As someone who’s grown up in the Midwest, Menards used to be just a hardware store/lumber yard but in the last 15-20 years really has branched out to more than just a hardware store. Hence the home goods, pet supplies, clothing, groceries, appliances, etc in addition to the hardware store/lumber yard bit. In some ways it’s a lot more like Fleet Farm than it is like Home Depot, though Menard’s doesn’t have the farming supplies and tractor parts and stuff like that which can be found at a Fleet Farm.

Since they made this change, the newer and remodeled stores are the ones with the multiple floors since they need all the floor space. But I remember some of the original and smaller stores were also multiple floors (electrical was typically upstairs), but those might be all gone by now. The one we went to when I was a kid wouldn’t be anyway close to being ADA compliant today. That store moved locations and the old building is long gone now.

As someone who also likes VFDs, I’ve fully expected that they’d be extinct in new products by now thanks to cheap LCDs and OLED. But I find it awesome that they’re still hanging in there.

That was revised in slightly newer cars, where the vacuum lines from the engine were required to hold the headlights closed. So when the mechanism inevitably failed, you had permanently deployed headlights until/if it was repaired.

It’s also just weird.

Along the same lines,

slackware.com today:

http://www.slackware.com/

slackware.com in 2001:

http://web.archive.org/web/20010404232132/http://www.slackware.com/

I have a Jansport that’s about that old from the college days. It’s held up pretty well I must say. No idea about newer ones.

When I was in college, I would have thought it crazy to be using a backpack older than I was.

You’re not getting anymore security patches, but as long as you keep your browser up to date and generally be careful about what you download and run (as you should already be doing) you’ll likely be just fine.

I’d estimate sometime around 2029 or so the major browsers as well as security software will start dropping support for Windows 10 and at that point you may need to start thinking about moving to something else if you haven’t already done so.

Essentially, no. If you don’t care about the cost, maybe with a MSDN subscription.

The main thing is to find a good external speaker though that doesn’t auto-sleep in the middle of one’s show…

That’s a thing now? It’s been a while since I’ve shopped for speakers, but other than those Google/Alexa jobs they seemed to be about as dumb as rocks. Which is exactly they way I want them.

The video player in Winamp is also completely non-functional in Wine the last time I tried it, as it relies on DirectShow in Windows which has very iffy Wine support. That may also be why it’s marked as silver.

It’s too bad as I really liked using Winamp as a video player in Windows, despite it’s quirks.

It’s either that or the baseboard heater right behind the TV stand.

DDG has also really gone downhill for me. It’s still noticeably better than Google, but DDG nows does a lot of the same shit that originally made me give up on Google years ago. I’m assuming a big part of this is because DDG heavily sources their results from Bing, and while Bing does manage to be better than Google, it’s not much better.

I really need to put some effort into trying out a few more search engines and seeing if they are any better. Last time I looked, many of them were also pulling results from Bing so they all had similar issues.

A lot of that sort of armor is more designed to deflect hits off of it. If someone can get a solid hit in, it’s possible to cut through it.

Which leads to another pet peeve of mine, which is armor that’s clearly designed in a way that it wouldn’t be good at deflecting hits. Particularly anything for women that has cups for the breasts.

It’s just typical Disney. Take a popular franchise, and then milk it for everything its worth. To Disney it’s not “bad” if it’s bringing in more money than it cost to make it. Sure, some of it maybe didn’t make as much money as they would have liked, but I don’t believe Disney has actually lost money on any of it (ignoring the Hollywood accounting tricks). So expect Disney to just keep cranking Stars Wars stuff out until everyone is thoroughly bored with it.

Other than hoarding up the houses, everything is pretty general Monopoly strategy I figured out a long time ago. Basically try to get a monopoly ASAP and then develop it ASAP. I’ve found that strategy to be good, but it depends a lot on luck. Sometimes despite everything you try, the only monopoly you can get are those horrid green properties and you’re pretty much doomed.

That’s assuming if Biden was to issue such an order as things stand right now.

If Biden really wanted to abuse his newfound powers of immunity, his very first official act would be making sure the supreme court won’t be standing in his way for any subsequent official acts.

Right. If you were to attempt something like this, you’d be better off with something like a chunk of granite than plutonium.

What they are doing is comparing your answer and seeing if it is consistent with how it has been answered previously. They realize that not everyone is going to give the exact same answer, so as long as you answer it in a way that enough other people have answered it, it should let you in.

I’ll usually go with the minimum number of clicks that I think will get me through, since I’m lazy and it’ll also at times slow down how fast you can click which is annoying.

I’ll also answer them wrong if I think it’s a mistake that enough other people will make. “Yes… that RV over there is a bus…”

My favorite are some of the work systems that I need to access, but only infrequently, yet still have ridiculous password expiration rules. Nearly every time I log in, before I can access the system I have to change my password because of course it’s expired again. So I change the password, write it down because I’ll never remember it months from now when I need to use that password exactly once to login and change my password yet again.

aren’t you still limited by ambient air temp because the hot side of the Peltier needs to be cooled by air anyway?

You can certainly get subambient. Put some electrical current through a Peltier and one side gets cold, and the other side gets hot. Use the cold side to cool your components, and get the heat away from the hot side, and you can make it work.

It can be a bit tricky. The hot side is right next to the cold side and it gets really hot, so if you can’t get the heat away it’ll leak right back over. Peltiers use a lot of power so you need a beefy power supply, and that’ll be another source of heat. Assuming you can figure that all out, you also have to be careful that the cold side doesn’t get too cold or you get condensation. Electrical components tend to not like moisture very much.

I remember people experimented around with it back in early-mid 2000’s. General consensus nowadays seems to be is that it’s not terribly effective or practical and not worth the trouble.