ok, updated. It’s getting more complicated

i just edited the title.

I think Amazon might be the only business I’ve encountered where there are no defects in what they destroy. The insider told me the stuff being destroyed does not even look like anything that would be hard to sell – even things like smartphones still in sealed boxes.

I recently walked into a grocery store and saw someone cutting open the net bags of onions (or something) and throwing out the bad items and dumping the rest in the bins where people select what they want. I was glad to see it wasn’t being wasted. This was a tiny independent shop… not sure if any of the big grocers do that.

I think they said the blades were wood when I heard it on BBC.

W.r.t killing birds, I thought that was solved a long time ago just by increasing the resistance so the blades turn slowly enough to be seen. If wood blades would have to move faster, then perhaps the birds would be threatened again.

It would be nice if we could improve on gut reactions and sort out how much (if any) CO₂ is accumulated by spruce trees at the various points of maturity. Ideally the trees would only be cleared at the point where their CO₂ absorption rate tanks (which may not necessarily be when the tree would look nice in a living room) – assuming there is such a stage in its life.

What’s the concern with cutting down spruce trees?

Some people believe trees absorb CO₂ from the atmosphere. There’s an uncited claim of 22kg/year/tree on avg for mature trees (according to the European Environment Agency). Others are claiming ½ that amount. But some people say trees are carbon neutral, and thus have no decarbonization effect. I’m not sure what to believe at this point but the benefit of living trees is clearly disputed.

One thing I’m confident about is that trees have a cooling effect by way of evaporative cooling and simply by giving shade. They also have a symbiotic relationship with boletes (mushrooms).

Good find. I heard it first on BBC World Service but I guess their site has some navigation deficiencies… the radio episode page does not link to the written article.

~10 years ago hybrid SSDs were a thing. The idea was that one could simultaneously benefit from the high capacity of magnetic media and the speed of solid state chips.

I wonder if it might be useful in the world of small things to have a filesystem that’s smart about this. If a file is rarely overwritten, it could be moved to the SD while new files and frequently overwritten ones could be directed to the microdrive. And important data could be on a separate volume that mirrors a partition on both the SD and microdrive.

It’s a good start but they really cannot anticipate what will be useful to people. They wouldn’t have obscure knowledge like really old hard drives still have a really strong magnet inside (which is useful for fishing in bodies of water for more junk :)). They would just say “surely no one wants this 2gb hard drive”…

Appliances and electronics in my area go to a non-profit who repairs them and distributes them to 2nd hand shops around town. In principle that’s quite good but I’ve seen them operate. A bulk of the stuff they get goes straight to a pile where it will be broken down and material melted. It would be nice if that pile of stuff they think is not worth repairing were freely accessible to the public.

Sometimes the staff kicks me out just for looking at the junk pile. Sometimes I encounter a balanced live-and-let-live worker who says I can pick through the junk on the edge of the pile, but cannot climb (due to injury risk). On another occasion, 3 workers approached me and I don’t recall what I said I was after, but they let me do my thing as they scattered (they did not want to be seen not enforcing the rules).

I agree liability is the real rationale but if they wanted to flex their muscle it’d likely just be a theft charge. In any case, a right to scrounge under the right to repair would naturally imply that the junk all be laid out at ground level for inspection before getting piled in a prohibited area.

That implies Android. There is a FOSS app that requires AOS 4.0 or greater which cuts off the charging when the battery reaches a user-specified level:

http://fdroidorg6cooksyluodepej4erfctzk7rrjpjbbr6wx24jh3lqyfwyd.onion/en/packages/com.slash.batterychargelimit/index.html.en

I would generally suspect that app to require root, but there is no mention of a root access requirement.

EDIT: just tested this and indeed root access is required (#fdroidBug). So @JacobCoffinWrites should root the tablet to extend the battery life.

There are some battery managers in linux which prolong the life of the battery by only charging it to ~40—50% capacity (which doubles the lifetime). If the tablet is mounted on the wall, then it might as well have continuous power and a power management app (if that exists on whatever platform the tablet runs).

I appreciate all the good advice. Testing the machine would have been tricky because I knew nothing about doing even the simplest test. The machine I bought was heaviest I could find at a street market where if I wanted to test it I would have to track down someone at the market with a portable power generator. Some sellers had samples under the presser foot of machines they were selling but the seller I dealt with did not do that. I didn’t think I was going to buy it… asking price was ~220% of my budget. I was walking away but the seller was highly motivated & came way down in price. I thought telling him what I would theoretically pay would end the discussion due to the big gap, but then he accepted. So I agreed to buy before I could really give the machine much thought or inspection. If I had been more knowledgeable and diligent I could have even tested it just by threading it and manually turning the wheel which would have revealed that it needs an adjustment, which I mention here.

I could take it to a pro but I should ultimately try to gain some independence and master the machine. So I guess I’ll fiddle with it to see if I can get it to stop skipping stitches.

Yeah that’s what I’m thinking now. I just have to make sure it has the zigzag/stretch stitch pattern. And guess i’ll be doing buttons by hand.

That’s fair enough, but it’s a bit of both (satire and reality). It’s actually a true account (details withheld because I have a bit of respect for the developer in the recent case). This is something that really happens. Not often, but occasionally there are devs & others who expect bug reporters to do a fix. There’s a poor attitude that bug reporters are in some way a beneficiary/consumer and the false idea that the devs are working for the bug reporter. There’s also an assumption that the bug reporter is in some way in need of a fix. When in fact the bug reporter is a volunteer contributor, performing work for the project just like the dev. It’s just as wrong for a dev to demand work a bug reporter work on the code as it is for a bug reporter to demand work from a dev. Everyone gives what they can or wants to. A bug report is not an individual support request. It’s a community bug – one that may or may not even affect the bug reporter.

Of course… The reaction shows how seriously wound tight people are. Obviously not much sense of humor in this community.

There are a couple rare cases where devs have tried to coerce me into a fix. Sometimes they outright say they expect the bug reporter to fix it, strangely enough. It never happened in a language that I knew, and weird that bug reporters would be expected to know how to program at all. But it’s far from the norm.

These are the interesting tasks I can think that I need regularly:

• reattach buttons (thanks for telling me this is an option)
• hem rigid pants (denim)
• hem stretchy pants
• cut stretchy pants off at the knees and introduce zippers (so they function as shorts or trousers) as complex hemming alternative
• patch holey socks
• fix tears
• maybe make new designs
• embroider over stains

Considering embroidery apparently complicates things and presumably bumps the price up substantially, I would nix the last item on that list.

Some machines have a mechanical dial that shows different stitch symbols. I’m not sure how to look at that and know if my needs are covered. This is why I thought in principle I would like to have it software controlled¹. But maybe that’s overkill for my need. I’d like to avoid buying something that falls short of my needs. E.g. if none of the preset stitches can work on stretchy material it’s underkill.

I saw a Signer on liquidation but did not buy it. It had ~4 or so dials with just digits. Not sure if that was for different kinds of stitches, or other factors like speed.

I’m a bit torn because the modern cheap ones look like they will do the job, but they’re plastic and I wonder if the gears are plastic… which I suspect means short life.

1: regarding software control, someone told me not a single FOSS sewing machine exists. The firmware is always proprietary non-free. But I was told Inkstitch can be used to create patterns that are loaded onto a proprietary machine. I’m fine with that compromise. But IIUC, that’s purely for the embroidery use case not for straight stitches, correct?