Ground wires don’t go from the pole to the house. Your home’s ground literally goes into the ground, either via a stake or by being attached to a cold water pipe. Having your ground connected to distant objects/poles/locations is counterproductive, because the extreme distance is likely to wind up with different potentials at different points, which would put current on the ground wire all the time, which is exactly what you don’t want.

Anyway, notice that the big bare wire is not actually electrically connected to anything and is only attached to a tensioner pulling it against the house. The ferrule on the end is to keep it from fraying over time.

Eh. I don’t see any compromised insulation on any of those wires. Honestly, I wouldn’t even bother. Just head on up there with a nonmetallic ladder and poke that junk out of there with something nonconductive if you’re worried. I ain’t afraid of no volts. (And before anyone freaks out, that bare aluminum cable is structural, to prevent the wires from sagging. It’s not carrying any current.)

It seems to me that whatever built that nest decided to abandon it before moving in. There isn’t any visible bird shit around it which there certainly would be if it had birds in it (especially ones big enough to drag those sticks up there) and the lack of chewed material around it indicates a lack of extant rodents.

Preventing that sort of thing is the primary function of the deflector dish, and not just whatever they’re jiggered it to do in order to solve the Negative Space Wedgie problem of the week this time.

And somehow they snork up hydrogen via the Bussard ram scoops, as well. I don’t think anyone’s ever adequately explained just how the hell that’s supposed to work at warp speed, only that it does.

I hate the new Chuck E. Cheese with a burning passion. I would even take his gonk original incarnation over the generic blanditude that he is now. The '90s Chuck with his ballcap and skateboard was a perfect encapsulation of his era and he should have stayed that way, especially since that decade is now suddenly so fondly remembered.

I await with interest the first serious accusation that I’m a bot. A very well armed bot, perhaps. I certainly type some strange things, but you guys have probably seen my hands too many times.

Unless my hands are also AI generated. Hmm.

I’ve already garnered the achievement of having several people on one of the Discord servers I hang around on of treating me as if I’m literally a penguin. Nobody’s yet come up with a credible explanation of how I’d be able to type. (Including, surprisingly, the obvious hunt and peck gag that presents itself.)

Ah, yes. Every child’s favorite purple dinosaur: Borney.

(But seriously, have you seen what they did to our man? Dafuq.)

I was going to post this in the root of the comments but then I saw yours, so I copy-pasted it and attached it in the hopes that we can get a Fuck Nintendo train going.

Yeah, literally nobody in my circle of gamer friends and acquaintances has any interest whatsoever in buying the new Switch. Not a single one. Not even the ones that were previously diehard Nintendo and Zelda fans.

Zero.

Crap like this is really underscoring why. Nintendo has ramped up their already user-hostile behavior far beyond the point of absurdity.

The happy-fluffy-starry-eyed wording in this article taking great pains to point out how “easy” it was for this person to have their fraudulent ban reversed are doing way too much heavy lifting. It never should have happened in the first place, and there shouldn’t even be any mechanism that makes it a remote possibility.

And then there’s this:

Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether they can still play with the used game cartridges they purchased, or if these are considered pirated copies that could result in another console ban if used.

Uh-huh. Miss me with every single molecule of that shit.

It wasn’t a matter of typing too fast that was the issue, but rather commonly paired letters should be positioned such that their mechanical linkages would be less prone to collide with each other if they were pressed consecutively. Your only real limitation in typing speed on an oldschool mechanical typewriter is that you can’t have two keys pressed at the same time and you can’t have two hammers hit the page consecutively before the first hammer has fallen away. Commonly paired letters should be mechanically unlikely to collide, which does not necessarily follow that they wind up with an intuitive location on the keyboard itself in terms of what’s “far apart” and “close together.”

On the Sholes and Glidden typing machine from which the modern QWERTY layout was originally derived, the hammers did not have a return spring but were rather dropped back home via gravity. Later models quickly developed spring loaded returns for just that reason.

The Sholes and Glidden 'board was tweaked somewhat from its original quasi-mathematically determined collision mitigating layout largely for marketing purposes, and also for aesthetics. The primordial design actually had the period key in the middle of the field which probably looked just as goofy to people back in the day as it does now. The rights were eventually sold to Remington (yes, that Remington) who made the final adjustments to arrange the keys in the modern QWERTY layout, invented the shift key for both upper and lowercase letter capability for their Model 2 Standard typewriter which the Sholes and Glidden machine lacked, and the rest is history.

I’m pretty sure QWERTY telegraph keyboards post-date typewriters. Early examples of telegraph transcription machines literally used piano keyboards with letters inscribed on them, and the prototype Sholes and Glidden 'board inherited a similar two row layout before adopting the staggered four row one.

I have offers turned off on eBay for this reason. The only thing you ever get is low ball offers. Yes, I know you can set a lowerbound limit.

Since I have offers disabled (or if someone wants to try to underbid your setpoint out of optimism and/or stupidity) that prompts the lowballers message instead. Usually with an insulting poorly spelled paragraph attached, or some sob story. Or both. But since they messaged you, that means you now have their user handle and can block them. So, goodbye.

Edit: In fact, speak of the devil. I had to punk exactly such a rando right now. They came at me with a 50% offer on an item I already have listed at roughly 50% below its selling price with their excuse being, “Well, I’m taking a risk trusting you that it works.” Broheim, if it doesn’t work eBay will force me to take it back, no matter what… The beauty of this, by the way, is that this precludes such idiots from interacting with your listings anymore and, I think, even being able to view them. So you’ll never even see them again, unless they go out of their way to create another account. And they lose out on their chance to buy whatever your thing was at any price through their sheer greed and ineptitude.

I’m given to understand a sizable fraction of these dweebs try to make their living lowballing whoever they assume are desperate sellers of crap on eBay, and then turn around and list the same item right back for full price.

I’m assuming glass printer beds are supposed to be tempered, and just an FYI for you or anyone else attempting the hardware store or score-it-yourself method, the glass you wind up with will not be tempered and will also have exceedingly sharp edges and corners. If you have access to a belt sander with a suitably fine belt you can at least round off the sharp bits.

Untempered glass probably won’t deal with thermal loading very well, either. It might work, and it’ll be cheap, but prepare for disappointment.

Not pretty much. It is, straight up. I use the same gallon jug to clean things as I do to run my lighter.

You could just re-melt the sprue and use it to make the next batch, right?

What puzzles me is the lack of vent holes to allow displaced air out of the mold once it’s assembled. (Unless they’re on the other half, the one that’s not pictured here. That seems doubtful.) So whatever this was meant to cast must have been a very runny metal with a low melting point, probably with the mold itself being piping hot as part of the process as well. Probably not much of an alloy, and probably very easy to melt again.

The inscriptions on these appear to be awfully similar to some of those listed here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xin_dynasty_coinage

Wikipedia mentions these specifically as being cast, and in big batches with multiple molds filled in one operation. In light of that I’m surprised that the mold is so small. Check out this sumbitch, for instance, which makes 42 coins in one go. That seems a little more like it, if you’re going to go through all that effort.

I’m reading that apparently what with one thing and another, the Chinese were still producing cast rather than struck coinage all the way up to the very early 1900s. Their currencies changed a lot throughout their long and never-ending parade of civil wars, overthrows, usurpations, fractures, and reunifications, and it seemed every time their leadership changed it came along with a reinvention of all the coinage as well.

Some of this may depend on your client. If you do a triple dash by itself on its own line:

You get a horizontal rule in most clients, including the default web UI and all of the major browser based clients I’ve tried.

In an LEP light? A regular LED, sure. But those lack the novelty of being able to lance somebody in the face with a laser beam.

My attorney has advised me to make no statements whatsoever regarding the applicability of the Lumintop Thor Mini I just bought the other week, which outputs a mere 250 lumens but does so in a narrow cone that’s got, to my reckoning, a divergence of only about four or five degrees.

I’ll have to do some measuring later, but at rear-windshield-to-asshole distance it’ll only throw a spot that’s probably about a foot wide, delivering maximum fuck you with a minimum of collateral damage.

Including this very platform.

Lemmy will automatically render a double dash – as an en dash, and a triple dash — as an em dash.

I usually just type alt + 0151, though, because I’m a nerd.

Easy. I did it the just other day because I forgot that my new CRF250L is a Honda, and the position of the turn signal switch and the horn are reversed from every other bike I own, and probably not coincidentally every also other motorcycle brand on the planet. Some guy in the lane next to me got super butthurt because he thought I honked “at” him as I was completing my turn, which was quite hilarious to watch. (He was in the far left lane, I was doing a right on red from the right lane. There is no conceivable reality in which anything I was doing would be related to him, if not for the fact that he had Main Character Disorder.)

some folks just want to feel some kind of power because they feel powerless and they just need a wake-up call.

This is, like, the perfect summation of the human condition. Probably an awful lot of it, anyway.

That works. Also, back when I delivered pizza I kept a rather large LED flashlight in my cupholder all the time, ostensibly for spotting mailboxes and house numbers. (This was back in the day when having a powerful LED flashlight was a big deal, not like nowadays when you can get 3 for $10 on Amazon or whatever.) Pointing it out the back window usually got the point across when asshats felt the need to sit three feet off my back bumper and shine their high beams at me.