Watching a mutual ask for printer recs and receive a chorus of tired tech folk going "Just get a Brother, they're fine" and man
MAN
Like this is actually kinda fascinating honestly, Brother is now the best printer brand, the one that every Computer Person recommends, and is it because their printers are good? Their printers are fine, they print, whatever, no, it's because everybody else's printers have gotten Innovated out the wazoo, every innovation making them way worse, until it's gotten to the point where I wouldn't have one in the house even if it were free, and meanwhile Brother's have remained consistently Fine I Guess, which now makes them the best printer manufacturer simply by virtue of them opting out of the Who Can Get Crappiest Fastest race
Brother have gotten to where they are now, by NOT innovating
@ifixcoinops laser printers have never had those problems. You seem to have bought an ink-jet. I don't think brother makes them. Spend just a little more on a good laser and it will work for a decade or more.
@bluGill@ifixcoinops@codefolio Brother does make inkjets, which I would not (and did not, in this case) recommend. An all-in-one monochrome laser printer with no subscription service for $180 is worth getting if the budget allows for it.
If you're in the US and you've also been idly wondering why "I don't like to drive at night" has become such a common thing to say in the past few years, stand near to a modern LED streetlamp and block it with your hand. In about two thirds of a second, the whole road brightens up as your pupils open.
You're not just getting old; between over-bright streetlights, over-bright headlights of oncoming cars, over-bright instrument clusters, over-bright porch lighting, nobody can see in the dark anymore.
Just in the last decade we've made it much harder and more dangerous to drive at night. Oh, and we also gave up the stars.
Every time I get my calipers out to measure a thing I go "Agh, these calipers are a load of flimsy shite and the batteries run down even when I'm not using them, I should buy a better set," and then I never do, so fedi, please recommend me a good set of digital calipers that you've got firsthand experience with.
Difficulty level: I live among AMERICANS and am subject to their measuring nonsense so it has to give fractional inches as well as proper.
☑ Slides like its filled with sand even when its not.
☑ No fractional inches.
☑ Tape keeps the battery from falling out, but the battery still needs to be squeezed in every 5 min or so or else it re-zeros randomly.
... but it measures things so replacing it feels frivolous.
@ifixcoinops Don't buy from amazon. You never know when you will get a counterfeit. If you want counterfeit quality at a lower price buy from Shars - reviews say they are actually pretty good though I don't have any. Otherwise find an authorized dealer for a band name and pay the price.
@ifixcoinops if its broke you have to take it part. Sometimes the problem is obvious and so you fix it and put it back together and use it. If any step fails then it was scrap anyway.
In case y'all were tired of hearing about popular Fediverse people making bad decisions, just thought I'd let y'all know I bought a 1980's hybrid pinball/videogame tonight
Fedi, my internet router sucks, drops wifi every few minutes, recommend me a different one?
Barest requirements:
I need to be able to hit a button and cut off the littleun's MAC address.
I'm buying it once and then I'm done, I'm not signing up for anything. If that means buying an old pre-capitalism-collapse one off eBay then fine.
If I need to screw with it then I'm going to 192.168.1.1, I'm not installing any damn apps. On my current Netgear one I have to tell my phone to pretend to be a desktop before it lets me in and it sucks.
I don't wanna screw around with OpenWRT or custom firmware or whatevs, I do enough of that on every other bloody thing I own and I don't have time for another hobby.
Nice to have:
Have the "Turn off the kid's internet" button press itself at a certain time. My current router has a really crappy thing where you can choose times and days for the littleun to have internet or not, I don't want that - I only want the kid to have internet when I say she can have internet, not when the router says it's time for internet. So right now inside the parental controls menu the internet is blocked on all time slots, and when she says dad can I have Scratch time I go to 192.168.1.1 on my phone and flip the "Parental controls are ON" toggle, but my problem is I forget to turn the block back on so she's sneaking Scratch time early in the morning, so I want that button to press itself at night. I want "Internet off until ask Dad" functionality.
@ifixcoinops i'm running a synology router and it works. Each kids' devices have separate off times or I can hit a button. It also blocks a lot of ads for me.
So I downloaded a whole bunch of free or pay-what-you-want Game Boy games off itch.io for my Game Dad. They're all made with GB Studio (which is a free super-easy game-making program to make Game Boy games) and so far they're all pretty chill.
A highlight is Analog Age Rainy Day, which has you playing as a kid trying to survive a rainy day; catch is it's 1984 so there's no phones or game boy or anything so you've gotta find ways to amuse yourself.
A lovely benefit of using the Game Dad for Game Boy games is the ability to shift the palette so that it's red-on-black for playing in bed without giving me insomnia. It only works for Game Boy games though, not Game Boy Colour or Advance; I wish this were an option I could toggle in Retroarch for all my games.
I'm getting into the idea of writing my own Game Boy game and I think I want to make it about a tiny smol officeboy/retailboy who gets laid off and joins a moving company to make a bit of quick cash, and finds that he loves using his body and feeling those aches and becoming stronk. And like this is possible now, it's very do-able to make a game that isn't about saving the world or whatever, doesn't have to have mass appeal enough to justify burning a bunch of ROMs and moulding a bunch of cartridges, you can chuck it up on the internet as easily as we could copy a tape game in a boombox thirty years ago and if ten people fall in love with it then Hooray.