in the greater Boston area where everyone is in a rush for no reason and nobody slows down for even a second… Trade?

    I recently took a trip to the Netherlands, and that is the kind of place I want to be. Not even just Amsterdam, I traveled to a couple other smaller cities. The “You mind your own business and don’t be a dick and I’ll do the same” mentality was very pleasant, as that’s how I try and live anyway… Interestingly, I talked with some Dutch guys while I was there, and they all seemed to hate it, and one of them wished to move to the southwest USA and live on a ranch with tons of land or something. The classic “You want what you can’t have”. I want affordable reliable robust public transit, walkable car-free infrastructure, and healthcare lol.



  • That solidifies my suspicion that it’s a standard Android feature… I also don’t get many spam calls, and only distinctly remember performing that action on this most recent phone.

    Based on OP’s comment “…I always assume that rejecting the call outright will also be detected as a deliberate action and therefore a person is on the other side…”, I figured maybe they didn’t know about that feature and/or have an iPhone and they somehow don’t behave that way.

    I also miss the old days of Android… I got a smartphone specifically to play Pokemon go in 2016 lol, up until that point I was still rocking one of those Casio Gzone indestructible flip-phones. Walked into WalMart, bought the cheapest LG whatever phone I could find (Android 5 I think?), caught a bazillion Pokemon. I remember buying multiple batteries for longer sessions, because you could just pop the back off and replace it on the go.