beastlykings

Mother in law fed me pink turkey.

She used an insta pot, loaded to the brim with turkey legs, but she set it on air fryer mode by accident. Mine was on top, so it looked fine, and she didn't notice the lower ones were raw until I'd already started eating.

Fun night. Didn't get sick 🤷‍♂️

I love my steam deck. It's underpowered for modern AAA games, even games a few years old make it sweaty. But dang it if it isn't efficient, and inexpensive.

You can't beat the performance in your backpack for $300.

People talk about the other handhelds, and granted I've not tried them. But while they may have fancier features and more performance, it's not THAT much more performance, you're still hampered. And to get that extra performance, you're draining your battery. All for at least 2 to 3 times the price.

No shade on anyone who loves their alternate handhelds. But it's just not worth it to me personally. I'll stick with my steam deck until version 2, whenever it's ready, no rush. Because I know it'll have performance and efficiency. Until then, I'm quite pleased 🤷‍♂️

I haven't sewn a single stitch since haha.

Ok that's a lie, I spent an afternoon on one project, then got busy and haven't pulled it back out 🤷‍♂️

I still have high hopes, just not enough time in life, or motivation. Besides distractions from other hobbies.

It's on my list though!

Lol yep you're right, I see that now 🤦‍♂️

Glad I could help!

I've got a spare pinecil, new in box, I can send it to you for whatever I paid plus shipping to you, if you're interested.

Thanks for the tips and encouragement, I'm gonna give it a shot!

Howdy! Apologies for the delay, been a busy week and I'm VERY good at procrastinating lol.

That's great! A desire to repair stuff is really all you need. Literally everything else you can just learn along the way.

Fun fact about soldering, you've almost certainly used flux before. Most solder these days is rosin-core, which means it has flux in the middle. It's aggressive flux so you don't want to leave it on the parts when your done, scrub it off with an old toothbrush an some isopropyl alcohol.

As for the iron? Which one do you have exactly? The iron is the place where most people go wrong, a bad iron will make your life very hard. But cheap irons can be good, it just depends. I HIGHLY recommend the PINECIL, it's cheap but better than many irons 4 times it's price. Load it up with the latest release of IronOS and you've got an iron worth its weight in gold.

As for learning the electrical side of things, I'm afraid I can't offer much in the way of training or guides to figure it out. You just kind of gotta.. play with stuff. Do some studying, sure, watch some videos, get a handle on basic concepts.

But honestly? Go to your local recycler, and grab some free broken stuff. You can't hurt it more. Maybe you can fix it? If not, maybe you just learn how it works by taking it apart. Use broken circuit boards to practice soldering, remove and replace components , get good at controlling where the solder goes, etc. Watch some videos on it, but hands on practice is what you need.

I'll throw some general info at you. "the difference between wattage, voltage, current and amperage". You can think of electricity kind of like a water pipe. Voltage is the pressure of the water, how hard it's being pushed. Current, also know as amperage, is the flow of water, how fast it's moving through the pipe. Now that sounds like pressure but it's different, related, but different. We'll come back to that. Finally is resistance, which is like squeezing the sides of a rubber hose, you're making it harder for the water to get through. With water, squeezing the pipe creates some heat at the point where you squeezed, but hardly any at all. But with electricity, resistance creates heat. Everything has a resistance, usually it's very small, but always present, and frequently becomes an issue you need to consider. There's also inductance and capacitance, even reactance, but that's getting too deep for this write-up.

Back to Wattage. Wattage is just the combination voltage and current. It is the total power delivered. You calculate it by multiplying voltage and current. The cool part is, you can trade one for the other, and as long as your circuit or device is designed to handle it, the result is the same. The same amount of power is delivered. You can have a small pipe, with very high pressure, blasting water out the end in a stream that shoots tens of feet, but if you tried to fill a bucket it might take 1 minute to fill 1 gallon. But you could also have a big 2 inch pipe, with water barely trickling out of it, and it also takes 1 minute to fill 1 gallon. In both cases the "wattage" was the same, 1 gallon per minute of water.

If you think too hard about the water analogy it starts to break down, at least for me. The problem is that current isn't really pushed along like water is, it's moreso... drawn, by the device using it. It's complicated, sorry.

Let's switch to real units instead. Say you've got a device that needs 1000 watts to run, it can accept any voltage, but the wires you have can only carry 10 amps before they get too hot and melt, because all wires have an internal resistance that limits them. To find the lowest voltage we can use, we just divide the wattage by the current. 1000 divided by 10 is 100. So if we provide 100 volts, the device will draw 10 amps of current, and the total power used will be 1000 watts.

If we want a safety margin, we just increase the voltage to 120. 1000 divided by 120 is 8.33. The wires will only have to carry 8.33 amps to get the same 1000 watts of power at the other side.

This is how the electrical grid works. From some quick googling, the overhead powerlines on a residential street can carry around 1000 amps of current. But, how can that be? That power line feeds hundreds of houses, and each house has 100 or 200 amp service, so that's easily thousands or tens of thousands of amps! The lines would melt!

Well, again some quick googling shows that the overhead lines are anywhere from 12 to 34 thousand volts. Your house only uses 240/120volts, here in the USA. The voltage is lowered through the use of transformers(how they work is out of the scope here) from 34,000 to 240 volts.

So let's say you're using your houses full 200 amps of service all at once. At 240 volts, that's 48,000 watts! 48,000 divided by 34,000 is only 1.4 amps. The actual load your house is putting on the power lines is only 1.4 amps. Barely anything. If every house was using the same 200 amps all at once, and the overhead lines can carry 1000 amps, it could support 714 houses. But of course not everyone is doing that, so there's some overprovisioning going on, at least I think there is, don't quote me haha.

Anywho, I think that's about enough for now. Questions?

I don't disagree, but it's not the issue being discussed? 🤷‍♂️

That's a fair point, it's also not the issue at hand 🤷‍♂️

Never went to work in a snowstorm? Or heavy rain?

I'm not OP, but my wife and I share locations, it's endlessly convenient for coordinating. Never abused.

Been sharing with select friends and family for years now, zero issues. And if we did have an issue? I'm turning it off for you 🤷‍♂️ pretty simple. Frequently extremely convenient.

A friend of a friend of mine is sharing with a friend of theirs. And it's a crap show like you said, coming over, inviting themselves to events, why were you there, etc. Everything you said. And it's still a problem, to the point where they leave their phone at home if they are doing anything sensitive, because they are afraid of hurting the person's feelings by turning it off 🙄

I think the key is having a backbone, and also not having crap friends 🤷‍♂️

Stargate Universe. Still hurts.

It was such a good show, and such a huge cliffhanger, and it hurt so much.... That for awhile it literally stopped me from watching any show that wasn't already concluded with a guaranteed ending.

Heck, my friends tried to get me to watch Firefly for YEARS, and I was like heck no. They killed it before its time.

These days I'm better. Watched Firefly, it was awesome, and worth it, but belongs here too. At least it got a movie to wrap it up.

Funny enough, they just cancelled another show I like, Resident Alien, and the posts are right next to each other: