Apologies if following up on a dull post with another dull one is too much dull.

And I have about 2 lbs of both tucked away so I'm covered until I need 7lbs in a few days. (Got a couple ideas though.)

And then back to real work outs and softballing instead of grillmastering. (Grilling is great but like a dog, I love chasing ball.)

There's actually no bucket, but I thought about the song this morning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_Hole_in_My_Bucket

I went to get a suitcase from the garage since I have a trip tomorrow.

I noticed some trash in the garden so went to throw that away.

I was annoyed at the plants growing into the path so I got the shears.

After trimming the foliage, I went to sweep up, but the broom was broken; the head was loose and it just fell off.

I got a nail and hammered it in with a wrench, fixing the broom. (I have a hammer, but my wife has undiagnosed ADHD, so nothing ever stays where it is supposed to be, and I just improvise for my own sanity.)

Put everything away, and finally can start packing.

After a bit of Lemmy to recover after my adventures, of course. 😉

Hurt my shoulder playing softball and the physio suggested a bunch of exercises, increasing the weight by 1 pound a day. We're on day/pound 3 now. No idea what I'll use tomorrow but that's a whole different day's problem!

I’ve had two wisdom teeth removed as a teenager since they were growing horizontally. The two others were left there because they were pretty far in, removing them was riskier and they weren’t causing any trouble. Gum was tender lately and this morning I realized this is because a wisdom tooth just erupted.

Moral of the story: there’s no age for coming out.

It had served me well for the last 2 years. I accidentally hit a rock on the backswing and it broke into 3 pieces. It was probably weakened by exposure to the elements, aggressive sharpening, and being low quality to begin with. The new one is much much better

Now they won't be sticking to each other in odd configurations and rattling around in the drawer.

Pretty much like the title says. Please excuse the dirty stove. This is my A team. I've used them all at least once this week.

• #8 Wagner (lower right), still rocking the vintage seasoning I bought it with. It just needed a little chain mail to get some crusties off.

• #8 unsigned, single notch Lodge (Lower left). This is my number one guy. Perfectly flat, just the right texture, and the seasoning turned out absolutely perfect on it. So non-stick. I have a slide-y egg video of it somewhere. And it's just Crisco, nothing fancy.

• #10 unsigned Wagner (Center). The big guy, 11 3/4". My man for big tasks. Frying chicken tenders, cooking two steaks at once, searing a whole tenderloin. Seasoned with canola oil.

• #3 unsigned Wagner (Upper left). The only pan I have left that was seasoned with flaxseed oil. That was really big on the cast iron subreddit for a while, but this is the only pan I used it on that did not completely flake off. No idea why this one worked, but it's still in good shape so far. Perfect for skillet cookies, tiny cornbread, or just for melting a whole stick of butter quickly.

I also have a nice deep #5 Griswold in the backlog waiting for seasoning, and a couple of camping dutch ovens. Then, there's my enamel dutch ovens. One of which is my oval 7 qt Le Creuset which is my all-time favorite Christmas gift from my wife. But these guys are my work horses. My best pan boys. I tell them how good they are when I wash them. Tell them that they are good pan boys when I rub them down. After they are clean and dry, they get to spend the rest of the evening out on the stove for admiration before they go back in their drawer.

My fridge has been very loud for probably a month. I was pretty sure it was going to be the compressor, because Samsung fridges are lousy with compressor issues. The the type of sound was a loud, mechanical buzzing. After playing around with a frequency generator, it sounded about 120 Hz. That wasn't a diagnostic tool, I looked it up just now to try to convey the noise to you.

Anyway, after pulling the fridge out and getting my ears back there, it was clearly not the compressor. But it was coming from the bottom of the fridge. So, it pretty much had to be the blower in the freezer. The hardest part was getting the drawer out. I saw tutorials where they just lift out the plastic bins, and there was no way I could get mine out. Mine did not fit out when the drawer was pulled out. I checked the manual. It says they just lift out. The manual also had dimensions of the drawer when pulled out, and I found my drawer was short by 6 inches! The stupid telescopic rails were stuck! I gave it a really good yank, and the drawer pulled out the entire 21 inches. I have no idea how long we have not had full drawer access. Makes getting ice cubes out a lot easier.

So, got it pulled apart, found the blower. Tested that it was the noise. It was. And I looked for a replacement. The OEM blower assembly was $143! I was taken aback. I found a third party blower on Amazon for $25. Went with that. That came last night, and I installed it during lunch today. Took 45 minutes.

I have a neighbor with nearly the same fridge, that had nearly the same issue. Except it was the circulating blower in the upper fridge portion. His wife insisted they call Samsung to come out for the repair. It cost them $1000.

I've been using my running headphones with my newest phone for a while now. They are okay, but hurt my ears after a few hours. The most comfortable headphones I have are old Shure SRH440... which only have a wired connection.

I found a USB to 3.5mm audio adapter on AliExpress (apparently from BLUEKAKA):

https://a.aliexpress.com/_EvvyelY

I also needed a 3.5mm to 2.5mm audio cable, since the one from the headphones are a huge coiled affair designed to prevent kinks in the cable... great for recording in a studio but not very handy when walking the dog.

After hooking everything up it seems to work well. Yay!

Anyway, I was just carrying everything around loose until I realized that it was small enough to just strap onto the headphones. I used a hairband that my wife left lying around to attach the adapter.

It looks really janky, so I'll probably 3D print a nicer looking setup eventually.

By neighbors’ dad insists on mowing their lawn at least twice a week, especially when I’m trying to enjoy my hammock.

How can I sabotage their mowers so it looks like normal wear and tear so that he doesn’t mow the lawn more than once a week.

inb4: suburbs suck

ETA: How does it take you three hours to mow a quarter acre on a riding mower?

Feels good.

I know there are lots of personal finance apps out there, and some are cool. I'm happy with my spreadsheet. I feel more rewarded by it being a creation of my own (yes, credit to LibreOffice for making the software in the first place) tailored to what I need, a creation I can change to match changes in me and my needs and I change, than plugging and playing someone else's finance apps. Oh, I'm sure there is customizability and ability to set up workflows, but since I have something that works and like using it I don't feel like branching out to try something new. But others still might appreciate suggestions in the comments if you want to talk about your favorite personal finance sorting/planning/budgeting methods or software.

I went down to the hardware store, and found there were two sizes of tub lever covers, so I bought both sizes, intending to return the other unneeded one.

The lever cover screws were easy to remove, and fortunately, the brass linked rods and plug were easy to fish out.

It turned out that the part of the lever just behind the cover had cracked and broken.

I lined up the old linked rods on a flat surface, adjusted the new rods to the same length, gave the new plug a thin coat of silicone grease, and it went back in easily, with a little flexing to persuade the rods to go around the opening lip.

I screwed in the new cover, tested the plug and it holds back water great!

I returned the unneeded plug mechanism to the store for a refund.

I don't like people who smoke at bus stops or who litter

I live in a legal state, so the other day I enjoyed the luxury of buying a THC cartridge from my local dispensary, and began using it as one does. Things were A-OK for a couple days, but suddenly the cartridge stopped working. I did some troubleshooting, and the best I could tell was that it was just faulty, and that as luck would have it, that fault wouldn't appear until I had already used about a quarter of the product.

However, the dispensary has an excellent return policy on cartridges, and will refund it within 30 days if it stops working. They've told me about this policy dozens of times as I've bought cartridges from them in the past, but this would be the first time I would put that policy to the test.

I had kinda low expectations that they'd accept it for a full refund, since I already used about a quarter of it before it stopped working. I thought maybe they'd give me 3/4 of my money back, at best. And I'd have considered that to be a totally fair exchange, honestly. But instead, the guy behind the counter was super apologetic and went to the cabinet to get a brand new cartridge for me.

There was a slight price difference, since it was a different strain, so he said he'd have to ring it up to issue me a refund for the difference. I told him I didn't think that was necessary since, again, I had already used a considerable amount of the original cartridge. But he insisted on refunding me the difference, so I let him ring it up.

"Oh, and since today's Saturday, all our carts are 20% off, so that'll actually be even more of a refund," he says as he scans the barcode. I'm kind of blown away at this point because, and I don't think I can stress this point enough, I had already used a significant portion of the first cartridge to begin with.

He asked me if I had a rewards account with them, which I don't. He says they'd prefer to issue the refund as a store credit, but that's also totally fine that I don't have an account, anyway. The lengths this man is going to is astounding. Then he says "so our cash refund process is actually kind of annoying and I don't like doing it, would you be cool if instead of the $12 difference in cash, I just hook you up with a $15 battery or maybe 3 of the $5 pre-rolls or something?"

I tell him "my guy, I would've been happy with half of what you've offered me already, but uh... I'll take a battery, I guess!" So he gives me a brand new battery that I get to keep as a spare, a full and fresh cartridge of a strain that I'm honestly enjoying better than the first one, and I basically got my high for the last few days completely for free. I almost feel like I robbed the place, a little bit.

That's been about the "coolest" thing that's happened to me in quite a while, so I feel this is sufficiently dull. I hope the rest of your day is adequate.

Not screws I had in boxes, but screws I have recovered from other projects. I did need to purchase 3 1/4"x4" lag screws for the gate.

It got me thinking: I had the freedom to turn around any time I wanted. I felt the desire to turn around somewhere between the start and end of the street. But I ended up walking to an end of the street as marked by a street sign. It felt better, mentally, to stop at a preexisting stopping point/boundary than to do it somewhere where a point/boundary wasn't marked out. Human tendency towards order, I suppose (aside from those of us who choose chaos). Neat little quirk of human brains.

But couldn’t find anything I wanted to play.

So I went outside and pulled weeds in the garden.

A while ago I got myself an used business desktop to turn into a NAS. Put a couple memory sticks in it, a small SSD to run TrueNAS, filled it to the gills with HDD. Filled to the gills, in this case, means using all 3 of its drive bays and onboard SATA connectors with two 3.5" HGST 4TB drives and one 2.5" Seagate 4TB drive. The drives were all used, the HGST bought on a used server parts website (they now have 9 years of power on time), the Seagate through eBay (and reporting almost no usage time, which of course was false). This is all too high-stakes gambling for this group, so I spared you this story.

A couple weeks ago the Seagate small drive was no longer answering SMART diagnostics. And now it really started crapping out. So I thought I'd be less of a cheapskate and buy a brand new drive. Even spinning drives have gone up in price nowadays with the gestures broadly at everything going on. 2.5" maximum size means I can't really put a server-grade HDD in, so another "notebook" Seagate BarraCuda is what I got that fit my budget. 5TB this time. Seller seems legit, what I could understand from what smartmontools spat out, it seems kosher. Not like I know what else I could do to check the authenticity of the drive / make sure it's actually new.

So, conveyance test passed, short test passed, and overnight long SMART test passed too. It's now re-silvering the RAID.

It also came with an ink converter thing which I might need if I use ink bottles.

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