I saw a youtube pipe maker using a hot wire to burn holes in green branches for pipe stems. General theory being that the pith would burn easier than the sapwood, so the wire would follow the natural curve of the wood. Obviously only works on relatively small diameter branches, but the general idea of fire forming might be helpful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcAcLWA2HBs

Having the vise jaw flush with the bench is kind of niche. If I’m trying to rout a mortise in narrow stock, supporting the router on the bench/vise feels more stable than on the part itself. Probably get similar stability just setting the part flush with the bench, leave the jaw low, and support the router on part/bench, but if your vise jaw is always flush with the bench, then that’s a very easy, very stable support. Also for planing smaller stock, if the vise jaw sticks up relative to the benchtop, then it’s a little less clearance for the plane.

Speed of the high lead is definitely a thing, but it’s easier to work up speed nut solutions for smaller screws. There’s split nuts https://www.mcmaster.com/products/speed-nuts/split-nuts~/ where you can open the nut to slide down the shaft. Can split a nut/lead along the axis, then clamp on/off the shaft. Drill the threads out at an angle (eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXhXezK4cKU ) if you’re really ambitious. Those mods start putting you at the point where cheaping out on the shaft and DIYing a vise pushes the time, cost, and effort close to where you should just buy a vise or vise kit

I’ve done it for a leg vice. It’s definitely on the rattley side, and the jaw can move around a few millimeters when not loaded. Once you get some tension on it, it tends to stay in place, but if I want to clamp something in a way that the vice jaw is flush with the workbench top, it can take a couple of tries to set it just right. As a coarse, just get it done solution, it’s fine. No speed nut.

The screw itself is huge and seems like that should make it really strong, but I think the reality is that even a 1/2" screw is stronger than your puny human arms, the diameter of the scaffold screw means you get less mechanical advantage from the handle, and the high pitch of the thread further reduces you mechanical advantage.

I feel like ‘normal’ politicians are more beholden to old-guard oligarchs, because those are the ones that brought their parents and grandparents to power. The people who’ve been funding them through their whole, 50-year careers. Those oligarchs have generally learned to avoid the public eye, including politicians that attract public scrutiny.

Donald Trump doesn’t care about relationships, heritage, or established trust. He just wants money and flattery, right now, in great volume, and that makes him uniquely susceptible to new money tech bros.

Trump’s first term, when backlash from the 2016 campaign, Russian interference, and Cambridge Analytica forced Twitter & Facebook to start ‘fact checking;’ when republicans were on a tear about how ‘big tech’ was systematically censoring right-wing speech, they definitely had a ‘break up big tech’ agenda.

Now that Musk bought Twitter and showed us exactly what unfettered right wing propaganda can achieve, now that Zuckerberg has bent the knee and TikTok all but banned, I think all that anti-trust mumbo jumbo will be moving to a back burner.

Without an adblocker, I used to mute the system and put youtube in a background window. Do something else long enough for the video and all its ads to play, then go watch it. They wouldn’t play the ads on a second play through, and it would interrupt the cycle of constantly playing a new video.

I have something similar, but wifi. Never even tried to connect to it, because you just use the buttons to set temp & time.

I can imagine, though, that an app might have buttons for ‘eggs’, ‘yogurt’, ‘steak’, etc. Or maybe let you program temperature-time sequences. Or let you check how much time is left from the next room. Conveniences. Definitely no need for them to phone home, though, except maybe for an ad-driven ‘recipe of the week’ type thing.

If you’re going to have any non-linux clients, samba will be an order of magnitude easier. MacOS handles nfs pretty well, but Windows just wants SMB

We really need a code of etiquette for them, though. Trip to the store this morning, and they were down to 3 self-check stations from usual 10 with literally a dozen people in line. Including one couple with a cart full of a week’s groceries and one lady trying to win coupon roulette. Four other people cycled through the third scanner while those two piddled away the day.