It was absolutely Bughouse (with some house rules tacked on)! It’s been years since I’ve played, but I’d never thought to see if the variation had a formal name. Thank you!

I once played a team chess variant where each player could place pieces captured by their partner on their half of the board instead of moving. Made for some of the wackiest play lines since a piece materializing on the board could throw off your whole plan, but super fun from a strategy perspective, since board state could change dramatically between turns.

Streets ahead

Gamers Nexus did a piece on this, but short of a crash or bubble pop, it’s not expected to recover any time soon.

Woo hoo! Decidedly not boring! I’m usually content to make a 3D printed part that holds load and fits where it’s supposed to, I can’t imagine the amount of time and skill it’d take to knap a quartz blade that large and not shatter the whole thing, let alone have the thing hold up over 5000 years.

Any chance you know what the handle is made of? Naively, the pommel kind of makes me think of a jaw bone, but the more I think above it, the more likely I think I’d be carved ivory, which is a whole other set of crazy skills and limited tooling.

Won’t bore us with it? This is the first I’ve hearing of it and that artifact sounds cool as hell!

Also, gorgeous sketch, really clean line work!

Sonarqube is a kind of like an automated code quality checker that works for a bunch of programming languages. It’s pretty configurable (though I’ve never configured it myself), so it can be set up to check a code base for a wide range of things.

There’s a couple of different ways to run it, in my experience bigger companies usually have a dedicated server on their internal networks that connects to their CI/CD pipelines so that code gets checked before it gets merged in.

On a smaller scale, it’s also possible to run locally (either on metal or inside a docker container). From there you’d install a plugin to your IDE of choice.

More info:

• Wikipedia

• Geeks for geeks

I think I see the play on words, since each key is a “sign”. In practice though, Sign Languages tend to be a mix of logographic language where each sign represents an idea or concept and segmental language where you string a bunch of letters/ sounds together to make words. I can only really speak to American Sign Language (ASL), but generally you only finger spell to super short words/ acronyms (like ASL) or as a fallback for when someone might not know a sign / when something might not have a sign (like proper nouns).

4k’s are their own special thing, but for regular Blu-ray’s I’ve had good luck using the MakeMKV integration for VLC (and Handbrake).

Technically there’s also libbluray from the same folks that make VLC, but in order to use it you have to have a list of disk IDs and their decryption keys which are annoying to get ahold of (I think I remember running across a community generated list or a methodology to break the key on avsforum, but it’s been years since I mucked with it- makemkv is significantly easier)

Also, if you want disk menus, you’ll need to have some version of the java 8 runtime installed and configured for VLC to use.

Lego Marvel Superheroes is probably one of my favorite Lego games! It’s not without its faults (it kinda bugs me that free play just sticks you back in with pretty much the same cast of characters), but it’s just so much fun to wander around the over world map causing wanton chaos and being a general menace. Plus, I love that the characters generally voice aced by the same people that voice/ play them in live action or other shows, so when Iron Man talks it sounds like Iron Man.

Can you elaborate on your points and maybe your kind of work a bit?

I’m not quite sure I know what you mean by phone compatibility. If we’re talking simple file transfers, both Windows and Linux should be able to do that pretty easily (for Android phones, just remember to change the USB mode to file transfer).

Is there a reason you’re after an i7 specifically? I think you might be working off of out of date information: laptops above bottom-of-the-bargen-barrel tier these days run solid state drives by default (it’s actually somewhat uncommon to find a new machine with a 2.5in drive bay that would support a mechanical hard drive). Additionally, Intel dropped the ‘i’ prefix from their names a few years ago. Plus, modern processors from both AMD and Intel have gotten really good lately. Like, a mid range choice from either manufacturer is more than enough oomph for office use and light gaming.

My knee jerk reaction is probably the Framework 13, the pre-build intel core 5 option clocks in at exactly $999. It isn’t top of the line or bleeding edge, but it’s got enough compute to handle every day workloads. Framework’s are orders of magnitude more repairable than any other brand on the market, which means it should last a very long time (most parts are designed to be user serviceable if something happens to break. They also sell main boards that you can swap in if something new comes out and you want to upgrade the machine down the line).

That said, if you’re looking for more budget friendly options, I’ve historically had good luck with the Dell Outlet (before I switched to buying framework’s), they sell overstock and manufacture refurbished machines at a pretty decent chuck off of retail, plus you have the option of attaching a warranty to the machine and it’s covered the same way a brand new machine is (it’s not strictly necessary, but I usually opted for a 4 year warranty with accident protection to keep the machines in service for at least that long. Mostly, because the laptops were purchased with the understanding that they’d get tossed in a bag and dragged around (academic use) and at least this way I could make Dell send a repair tech if something broke). Also, if you time your purchase around black Friday, you can usually combo the sale price of the machine with a service like Rakuten to get something like 10% cash back on the order.

Nice! I never had that set specifically, but I got a bunch of agents/ alpha team line as a kid (I had a thing for marine life at the time and loved the underwater phase) and they’re some of the favorite sets in my collection. It makes my day to see that your set has a place of honor with your turntable and other media.

Not vinyl, but what Lego set is that on the far left? (Looks a bit like 6774, but the front isn’t quite the same)

Seasoning is just oil baked onto cast iron through a process called polymerization. It gives your cookware that classic black patina. Seasoning forms a natural, easy-release cooking surface and helps prevent your pan from rusting.

- Lodge (as I understand it, they’re the gold standard for cast iron cookware)

In the case of non-stick stuff, it’s less that they’re seasoned with PFAS and more that they don’t need seasoning because they have PFAS (at least in theory).

That’s completely fair! I was just noting that notepad++ and some whitespace has almost entirely replaced Word in my writing workflow, since I don’t tend to write anything with the intent of printing it (mostly just personal notes and programming documentation). Plus, my train of thought was along the lines of a bulleted outline that’s meant to be replaced in situ with actual writing.

That said, I have used LaTeX a bit though and I remember it being super neat once I got the hang of it! I had some grad school papers that needed journal style formatting and slapping an import at the top of the file and moving on with my life was far and away easier than fighting with Word. Come to think of it, it might be worth taking a stab at formatting my resume with LaTeX, just to see if document parsers have an easier time with it…

Maybe it’s the programmer in me, but I’ve found that markdown is more than sufficient for formatting the vast majority of what I write. Plus, I find it way easier to search through plain text files.

It’s the adjective form of parody.

That said, English is the kind of language where you can absolutely invent words and let context clues fill in the blanks for what the words mean.

us-east-1 then?

Aww schist, here we go again!

That is adorable and I love it!