MystikIncarnate

Everyone knows the real power of configuration on Windows is regedit.

Lowering emissions doesn't increase shareholder value. Try again, and this time think of the shareholders.

/s (obviously)

I agree. Too many cooks in the kitchen and all that. There's enough of us that we can diversify our efforts. A set of large teams working on eliminating carbon production, and a set of large teams working on carbon capture.

We don't really need to pick and choose. There's literally billions of people on earth.

Just a thought, but BT transmitters are a thing, you could pull in audio from several sources and pipe it to a transmitter and use it that way.... Though, that would kind of defeat the purpose, IMO.

I've had several pairs of aftershokz, almost all of them Bluetooth. Most recently I was gifted a pair of openrun pro. Shokz has made significant improvement since the first generation. I would put their modern versions on par with fairly average earbuds, with a notable bass drop off as the most significant audio fidelity issue.

They're massively convenient. They sound rather good apart from the missing low end, and they're easy to make into an all day wear.

I've worn headsets on top of my trekz, glasses, even headphones (don't ask). They're not the most comfortable when you have stuff on top of them, pushing them into your skull, but that's expected.

Most people don't notice I'm wearing them.

Honestly, 10/10 for convenience.

The point is never expensive. The point is always that it lasts. Sometimes that means more expensive, but not always.

DeWalt is a special case, because no matter what we buy for wireless tools, it's going to need batteries and the batteries are not cross compatible. So that's more about total cost of ownership. My TCO goes down if I stay within their battery ecosystem.

I'll have a look around for cheap-but-good impact sockets when the time comes. I'm not in a position to need them quite yet.

This is the way.

The impact wrench I'm looking at is one of the newer lineup from DeWalt. I have DeWalt everything already (impact driver, hammer drill, circular saw, reciprocating saw... Even my hedge trimmer, string trimmer, lawnmower and snowblower), all using the 20v MAX or compatible batteries, except the snowblower, which uses the power flex 60v (which can be used in 20v tools, but 20v MAX batteries cannot be used in it). The impact wrench uses the same 20v batteries. So I just need the tool. It's still something like $200 for it, but I don't think I'll need anything more for power tools for a long assed time after that.

We picked most of this stuff up over the past year starting with a kit (impact driver, hammer drill, circular/reciprocating saws, even a small light, with some batteries and a few extras) about a year and a half ago, and we've been steadily adding to it. I chose DeWalt because I have an old, 12v drill I used for like 10 years and it still works. The original battery has left us but the second battery I bought when it was new (it came with one and I bought an extra so I could have one in the drill while one was charging) is still kicking. I got a replacement for the original battery that shipped with it, so I still have two for that unit. It still works, and it's fine, but there were a few times I really needed a hammer drill and the puny 12v was all that I had... But that was literally my only real gripe about it. Given that history, I wanted to keep with DeWalt because they clearly make tools that can last.

I wanted to go with one brand so I didn't require several different battery chargers for different tools. DeWalt was only missing a snowblower, but they released one late last year and we obtained it shortly after it hit the market, which completed our large tools. There's only a small number of handheld tools in the DeWalt lineup that I still want to get. The impact wrench is one. Another is a brad nailer (IIRC), because I have to install some baseboards/trim, but it's hard to justify buying a $500+ tool for the job.

My entire automotive kit probably needs to be replaced. I have a complete socket set with ratcheting wrenches, and not a whole lot besides that at the moment. I will need to get a new torque wrench, breaker bar... Probably a lot more that I'm not thinking about right now. I have access to my brother's Jack and Jack stands, so I'm ok there. For the impact wrench, I'll need to add a small set of impact ready sockets for it, otherwise I'm going to rip my sockets to shreds.

I have a ton of electrical testing stuff for my other hobbies, so I'm good on that front, but I notably don't have a CCA tester, which I would like to get. Among my more electronic things I have a fairly crappy, and old, OBD2 reader, which has come in handy plenty of times.

As you can imagine, I'm the "handy" guy in the family. I just find it all fascinating, but I wouldn't want to make it my job. After working on a vehicle for a few days, I don't even want to look at a wrench for several weeks.

By day, I work in IT, so I'm generally sat at a computer pushing buttons until the screen dots show up in the right order.

I can only tell you what I use. Obviously, the first thing I did was put my modem in bridged mode. I attached a router/firewall (in my case a sonicwall, but anything is fine, as long as it's not found at the local best buy); a few switches, access points, and two raspberry pi's running...... Bind.

Yep, I don't use pihole. I don't see the point. I have Adblock on my browser, where I can set it to run, or not run, as I see fit.

I'm going Max performance here, the firewall is running in an optimized spi mode, QoS enabled, the whole nine yards. One of the pi's runs DHCP, the pair run bind for DNS forwarding and caching out to Google's public DNS servers.... The whole system is ripping fast. at least for response times. Bandwidth.... Well, I blame my ISP for that.

If I were to recommend something similar to someone else, the things I would change are my WiFi and switch selection, I'm using all Cisco products, which most people don't want to deal with that complexity. I can't blame them; and ubiquiti is a good substitute.

For the firewall, I'd usually recommend opnsense.

And I'm pretty solid on recommending the pi's, with bind. I'm sure pihole is nice, but bluntly, I just want my DNS to do DNS things. Let everything else worry about the rest.

Yeah, she needed it on all four. I think I needed to torch out at least three of the slide bolts around the car. We saved a bunch of money by having me do it, but I broke my cheap torque wrench in the process, snapped the socket connector right off the end of it trying to loosen the lug nuts. I only used the torque wrench for loosening things because I didn't have another tool long enough to pull them off (aka a breaker bar, I think it's called). So, RIP. I told her that if she wants me to do another wheel/brake service, she'll have to buy me an impact wrench, and I'll send her the link to one I found that will fill the purpose (which is both compatible with the stuff I already use and was tested and recommended by the torque test YouTube channel). Because I'm not dealing with getting, and breaking, any tools to get her tires off because some crackpot at the shop decided to torque her lug nuts with an impact.

I only want to reduce my workload and not sit there standing on a breaker bar, unable to get the damn lug nuts off... I'm not light, over 200lbs, so if I need to stand on a bar to get the lug nuts to loosen, someone probably did something wrong.

Never again.

Yeah, they say that.

When you're too busy to actually get your time in and you look like a damn slacker, they'll use it as evidence to say that you don't need any additional help. I've been through this song and dance several times.

I understand why. I have had a bit of insight into how all of that works and short of being a prodigy, you can't really get ahead.

This is why I do a lot of my routine maintenance on my own car. If all I need is a wrench, some materials and a few hours, I'll do it myself. I've become quite skilled with mechanics over the years; I'm sure it's nothing compared to what an actual mechanic knows, but brakes, tire changes/rotations, battery replacements, even coolant changes and thermostat replacements, totally do-able. I could go on with minor repair crap I've learned but you get the picture.

I did a brake job on my SIL's car and discovered that the last person in there didn't lube anything up, I had to beat it with a hammer to get the damn brake pads out. I put the right lubrication in the right places and put everything back together better than I found it. I even did the slide bolts, which I had to break out the torch to get loose. New pads, rotors, slide bolts, slide bolt boots, the whole nine yards. Pretty much everything short of doing the calipers and brake fluid.

I suspect the last few techs that touched her vehicle were trying to move so fast that they didn't bother doing anything to the side bolts even though they would have been obviously in need of maintenance/replacement.

The thing that bothered me is that she sold the car a few months after I spent 10+ hours fixing the stupid brakes. So next time I have to go look at her vehicle, it'll be a surprise for what things were not done, or were not done right.

grumbles

Agreed. The time wasted just marking down what you did and how long it took you is incredible. If I get too busy, I look like a fucking slacker because the first thing I just cannot do when I'm too busy is to mark down exactly how busy I am. It just doesn't happen. I'm moving from one task to the next so fast that I barely have time to take a drink, nevermind write a short story about how I did a thing and figure out exactly when I started working on something.

Compounding this, when it's that busy, I'm often flip flopping between tasks, while I wait for a program to install or a file to copy or something, I'm off trying to chip away at something else. When it's slow, I can take a minute while thing copy/load/whatever, and update my notes. My tasks occur sequentially, so it's easy to see, I started on this at 9:30 and working on this and only this until 10:45. Meanwhile when it's busy, I did X from 9:30 to 9:48, then Y from 9:48 to 9:56, then X again from 9:56 to 10:10, then Y from 10:10 until 10:18, then I finish X from 10:10 to 10:45, and finished Y from 10:45 to 11:05.... Yeah, I'm not entering all that time... At best I'm going to guess, at worst I'm just going to not enter anything. Closed/resolved. Worked for unknown time, text entry: "fixed problem" done.

The task of entering time takes more time to do. If I'm too busy trying to put out fires, I don't care what the time sheet says, I care that the fires were put out as quickly as possible. So I look like I did nothing, but I damn near lost my mind trying to get it all done.

This was a major problem at my last job. Not only would I be so busy, jumping from one foot to the other trying to put it fires, but people would continually walk over to my desk and bug me about unrelated crap. 90% of the time they were managers or senior staff whom I couldn't just ignore, or tell them to go away. So now I'm not putting out a fire instead I'm taking to Sally, who is the daughter of the owner, about her stupid Excel issue that she can, has, and could continue to work around, but she wants it to work in a different way that she never learned how to do from the cut rate community college during the business course she took.

I dunno Sally, why don't you fucking Google it? I'm not your personal chat GPT of problem solving shit that's not broken. I'm currently trying to solve a problem that affects hundreds of people, and this issue barely affects one. Can you go away and stop distracting me? But nooooo. If I tell Sally to go away, daddy bossman will hear about it and I'll get pulled into yet another pointless meeting about my "attitude" towards staff, that will only put me further behind on fixing contoso corp's file server, which is preventing them from doing millions of dollars in business today alone. Apparently Sally's feelings are more important until contoso corp changes IT providers because we couldn't meet our SLA with them, which will also be my fault because I'm lead technician on that account.

Fuck.