I’d argue that having them be 30 or 40 years would even be fine. An author who starts in their 20’s should reasonably expect to keep profiting off of their early work until they retire in their 50’s or 60’s. But the current state of copyright is just asinine, because it is basically written by and for corporations.

My favorite BG3 item is the bent wand of fireball. It allows you to cast Fireball, but only at melee range.

I once gave a player a ring that did something similar. It was a cursed ring of jumping. The player was able to jump 16 feet into the air, and/or 30 feet in distance… The curse was that the player was only able to jump 16 feet high/30 feet long.

Just need to hop over a small 5 foot wide pitfall trap? You’re taking a flying leap and slamming into the wall that is 10 feet behind it. Want to hop over a table during a tavern brawl? You’re slamming into the 12 foot ceiling of the tavern, hard enough for everyone to stop fighting and stare for a split second before resuming the brawl.

It’s an old meme that states the first 30% of every YouTube video is useless and can be skipped without consequence. It’s a constant because it doesn’t matter if the video is 3 or 300 seconds long; The first 30% can always be skipped without missing anything important.

IIRC, it started on Reddit when a user named Wadsworth wrote about it in one of the AskReddit threads about life hacks.

If you use it often, sure. If you don’t smoke and just occasionally need to light fires, get a butane conversion. It’s a replacement for the wick, which pops into the Zippo shell. It doesn’t evaporate over time since it’s sealed.

Yeah, Ryobi had a bad reputation for a long time, because they’re old (dark blue) tools were hot garbage. But when they were bought out by TTI (and they changed the color to the bright green) all the tools started getting made on the same production line as Milwaukee (also owned by TTI). The QA is a little looser on the Ryobi stuff, but it’s all sourced from the same place as the (much more expensive) Milwaukee tools that many people swear by. If I remember correctly, TTI also owns Ridgid.

It’s basically the Lexus/Toyota thing, where they’re both owned and manufactured by the same parent company, but the Lexus brand is much more expensive just because it’s marketed as luxury. You can get a Toyota for half the price of a Lexus, and find the same quality as a Lexus. And for the insanely cheap price and wide range of available tools, it’s hard to go wrong with Ryobi. The Ryobi may not stand up to the same level of abuse as other (more expensive) brands. But the average person isn’t a construction worker using and abusing their tools for 9 hours a day. The average person just needs to occasionally drill a hole in the wall, or cut the occasional piece of lumber. And for that, the Ryobi is the way to go. Hell, even if you’re a hobbyist in the garage, Ryobi will likely be fine for what you need.

Just avoid their larger power tools, like the vacuums and lawn mowers. From what I know, those have a range of issues that haven’t been worked out yet.

Also, it means you can easily repair/modify the hardware for whatever reason you might come up with.

The ironic part is that you’d need a second soldering iron to do that.

If you’re a musician or audio tech trying to get started, the Shure SM58 and SM57 are the first two mics you should grab. 58 for vocals, and 57 for anything that doesn’t need a screen (like an instrument or guitar amp.) Both have the exact same mic capsule, but the 58 has a larger filter that will make it a little warmer and less prone to popping on plosives.

Are there fancier mics out there that sound better, or are made for specific purposes? Yeah. But there’s diminishing returns on audio quality, you can’t use them for as many things, and more sensitive mics are also more fragile. For $100 each, you can get some mics that will be passed down to your grandchildren. If you’re trying to cover the widest possible range of uses, the 58 and 57 are your go-to mics.

Whenever you think of a stereotypical 🎤 microphone, you’re 100% thinking of a Shure SM58.

I use an Altoids tin for my first aid kid, for similar reasons. The damned things are basically indestructible as long as you’re not going out of your way to crush them. The one in my pocket right now is probably 5 or 6 years old. I prefer the smaller form factor, because I typically only pack for a few blisters or scrapes; Anything larger would be referred to the full first aid kit in my car.

The Kobo and Kindle are functionally identical in terms of hardware, except for a few things that are specific to Amazon. But Amazon has been increasingly hostile towards Calibre in recent years. It used to be supported almost natively, but it seems like each update from Amazon locks down something that used to be accessible, or breaks existing functionality.

For instance, you used to be able to edit collections directly in Calibre, but Amazon broke that because they want everyone to use their collections (which are only included on books purchased directly from amazon) instead. So for instance, if you uploaded the entire Harry Potter series, you used to be able to tag all of them with the series and they’d be added to a collection together. You can’t do that anymore, and have to add them manually one by one on the Kindle’s laggy touchscreen.

They have also started breaking included cover art, because the Kindle automatically polls Amazon to download art instead. And when it doesn’t find any, (because the book isn’t from Amazon,) it wipes the included art instead of just falling back to it. Luckily this has a fairly simple fix (just unplug your kindle, let it index and break the cover art, then plug it back in so Calibre can push the cover art back to the Kindle,) but that means you need to actually take the extra time to do that every time you upload something new.

The Send To Kindle email functionality has recently been broken to where every .epub file you email just gets sent to Documents instead of Books or Newsstand. So if you have Calibre set up to grab news every Sunday, or to send new books to your Kindle, they won’t actually land in the News or Books sections like they’re supposed to. The only way to fix that is to plug it in and upload them via USB. Additionally, they have the same issue with broken cover art. So you need to plug your Kindle in to update the cover art, even when emailing your books. Which kind of defeats the purpose of emailing them, because you’d most likely do that if you don’t want to plug your device in every time.

The kindle’s indexer also has some weird issues, where certain books will just crash it and new books will stop appearing entirely. And there’s no way to see which book is the issue. So if you uploaded a bunch of books to your kindle, you’ll have to play guess-and-check to see which one is the issue. This may not be exclusive to the Kindle, but I haven’t experienced the same issue on the Kobo.

There is no ReVanced or uYouPlus for iOS. You have to sideload that shit, cuz YouTube is too far up Apple’s ass for them to allow something like that on the App Store.

Ironically, they allow Vinegar. But only because it’s a Safari extension (and Apple likes when people use Safari more than they like the money from YouTube.)

+1 for Vinegar. My only real complaint is that I use Firefox as a daily driver, and Vinegar only works with Safari. Even though Firefox is using the Safari engine under the hood on iOS, (because Apple doesn’t allow third party browser engines like Firefox’s Gecko, and forces everyone to use WebKit instead,) it doesn’t support Safari extensions.

I’m fine with switching to Safari to watch YouTube… But since Firefox is my default browser, YouTube links automatically open in Firefox. There isn’t a way to specify that I want everything except YouTube to open in my default browser.

Amazon is increasingly hostile with Calibre, especially within the past year or two. Things like intentionally destroying included book covers/thumbnails for books uploaded by Calibre, intentionally breaking Collection editing via Calibre so you have to do it on the Kindle directly, and not allowing users to download their Amazon-purchased books into Calibre.

Worth noting that the one exception for every e-reader is the screen. E-ink screens are very sensitive to pressure, and can be damaged internally even if the surface is totally fine. It’s not something that any one model will do better or worse, because it’s simply due to the way e-ink screens work. Fixing the issue would require inventing new e-ink tech.

Get a folio cover, with a hard/stiff fold. This will more evenly spread any pressure out across the entire screen, ensuring that no damage happens to the underlying e-ink. Nothing worse than pulling your e-reader out of your bag and discovering that it was resting up against something pointy while you walked around, and is now damaged.

That being said, the Kobo’s waterproofing is no joke. I take mine when I go camping, because I’m not worried about it getting wet at all. I could read in the middle of a monsoon, and it would be totally fine.

Yeah, I love everything about my Kindle except for the fact that it’s tied to Amazon. Calibre goes a long way in bridging the gap, (I have a fairly large personal library that isn’t tied to Amazon), but it’s no replacement for native support. If you plan on using Calibre, you should seriously consider a Kobo.

I’ve heard of similar things. Boss wants to see who is the least busy, so they do something like open an employee gym. Then anyone who uses it is fired, because “if you have time to use the gym, you’re not working hard enough.”

Similarly, the process for purifying aluminum is still the same as it was when it was first invented. Prior to the discovery of the Hall-Héroult processes in the mid 1800’s, (two men discovered the same process at the same time in different parts of the world,) pure aluminum was extremely rare. It used to be considered a fine metal, more expensive than silver or gold; Napoleon famously had aluminum silverware that he would use (instead of real silver) when he wanted to impress guests.

Yeah, some parts of the US recently experienced something called a wet bulb event. Basically, that’s a phenomenon where the heat and humidity are both so high that your body’s natural cooling mechanism (sweating) stops working entirely and people will overheat simply by being outside. No amount of shade or cool drinks will help, because your body’s primary cooling mechanism has been defeated.

Basically, sweat works by evaporating. When water evaporates, it takes heat with it. This allows sweat to cool you down as it dries. To be able to accurately determine what the temperature feels like, you can’t just use a regular dry thermometer. You need to use something called a wet bulb thermometer. This is basically a thermometer with some wet cotton wrapped around it, to simulate sweat. As the wet cotton dries, it creates a more accurate gauge of what the ambient temperature feels like, the same way sweat cools you.

But a wet bulb event is when the wet bulb thermometer reads above 95°F. At that point, it means the cotton isn’t drying fast enough to cool a person down. At this point, the temperatures are dangerous even to fit and healthy individuals in the shade with fans and cool drinks. Because a breeze won’t even cool you down when it’s that hot outside; A fan will actually heat you up even faster, because the air is adding heat faster than evaporative cooling can remove it.