walden

What's up?

There has been a bit of renewed interest in logging in here in order to participate in the upcoming Atlas Shaves.

That's great!

If you're reading this and are having trouble logging in, please contact me, walden, on Discord. Alternatively, click "Send Secure Message" in my profile, which takes you to Matrix chat. I can get you up and running.

If you remember which email you used to register a couple of years ago, try using the "reset password" link on the login page. That's a lot easier for me.

Wife wanted an air fryer for X-mas. Sure, it's a bit on the "stereotypical gender roles" side of gift giving, but who am I to deny her what she wants?

I unboxed it for her and it says to do a 30 minute cook with no food in it to get rid of the burning plastic smell, so I cleaned everything and now it's baking away the extra plastic.

The kitchen smells like burning plastic.

I can't wait for some crispy fries and other assorted foods.

We have a service contract with a local heating oil company. It includes 1 tune up per year. I asked him a couple of questions and he was nice and answered them. One of the parts he was replacing had stripped threads and he had to wait for the parts truck to deliver a new one, but it's covered by the service contract.

Right now he's in his truck, doing paperwork I assume.

Not long ago I won a beautiful brush handle from Peter at Wolf Whiskers in a charity raffle. It came with a great synthetic knot, but it was lofted too short for me. I decided to remove it so I can put something else in.

I emailed Peter and he confirmed that all of his brushes are assembled with epoxy. I didn't want to risk steaming the handle, but the Discord chat convinced me to try a 5 minute steam, which I did... 5 minutes isn't long, and it didn't work.

Not wanting to further risk a total failure (the handle is in 2 pieces, plus it has a coin in the bottom), I went back to plan A - mechanical destruction.

Picture 1: I used a box cutter with a fresh blade to slice most of the hair off

Picture 2: I used a combination of a small cutoff wheel and a grinder bit on a Dremel tool and started slowly chipping away at things.

Picture 3: This bit worked the absolute best. It's small, so it took a while. It also created TONS of dust, so I had to do this outside.

Picture 4: This is pretty much the end result. It was very difficult to know when to stop. The end of the knot/epoxy and beginning of "handle" was never really obvious. In the end, the hole was 15.5mm deep, and 26.5mm wide.

I did mess it up in a few spots. The keyless chuck on the dremel has some knurling which made contact with the ferule a few times, despite me trying to be careful. I was able to buff them a little bit and they're only noticeable if you're looking closely at it.

I still haven't decided which knot to put in it, but it's a beautiful handle!

I went on this beautiful ride last week. I'm a relative n00b and the ride easily exceeded my skill level, but it was fun!

Sup everyone. Hope you're all enjoying the season of decorative gourds.

I know a lot of you just use mobile apps (yay, mobile apps!), but for the few that also use a web browser, I've been slowly rolling out alternative "front ends". The normal URL (https://sub.wetshaving.social) has the default front end. It is honestly pretty good, if not a tad dated.

Most recently we brought online https://old.wetshaving.social, which is designed to look like old.reddit.com. Even though I'm used to that layout from real-reddit, I'm still finding it a bit lacking for Lemmy, especially from a moderator point of view.

Next, we want to introduce the Alexandrite front end. @sahenders@sub.wetshaving.social already uses this, accessible from https://alexandrite.app/sub.wetshaving.social. Feel free to check it out there until we get ours behind https.

Anyway, we want to run our own instance of Alexandrite, which will be locked to our lemmy server, simplifying the experience for people like @sahenders@wetshaving.social.

All that is to say, we need a URL to put it behind.

So far, the suggestions are:

gem.wetshaving.social - Alexandrite is named after a gem on the devs wife's ring, and of course there's the GEM connection with our hobby.
alx.wetshaving.social
new.wetshaving.social - simply the opposite of old.wetshaving.social

Please leave your ideas, good or bad. Often our worst ideas turn out to be great, so don't be shy.

THANKS!

Do you miss the layout of OLD reddit? Do you wish Lemmy looked liked that? Well, check this out... https://old.wetshaving.social

Maybe someone will find it enjoyable to use.

There are some limitations to this front-end, but I don't know enough about it yet to give any advice.

Technical details:

This front-end is called "mlmym". https://github.com/rystaf/mlmym

Like everything else with Lemmy, it might break in the future. All it does is change how stuff is displayed. Think of it like a theme.

There are other front ends available, but this is the only one that we've implemented so far. There's one that makes it look like an old-school forum (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB), and one called Alexandrite that looks very interesting https://lemmy.world/post/1095076. I might play with that one in the future.

A new report by the U.S. intelligence community on Tuesday says Russia sought to help former President Donald Trump in last year's presidential election. But the document also emphasized there was no indication Russia or any other country attempted to alter actual votes.

Republicans are reeling from Trump’s undisciplined approach to the opening stages of his race against Harris.