solidworksofficial

[solidworksofficial]

something you don't learn until you get really far into the making and tinkering life is that there's no such thing as "glue" really. there are so many kinds of substances that stick other substances together and they are all very different and if you just go look at the adhesives aisle in the hardware store the packaging never actually tells you anything useful. it's like "this is SUPER T-REX POWER GLUE" and the fine print says "good for use on wood metal and plastic". okay. but WHICH PLASTICS MY GOOD BITCH,

because SURPRISE, there's no such thing as "plastic" either. every kind of wood is basically the same on a chemical level, but the only thing every plastic has in common is "some of its molecules are long" and that is NOT a quality that determines how things stick together.

I just ordered some stuff I hope will permanently stick a circuit board to a steel sheet and withstand temperatures up to 150 degrees. by the way circuit boards are made of epoxy-bound woven glass cloth which is cool as hell but what the fuck do you glue that with? can any of the 12 kinds of adhesives I currently own do that? no of course not. if I want to stick two pieces of acrylic together so hard they become watertight to a depth of 3000 metres I have some shit that does that, but it does literally nothing else.

anyway. once you start learning how many kinds of sticking things together there are, the people at 3M start to seem like witches and I don't know if they're the kind we can trust with that level of arcane knowledge

[solidworksofficial]

How do they keep making later and later stages of late-capitalism

[solidworksofficial]

[solidworksofficial]

this website is seriously fucking awesome it's got a shit ton of aggregated transfem endocrinology information

it's got comparable doses for different ROAs

an injectable estradiol simulator/steady state finder (sadly missing the functionality of a loading dose option but that's fine)

and scientific articles about various different minutiae of hrt

seriously awesome website please give it a look and explore some, it's got a shit ton of other tools and links

[solidworksofficial]

Me upon discovering an online game that helps you learn git: haha I've been using git for years now, I could skip ahead many levels, methinks hahaha no, no, I'll be humble and start on level 1

Me on level 5: You can do what??? There are commands for what???

[solidworksofficial]

Download this easy DIY clothing repair guide (only 10 pages) from Uni of Kentucky

link to PDF

[solidworksofficial]

how to keep following people when a major social platform implodes

(...and you don't want to join 20 new websites)

First, get an RSS reader*:

Desktop: Feedbro (browser extension), QuiteRSS, Raven Reader

Android: Feeder

iOS/Mac: NetNewsWire

You'll be able to make a custom feed to follow blogs, webcomics, social media feeds, podcasts, news, and other stuff on the web all in one place. To follow something, find its "feed URL"-- often marked by an icon that looks like this ↓-- and paste it into your reader of choice as a new feed.

Some feed URLs for social media:

Twitter: Feedbro can use Twitter profile URLs as feed URLs. Otherwise, use nitter.net/username/rss (or other Nitter instance) (You can get a CSV file of all the accounts you follow using "Download a user's friends list" on Tweetbeaver)

Tumblr: Use username.tumblr.com/rss or username.tumblr.com/tagged/my%20art/rss to follow a blog's "my art" tag (as an example)

Cohost: Use username.cohost.org/rss/public (WIP feature)

Mastodon: Use instance.url/@­username.rss

Deviantart: Info here

Spacehey: Info here

Youtube: Go to a channel in a web browser, view page source, and use Ctrl-F/Command-F to find a link that starts with "https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id="

Instagram: Feedbro can use Instagram profile and hashtag URLs as feed URLs. Otherwise, Instagram doesn't have RSS feeds, and due to aggressive rate limiting on their part, it's not so simple to generate a feed URL.

Facebook: Feedbro can use public Facebook group/page URLs as feed URLs.

(If you know an artist who exclusively posts to Instagram, you may want to gently suggest that they crosspost elsewhere...)

Also see how to find the RSS feed URL for almost any site. Try using public RSS-Bridge instances or Happyou Final Scraper to generate feeds for sites that don't have them (Pillowfort, Patreon, etc).

*You can set up your subscriptions in one reader and import them into another by exporting an OPML file.

[solidworksofficial]

If the door’s locked, try the wall

[by Geoff Manaugh]

a drywall knife

In one of the most interesting moments in his memoir, [jewelry thief Bill Mason] sees that architecture can be made to do what he wants it to do; it’s like watching a character in Star Wars learn to use the Force.

In a lengthy scene at a hotel in Cleveland that Mason would ultimately hit more than once in his career, he explains that his intended prize was locked inside a room whose door was too closely guarded for him to slip through. Then he realizes the obvious: he has been thinking the way the hotel wanted him to think—the way the architects had hoped he would behave—looking for doors and hallways when he could  simply carve a new route where he wanted it. The ensuing realization delights him. “Elated at the idea that I could cut my own door right where I needed one,” he writes, Mason simply breaks into the hotel suite adjacent to the main office. There, he flings open the closet, pushes aside the hangers, and cuts his way from one room into the other using a drywall knife. In no time at all, he has cut his “own door” through to the manager’s office, where he takes whatever he wants—departing right back through the very “door” he himself made. It is architectural surgery, pure and simple.

Later, Mason actually mocks the idea that a person would remain reliant on doors, making fun of anyone who thinks burglars, in particular, would respect the limitations of architecture. “Surely if someone were to rob the place,” he writes in all italics, barbed with sarcasm, “they’d come in as respectable people would, through the door provided for the purpose. Maybe that explains why people will have four heavy-duty locks on a solid oak door that’s right next to a glass window.” People seem to think they should lock-pick or kick their way through solid doors rather than just take a ten-dollar drywall knife and carve whole new hallways into the world. Those people are mere slaves to  architecture, spatial captives in a world someone else has designed for them.

Something about this is almost unsettlingly brilliant, as if it is nonburglars who have been misusing the built environment this whole time; as if it is nonburglars who have been unwilling to question the world’s most basic spatial assumptions, too scared to think past the tyranny of architecture’s long-held behavioral expectations.

To use architect Rem Koolhaas’s phrase, we have been voluntary prisoners of architecture all along, willingly coerced and browbeaten by its code of spatial conduct, accepting walls as walls and going only where the corridors lead us. Because doors are often the sturdiest and most fortified parts of the wall in front of you, they are a distraction and a trap. By comparison, the wall itself is often more like tissue paper, just drywall and some two-by-fours, without a lock or a chain in sight. Like clouds, apartment walls are mostly air; seen through a burglar’s eyes, they aren’t even there. Cut a hole through one and you’re in the next room in seconds.

~ Geoff Manaugh, A Burglar’s Guide to the City

[solidworksofficial]

why the gritty aesthetic? don't know, just having fun

[solidworksofficial]

Excel really is an amazing example of how too much localization is worse than none at all. It makes a lot of things harder for itself through the MS Office philosophy of "do everything wrong without asking", but it goes above and beyond that doing some genuinely insane things that nobody else even attempts.

In Excel, locale determines not just UI elements, but also:

Separators, like whether to use . or , for decimals (e.g. "1,000,000.00" becomes "1 000 000,00" in French)

The syntax of function delimiters and format specifiers, because these were originally chosen under the assumption that the first thing followed English-region rules

Date formats (e.g. US 10/31/2023 becomes 31/10/2023 in other locales). This (as well as differences in month and day-of-week names, etc.) influences what Excel automatically converts to a date when you don't want it to, which in turn influences what data is safe to enter manually.

Hotkeys: These are all different by locale, mostly for no real reason. For example in English "fill right" is Ctrl+R and "fill down" is Ctrl+D, but in Spanish Ctrl+D is to fill right (for derecha) and to fill down you use Ctrl+J (for abajo, yes really). These also have the distinction of being esoterically unknowable: there is no way to list all hotkeys within the app, and the official localized documentation only contains a translation of the English-region bindings. Better see if you can find one of those 500-page "How to use Office 2013" tomes at a library sale!

The names of most functions: e.g. BITRSHIFT becomes BIT.PRZESUNIĘCIE.W.PRAWO in Polish. (By the way, did you know that Windows treats AltGr as bidirectionally equivalent to Ctrl+Alt? Have fun with that!)

It need hardly be said that none of this is very well tested so there are 50x as many bugs in non-English locales, but the bigger problem is that none of this is at all configurable. You can't set a locale for an Excel file, or for Excel as a whole; it infers your locale from the operating system, and given how much of it simply doesn't work reliably, the standard workaround in all cases is to set your operating system locale to an English one. I've seen software that required you to change your region to the one it was made for, but Excel is the only thing I've ever seen that's internationalized so badly that it forces you to use all your other software in English. You'd think the move to a webapp version would fix this, right? But they did all they could to preserve the problem: now it infers your region from your OneDrive settings rather than your OS.

Of course, Excel tries to automatically tweak all this to match your region when you open a file, and of course it's not smart enough to always do it right, but the key thing to note is that it makes these tweaks by destructive changes to the file. They look superficially non-destructive because it will change them back if you open them in another region, but the conversion isn't reliable enough to be 100% safe, and if you were hoping to collaborate simultaneously on the same file with someone working internationally, or view it while they have a lock, go straight to hell.

I know complaining about Excel is some 1990 Dilbert kind of shit: MS Office as a whole is a kind of cautionary fable about how it's better for software to be consistent than clever. But I avoided this rabbithole for a long time and so I haven't yet got over my astonishment at how much work they put into creating problems that no other software has, only to lead to a situation where the ultimate result is "avoid using Excel on any computer set to a non-English region, if at all possible."

[solidworksofficial]

btw, shopping carts largely work by saving information in your cookies. cookies are the way to save data between webpage visits! amazon saves it to your account details, but other shopping sites that dont require a sign-in actually need this functionality. of course, they may use other cookies for stuff, which is annoying...but lets not confuse web features with malice

Contrary to what many sites seem to believe using a vpn is not illegal

[solidworksofficial]

[solidworksofficial]

A boy can dream, can't he?

[solidworksofficial]

handy guide

[solidworksofficial]

Feel like I should at least mention this: if you ever see a post circulating about y23.tech I let that domain expire due to money trouble (my apologies), the site you want for an ad free youtube (and other site!) downloader is y232.live

You can check out the Y232 tag on this blog for more info.

Some additions since this seems to be getting some traction:

Private videos/playlists cannot be downloaded atm (and not for the foreseeable future) because those require you to log in and I do not want to handle credentials for security reasons

You can host it yourself! The repos are here:

Lastly if you have any problems feel free to add an issue on the repo for the ui or the api depending on what exactly the issue is (I may have to move the issue but you will be notified if so)