Hell, even consoles aren’t as easy as they used to be. They require accounts with Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo, they require updates for the console itself as well as individual games, most games have to be “installed,” you still have to think about internal storage…

What’s the flavor like? I’ve seen recipes that pair it with strawberry?

I’m working on an ~$800-900 build for my little cousin with a Ryzen 7600X and a Radeon 7600 in an mATX mini-tower. According to the specs I’ve read, this is at or above the Steam Machine in both processing and graphics power.

Socket AM5 motherboards are weirdly expensive in the ITX form factor; I bought an ITX AM4 motherboard for like $100 a few years ago, but like, Asrock isn’t selling a B650M-ITX Pro RS, not in this hemisphere anyway. That and non-stupid ITX cases are difficult to find. A lot of the “it’s a PC tower, but ITX size” like the Meshify Nano are being discontinued. So motherboard manufacturers think the ITX market is going for extreme high end, as if we need lots of PCIe lanes on motherboards that only fit one slot, and case manufacturers don’t think heat sinks exist.

Not sure about hate, but the entire Steam Machine thing happened because Microsoft was making noise circa Windows 8 that they were going to take the platform more closed and require sourcing software from the Windows Store, which would shut out things like Steam. So they said “Okay, we’ll make our own operating system with blackjack and hookers. We could take the PC gaming market with us, and we’ll even come for the living room console market and threaten Xbox while we’re at it.” And if anyone in the world is going to get that done, it’s Valve.

so…dessert celery?

But then they’ll implement an AI detector detector deflector.

tell me about rhubarb. I don’t have any experience with it, eating or growing.

I grow several varieties of peppers from sweet bells to habaneros, tomatoes, okra, cucumbers, and mint, plus a few odds and ends that look cool at the garden center. I tend to grow plants that either produce more per dollar to grow than I can get at the store, or in the case of tomatoes, of better quality. And mint is eternal.

I also harvest beautyberries that have sprung up wild on my property, and have recently learned that the big weird thing looming over my wood shop is a black walnut tree, so I think I’m gonna go nuts next summer.

A Connecticut Linux Administrator In King Arthur’s Court.

Why didn’t you fix the power steering? I’m pretty sure they were all built with it.

Somebody sent around that same template but with the girl’s face replaced with some gorn, and it spooked THE FUCK out of the mods and admins, to the point that sh.itjust.works blocked any community with the string “nicole” in it.

Eh, if I’m doing something like chiseling the shoulders of tenons by hand, I like using a knife to mark that so that I don’t stair-step it around the board, plus it makes sure the line that will be visible in the finished product will be straight and not jagged. When marking out for using power tools, I use a pencil, typically a Pilot Sharpwriter. They’re cheap as borscht and the spring action they have reduces the amount of lead I break on wood.

With or without the bowl itself?

I’ve been kicking around the idea of hosting a Youtube channel from my wood shop. Which is a 10x12 foot shed on the corner of my family’s land. I’ve built some decent furniture out of there.

I often see comments under woodworking videos, to include the New Yankee Workshop’s, that read “I could do that too If I had a giant building an $30,000 worth of tools” and I have two simultaneous thoughts:

1. It’s a valid complaint; woodworking is a relatively expensive hobby to take up in both tools and materials, and by the time you feel you know enough to stand in front of a camera and talk you’ve probably amassed quite an arsenal, worsening that perception.

2. I’ll just bet you couldn’t.

Woodworker here, the reason you use a marking knife rather than a pencil is because it is more precise, in two ways:

1. A pencil line has width to it. Even a very fine mechanical pencil line. A marking knife has a single bevel, so the cut it leaves looks like |/ The vertical surface is the mark.

2. If you need to transfer the mark around the board, say for tenoning, you make the first mark, then you turn the board, put the knife in the end of the cut, butt the square against the knife, and then cut. With a pencil you might stair step a bit. Then, when it’s time to cut, you can register a chisel against the mark, you can feel when you’re in place because it clicks in.

Note I’m talking about chisels here, because you use a marking knife when using hand tool techniques. It doesn’t help at all when using power tools like a track saw, so using a marking knife in a power tool workflow is a bit pretentious.

A marking knife does not need to be expensive, you can use an ordinary utility knife to get the job done, and a cheap single-bevel marking knife can be had for a few bucks. I bought mine from eBay for $9.62 American. Or you could buy this weeb shit for $2400.

For a moment I was like, “well yeah, most radio shows do pretty well without computer graphics” but then I remembered they made a TV miniseries.

Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park make heavy use of CGI. The liquid metal effects in T2, and any time you see an entire dinosaur that is standing up and moving around in Jurassic Park, are computer generated. They were just done very well.

And yet it’s pretty much all they use it for.

Mine is a cat toaster. It sits next to my desk and Izzy will sit on it sometimes. It’s got the amp in it, so it gets a little warm.

I think I can give a list of things to think about. I’m a mod over at !woodworking@lemmy.ca, I might start a thread over there to gather more if there’s interest. But here are some things I’ve noticed over the years of computering at a desk:

1. Avoid particle board. Particle board is almost synonymous with flat packed furniture like most computer desks are, but…it sags. I had an entire desk that bowed under the weight of a CRT monitor. The desk was on castering wheels, so the weight of the monitor wasn’t directly supported. Plus, on any surface that is touched a lot, the veneer will chip, peel, bubble, and then it looks and feels like crap. Plywood might be acceptable for internal framing but anywhere that hands frequent I would go with solid lumber.

2. Computer components are larger and more numerous than the manufacturers seem to think. I’ve never seen a computer desk that was designed with power strips let alone UPSes, subwoofers, or network gear. I’ve found so many marketing photos like this with a single 4:3 monitor, a nook for the PC tower that a relatively small mid-tower barely fits in; four books, an old kettle, and a Venus Fly Trap of the Year award. This desk, which looks like it was designed with 2004 era PCs in mind, is for sale right now in the space year 2025 for $3,078, discounted from $4,189. Meanwhile, a computer desk would end up looking like this Cluttered with crap, there’s multiple monitors, multiple computers, two sets of speakers, stuff on the floor, stuff on an upper shelf, more cables than AT&T.

3. Wires are a thing. I see so many ads for desks like this that look like they’re AI generated. They’ve always got an Apple computer on them, turned on even though there’s no evidence of even a power cable. Granted, wireless mice and keyboards are a thing, but not so much with the desk lamps, printers, computers, monitors and mismatched speakers. A lot of desks feature upper shelves or hutches, often marketed as somewhere to put a printer or speakers, I’ve NEVER seen one that offers any kind of cable routing or management so you get random dangly cables visible down the wall. A trend in modern PC cases is to widen the case to allow a compartment behind the motherboard tray for cable management, computer desks kind of need that.

4. Wires are bastards. It needs to not only make sense when assembled, but it needs to be maintainable. Sometimes you need to plug something into the back of the computer, or to unplug something. Maybe you need to pull the computer forward a bit to get to it, and then you hear a pop crackle louder than god because the speaker wire was the shortest and you just pulled it free. I had a goddamn video cable with a bigass ferrite on it. There needs to be provisions for cable retention so that, if you need to temporarily unplug the computer, the mouse cable doesn’t slide off the shelf back behind the desk where no mortal hand can reach.

5. The foot well is for feet. I’ve had to do it myself, put some big box like the tower itself or a subwoofer in the footwell. A lot of desks have this shelf at the back of the footwell? My current desk has one that the assembly instructions referred to as a “bookshelf.” Which, if you ever need to read those books, it’s a pain in the ass to get to them there.

6. A lot of manufacturers seem to approach computer desks as “office furniture.” As if every single computer user is going to sit in front of it bolt upright and cross ankled like a secretary in a pencil skirt typing memos like it’s 1974. For a lot of people, their computer desk is living room or bedroom furniture. It’s a recreational and/or social space. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a computer desk that tried to be cozy.

7. Don’t try to pretend a computer desk is some other piece of furniture. An executive pillar desk? I mean, okay. A cross between a pillar desk and a dining room cupboard, with the upper hutch? Well, maybe. An armoire? Why? There was a big trend of "It looks like an armoire, but if you swing open these doors and pull out the keyboard tray, it’s a computer desk! That doesn’t really give you much room to move your legs around wtihout banging into the lower shelves/printer. What do you do with your office chair when you close it up? Yeah, it is a pain that the floor isn’t quite level and it leans such that the left-hand door keeps trying to close on you. Of course they didn’t provide any means of latching it open. Yes it is only 40 inches wide, so there’s not a lot of space for accessories, documents, decorations, tools or toys. Yeah, being entirely enclosed means cable management is an even bigger bitch than normal. Oh this one has a work surface that folds out for more space. What are the odds that that’s going to get permanently cluttered and this thing is never going to get closed up, so you’ve got this permanently messy cabinet looking thing with doors that are constantly flapping around in the walkway? Nobody folds up their computer desks every time they log off. Stop trying to make computer desks look like shitty armoires and make them look like great computer desks.