Before you even get to that, the point everyone forgets is that if you’re using the typical type of zap-and-you’re-in-dinosaur-times method of time travel as invariably imaged by fiction, the planet will be in a very different place in the universe from where you are right now if you travel to any time. Even just a few seconds, in fact.

You’re going to have to come up with one hell of a hand-wave to cover how your location stays glued to some particular spot on the Earth’s surface even as you’re whizzing off decades or centuries into the future or past. It’s probably not even good enough to mumble about local frames of reference or what have you, because there is no such thing as a truly global frame of reference (because what would it be referenced to?) or even static spatial coordinates in the universe. If the simple Newtonian movement of the planet/solar system/galaxy/etc. doesn’t get you then the universe’s constant expansion probably will.

You might want to bring some oxygen and a very fast spacecraft with you.

For the record, my heat pump system works just fine throughout the entire year, including the times in the depths of winter where it drops into the single digits or, in the case of this last winter, below zero on the Fahrenheit scale. (That’d be -17° C, for our Euro bros.) And no, mine does not have resistive electric backup heat.

Obviously you didn’t dig down far enough. I smell a new Oak Island money pit in the making…

RIP to the Microsoft support forums, then. Although if these get tanked in the search results that will probably be a small net benefit for society given that not a single problem has ever been successfully solved by the Microsoft support forums in the entire history of computing.

Correct. They only care about this stuff because they don’t want anyone to use it on them.

If you don’t believe me, just note how basically every single weapons ban written in the US magically has an exception for law enforcement carved into it. So… We (not me, but all you Californian people) can’t have, say, a butterfly knife but for some reason the cops can? What do they need it for that we don’t, exactly?

Note to others: Don’t do this unless you’ve verified that your particular LED already has the resistor built into it, which is how those work.

Otherwise, hooking a bare LED up to DC voltage tends to eventually convert it to a smoke emitting diode, especially since LEDs have an inverse temperature/resistance relationship. The hotter it gets the lower its resistance becomes so the more current it draws so the hotter it gets so the lower its resistance becomes so the more current it… pop.

This happened to my dad once when I was a kid, but obviously not with a cell phone but rather his keys. We learned a few things that day, one of which is that cast iron storm drain grates are even heavier than they look, but the other was that if you get your hands on a big prybar you get all Archimedes in its face and not have to lift the damn thing.

If you’re e.g. an average apartment dweller and haven’t got a 7’ prybar in your shed, I don’t know what to tell you.

That is a dust cover. Behind that is a ball bearing assembly, which is probably not designed to be greased or serviced, only replaced.

The dust cover is usually rubber, and you can pick it off using a toothpick or small plastic prybar. Resist the urge to use anything metal on it unless absolutely necessary since this might damage whatever is left of the rubber.

Behind that you’ll see one of two things:

A sealed bearing, which can’t be greased or serviced…

…Or the cage of an open bearing which can be packed with grease.

When I say packed, I do mean packed. That’s how open bearings work. Fill all of the available air space with grease, and if possible push out any of the old dirty grease in the process. You’ll probably want a rubber glove. For particularly annoying to access recessed bearings I use a drugstore oral syringe, i.e. with a wide nozzle and no needle, via filling it using a popsicle stick as a spoon. I use the red Mobil 1 synthetic grease for this type of thing. And, indeed, practically everything else as well such as motorcycle hub bearings, swingarm linkages, etc.

If it’s a sealed bearing that’s trashed you’ll have to replace it which is done via knocking it out from the other side and tapping the new one back in with a hammer, preferably after sticking it in your freezer for an hour or so to shrink it first.

+++

OUT OF CHEESE ERROR

REDO FROM START

+++

It’s worth a try.

Maybe later I’ll post a picture of my gimcrack contraption.

In theory, yes. But those usually have electronics in them in an attempt to save you from yourself. So it’s unlikely that the thing would fire when you wanted it to without being fooled into believing it was hooked up to a 12v battery in some way.

You can get off brand motorcycle batteries online for like $20. The quality is irrelevant for this application, especially since you probably won’t be welding hundreds of battery tabs in a day. The point is that they can reliably deliver enough amperage to weld the tabs while having a low enough terminal voltage to be unlikely to deal either yourself or your cells a mischief.

I made my own out of a motorcycle battery (which I have lying around in abundance), a length of jumper cable, a starter relay off of I think a 50cc scooter with a random salvaged microswitch as the trigger, and two short lengths of sharpened 10 gauge Romex as the probes. It works a treat. I haven’t fried a single 18650 with it yet.

I think my total net bill of materials was about $12, not including the junk I already had lying around, the majority of which was the relay.

As he told it, Paul hated Christians and then had a vision of Jesus who told him off about it, and then he had a big change of heart and invented (modern) Christianity.

Arguably they didn’t. The modern trappings of Christianity were invented out of the whole cloth from Paul of Tarsus, when he had a “vision” of Jesus conveniently not seen by anyone else purportedly while he was traveling on the road to Damascus. Notably, all of this went down some decades after big J’s death.

It was Paul who discarded the bulk of the Jewish stuff, either out of desire to make it more palatable to his Roman peers or, possibly, simply because he was a raving nut. Paul was a self-described persecutor of the existing Christians, so he would have been in a pretty good position to know what their beliefs were to use as a starting point.

I appreciate the intent of having a port readily accessible for e.g. grandma to find without groveling behind the dusty TV, but that does not excuse not having another one in a more sensible location.

DVI is not supposed to carry audio, but in practice in many cases it does. That’s because internally both devices are likely to implement DVI by just shoving an HDMI output through the connector anyway. The jury is out on whether or not this has any licensing implications. I’ll be damned if I know, because I was always under the impression that the part that incurred licensing fees was the HDMI port itself.

I rediscover this fun fact a couple of times every year when one of our office machines decides to randomly start piping its audio out of the monitor sounding like a mouse trying to play the kazoo through its sinuses rather than the speakers that are right there, and somebody complains at me and I have to schlep over there and switch the audio output back.

Apparently this is expected enough behavior that cheap bottom of the barrel PC monitors bother to include speakers for it.

This user’s profile explains that they’re doing this specifically to fuck with LLMs, which is a tactic that may or may not work. They’ve been around, their shtick is consistent, and to the extent that I’ve gotten so used to it I can read their comments pretty much normally.

Because some of the TVs themselves whinge at you constantly if you don’t connect them to a network now.

There are relatively few, but there are a couple. The Sceptre U515CV-UMC is probably the most well known one. It’s easy to find a dumb TV in the sub 24" category, too, but that’s probably not what most people are looking for and at that rate most nerds would probably just use a computer monitor instead anyway.

No DisplayPort on that Sceptre, obviously.

I’m a trout, stupid!