Thanks for the summary. I signed up for it just in case, but don’t think I’ll end up using it. I have a similar experience with Mastodon, but then I was never really into Twitter, either.

I share your feelings on the importance of open platforms. While reddit may have been shitty for a while, the whole third-party apps thing was an eye-opener for me, and started me thinking about (and moving toward) open source.

My next big challenge will be to de-Google, but I’m increasingly up for it. Problem is I have a ton of site identities associated with my email address there, so we’ll see how that works out.

I feel for you. We have always had a lot of pets (4 cats, 2 dogs atm) and dealing with their end of life stage is heartbreaking every time. Just grieve your loss however you need to.

We always take comfort in knowing how much our departed friends brought to our lives, and, particularly for our rescues, how much love and care we were able to give them. Our relationships with them are a gift.

Take good care and trust that you will know if and when the time is right for another one in your life.

No problem! I think you could probably still improve performance with a scrap piece and good clamp pressure before you’d have to spend any money. Good luck!

I would clamp a scrap piece underneath your work piece and then drill. Should take care of the tear out better than tape.

The other way to go would be to use a lipped brad point bit or a forstner bit depending on the size of your holes. Those bits have a cutting edge around the circumference of the hole to prevent chatter when starting to drill and to produce a cleaner pass. A good set of brad points will cost you $100 or so but are a great investment imo.

I agree that if you’re finding it hard to go in every day it may be time for a change. The main strategy I have used is to try to get clear on what you want, what you would consider to be need-to-have vs. nice-to-have. You can do this by making lists of things you like where you are now and things you don’t. The things you like are what you want to try to replicate somewhere else.

The main thing is to try to be more about moving toward something you want, and less about moving away from something you hate. Not always possible, but good to strive for. Otherwise you could end up repeatedly changing jobs to get away from bad people and drama, which, as many others have pointed out, will always be there to some degree.

I wish you well in your search. Stress is a real killer, and sometimes we don’t know how bad it is until we’re out of that environment. Trust your gut.

Sounds like a great experience! Congrats.

I switched from full-time windows to full-time Linux with Pop_OS and haven’t looked back. I’m very happy with it and enjoy finding FOSS alternatives to my former go-to apps. So far so good. I’m also keeping an eye on Vanilla OS as that sounds like a very cool project that is headed to beta by summer.

Sorry, Memmy only let me add one image to the original post. Really should have provided some sense of scale as you suggest. In the image above it is filled with candy (full-size bars). It’s only about 2 feet long, but I will add precise dimensions later.

Agreed, great book. There is a second book in that series, The Boy On the Bridge, I believe. Also quite good.

I found the movie on Kanopy through my (Canadian) public library. I’m not sure how easy to find it is on other services, as it’s not exactly blockbuster stuff. I discovered it quite by accident.

The Girl With All the Gifts was pretty good, based on the book of the same name.

For comedy, one of my faves is Stranger Than Fiction.