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  2. Today I realised I had never taken any good photos of this mountain dulcimer I built in 2016 as a warm-up project after moving to a new workshop.

    An hourglass-shaped mountain dulcimer with four strings, made from walnut, cedar and ebony, with mother-of-pearl fretboard inlays, against a folded blue fabric background

  3. The 70s got me covered if I end up getting quarantined due to coronavirus. Unopened and in mint condition, I can rely on McDougall to see me through these hard times

    A huge, tin of “McDougals Instant Mashed Potato” sitting on a shelf

  12. My summer workout is going for a walk in the woods around a village named for its horsefly population. 30 minutes waving my arms around then 20 minutes jogging to try to get away from them, the CO2 and sweat attracting more and more

  13. ↪ Aaron Parecki: Ok that was fun, thanks for all the responses! Lots of great stuff in there. Now take your favorite programming language and tell me the 3 things you most dislike about it. No complaining about languages you don't use!

    For python, the lack of type information for function signatures and return values in the documentation has always annoyed me.

    The lack of naming consistency in the standard library, too — it’s almost as bad as PHP, with nospaces, under_scores and CamelCase at every level: modules, classes, functions, arguments.

    I can’t think of a third major annoyance off the top of my head though, and almost every time I use another programming language, I end up realising just how well designed some aspect of python is, so it’s not doing too badly.

  14. Experimenting with some computational musicology on a vast corpus of traditional music compiled by a friend. Extrapolating from the last few hours, I anticipate the first complete analysis will take 2.5 days to complete on my macbook. Plenty of time to research how to build a raspberry pi parallel computing cluster…

  15. I wish SMD diodes came in the same package sizes as SMD resistors. It seems like every time I buy them, or design a PCB with them on, I end up with something ridiculously small or inexplicably huge.

  16. Rewatching TNG, they violate the prime directive so often that not even Patrick Stewart’s Acting can convince me that it’s a big deal. I also got a lot better at spotting obvious plot holes, and wow are there a lot of them. Still the best Trek I’ve watched though.

  17. I engraved a rat on my DIY rat pedal, first time laser engraving aluminium. Filling the engraving with paint makes a huge difference, definitely worth the extra step.

  18. Has anyone ever clicked on one of those whole-page modal ads or CTAs which pop up over articles, other than accidentally? Big sites must have analytics on this stuff. I find it hard to believe that they work well enough to justify keeping them around

  20. Absolutely no-one:
    This capacitor manufacturer:

    “22nf? …ah, you must mean a Twenty Two Thousand Micro Micro Farad capacitor”

    Seriously, if you’re able to print µµF and three extra zeros, then just printing “22nF” is well within your manufacturing capabilities.