You may want to opt out of those services. Even LinkedIn seems to know it’s got potential to be a flaming hot train wreck, apparently to the point where they desire no responsibility for the public messages made by their machine that they own, train, and qc.

Ahh, I was mistaken. Libre is open source.

Having used autocad for nearly 40 years, I will say they stick it to their customers pretty fiercely. I still use 2010 with 3rd party software to get it to run on win10 at home. I do a lot of solid models and assemblies as well as technical 2D drawings and renderings.

FreeCAD is impressive, but it lacks an easy to use interface. NanoCAD and LibreCAD are not open source but are free and are both better 2D alternatives.

Edit: LibreCAD is open source.

Professional geologist Shawn Willsey posted a graphic of the approximate location of the newest fissure on his livestream. This fissure and flow is not likely to be a threat to the town of Grindavik, but it is a threat to both the blue lagoon and the powerplant.

I built a PC for my little sister in 2007. She was starting college and didn’t have a computer. It totaled 2805 and some change, custom built through Antares Digital (When you know, you Lili). These were all top of the line components (Asus M2N32-WS PRO, Amd athlon64 X2 AM2 5200, Corsair Memory). Not a cheapy system in its day.

Three nights before I was to deliver it to her, I completed all of the setup, had all the software ready to go, even setting up a custom theme for her (We were both metalheads). My folks said that she would need a printer/fax/copy/scanner as well, so last minute, I ended up buying an HP 5610 at target for 192 dollars.

The HP instructions didn’t say that if you connected the cable between the printer and the PC before you had installed the drivers, the printer would not mount as a device. In fact, it would never connect to that PC ever again. Apparently, it ruined the registry until you reformatted and reinstalled the OS.

To be fair, the manual did say to install the drivers first, then the cable, but this was not the norm back then and they didn’t really emphasize it in any way, nor did it mention that you were about to be FITA big time. Had to scramble to completely reformat the drive, reinstall all the software… Essentially, starting over from a blank slate and getting done in 2 days for delivery to her dorm on move in day. It did connect second time around.

I wrote them an angry letter regarding the poor deployment, but of course I never heard back from them. Never bought another HP for myself or anyone else ever again. I go out of my way to encourage people to not buy anything from HP. If I happen to be somewhere and see someone looking at an HP printer, I’ll just approach them, introduce myself, and tell them my story to discourage them from buying it.

I use Brave Browser (with Ublock Origin and AdBlock) and rarely have any issues. I do have Freetube downloaded, installed and ready to go for when they escalate their game (and they will). For certain other applications, a youtube downloader can be quite handy.

Ads truly are the most annoying, counterproductive and least creative way of putting yourself out there. Even worse, they can never seem to match an ad with the content it gets forced upon, and this serves only to train people to associate their brand with uselessness and irrelevance. Even if you have a product that is good, you’ve just presented yourself as an obstructing pair of clown shoes and that becomes your first and long-lasting impression. When the time comes that they may need it, most people will not remember your product from that ad, only that your brand is a pair of clown shoes.

The simple truth is, if you have a good product, you do not need advertising. You only need advertising if you have a bad product and you are worried that negative word of mouth will spread faster than you can dupe your share of people into buying it.

Edit: Replaced a word that may be taken as a slur.

We knew what was going to happen verbatim, and yet we laughed hysterically anyways.

Thanks so much. I will check it out.

At that time, no one knew what was going to happen. They didn’t want to chance it so they upgraded nearly everyone.

Whatever the reason, it made my decade. I experienced no problems at all on any of my machines.

In my old party days circa 2000, I had a nice party house in the hood. The neighborhood wasn’t all that great, but it was a nice big house for cheap rent. Lots of rooms and space. I was young and had more knowledge of computers than money, and this meant I could bus to work instead of driving and paying to park.

I worked at a large engineering company. They upgraded their computers for the Y2K bug. This left them with an extraordinary amount of old PC’s they had to actually pay to dispose of properly. To save money, they yanked the hard drives and raffled them off to the employees. We’re talking nearly 400 PCs. 386’s, 486’s and even some (then highly coveted) 486-dx2’s.

A few people that won just gave me their PC. They didn’t want it since it wasn’t usable without a hard drive but knew I did. I cashed in a few favors here and there to get a few of those choice 486-dx2’s from those that won them where I could. In all, I made (6) pretty decent Dell PC’s and set them up in various rooms in the house. I also had my cadd workstation and my roommate had his PC as well. I put Windows 98SE, VNC and Twisted Metal 2 on each.

I lan’d together all (8) PC’s into a home network using a partial reel of CAT6 cable that I got from another friend in exchange for devising and assembling his wife a new PC for her birthday. He was in the IBEW and the cable was scrap surplus from construction at a major airport. He gave me some speaker wire as well. In hindsight, it was for a public address system and was not the best for musical range but it did work. I borrowed a crimper and helped myself to some RJ45 connectors from our IT department. I ran the lan cables to network the PC’s. I placed a speaker in every room and wired them into the home stereo. Mono, but I only had so many speakers. I then converted my workstation to more of a home theater, running a video out to the TV. PC audio was outputted to the home stereo as auxiliary.

It made for a kick ass home theater system for the year 2000. In it’s day, it was pretty hip. We had some great multiplayer games for years to come and nearly everyone had their own room to play in. TM2 was really neat in that it could take up to 8 players.

VNC gave you control over any computer from any computer. You could watch a movie on the Home Theater in any room you want to, or all of em even. Kick on winamp with milkdrop and just jam out. Put on ‘The cat sitter’ and get the cat all riled up. Ahh, good times.

In all, and not accounting for any time spent or software licenses, I may have invested 30 dollars for a new corded drill (which I still have today). Beer was probably the highest total expenditure for the project. There were some wire coat hangers that got away fishing the wires through the walls that are probably still there.

Also, I totally agree with you on Chrono Trigger. It has another title set in that same world that can be tricky to find called Chrono Cross. I personally think Trigger was the better of the two titles but Cross is play worthy.

I enjoy programming but I get kinda OC when learning something new, and have to remind myself to be patient. I usually plan projects that are way over my skill level (just a hobbyist).

Most of my successful programs have started out very small and then re-written numerous times over a couple years, gradually becoming large in both scope and complexity as my mind. This allows my mind to envision the programs entirety and make better choices instead of immediate results.

Twisted Metal 2 for PC.

Farewell sir. Thanks for all the laughs.

Kevin Pollack’s fantastic story about torturing Alan Arkin. Skip to 1:30 if you want to hear his answering machine prank.

Say what you want, but Georgio got some great hair. It deserves it’s own zip code.

The chemical reaction that binds concrete in a matrix takes place after you add the water and continues until you dry it out. Anything you put in the crack will be a temporary fix only. The material will work itself out over time, and you will additionally be trapping a certain amount of moisture in the crack with it. You will now have a concrete pad with a ‘pocket’ and a ‘plug’ made from different materials. Materials that are likely to expand and contract at different rates exposing an opening for moisture and debris at least once through the year.

You only get (1) chance to successfully pour concrete i’m afraid. Your pad is damaged for all time. The crack will certainly grow from thermal conditions alone. It’s incapable of healing itself. What you need to stave that off is good chemistry for binding and something that expands and contracts at approx. the same rate as the concrete. I’d call the company that poured it. They’ll know what repair product best matches their chemistry. If you put the wrong products in it, it’s going to accelerate the degradation.

I am a refractory designer, and the company I work for makes several ‘patch’ type products of different chemistries. They all have a use. Temperature, application, chemistry, elevation even. While these do work, they are again only temporary.

They come in different consistencies. One of those is what we call a plastic. It is very much like a putty until it dries. It does contain some moisture so it will shrink as it dries out. It does not contain as much moisture as a self flowing castable would.

My stepfather Michael. I owe it to him.

He did drafting and design. One day ion the nineteen eighty’s at work, someone gave him a TRS-80. He let me use it. It came with the obligatory box of unlabeled disks and several copies of ‘digital’ magazine. Among the disks was one labelled ‘edtasm’ in blue pen. It was the editor program for writing in assembly. I bought books on assembly (mail order through a local bookshop) and tried to create the ‘pong’ game. It was terrible. So much frustration.

When my stepdad saw that, he bought me an Atari 65XE home computer, which had an editor for writing in basic and had a port for saving the data off to a cassette tape so you could reload later. That was a fun time in my life and a good skill to learn early on. It made me unfearful of learning programming, which might have helped me more. I would go on to learn VB, C, C#, Autolisp and VBA.

Today, I’m a refractory designer, and my pet project at home is loading 3D CADD models into Unity where I play it like a video game, manipulatiing them in VR. At the moment it’s mostly taking a hammer to it, but when my stress goes back down and I get back to it, it shows real promise.

I’m pretty good with it. I’ve always hated their syntax too. It’s not natural to my grey matter like a lot of other languages are. I’ll second Lee Mac. I use his numinc.lsp. Very handy. Afralisp is another good site. He does a bit better explaining certain things by example and in much smaller steps.

I can tell you that you get used to reading and writing autolisp after prolonged use. I’ve used it since learning of it around 1996ish on R11. I create lisp files as needed when I notice something being repetitive or time consuming. I currently have around 300 and they are pretty catered to my work as a mechanical designer or refractory designer. Most are very simple and pointed routines that save me a minute and I might use one of them 60 times a day.

However, a more complicated yet far more dynamic alternative exists. I often create .Net front end software programs that in turn create and output a dynamic lisp all based on the user inputs . They do require a bit more effort since they are for a more complex idea. It’s essentially making a vb or c# program that handles a geometry and its range of permutations. It does it’s own calculations and point plotting. It also knows how to write an autolisp script. So run program, input data, calculate, generate script. Then switch to Autocad, run script. Viola! An hour of work in a few seconds.

With that in mind, you can further this even more by chaining that module program and other module programs like it to an assembly type program. Teach the assembly how to determine it’s own plumbing and (presuming its calculatable), it can be programmed to create and send the module programs their inputs directly.

Here’s a video of an old one I did (sorry, no audio). You might find it neat. It’s software I made for counting and creating drawing views for brick dome module. Everything is to scale and is in fact accurate to (8) decimal places. It handled Domes, Cones, Cylinders, and all of the basic 3D geometries.

Not exactly text based, but the old sierra style games are still a blast to play. Leisure Suit Larry, Maniac Mansion, Thimbleweed Park. They sure don’t need many resources to play.

Yeah, Call of Cthulu was my favorite out of most of the tabletop games. You need a good Storyteller, which I was lucky to have once.