“…and yes, somehow this assembly of three aluminum tubes will cost you $2000.”
Communism breaks your leg, then “Oops, sorry comrade! No crutches produced in factory this week! Maybe new crutches in six months! Have new toaster instead!”
“Also no bread unless you have a roof!”
Stalinism breaks both your legs, then issues you a pair of state-sanctioned non-Western shoes and asks why you’re so lazy you can’t get up and go to work for glorious motherland.
Every time you pick up a new tool, you learn things about working with it that teach what you want from your next tool. Gotta start somewhere.
When you reach that point, and you know what you want, what’s important to how you work, you should replace the tool. Just do it, because it’s wasting your time and effort, and possibly also material if it’s failing in ways that a better tool would not. It’s preventing you from doing better work.
Pass it on via Goodwill if you can’t find a better candidate.
So I want to try making my own patches
If you mean small pieces of already patterned fabric to sew onto larger textile products (clothing, bags, etc), that you can just cut and sew by hand.
If you mean stitching complex patterns or symbols with multiple colors of thread, that’s something you do with an embroidery machine. These are mechanically complex - they are more work to set up, more fragile, and more expensive than a standard sewing machine. They are also not very good for basic productivity stitches (e.g. seams) as they are intended to make very fine stitches on relatively lightweight fabric. They are not good starter machines.
For general sewing work, and especially for learning, I recommend any machine that does not have a screen like this one:
https://www.brother-usa.com/products/ps700
These types of machines are common at entry-level prices, and they offer a wider variety of stitch options, but realistically you won’t get much use out of those, and in my experience the embedded computer parts make the machine less reliable.
I prefer something purely mechanical like this:
https://www.brother-usa.com/products/st531hd
All the controls are physical knobs, dials and switches - no touchscreens or touchpads, no computer components, no vague error messages. It’s mechanically simple to the point where there is very little that can go wrong with it - it just does the job.
This model is also heavy duty, which means it has a stronger metal frame, a stronger motor, and more metal parts in the construction in general (over a standard duty machine). It should last basically forever. Other machines may be able to take heavy duty needles, but that doesn’t mean the machine itself can actually punch through 4 layers of denim without stalling or twisting the frame. Even if you don’t end up working on a lot of heavyweight fabrics, a heavy duty machine will suffer less wear and tear from normal use.
Why would you need to punch through 4 layers of denim? Because when you make a seam in a pair of pants like this:
you overlap the two pieces of fabric and then fold it over and stitch through it like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felled_seam
In the places where multiple seams come together (like where the pocket meets the side seam) there will be even more layers, and an otherwise easy project can suddenly become very difficult to complete when your machine just can’t handle 8 layers in a double-over seam.
Um… one possible downside of a heavy duty machine is that it will sew through your finger if you’re not paying attention, where a lighter duty machine might jab you and then get stuck. It’s also heavier to pick up and move around. It may also have less throat space:
than a similarly priced standard duty machine, because the longer the frame pieces are the more flexible they are. More throat space makes every kind of project easier because there’s more room to feed the fabric through, but it also makes the body of the machine more fragile. If you think you might work on larger projects (like blankets/quilts) you may want to prioritize larger throat space as a feature (dedicated quilting machines have longer arms to accommodate larger pieces of fabric).
Don’t be afraid to buy a used machine, but try to find a copy of the user manual for it before you buy it. Especially starting out, you’ll want the instructions for how to set up your particular machine, and how to do basic maintenance and troubleshooting. All mechanical devices require occasional maintenance. Looking at the manual should also help you figure out if the used machine has all of its parts.
Whatever you buy, keep in mind: simple is good, simple is reliable, simple is difficult to break accidentally and easier to fix if necessary. Extra fancy features do not make a better machine.
*Edit: also don’t buy one of these cheap portable/handheld type machines:
https://sewingmachineguide.co.uk/guides/best-handheld-sewing-machine/
Don’t waste your money. The little handheld ones can have a use to get into weird angles or small spaces that would be impractical with a normal machine, but only in very specific situations. They aren’t general purpose machines.
Also by what it destroys.
And also by what it refuses to create.
Society is defined by society.
Tautology is defined by tautology.
[ Dennis, 1975 ] Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony!
Hmm, but a prospective hire in an interview is not an employee (yet). Is there any similar regulation covering interviews?
The Tragedy of systemd: https://archive.org/details/lca2019-The_Tragedy_of_systemd
Hopefully the energy of this reaction won’t be scattered among too many alternatives, although some amount of scattering is always good.
It’s traditional:
But what will I do without Copilot in Notepad
just doing the FAFO approach.
Please consider the following:
How did early humans find out which food sources were safe to eat, and which were not?
the thing is that cleaner production methods benefit big industry because they get to produce higher-quality products which makes them more profit due to higher price.
Sure, maybe in the long run. But that will cost money now and the quarterly earnings report is due.
So all those problems are fixed but somehow new ones keep popping up?
Yes. Welcome to reality.
Maybe it wasnt real change but actually just band aids and the root cause stayed unadressed through all those years.
The entire history of human civilization is an example of building the airplane while you’re flying it, without a plan for either the airplane construction or the flight path.
Somehow the system you want to maintain and support keeps creating these problems.
There are a lot of problems, and yes the solutions to old problems often create new problems, because reality is not a video game where collecting a dozen McGuffins ends the quest and you get a reward and then never worry about that issue again.
Sometimes the airplane crashes: https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/
The options are:
You could have spent a century testing CFCs in a lab environment. The problem they caused with the ozone layer would still not have become apparent until CFCs were used in the real world where they could interact with the ozone layer.
There is no amount of testing and preparation that can account for every possible outcome or interaction.
Asbestos is another good example. It is naturally occurring and quite common and was used as a building material for millennia. It is lightweight but strong, flexible in thin sheets, and fireproof. It’s an extremely useful and versatile material, and abundantly available.
It wasn’t until the 1900s that medical testing linked asbestos fibers to several health risks. It basically required the entire history of human development for our medical technology to identify the danger. No amount of testing, analysis or review done prior would have mattered.
The hole in the ozone layer is now repairing due to international regulation of CFCs
Acid rain is no longer a problem because of regulation of sulfur dioxide emissions
Leaded gasoline has now been banned in every country
Asbestos exposure is rare now due to regulatory controls. It’s bad that it took so long to get done.
Government regulation is effective in protecting people from health risks.
Collective action (e.g. through voting) is effective in establishing such regulation.
If you spread the lie that voting in favor of such policies (and politicians who support them) is a useless waste of time, you are spreading industry propaganda.
Effective, large-scale change is IN FACT at the polls.
It is nowhere else.
Yes, actually.
Do you remember the hole in the ozone layer? It’s self-repairing now because the chemicals that were damaging it were internationally banned - by government regulation.
Do you remember the acid rain scare? It’s not a problem now because of regulatory control of sulfur dioxide emissions.
Do you know why gasoline is unleaded?
Do you know why asbestos is banned in building materials?
Government regulation actively improves human health and wellbeing, and has prevented several outright disasters from progressing.
Real change does, in fact, come from voting for politicians that support effective environmental policies. It is industry propaganda that wants you to believe that regulation is ineffective.
First and most important:
In the context of long-term data storage
ALL DRIVES ARE CONSUMABLES
I can’t emphasize this enough. If you only skim the rest of my post, re-read the above line and accept it as fundamental truth. “Long-term” means 1+ years, by the way.
It does not matter what type of drive you buy, how much you spend on it, who manufactured it, etc. The drive will fail at some point, probably when you’re least prepared for it. You need to plan around that. You need to plan for the drive being completely useless and the data on it unrecoverable post-failure. Wasting time and money to acquire the fanciest most bulletproof drives on the market is a pointless resource pit, and has more to do with dick-measuring contests between data-hoarders.
Knife geeks buy $500+ patterned steel chef’s knives with ebony handles and finely ground edges and bla bla bla. Professional kitchens buy the basic Victorinox with the plastic handle. Why? Because they actually use it, not mount it on a wall to look pretty.
The knife is a consumable, not an heirloom. So are your storage drives. We call them “spinning rust” for a reason.
The solution to drive failure is redundancy. Period.
Unfortunately, this reality runs counter to the desire to maximize available storage. Do not follow the path of desire, that way lies data loss and outer darkness. Fault-tolerant is your watchword. Component failure is unpredictable, no matter how much money you spend. A random manufacturing defect will ruin your day when you least expect it.
A minimum safe layout is to have 2 live copies of data (one active, one mirror), hot standby for 1 copy (immediate swap-in when the active or mirror fails), and cold standby on the shelf to replace the hot standby when it enters service.
Note that this does not describe a specific number of disks, but copies of data. The minimum to implement this is 4 disks of identical storage capacity (2 live, 1 hot standby, 1 on the shelf) and a server with slots for 3 disks. If your storage needs expand beyond the capacity of 1 disk, then you need to scale up by the same ratio. A disk is indivisible - having two copies of the same data on a disk does not give you any redundancy value. (I won’t get into striping and mucking about with weird RAID choices in this post because it’s too long already, but basically it’s not worth it - the KISS principle applies, especially in small configurations)
This means you only get to use 25% of the storage capacity that you buy. Them’s the breaks. Anything less and you’re not taking your data longevity seriously, you might as well just get a consumer-grade external drive and call it a day.
Buy 4 disks, it doesn’t matter what they are or how much they cost (though if you’re buying used make sure you get a SMART report from the seller and you understand what it means) but keep in mind that your storage capacity is just 1 of the disks. And buy a server that can keep 3 of them online and automatically swap in the standby when one of the disks fails. Spend more money on the server than the disks, it will last longer.
Remember, long-term is a question of when, not if.
One’a these days, Alice…
Really nice overview
I’ve got a USB SSD that I can’t use, because I need to “unlock” it in a windows device first. I can’t even re-partition it in linux.
Is this Bitlocker FDE? Have you tried using Dislocker?
If that doesn’t work, I recommend building a gparted live USB. Once you’re up and the SSD is visible, create a new partition table
Complete this step with no other changes. This shouldn’t care if the partitions on the disk or encrypted, it will reset the partition table which will make the disk appear blank, as if it was never formatted. You should then be able to create any new partitions you want in the available space.
! THIS IS DESTRUCTIVE !
But if you couldn’t access the encrypted partition then the data was effectively destroyed already.
“I got mine.”