The reverse of a question I asked on here a while ago.
Steam Deck
Basically every Valve product and software.
OG steam machines were the shit, but way ahead of their time. If it had come out with proton already, then it would have dominated. But it’s wonderful that the UX had laid ground work for the steam deck
It’d be interesting to see if you could install the Steamdeck’s OS on a Steam Machine.
Valve has not yet put in the effort to create a generic version of SteamOS because their focus is on the Steam Deck right now, but the community has.
Bazzite has been made to look and feel almost exactly like the Steam Deck and can be installed on any PC (AMD GPU recommended). Give it a shot!
have you not seen tf2’s state?
In Vavles defense, they proclaimed TF2 to be a “Hat Simulator” and I suppose they delivered on the advertised product…
It’s also 17 years old and still online
The game Portal genuinely lived up to the slogan “now you’re thinking with portals.” Soon after I started playing I’d be walking around in real life and thinking “if I put portals there and there, I could get from here to that building rooftop there and on to over there…”
I still regularly replay those games.
The only Valve hardware I’m aware of and haven’t bought is the official dock for my Deck. I’ve yet to regret any of those purchases.
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One of the only brands I would ever promote, Darn Tough socks.
Wear em out, ship them back, order a free pair. It’s that easy and they are the most comfortable, durable socks I have ever worn. Won’t ever buy another brand.
I’ve worn mine long and hard and haven’t gotten to test out the warranty yet, the first pair I bought is probably closing in on a decade and nearly indistinguishable from pairs that are several years newer. Even if they don’t honor their warranty for some reason I feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth and then some.
I want to point out here, in Australia there is a brand of socks called Darn Tough that is sold at Kmart, Target and BigW, it is NOT THE SAME Darn Tough brand you see raved online. It’s a completely different sock brand thats been around for about 20 years in Australia and just happens to have the same name. They are not great socks, very thick but don’t last long.
Do you use those for everyday wear?
Not op. Yes.
Also not OP.
Also yes.
Thirdly not op. Prefer them over any of my other sock-tions.
Also also yes
Fourth not OP. Wear them in my work boots every day, even when it’s hot as shit.
Fifth not OP. I do not wear them everyday. But that’s mainly because I don’t own a pair.
Reading this message chain makes me want to buy ones.
I do indeed. Most of mine are the midweight quarter high hikers.
Fifth not op. Yes.
I also wash them with Wool Wash, and about once every 5 wears. Merino Wool is naturally antimicrobial, so I cycle a bunch of pairs letting them air out.
Bought 2 pairs of their normal socks (everyday/sport socks) because they advertised to keep your feet cool during the day. I decided to test them out before I bought a bunch as workout socks.
1 was completely ripped on the sides by literally the 3rd wear (2nd week I had them), only walking around the office a bit.
The other lasted 8 wears before it got a hole on the balls of my feet and was almost worn through on the sides (about 6 weeks), still not one workout done with then
By very far the worst socks I have ever owned. I didn’t get a chance to try their warranty because I moved out of the US, but hot damn I will always recommend against their thin socks, only go for the large tube/hiking/warm socks.
Crazy. I have hiked hundreds of miles in the thin hiking socks, and while they weren’t nearly as durable as the midweights, they still outperformed every other sock I have tried. Smartwool, rei, carhartt, typical cotton socks etc. I guess as with most things, YMMV
Well, that sucks that your experience was poor, especially at their price point. I would be a bit frustrated with the brand as well.
Bear in mind they’re in the EU and don’t need a receipt https://darntough.eu/pages/our-unconditional-lifetime-guarantee
EU and US warranty are not transferable to each other, sadly.
Timex: Takes a licking and keeps on ticking.
I licked my watch when I was a kid and it kept on ticking.
Wood glue, no particular brand recommendations, is one of the pew products I trust to do exactly what it claims to - glue wood.
Titebond 3. It’s a pretty easy choice; it has one of, if not the highest strengths of wood glues on the market, and it’s water resistant. If you want the wood to break before the glue does, that’s the stuff you want.
That is usually what I go with, because I normally only keep one bottle of wood glue around and it covers pretty much any use case I could ever have for wood glue being waterproof, safe for indirect food contact, etc.
But honestly, for general gluing furniture together and such, even the cheapest no-name brands of wood glue have always done just fine. Pretty much any wood glue out there is stronger than any wood you’re likely getting the be gluing (inb4 some carpentry nerd chimes in with some rare wood that only grows in New Zealand or something that is stronger than steel or something)
Wood glues like Titebond are PVA-based glues. So is Elmer’s white school glue, which is also very good at bonding wood. Wood glues are yellow either because of added resins that make it tackier when wet so clamped boards don’t slide around as easy before the glue dries, so that the glue dries to a harder, more rock-like consistency rather than staying slightly flexible, or because wood is kind of yellow so they wanted it to look like wood, I’ve heard all three and I’m not sure which is true. Titebond does sell a brown wood glue so that it blends into darker woods like walnut and ebony though.
I’ve seen plenty of bonds on furniture fail, rather than the wood. It seems most typical on things that are a dowelled construction rather than a mortise and tenon joint. I’ve seen it most often with chairs, since they’re under a lot of stresses. Maybe I’m in a uniquely bad environment that’s harsh on wood glue; I don’t know.
Yeah I think the way a lot of chairs are constructed is just a bad use case for glue. Like you said, chairs are under a lot of stress (tension, compression, shear, cleavage, peel- glue can handle some of these well and others not,) there’s a lot of weird ways you can put leverage on the joints, people don’t tend to sit perfectly still so those loads are dynamic and always shifting a bit, and to make it worse they kind of have to be designed to be somewhat lightweight, easy to move around, small enough to fit under a table, etc so there’s always some compromises made and they’re never as overbuilt as they probably should be.
Different kind of construction, but I work in a 911 dispatch center, we have some ridiculously overbuilt chairs that are supposed to be rated for someone to be occupying them 24/7. They cost a ridiculous amount of money and they’re still breaking in new and spectacular ways almost constantly. It’s tough to build a good chair.
There’s also of course issues that can arise from bad surface prep, poor fitment, improper clamping, too little glue, not letting it dry long enough too high/low temperature/humidity/moisture, the wood shrinking/expanding, poorly thought-out joints that don’t have enough surface area or are putting the glue under the wrong kind of stresses, and of course sometimes you’re asking the glue to do something it doesn’t do well, it’s good at gluing wood to wood, but not nearly as good at gluing paint to paint or varnish to varnish.
Totally agree.
Unfortunately, wooden chairs that don’t suck tend to cost a fuckton. The styles that people tend to like are usually on the fragile side by their nature.
Chairs, like wooden dining room chairs, are some of the most dynamically stressed woodworking projects. A bookcase may carry hundreds of pounds of books but you put the books on the shelf and they mostly just stay there. A dining room chair has people sitting down, scooting forward, shifting around, leaning back, standing up etc. so there’s a lot of force moving around trying to bend the frame members and shift the tenons around in their mortises. This often causes the glue, or the wood immediately around it, to fracture under repetitive stress and causes loose joints.
Some woodworkers prefer to use hide glue (or its modern synthetic equivalent) rather than PVA glue specifically because it isn’t as strong, and because the bond can be released with heat. That allows the glue to fail while the wood itself remains intact, and then a chair with a failed joint can be disassembled and repaired. A chair assembled with PVA is likely to break in the middle of a board or dowel and is impossible to disassemble in any intentional way.
Yeah. If it fails it’s the wood around the glued joint, not the joint iself.
A face grain to face grain joint will usually fail at least partially along the growth rings in the board(s) rather than at the glue joint, yes. But an end grain to end grain joint (which are rarely made for practical reasons) will typically fail at the glue joint.
Wood is kind of a composite material; it’s cellulose fibers bound together with a polymer called lignin. PVA wood glue is stronger than lignin but not as strong as the cellulose fibers, so a broken face-to-face joint will break along the weakest, the lignin.
If you edge glue a panel together for say a table top, gluing boards edge-to-edge, that board will be at least as strong as if it was one wide board; it will take at least as much force as a single board to break.
But, if you glue two long boards end to end, it won’t be as strong as a single continuous board of the same overall length. It will fail at and along the glue joint, maybe pulling a couple splinters out of one board. Which is why we basically never do that; if a board has to be spliced it’s common to add a doubler so there are fibers crossing the joint line.
But yes PVA glue like Titebond is amazingly good at bonding wood.
I wonder if there is any bad wood glue out there. I use it quite a bit and I don’t think i ever used the same brand twice.
My latest bottle is gorilla and it works well enough. But exactly like you said, I don’t think I could pick it out from every other bottle I’ve used in the last 20 years.
For some reason I have a thought in my head that I don’t like Elmer’s wood glue. I don’t know why, I don’t remember it ever letting me down.
White Elmer’s glue is pretty much the same formula as their “washable” school glue. It bonds wood quite strongly but it tends to be slimier than wood glue so when you go to clamp the boards together they tend to slip around out of orientation. It’s not as fun to work with as yellow carpenter’s glues which tend to be tackier so the boards don’t slip around as much.
I think zippo lighters say they’re wind proof. I did enough professional testing a month ago to confirm this. My neighbors can also confirm there was a man in my lawn with a lighter violently whipping it around in his hand until said man was winded.
Sadly i am not made of zippos.
I think “wind-resistant” would be more accurate.
As someone who used to smoke and had a Zippo, absolutely this. If it was pretty windy, the flame may stay lit but it wouldn’t hold still enough to light anything.
I fixed my hot tub with Flex Tape. It seems to be doing the job.
now that’s a lotta damage
“Open heart surgery - guy’s got an artery going - FLEX TAPE”
I’ve repaired 2 kayaks and my tiny, flat-bottom boat. That shit is scary.
Bone conduction headphones
Really? I’ve been dubious of these but…if true…
The sound quality is definitely worse than similarly priced regular headphones or earbuds.
But having the ears completely free make them a great option for cycling or running, where keeping track of your surroundings is literally kind of vital.
I think that goes without saying. But i was still very surprised on how good they were, my expectations were very whelmed.
I worked in a setting where we had to use them because people had to get audio prompts but still needed to be able to hear for situational awareness. They definitely work and work pretty well. You can even use them underwater. They can’t match the sound quality of actual headphones though. But for voice stuff or if you’re not super picky about audio quality they’re great, you can easily hear everything going on around you much more clearly than any of the “transparency modes” that modern noise cancelling headphones have because they don’t block your ears at all
They are fantastic for spoken audio like audiobooks and podcasts by themselves, if you’re using them in combination with earplugs they work a lot better for music because you get the low bass sounds that you would miss without the ear plugs.
They’re good for activities you want open ears for, like street cycling. Audio quality is not fantastic though. I use them for podcasts.
I used to have a pair. Tried to use them on a train and ended up wishing I also had earplugs.
Have a recommended brand or style?
I use whatever the premium Shokz product was 4 years ago. They have a new model that’s supposed to have better sound quality. I think it’s the open run pro 2. That’s what I’d get if I were buying another pair
My mom bought my backpack 25 years ago and the clerk told her “they’ll last for at least five years”.
Well I still use mine daily, so yeah. Definitely lived up to expectations. Although I’ve did get it fixed, but first time just a year or two ago. So lasted without any fixing for longer than the average age on Lemmy, I’d say.
What brand?
Sorry forgot to reply. Hedgren, it’s called.
But idk if their current products reflect that level of durability.
doubt they make them the same way so it wouldn’t be as good
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I’ve got a 20 year old Swissgear backpack but I haven’t used it for a few years. It lasted through my rave/festival decade!
I used to break a backpack (usually zipper failure) every year until I got a swissgear backpack. It’s 15 years old. It’ll probably make it to 20.
I sound like a shill but I LOVE IT. Lugged laptops around with oodles of other things, I really like that the top handle has like, twisted wire in it so it doesnt snap off when carrying heavy loads.
Power (not adidas, the brand is power) backpacks are good. Spent like 25 bucks a decade ago and it only needed some stitches. Was daily use for most of that time, too!
I bought a laptop backpack a loooooooong time ago, and still use it constantly. It’s been through 3 laptops, and I’m not the type to upgrade until it is absolutely necessary.
I bought a military grade backpack on a Marine Corps base in 2001. I used it for 3 years in the military, then all of undergrad, masters, and phd school. I use it on almost all of my travels, and I use it daily in town. It’s still going strong. Hope to get another 23 years out of it.
My MacBook air… Apple bad and all, but the battery life and (CPU) performance meet the claims…
Same with my early-2015 model MacBook Pro. My only Apple product. It just works, what can I say. I’m basically waiting for a reason to switch to the Framework laptop but we’ll see. I might eventually just get another MacBook. I gifted my SO a MacBook air around the same time I bought mine and she has had zero issues with that as well.
I got this M3 air earlier this year… It’s also my only apple product and so far it’s been great. 0 driver issues, 0 slowdown, 0 screwing around. It just works…
I had the same 2015 MBP, and honestly the only reason I sold it was because I was gifted an M2 Air. For the £400 I paid for it, it’s an incredible laptop.
The one apple product I’m willing to buy.
I feel like other brands have closed the gap but there was a time where macbooks seemed like the only great laptop on the market.
IMO:
Early 2000 -> 2014 - MacBooks are great
2014 -> 2016 - MacBooks are decent
2016 -> Last Intel Models - MacBooks are bad
M1 -> Present - MacBooks are great
Currently using my 2011 MacBook Pro! It’s got 16GB of RAM and I’ve replaced the optical drive with a SSD, but it still browses the web and handles sorting and browsing and editing 80k photos!
I put Linux Mint on mine. It’s like a brand new laptop. Incredible hardware.
Ugh I would LOVE that, but I need OSX for iPhoto, it’s so amazing for organizing a million photos…
Yes, Apple have become a steaming tower of shitheads, but fuck me, their hardware is (generally) incredibly well built.
I have a 2011 13” MacBook Pro that I bumped up to 16gb RAM, and replaced the DVD drive with a second hard drive. I had it running Sonoma through OCLP until a few weeks ago when I threw Linux Mint on it. Damn thing won’t die. Same for the 2011 and 2014 Macs mini that I also use regularly. I also have a 15” M2 Air, which is legitimately the best computer I’ve ever owned. I don’t imagine I’ll get the same life out of that, not with macOS at least. Asahi Linux seems to be very, very promising though.
Louis Rossman enters the chat.
Not the 8GB RAM model tho, too low for 2020…
Mine’s an 8GB. At least for my use case (web development/design) it’s plenty…
Knipex ♥️
A Knippix Kombi-Zange. Well played! Good tools are worth every cent.
Their flush cuts are the shit. Next time I break a tool I’m going to see if there’s a knipex version.
people with really wide toes:
my 260 euros hiking shoes with extra wide toebox. i had size ten. with these shoes i have size 8.5 (i had to go longer, so i got more widht to fit my toes)
no pain anymore, no more infected nail beds. best shoes i ever had. model innsbruck
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Believe it or not, Oxyclean. That stuff works wonders. RIP Billy Mays.
Those magic erasers turned out to be pretty effective, too.
If people wanna save money they can use Melamine sponges! Exact same thing, give or take a few small proprietary cleaning agents or scents. But effectively the same
While I have observed this to be true, I find it surprising. Melamine is also the material from which the backing of IKEA bookshelves is made. Of course one material can be formulated in many different ways, but still … That was a revelation.
Fuckin love ikea
Melamine works great, just be careful. It’s an abrasive and can wreck some surfaces.
like the planet
Lol, how high are you?
The reason they work so well is because they’re basically sandpaper. You are removing your countertop finish when you use them.
that release microplastics with each use!
Miele washing machine. Doing my laundry since 2001 and still as good as new.
A $250 Epson ink tank printer.
500 full colour 10x15 photos and still half full.
LASERJET COPIERS ARE SUPERIOR!
