I bought a used workstation (xenon, ecc memory) pre-covid hit. I swapped the processor with the highest spec one that would fit the socket (thanks for changing sockets so frequently intel… not) and 64 GB ecc momory. Both were cheap because they were used. About 6 months before the GPU crazyness I bought a used 1070 TI for around $200. Upgrading the GPU a few years later was out of the question and now upgrading the whole thing is out of the question.

Due to the processor age I’m just going to install Linux on it and cozy into my older game library. Gaming time is pretty limited these days anyway due to having kids and these days I’m doing most of my gaming on a handheld.

I will give it a try, thanks for the suggestion.

Sorry, I meant a decent editing workflow. Things along the lines of editing - adding outlined text, moving and/or removing things, etc. For example, I’ve tried gimp a few times but I’ve found myself fighting against the way it wants you to do things.

Thanks a lot for the suggestions, I’ll have to check Pinta out.

Noise cancelling headphones and background music helps a ton when I’m in the office. Stupid open office…

I found darktable pretty user friendly TBH. The thing I’ve been struggling with is image editing - I can’t find something that has a decent workflow. I’m not looking for anything fancy. Paint.net on windows more than met my needs when I was spending more time in windows.

I’ve used a razor to scrape down our shower door before. If you’re not careful you can inadvertently scratch things with the corners of the blade. Ask me how I know…

White collar professionals who spend their days developing and deploying software or working on compute infrastructure? Sure, some of them have been on Linux for decades. Although many big corpos love Windows and Microsoft products, so at best you’re going to have a foot in both worlds if you work at one of these companies.

Some admin jobs that don’t require bespoke software (ie very little beyond say an office suite) have started making the jump recently to save $$.

Basically every other white professional that needs to work on a computer with industry specific software like people in medical, engineers, business? Odds are they use windows since the software they use for their job is probably only built for Windows and maybe Mac if they’re lucky. Very few employers are going to mass deploy Linux to run applications via Wine. These employers have support contracts for the major software products their employees use and they won’t get support if they’re not running software on its native OS.

That’s a nice collection of plants!

We’ve started avacado pits a few times. Ours tend to be less tall when they start putting out leaves, I wonder why that is.

None of our avacado starts ever seem to last that long. They have to stay in pots due to our climate and either seem to do really well and get too big too fast or never do well and just look sad.

This is less about 3D printing and more about “what material will adhear to the layer before it?” For example, using both water and oil based products is generally not a great idea. If want to use both then a layer of sealer will help.

How you want to apply the paint (eg air brush vs bristle brush) will greatly impact which paints and finishes you can choose. It will also greatly impact your final finish/look.

In most cases no need to “seal” paint. In fact, depending on the type of paint it might be a sealer itself. A sealer can protect the paint below it from say UV light or water. A sealer can help you achieve a higher gloss finish. However, the paint itself might already be durable, UV stable, and have the sheen you want.

The question isn’t which store sells better paint, it’s what kind of paint do you want to use? After that the choice of store is largely a question of who carries that type of paint with an added wrinkle or brand variation. For example, you’re not going to find miniature airbrush paint at a big box store and you’re probably not going to find automotive paint at either.

Straight up vibe coding is a horrible idea, but I’ll happily take tools to reduce mundane tasks.

The project I’m currently working on leans on Temporal for durable execution. We define the activities and workflows in protobufs and utilize codegen for all the boring boiler plate stuff. The project hasa number of http endpoints that are again defined in protos, along with their inputs and outputs. Again, lots of code gen. Is code gen making me less creative or degrading my skills? I don’t think so. It sure makes the output more consistent and reduces the opportunity for errors.

If I engage gen AI during development, which isn’t very often, my prompts are very targeted and the scope is narrow. However, I’ve found that gen AI is great for writing and modifying tests and with a little prompting you can get pretty solid unit test coverage for a verity of different scenarios. In the case of the software I write at work the creativity is in the actual code and the unit tests are often pretty repetitive (happy path, bad input 1…n, no result, mock an error at this step, etc). Once you know how to do that there’s no reason not to offload it IMO.

Looks like some flavor of this or this.

They seem like super early garden tractors. I’m surprised there was a market for these. They don’t seem like they would be much use to a home owner and I imagine a small scale farm would want a slightly bigger tractor like a Fordson.

That’s exactly why I preferred cash when I was in my 20s, but there’s a catch. Completely avoiding the credit system isn’t good for longer term finance either. In the US at least, no credit can be worse than bad credit. This makes it hard to escape the poverty trap even if you get finances are in order.

Obglatory not OP, but… When I was younger and pretty broke I preferred paying cash. It was very easy to keep track of my spending rate and there was no risk of getting declined.

This whole reply was top shelf!

I am not sure that I completely understand your premise. Products are generally available during a depression. The best financial course of action today is to save money… unless the dollar becomes devalued too, which will make imports more expensive.

In terms of finances, doing things to lowering your fixed monthly bills is always a good idea - looming depression or otherwise. Since you’re in Texas and you’re all engineers, perhaps look into solar and/or battery storage for electricity? Do the math first obviously. A small(er) garden can help save some $$ but you have to be careful how much you spend on it.

If you’re coming from the perspective of wanting to provide value to your family, simply helping out around the house (cooking, cleaning, etc) and taking on projects you’ve all been putting off will probably go a long way. Your labor might not be cheaper than a builder’s now, but… Doing home repair/improvements, landscaping, building an out-building, building some outdoor shade, etc could be really appreciated.

If you’re looking to earn some $$, farming seems fairly depression proof, but should a depression hit people won’t be buying cash crops. Relative to labor input farming will likely not be very lucrative. Starting a side hustle/business might be a better option. It seems like the demand for repairing basically everything would go up. People will also be looking for cheap local distractions.

The YOLO option is to buy a ton of imports from a country you expect will have their currency strengthen relative to the dollar and then sell those items once the cost of them goes up, but this sounds super risky.

It’s good to hear that you have equipment already. If the wooded areas of your property have been that way for a while, odds are the soil in that area is pretty good. Granted, clearing the trees could take some work.

Before buying anything I suggest focusing on your goals and planning. If you’re more on the hobby vs commercial side of the spectrum I suggest starting small. Our garden is only 175 square feet of beds and pots, but it greatly reduces the amount of produce we buy during the summer and fall (yay zone 6).

I have another idea, but am going to break it out as a top level comment.

If you’re thinking about growing anything start considering:

• Your goals. Are you looking to sell some/all of your crop? Is this meant for sustince? A supplement to groceries?
• Land management. Do you want to let fields go fallow? Rotate crops? Grow cover and/or summer/winter crops? Till or no till?
• Equipment. Do you need to buy anything to help with maintenance, plowing, planting, harvestint, or processing the harvest?
• What you intend to grow. Do you want a few main crops? A ton of verity? Do you care about how easy it is to store? How do you want to balance calory density, nutrition, and flavor? Are you looking for single year or multi-year crops?
• What grows in your zone?
• Layout. How are you going to layout the planting area(s)? Do you need to worry about fencing? How about irrigation? Do you care about containing crops and/or weeds?
• Required inputs. Things like water, fertilizer, herbicide, pesticide, etc. You will want pest and fungicides even if you’re going organic

Note that all of the above are strongly interrelated.

We have a decent size fruit/veg garden that’s mostly annuals. Despite having done this for 10 years, the last thing on my mind for the next season is whether or not I should buy fertilizer now.

A final suggestion: go in open eyed to the amount of effort this will take. The amount of labor required by our garden follows a boom and bust cycle. On some weeks I’m out there once for an hour. On other weeks I’m out there multiple times a week. If you’re not able to devote continual time to the garden then your crops, and yeilds, will suffer. Harvesting and processing is time consuming and is greatly influenced by what you grow. Doing something with perishable crops before they go bad can also be a challenge. Even with 40 sq ft of raspberries our family of four can’t keep up so we have to jam/can/freeze them or turn them into compost. The same is true of tomatoes and a bunch of other produce - especially if you plant crops that actually taste good and you pick them when ripe.

For passive, and even now some active loudspeakers, very much so.

Links for passives: https://sites.google.com/site/undefinition/diy https://www.zaphaudio.com/ https://www.madisoundspeakerstore.com/speaker-kits/ (etc)

Active speakers are usually things like this and use commercially available parts with commercial software. But if you want you can build a DIY DSP and DAC and DIY amplifier. Note that there are tons of other designs for both available.

The DIY audio community is very vibrant. There are tons and tons of forums collaboratively iterating. You can build DIY headphones and DIY headphone amplifiers. Hell, you can even build DIY speaker drivers.

Anything I missed was not an intentional omission, lol.

Operating temps? Generally speaking, ICE is fine once started. Consider piston aircraft, it’s nippy up there.

Starting temp is where the real challenge is. Fluids (oil, gas, coolant) will be thicker, which makes the engine turn over more slowly - or not at all. Diesels especially struggle with this as their fuel can gel when it’s cold enough. The battery will also be cold, which makes the engine turn over more slowly - or not at all.