My experience with cats: unless you’re willing to reapply the finish every couple of months as the cat removes it (in which case use a food-safe oil and keep in mind that cats notice smells) leave it unfinished. The cat won’t care, and we’ve had several that actually preferred raw wood (the current one is a cardboard junkie, though, so he’s happy with cheap scratching pads from the store).

Alas, my only holiday project is getting the three dining chairs whose crossbars have fallen apart fixed before anyone shows up to sit in them. Not difficult, except that not a single thing I’m going to need to clamp is flat and square.

If you don’t already have fabric you’re intending to use, you might also consider paper as an option. Paper of the type used in Japanese shoji screens, that is, not office bond paper.

Sounds like the person you were talking to may have been the confused one. (In all fairness, if they have no great interest in wood, woodworking, or furniture, they don’t really need to know that engineered sheet goods don’t count as solid wood.)

Experiencing a bit of plane envy here, since the only one I inherited was trash and yours looks very nice indeed.

Hmm. If I’m visualizing this correctly, and depending on the size of the table . . .

Two pairs of legs with stretchers in between, on pivots that allow them to fold up agains the bottom of the table, slighly offset so that the legs end up alongside each other when folded instead of interfering. If you want them to touch the bottom of the tub, set them up to fold at the “knees” rather than the “thigh”, if you see what I mean. The difficult part is figuring out how to secure them in the extended position. If you’re okay with putting in a couple of bolts whenever you unfold, you could add a couple of supports that link the stretchers to the underside of the table at an angle (pivot at the other end again). Or you could attach a length of wood to one stretcher with a pivot and notch the other end so that when the table is unfolded, it drops over the other stretcher and forms a tight cross half-lap joint.

All this requires gluing or screwing hinges or bits of wood pierced for dowels or screws to the bottom of the table to form the pivots.

Better too many clamps than too few. Use 'em if you’ve got 'em.

letting cats roam outside is objectively harmful.

That’s very situational. If you’re in a rural or semi-rural area that has small wildcats (or foxes or similar) already, adding a handful of domestic cats isn’t going to disrupt anything much. The only reason to keep cats inside in such a place is for their own safety (from larger predators like coyotes, and from highway traffic).

If you’re in Australia, Antarctica, or a protected island biome with no native small wildcats or canids, or you have a known endangered species in the area that cats are likely to prey upon, that changes the equation. If you’re in a highly urban area, that changes things in a different way, because the danger to outdoor cats from traffic and other human activity rises exponentially.

Very unlikely this person is a grandparent—up until about 40 years ago, most cats outside highly built-up downtown areas were allowed to free-roam, so an older person would see it as normal.

One thing that’s helped me a bit in similar circumstances was to find the manual (by searching on-line, since the paper ones don’t tend to survive in our household). Even 30-50 years ago, they were pretty good at telling you what to absolutely not do, in order to reduce the number of lawsuits flung at the manufacturer. Also a nice-to-have for maintenance purposes.

(Now if only I could find the one for that damned drill press . . .)

If your local library is no good, you can also try Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=woodworking. Has an exhaustively detailed book on joints in particular, plus an assortment of beginners’ manuals. A lot of hand tool stuff hasn’t changed all that much in the past century.

I ended up with a 103-key Unicomp New Model M (essentially the same layout as a 101-key, but with one Windows key and one context menu key stuffed into what would have been the small blank spaces in the bottom row between ctrl and alt—I really wanted a full-length spacebar). Linux is most often installed onto ex-Windows PCs, so it’s hardly surprising that it expects the Windows keyboard layout.

(I believe the current generation of Gnome devs is big on minimalism, AKA omitting or removing features. I can understand the appeal from a code maintenance point of view, but it’s never been a DE that I liked.)

You can buy keyboards with replaceable keycaps. You can also buy keycaps with Tux logos on them for at least some of those keyboards. You can decide for yourself whether your aesthetic dislike of the Windows logo is worth the rather higher price of such a keyboard.

Then, in my opinion, you would have failed to perform due diligence. Even if you’d thought C.O. was an adult, suggesting a woman strike up a private conversation with a man neither of you know is always something that deserves a second look (dating sites excepted), because the potential for harm is regrettably high.

Snapchat is not the only problem here, but it is a problem.

If they can’t guarantee their recommendations are clean, they shouldn’t be offering recommendations. Even to adults. Let people find other accounts to connect to for themselves, or by consulting some third party’s curated list.

If not offering recommendations destroys Snapchat’s business model, so be it. The world will continue on without them.

It really is that simple.

Using buggy code (because all nontrivial code is buggy) to offer recommendations only happens because these companies are cheap and lazy. They need to be forced to take responsibility where it’s appropriate. This does not mean that they should be liable for the identity of posters on their network or the content of individual posts—I agree that expecting them to control that is unrealistic—but all curation algorithms are created by them and are completely under their control. They can provide simple sorts based on data visible to all users, or leave things to spread externally by word of mouth. Anything beyond that should require human verification, because black box algorithms demonstrably do not make good choices.

It’s the same thing as the recent Air Canada chatbot case: the company is responsible for errors made by its software, to about the same extent as it is responsible for errors made by its employees. If a human working for Snapchat had directed “C.O.” to the paedophile’s account, would you consider Snapchat to be liable (for hiring the kind of person who would do that, if nothing else)?

Actually, Gentoo has no restrictions against packaging closed-source software, or even for-pay software. The net-im category is full of closed source.

Closed-source games rarely get packaged, and almost never in the main tree, in part because they all have to be fetch-restricted. The system can’t predict whether you bought from Steam or GOG or some smaller store, or whether you have a means of downloading from that store without user interaction, so it has to send you to download the package yourself and place it in the source directory. That’s considered a black mark against the package. (There was someone a few years ago who was packaging GOG games in an overlay, but they don’t seem to be doing it anymore.) In general, no distro will package this stuff—you’re better off installing Steam and having it manage your games.

As for build times, get used to letting updates involving large packages run unattended overnight. Sort out the dependencies, issue an emerge with --keep-going, and go to bed. Works for PI3s and my Athlon64x2 laptop, anyway. (If this is still intolerable for you, maybe Arch would be a better fit?)

Finally, you may not be aware that the most complete list of Gentoo-packaged software available is not on the official site, but at gpo.zugaina.org, which also indexes ebuilds in overlays and Bugzilla.

Yes, they should. They chose to deploy the algorithm rather than using a different algorithm, or a human-curated suggestion set, or nothing at all. It’s like a store offering one-per-purchase free bonus items while knowing a few of them are soaked in a contact poison that will make anyone who touches them sick. If your business uses a black box to serve clients, you are liable for the output of that black box, and if you can’t find a black box that doesn’t produce noxious output, then either don’t use one or put a human in the loop. Yes, that human will cost you money. That’s why my suggestion at the end was to use a single common feed, to reduce the labour. If they can’t get enough engagement from a single common feed to support the business, maybe the business should be allowed to die.

The only leg Snapchat has to stand on here is the fact that “C.O.” was violating their TOS by opening an account when she was under the age of 13, and may well have claimed she was over 18 when she was setting up the account.

Bunch of things going on here.

On the one hand, Snapchat shouldn’t be liable for users’ actions.

On the other hand, Snapchat absolutely should be liable for its recommendation algorithms’ actions.

On the third hand, the kid presumably lied to Snapchat in order to get an account in the first place.

On the fourth hand, the kid’s parents fail at basic parenting in ways that have nothing to do with Snapchat: “If you get messages on-line that make you uncomfortable or are obviously wrong, show them to a trusted adult—it doesn’t have to be us.” “If you must meet someone you know on-line in person, do it in the most public place you can think of—mall food courts during lunch hour are good. You want to make sure that if you scream, lots of people will hear it.” “Don’t ever get into a car alone with someone you don’t know very well.”

Solution: make suggestion algorithms opt-in only (if they’re useful, people will opt in). Don’t allow known underage individuals to opt in—restrict them to a human-curated “general feed” that’s the same for everyone not opted in if you feel the need to fill in the space in the interface. Get C.O. better parents.

None of that will happen, of course.

Installing Gentoo requires you to 1. follow a long list of instructions (correctly, in order, without skipping) and 2. be willing to make some decisions about your system setup. I don’t consider that painful, but some people apparently do. It’s also useful to bring a book or some other secondary form of entertainment to occupy yourself with during the non-interactive parts of the install process. Once the initial install is done, you can minimize wasted time by starting updates right before leaving the computer, or just configure it to always leave one core free for your interactive needs.

Gentoo has never been an appropriate distribution for new Linux users with no technical background, or people who want their system to “just work” without caring about how. It’s always been about choice, and its flexibility is both a strength and a weakness. Regardless, the OP did the correct thing by not including it in their guide.

Actually, what really matters is not the quality of your code or the disruptiveness of your paradigm, or whether you can outlive the competitors that existed when you started up, but whether you can keep the money coming. The rideshares in particular will fail over time in any country with labour laws that allow drivers to unionize—if the drivers make a sane amount of money, the company’s profits plummet, and investors and shareholders head for the hills. Netflix is falling apart already because the corporations with large libraries of content aren’t so happy to license them anymore, and they’re scrambling to make up the revenue they’ve lost. Google will probably survive only because its real product is the scourge of humanity known as advertising.

Again, it’s all business considerations, not technical ones. Remember the dot-com boom of the 1990s, or are you not old enough? A lot of what’s going on right now looks like the 2.0 (3.0? 4.0?) release of the same thing. A few of these companies will survive, but more of them will fold, and in some cases their business models will go with them.

You’d lose that wager, actually—this area has at least two taxi companies but no ride shares (Uber and Lyft have very little penetration in Canada outside a few specific cities), and our household does subscribe to a standard cable TV package, although it’s mostly for the benefit of my elderly mother. Those companies have not been nearly as disruptive as some people think they have.

(As for Google’s search engine, I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole these days. And Yahoo and AltaVista both sucked even when they were popular—I preferred InfoSeek, back in the day.)