Under the Red Hot Moon by Rancid

“You know you’re old when they take your favorite item off the Taco Bell menu.”

RIP chillitos. You are missed.

I wouldn’t call model railroading my main hobby, as I only touch it once in a while. But that’s also what I do love about it. You leave it packed away in a closet for YEARS, then one rainy day you stumble across those boxes & decide to unpack them. And they still work like you remember as a kid. It’s like reconnecting with an old friend.

I get about 7. Turns out I need closer to 9. When I do get enough sleep, the difference is pretty wild - my mood is better, WAY better. And my appetite is under control too, which is a nice bonus. But the only way to actually get those 9 hours is literally “eat-sleep-work”. Just ain’t enough time in the day.

See if I can bribe enough local officials to pass an amendment making bike lanes mandatory on all new road construction projects. Sadly, even at the local level I don’t think $10,000 would be enough.

I started baby steps when Steam stopped supporting Windows7. I built my main gaming PC to dual boot W10 & Ubuntu maybe 3 years ago? And that just worked so-so honestly. Felt like everytime I went to play co-op games w my friends, whatever game we picked that weekend didn’t work correctly in Linux. But because I had Win10 right there, I also never forced myself to learn anything either. Biggest thing I could find was the problems seemed to be related to the Nvidia drivers, but never could quite figure out how to update them.

Recently I doubled down with a new PC, and this time it’s Ubuntu only. Made an effort to find native Linux apps where possible, learned a few terminal commands, forced myself to also learn Bottles (play Windows games), and bought a Radeon video card instead of Nvidia. Learning curve for what I wanted wasn’t nearly as high as I feared. If anything, I think it’s pushing me to consider distro shopping, as I’m starting to understand why folks don’t like snaps. Looks like Mint will be my next stop.

Biggest challenge so far is there’s a few apps I use that just don’t have a great Linux equivalent. AutoHotKey is the biggest one, but I see there’s some new options here I didn’t try yet. https://lemmy.zip/post/47337622 I have not dicked around with my 3D printer software yet, but I’m sure that will be a hurdle.

I stopped a long time ago. I just prefer interactive entertainment over passive. TV was easy to axe, cut the cable bill & never looked back. Movies went much later, too many shitty movies back to back, eventually stopped going, so stopped seeing previews, which in turn broke the cycle of wanting to see the next one.

I will say that not watching movies or TV makes it harder to interact with folks. There’s something of a shared culture we have through our entertainment, and not having that makes it harder to connect.

Oddly, I just started watching movies again this year. I’ve been getting better about getting on the elliptical, and I’m now at the point where my ‘runs’ take about 90 minutes. So been catching up on all the movies I considered watching over the last ~25 years. Turns out I didn’t miss much. lol.

So, I’m a novice Linux user and have been on Ubuntu for maybe 2 years now. And I’m just starting to hit the SNAPS wall - IE, just a bit too much of what I want doesn’t install through snaps. Is there a good progression for my “next distro after Ubuntu?”. Still need some training wheels, but ready to take the next step.

I wanted to play a Mass Effect game, but I suck at cover-shooters. So I put it on easy and ran around punching my way through the game.

Ah, I see it now! I was an idiot and only looking at the menu above it for interface language. Got it. Thanks for the help!

On mine, there’s a dropdown to select your language. There is no option to add an additional one.

My two favorite arcade games of all time are UN Squadron and Hot Rod

UN Squadron is a side scrolling shooter by Capcom with a solid anime theme. My understanding is it’s based on an Anime called Area 88. Quite the quarter eater, but if you like seeing GIANT machines and blasting them with your airplane, give it a go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.N._Squadron

Hot Rod is a top down racing game by Sega. (The name is so generic that it can be hard to find.) The cool ‘hook’ on this game was that it was meant to be played with four players standing around a tabletop arcade cabinet, so every player was looking down on the screen. It also had the interesting note that the game never ended, it played much like a campaign where you are championing a racing team. Manage your power-ups, because they break down, and are often the wrong one for the next track (with the artificial difficulty that you can only change 1 part per race). At my home arcade, the difficulty was set low enough that I could loop the game until I got tired of standing, which definitely helped make it one of my go-to games.

I should add - the original version of this game plays kind of slow - there’s a lot more focus on car control & driving clean lines. But Sega released a mod chip set for it later that doubled the game speed, which turns it into a ‘just hang on & don’t hit anything’ type of racing. Both are fun, but it’s like two different games. https://www.arcade-museum.com/Videogame/hot-rod

Oh wow, so if I want to see English AND Spanish content, I would need to add both languages? Neat. TIL!

Oh, looks like that’s not an option for me (lemmy.zip). Are you able to add multiple languages on other instances?

I carry like $2 in change in my right front pocket, and have for as long as I can remember. I cannot leave the house without it anymore - it feels like something is wrong. I also would struggle to tell you the last time I ever NEEDED physical change. It’s more of a novelty than anything at this point, but it’s part of my routine.

I realize OP probably doesn’t care, but I find the differences interesting. Not too long ago, I just happened to park my truck (with grandpa cap) right next to the identical SUV. From the outside, the two looked like twins - same paint color even. And yet, when you peer through the back window, it’s immediately obvious how much less cargo space the SUV has. Even if you took the back seats out, there’s all this plastic trim that devours what should be cargo space. You’d never fit a sheet of plywood back there. And I don’t see why. Airbags & cupholders I guess?

I haven’t been able to even look at new vehicle prices in a while, but back when I bought the truck, it was literally half the price of the SUV. That’s an awful lot to pay for 2 rear seats and less cargo space. And yet, SUVs are everywhere here in America. Go fig.

I guess what I’m saying is that if you want more cargo space for less money - yes, the extra step of buying a tonneau cover or camper shell is totally worth it. Or was, anyway.

For me, what has sort of worked it pointing out that both sides of the news are getting basic facts wrong - things where there shouldn’t even be a debate. If the news was true, you could watch any channel - it would all be the same. Instead, we get things like one side claiming murders are up and the other claiming murders are down. Our current journalism is a failure of a system designed to drive engagement/viewership/clicks rather than convey knowledge.

I also find it helps to remind them that we’re Americans first, party second. The other side isn’t stupid, they’re just getting a completely different set of ‘news’.

Mildly related - I vividly remember back in the 90s on my drivers test in Florida, it was illegal to have a screen facing the driver. Period. Now, what they were aiming at was making sure the driver wasn’t watching a portable TV while driving. But the center console screen in modern cars would 100% qualify. Heck, mounting your GPS or cell phone to the dash so that it’s hands free would still be illegal by that law. So I have to assume something in Florida’s driving laws changed. Always been curious what, but I moved away shortly after then, never bothered to follow up.

As others have said, search YouTube for brake pad changes on your make/model of car. If that still leaves you with questions, you can also find a self help book specific to your car (Chilton or Haynes).

Good news, based on how you’re describing your own technical level, I think you’re going to find this is pretty easy actually. Only concern is if you live where they salt the roads, then some of these things will be rusted together. So, good to watch the video again & see how it’s supposed to come apart.

Once the calipers are off, you need to support them somehow so they don’t hang on the brake lines. I usually just slide a cinder block underneath them, but others like using bungie cords / zip ties & tying them to spring/strut. (Depending on the car, you may not even need to fully remove the caliper - many of them pivot upwards).

Probably worth mentioning, the pads themselves are cheap, but you should also resurface or replace the rotors. One of the important steps to making sure they last is having a clean & smooth surface when they’re new, so that they will mate together smoothly. There’s a lot of neat stuff going on with the transfer of pad material to the rotor itself, I can’t pretend to cover it all, but “bedding” the pad material to the rotor properly ensures long life. And the short-short answer is that to accomplish that, you need new rotors or you need to have the rotors machined smooth when you replace the pads. I find it’s usually more cost effective to just buy cheap rotors from Rock Auto online.

Lastly, you may want to watch a video on brake bleeding (getting the air out of the brake lines). In theory you might not need to even open the brake lines, but often you need to do so in order to get the caliper pistons to retract far enough for the new brake pads. (I like to bleed the brakes on every pad change just to have fresh fluid in there). I mention this because brake bleeding is usually a 2 person job. There are special tools to work around that, but you need to know in advance if you’re going to need them.

At the risk of sounding silly - Instead of focusing on burning the solids, boil the water. Water boils at 100C, at which point the water vapor should separate and leave all the solids behind. Then capture the vapors and condense it back down into clean water. Now, if you later want to incinerate the leftover solids, sure, go for it, fire’s always cool in my book.

I’ll add, simply boiling water is energy intensive. What you are proposing probably won’t work at any scale.

We never really back up and say ‘did you REALLY get that part, because you’re going to NEED it for the next 14 years?’. I can remember I was sick for multiple weeks when we were learning division. I came back, and we were already onto the next topic, and it was just assumed I knew it. Now, I was super-lucky, in that I understood multiplication well enough to puzzle it out. Not every student cares, especially when they are like 8 years old. Just want to learn it enough to pass and be done with Math. ‘What do you mean I have more Math next year too???’

As soon as you miss a single step in the mathematics education train, well, you’re going to be hating math for the rest of your schooling. It’s a series of incremental building blocks, but we never double check that each student really has each piece.