My father smoked for quite some years, but he started after I was born. This is irrelevant for the purposes of this conversation, but it gives me a chance to repeat yet again a story and a decision he made that I immensely respect him for.

Once he divorced my mom, nobody in his circle smoked except him and my grandfather. So as these things go he would frequently find himself outside, alone, sucking down yet another coffin nail. When we were at family gatherings I’d often go outside with him and chew on my toothpick, just so he wouldn’t be out there alone.

One day we were outside at my grandfather’s, missing some portion of the yearly Christmas party. Both of us out there in the dark, in the freezing cold, with snow falling all around us and disappearing outside the tiny cone of light from the front porch light. Not even grandpa wanted to be out there with us. We could just barely hear the revelry going on inside, but it was quiet enough outside that the snow hitting the ground was audible.

My father took a contemplative puff, about halfway through the length of his cigarette.

Out of the blue he said, “Why the fuck am I doing this?” This stuck with me, because he didn’t cuss around me much.

I looked at him. He looked at me. Then he threw that cigarette out into the snow and never smoked again.

Just like that.

It does, but in mildly corpo-speak:

I didn’t say you were. I was just mentioning that there are still a few stalwarts out there actually trying to do it right. Admittedly, probably not many.

Not my web site.

Our privacy policy is one paragraph long. We don’t share any information with anybody. And if we can at all help it, we don’t collect any identifying information on you whatsoever. In one case we can’t help it – If you actually buy something, you’re going to have to admit your name, contact information, and shipping location to us. Other than that, I literally could not give less of a flying fuck.

My analytics are interested in what users are doing in general, not what a particular merely pseudoanonymous individual is doing specifically.

We have a spam… ahem, email marketing list, also. I’m astounded at the proportion of users who deliberately check that check box that says, “Yes, please send me spam.” (It’s unchecked by default.) The month before last I didn’t have anything particularly compelling to market, so I didn’t spam anyone on our list.

I realize the way my particular business operates is a minority, but there it is. (Oh, so you have an Etsy shop or something and you’re pretending to be Mr. Big Time Businessperson, you say. Er, no. We did $5.4 million in sales last year, a significant portion of which was online.)

Whatever driver Windows hands you for your nVidia/AMD card is likely to be hilariously out of date. If the driver it gives you is the one with the bug that’s bugging you, you won’t have a choice.

Not only that, but a depressing plurality of people also still have gas fired dryers and water heaters. These are ducted as well because they obviously absolutely must vent to the outside.

I’m going to buck the trend here and propose that this is probably a component off of a hard drive. It’s very common to find that type of flat film cable linking the driver board(s) to various components or the spindle motor on those, and since they have to fit within a defined footprint for a 3.5"/2.5" drive body they often use tiddly little laptop-eque ZIF connectors and so forth. The “thermal pad” on the back is most likely a piece of double sided adhesive foam tape that was mounting it to whatever it originally went with.

The dingus it terminates in definitely looks like it ought to be a mic or a piezo speaker. There’s obviously no call for a microphone on a hard drive, but having a little speaker on an industrial/enterprise drive or its controller board definitely makes sense, for the purposes of screaming at the operator if the drive is in an error state. It was probably unplugged by the previous owner to make it shut up, and it’s likely that the drive is no longer in that computer because the reason it was screaming at them was because it had failed.

Yes, because in my experience the typical response to this topic every time it comes up is, “What filter?”

Just wait until we tell everyone you’re supposed to regularly clean the built up lint out of your dryer duct, as well.

Not only that, but given that heating up volumes of water is basically the metric around which energy units and calculations are all derived, it’s easy to determine just how much energy.

Assuming an inlet temperature of a fairly optimistic 60°F or 15.56°C, it takes 12,934,470.48 joules to heat one US gallon of water to 500°C. Or if you prefer, possibly because you’re an American used to reading your electricity bill, 3.59 kWh to heat that gallon. Just one.

The EPA estimates that just in the US alone, wastewater plants treat 34 billion, with a B, gallons of water per day. No need to get out your calculator, that’s 122,060,000,000 kWh or if you prefer, just under 11.5 times the existing average daily power production of the entire country (10,640,243 MWh, if you’re wondering).

So, uh. Yeah. Probably not feasible.

I’m with you on it being fascinating, but this also has the same drawback as the stock camera in my Qidi which is that the frame rate is ass. And mine actually manages as many as 6 or sometimes even 8 frames per second!

I imagine this is in no small part due to the video compression happening in the dinky SoC on the printer’s mainboard, and obviously it prioritizes timing the print head moves over everything else. When my printer is idle and preferably showing a largely black frame (i.e. the internal lighting is turned off) the framerate rockets into the 30’s. I’ve toyed with the idea of splitting the camera out onto a separate board since it’s only USB internally and can be unplugged and the wire rerouted, but thus far I haven’t cared enough to overcome my laziness in setting it up.

To be fair I also have a GoPro that’s usually not doing anything productive. If I really wanted to go whole hog I could adhere one of its little mounts in there somewhere and power it off one of the USB headers. I’m sure there’s enough clearance inside the case for it, and then we could print at 4K60.

I’m much more interested in whatever mechanical contrivance you’re printing parts for, there.

Because we came out on top at the end of WWII, but we were the main Allied nation whose country didn’t get blown to smithereens during the war due to being an ocean away. (Granted, neither was Australia but they were not and did not become a manufacturing powerhouse in the process.)

All of the European colonial powers lost a ton of their colonies either during or in the immediate aftermath of the second world war, especially the British empire. Australia is even included in that list, becoming independent in 1942. The rest looks like a who’s-who of former British colonies and protectorates, the most impactful and arguably the most famous being India in 1947. Also Jordan (1946), Myanmar/Burma (1948), Sri Lanka (1948), Israel (carved out of the British mandate of Palestine, also 1948), and many others in the intervening decades.

The Brits had to dedicate most of their military forces to fighting the war which left their various colonies undermanned. India’s independence in particular put into motion the expectation that all of these lands and protectorates could self-determine, and since Britain was A) broke, and B) imperialism was becoming progressively less socially acceptable in Europe, Britain let most of them go. Not least of which because they did not have the manpower to spend keeping those pesky natives down, nor did they have the money to spend paying anyone to do so for them.

America, meanwhile, built huge swathes of industrial capacity during the war which was all still there afterwards, owned significant amounts of debt from the various European powers from loans made and equipment provided before we entered the war fully, essentially owned Japan for a decade or two, and importantly did not suffer any damage to its own infrastructure, factories, or civilian populations due to being separated from both theaters of war by an entire ocean each.

TL;DR: Pretty much everyone involved in the war was left with a country made of rubble and ashes in varying degrees, except the US.

Fry is easily the oldest living human depicted in the series, at least if we consider age simply as the difference between that person’s date of birth and now. I believe the Professor is stated to be the biologically oldest person in the world at some point, but given that the show itself jokes that he is technically Fry’s junior I think in the spirit of things that shouldn’t count for much. Various aliens, “god,” and other entities may have the technical or biological capability live longer, but only if they’re able to survive the end of the universe and continue their existence into the next one… Twice.

I think who gets crowned “oldest” depends heavily on how age is defined in the context of a show where time travel is so frequent. Some additional rambling on that point follows, since I wrote my last comment on my phone in haste and using hazy half-remembered details about a series I haven’t watched for years.

Fry was born in August of 1974 and thus at the time of his first freezing at Applied Cryogenics he was 25. When first thawed in the year 3000 he is thus 1025 – at least chronologically albeit not biologically. Context clues in that season of the show (e.g. ComicCon 3010) indicate that the time machine incident takes place in the year 3010 in the original timeline, thus Fry is 1035 from the perspective of his birthdate when he steps into the machine. I had initially forgotten that the trio make two complete loops of the time span of the universe rather than one, also. Even if the trio did not age for any of that intervening time other than a few minutes here and there while they stopped the machine to search for the reverse time machine technology, they did witness the complete cycles of two universes in super-accelerated form through the windshield and also explicitly can’t return to whence they came. So from the perspective of Fry, Bender, and Farnsworth those years have irrevocably passed. Fry, Bender, and Farnsworth now have two entire universe lifespans between the present and their original birthdates, but Fry is already technically the oldest of those three before they even step into the machine.

So from the time of Fry’s birth to that moment when they return in the machine and crush their paradox duplicates, two universe lifespans plus 1035 years have passed. (I’ll leave calculating exactly how long one universe is to someone else, but the machine shows the end of the current universe to be the year “100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000.”) Nobody in the show is provably as far dislocated from their original birth/creation date as Fry, so claiming anyone else is would require some assumption or unsourceable claims.

For what it’s worth his Lars incarnation is biologically older than him by 19 years by the events at the end of Bender’s Big score, having spent an additional 12 years living his life in the past and then freezing and returning to the year 3000 (not 3007 which is when the ending takes place) and living 7 more years in the 3000’s timeline before meeting up with the crew during the plot of the movie. He is killed at the end due to being a time paradox clone at the apparent biological age of 59, but prime Fry outlived him by default. Lars died before having two universe lifespans added to his chronological age, also.

In terms of most time actually experienced, Bender is certainly a top contender. Possibly for this reason the Futurama wiki seems to think that he is the oldest character in the show. I think that’s pretty debatable, not least because all of the time paradox Benders are indistinguishable from one another. We also can’t prove how old the space god is, but he/it is clearly conscious and experiencing events, and has been around for a long time. For completeness, Bender is four years old when Fry meets him (manufactured in 2996) and thus 14 by the time of the time machine incident. But his head was previously buried outside of Roswell for ~1055 years, making his experienced lifetime at least 1069 years by that point. (I don’t believe the show specifies what year the crew left from/returned to bookending the events of Roswell That Ends Well. This could be plus another couple of years.) And as said above one of his incarnations – possibly the prime one, possibly not – from “way at the end” of Bender’s Big Score also went back to the year 2000 to tattoo the time code onto Fry’s butt and then apparently took the long way back to 3007 by simply waiting it out in the cave with all the other time paradox Benders. Bender also did the double universe loop with Fry and the Professor, so regardless of what his experienced lifetime is, he’s third in the top three for oldest beings since date of birth/construction, regardless. What is less clear is while he traveled backwards in time repeatedly using the time code in Bender’s Big Score to steal historical artifacts and returned to the show’s present by waiting in the cave, we don’t know how many times he did it. Each trip is easily thousands of years, and while at the end all of the Benders explode due to the time paradox effect except one, it’s only implied and not outright proven whether the prime Bender is the one who survived (i.e. the one who was ordering the others around and did not take all of the trips himself), whether the Bender who survived and the one who traveled back to 2000 to leave the tattoo are the same Bender, or indeed if the robot we think is Bender is actually Flexo pretending/believing he is Bender since that’s also left ambiguous. Either way, Bender’s experienced lifetime is clearly the longest of the Planet Express crew and probably anyone native to Earth, although on that point the Nibblonians may even have him beat.

That’s because as you have observed the Nibblonians are explicitly immortal in the sense that they do not die of old age, but I don’t think when they actually came to be is specified in the show. It’s possible but not demonstrated that they could have escaped the natural end of the universe by eating themselves, but where they go afterwards is never explained and whether or not the ones we see in the show are native to this universe or came from a different one is never defined. Any of them we meet could be thousands, millions, or billions of years old but we don’t have any specific evidence one way or the other.

TL;DR: Fry has the longest provable time span between his birth and the show’s present. Bender has the longest experienced lifetime in the context of us actually having been able to see it. Space god is probably equivalent to the current age of the universe but we’re not sure. Some random Nibblonians may have escaped the last universe and now live in ours, being an indeterminate and possibly very old age, but we can’t prove that either.

If you include his going around the long way in the professor’s time machine and completely looping the time span of the universe in the process, then yes, and he’s certainly the oldest organic entity. He is his natural age plus 1000 years plus two universal lifetimes. (Initially I said one universe lifetime. This is wrong, it was two.) The professor is technically younger than him by nine hundred years and some change, and Bender is established to be young enough that Hermes approved his QC check. Those two being the only others to take the time machine trip with him. Everyone else got left behind at the end of the first universe unless we see otherwise.

If it’s a double cylinder knob or handleset, i.e. keyed on both sides, you can indeed close the door with the mechanism in the locked position. This would obviously be impossible with a deadbolt.

Those are quite rare these days because they have the potential for the exact same failure mode as what has happened to OP. Typically you only find them in commercial settings, and I’ll bet you a nickel you’ll get flagged on your fire inspection if there is not another means of egress from the building. I don’t know where they’re located but I’ll further raise you a dime having the door arranged this way is illegal in their locale.

In a normal house you could just use another door. Unless he has a balcony and rappelling equipment (or a ground floor balcony), it’s unlikely OP has such a luxury.

I’d be concerned about some joker coming by and swiping the keys in the meantime, though.

To be fair, “domesticated” cats are as well and no doubt to the same degree. It’s just that due to their size they’re not in a position to do much to you.

I certainly get randomly attacked by my cats whenever they get a bee in their bonnet, or want something, or are bored, or because it’s Tuesday, etc. The rest of the time they’re chill.

Yes, but OnShape is only “free.” FreeCAD explicitly allows you to retain ownership of your own work, without requiring it to be percolated through someone else’s cloud servers.

I will go back to carving things by hand out of stone before I rely on cloud based design tools.

Indeed. Some of the seceding states had it written into their new constitutions. The post-hoc notion that this was not the case is laughably absurd.

I’ve always heard it called the “Lost Cause Of The South” by racist rednecks; they seem to be aware enough (or someone was, whoever it is they’re parroting) to attempt to distance it as much as possible from terminology that associates it with slavery because otherwise it looks even worse. Even though slavery is absolutely what it was all about.

FreeCAD all the way.

The commercial CAD packages are all subscription schemes at this point which are designed around the dual purpose of extracting as much money as possible from businesses and nickel-and-diming hobbyists to death. The megacorporations that own them are actively evil and doing business with them should be avoided at all times.

Blender is not a CAD tool. You can bully it into kinda-sorta doing something that resembles CAD work with plugins, but that’s not what it’s for.

Sketchup is about the same caliber as TinkerCAD and LibraCAD is 2D only.

That leaves FreeCAD.

There probably actually isn’t an alternative. Whatever piece of software you might otherwise use to encode or convert video is probably using ffmpeg behind the scenes anyway.