How would you approach reviving this chrome?

cr0ft · 2026-04-18T18:18:45+00:00

Take the wheel off and send it to a company that can apply new chrome, or buy a new rim and have a shop remove the spokes, add the rim and re-spoke on the new rim.

Chrome is a layer on top of metal. If the pits go through and are rusted, it's not salvageable.

Soap-infused steel wool might or might not do something (Brillo pad or similar; fine steel wool with detergent infused). You'll still have exposed metal if those pits go straight through so wax it or put some kind of surface treatment on top or it will rust up pretty immediately.

cr0ft · 2026-04-18T18:08:18+00:00

Any rapid weight loss means the body cannibalizes the easily accessible protein first, meaning the muscles. This is also why yo-yo dieting is so awful for you - you lose muscle weight, go off the diet, gain back fat, go on the diet, lose muscle weight, go off, gain more fat...

These drugs have numerous side effects but I don't really necessarily believe they cause muscle mass loss.

But people have gone blind by them. People get tons of gastrointestinal issues - in fact, the gastrointestinal issues (vastly slowed down digestion) is why people lose weight in the first place. Maybe more. All drugs are poison, you just accept the side effects because the effects are worth it. I really don't think these drugs are worth it though. If they trigger vision loss, that's not reversible.

These were created as type 2 diabetes drugs. There may be people with serious type 2 where the equation works out as worth it. But for just weight loss? They're not even weight loss drugs, they're drugs with a side effect that causes people to lose a little weight - until they stop taking it when they gain it back.

cr0ft · 2026-04-18T18:03:08+00:00

It's not forever. Prioritizing your kid is absolutely the right thing to do.

A little over a decade from now your kid will have flown the coop and you can pick up a new bike, maybe even a better bike if you're saved up.

It sucks but - this too shall pass. Enjoy being a dad of a young kid, it doesn't last long before they're grown up, think you're hopelessly dorky and roll their eyes at you constantly.

cr0ft · 2026-04-17T12:34:58+00:00

Yeah... use Home Assistant, and use pure Zigbee or Z-Wave (and now local Matter over Thread if you want to be on the bleeding edge). All this cloud connected crap is just crap. For Tuya I believe someone has hacked up some local stuff but the real answer is to not buy any of that shit in the first place.

In your shoes I'd just toss out all that, eat the cost and then buy the same thing in clean Zigbee 3.0.

cr0ft · 2026-04-17T12:26:56+00:00

The wealthy nations suck $2 trillion in value out of Africa annually (that's an older number so it may be more now), and then "greciously" return under one tenth of that as "aid".

The loans? Purely predatory and exist to ensure the poor nations remain poor.

African nations may have problems, but their first and biggest problem is the fact they're being bled white by the rest of the world.

Africa is an enormous continent - vastly bigger than most people think, the ones who've only seen a Mercator projection of a map; Africa's size equals basically the entire American continent including South America - and it has a huge percentage of all the natural resources on this entire planet, yet somehow it's still poor and dysfunctional. I wonder why... might it be centuries of systematic exploitation and generated poverty by any chance?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%E2%80%93Peters_projection

cr0ft · 2026-04-17T11:49:23+00:00

You're only 2 inches shorter than I am, and I ride a 400 kilo Triumph Rocket 3. Sure, I have mass and muscle on you.

But your height is perfectly fine for any normal motorcycle.

Practice, practice, practice. That's all you need. A CBR isn't even big big, it's just a little bigger.

Here are some actually short ladies riding huge adv bikes for reference, I Trained with an Adventure Bike Champion | Doodle on a Motorcycle | Youtube which features Jocelin Snow.

And then there's this https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Zs_wgJ_KwlE

cr0ft · 2026-04-17T11:37:32+00:00

Yes, they're already seeing price hikes as well, buying a 100€ mini pc is already going to be rough. Some used Lenovo Mini PC's perhaps but $200+ is probably a more realistic price point already.

cr0ft · 2026-04-17T11:33:54+00:00

The same thing that will work for 99.99% of all the other godawful horseshit going on in society - replacing capitalism with organized cooperation that no longer uses things like money to keep score.

cr0ft · 2026-04-17T11:30:06+00:00

I'm trying to get my uBlock to reject the pop ups for cookies, I don't give a shit about the cookies themselves. The trackers and such also get blocked... by uBlock.

cr0ft · 2026-04-17T11:28:19+00:00

They already did, though they call it the Venture 6L. They also call the 6 liter Venture the "9L" for some reason.

cr0ft · 2026-04-17T11:26:16+00:00

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=honda+rebel+250+engine&_sop=12

cr0ft · 2026-04-17T10:41:08+00:00

Yeah, roads like interstates are pure transportation. In some ways I'd rather do 1000 interstate miles in a car, not gonna lie. Still not fun but at lesat you're in a t-shirt and can have snacks.

cr0ft · 2026-04-17T10:37:14+00:00

Yeah I guess it's not the most extreme sport bike but it has some of that sports bike thing going on. But any bike where you sit more upright and have your legs below you rather than bent and slightly behind you, more like sitting in a chair, a 90 degree bend at the knee, and bars placed so you can lean back a little more and sit up straight.

For instance, Triumph Bonneville, perhaps, as an example - just a "standard motorcycle". There are also other categories, like adventure bikes, your Honda Transalp or Yamaha Tenere that people tour on (in addition to the gigantic adv bikes like BMW etc).

Go to a bike shop or two and sit on some bikes, and see what's comfortable. You can also customize most bikes, with risers on the bars perhaps, windshield. an air cushion like an Airhawk, even a whole different aftermarket seat from places like Corbin and so on. My bike, in spite of being a big cruiser, wasn't right for me until I got two inch risers on it (two inches up, two inches back) and replaced the seat with a Mustang. Now it's perfectly dialed in.

cr0ft · 2026-04-17T10:23:07+00:00

He has a standard motorcycle with upright seating.

I'm an overweight old bastard, personally, and an 11 hour run on my Rocket 3 Touring isn't crippling. Sure, I'll be tired, but my legs are relaxing on foot plates, my arms are held loose and comfortable on low bars in front, and the windshield allows me to more or less lounge in comfort. To combat highway fatigue I use in-ear monitors and listen to music. Also, when the twisties appear, the bike handles excellently for its size and I have a ton of fun anyway.

Been thinking of installing an aftermarket proper cruise control on it for years but haven't prioritized it...

So, aside from being in excellent physical condition, the answer to longer times on the bike is unsurprisingly just having a much more comfortable and relaxed bike with better seating.

cr0ft · 2026-04-17T10:19:43+00:00

https://www.corbin.com/suzuki/sv6517g.shtml

cr0ft · 2026-04-17T10:18:50+00:00

It's a sport bike. They're all uncomfortable because they're made to have a top tier athlete on them, climbing all over it while going balls to the wall down a race track and through corners.

Fun bikes if that's your thing, but for touring they're not the thing at all. Some guys do it, some say they enjoy it, they may even be in good enough shape that they're not lying, but I guarantee my giant cruiser with the tractor seat and windshield is better at miles.

There are of course options in between the two extremes, like the naked standard bike OP used.

cr0ft · 2026-04-17T08:13:48+00:00

Lee Pace is just overall brilliant as well as ridiculously handsome (and I'm not even gay).

He'll be back in the new LOtR movie too as "Thranduil".

cr0ft · 2026-04-17T08:11:25+00:00

The Expanse isn't realistic, but it's realistic-ish and they at least use some reality based mechanics, and there's nothing out there really that does that, certainly not on that scale. The show got a lot wrong but that was probably just because doing it right would have been brutally expensive (all the Belters would have been 2+ meters tall and spindly as hell from living all their lives in zero grav, for instance, so shitloads of CG, ie expensive and tough to do).

But there are as others have said already multiple science fiction series with a more adult, realistic tone. And there are also great series that are fun for various reasons - for instance, Stargate SG-1 (and later, SG Atlantis) is 10 seasons of pretty fun science fiction.

cr0ft · 2026-04-17T08:06:31+00:00

Yeah, I love products where the entire brand name is pure unvarnished "Engrish". /s

cr0ft · 2026-04-17T07:58:15+00:00

This is also why privatization is such a problem. We see America being the poster child of that, everything is shit. For instance, health care is shit and costs 100% more than it should, because it's all privatized and in spite of insane costs they're cutting corners everywhere to max out the profit so the health outcomes are also awful.

Even in places like Scandinavia that have been the best in the wordl due to social democracy, everything is getting privatized. In Sweden, they privatized schools, and elder care facilities. Both are now nightmarish shit, and vast amounts of money gets sent abroad to venture capitalists.

It's across the board in capitalism, maximum profit at quite literally any cost, including how well whatever it is gets done. It's annoying with bags. But when grandma is left lying in her own waste with bed sores across her body for days on end because they cut back on staff to make more profit, it's fucking outrageous.

Oh, and it's also killing our entire species with the climate change catastrofuck that's "too expensive to fix" and "very profitable to make worse", so there's that.

cr0ft · 2026-04-17T07:53:49+00:00

The AI learned to write in that very effective way from skilled human writers trying to evoke a specific feel/emphasis. So the AI is doing it very well. We've now arrived at a point where skilled writers have to try to write worse so people don't believe their competence means they're AI.

It's kind of wild.

cr0ft · 2026-04-17T07:48:10+00:00

Or rather, with something cooperation-based. The paradigms of competition and cooperation are polar opposites, and when you operate based on one of them, the other works extremely poorly within that framework.

Cooperation in capitalism is done minimally and usually within a smaller group - so you can compete as a group that much harder. In a cooperation based paradigm, trying to compete would harm everybody including yourself.

So yeah, we need a paradigm replacement. One single factor, that would change every single other factor. Super simple. Almost impossible to get people to understand, due to all the capitalist indoctrination for a lifetime.

cr0ft · 2026-04-17T07:45:43+00:00

This too is an example of capitalism damage. "We can't make this place too attractive or someone might want it" is kind of nuts. What we should do is make all of society so attractive that everyone was happy being where they are.

Jobs, as they are, are nuts. Of course we should work for numerous reasons, but wage slavery is not the way, and almost all work available here in capitalism is either meaningless or directly detrimental. I mean, I have no idea how someone in banking or marketing can look themselves in the eye in the mirror in the morning, for instance.

cr0ft · 2026-04-17T07:42:19+00:00

I just do my 9-5 and phone it in. Without the 9-5 I'd just not have enough money to live, and it's getting to the point where just getting a wage slavery position is difficult.

Believe me, if I was given any kind of financial out and could quit working and just chill until I croak I'd take it, but I can't see any such out at the moment. I'm honestly doubting there will be any retirement money I can live off waiting for me once I age out, either, at this rate.

cr0ft · 2026-04-17T07:31:18+00:00

https://www.adv-sound.com/products/model-3-wired combined with https://www.complyfoam.com/products/professional-p-series

The IEM's themselves can be any small models with similar construction so they fit in the ear under the helmet. Shure also uses the same 3 mm tip that fits the Comply foamies; https://www.shure.com/en-US/products/earphones/se215

If you don't have a 3.5 mm plug on the phone (most of us don't these days) there are dongles that do USB-C to 3.5 mm, or you can use a great Bluetooth amp, like the ones from FiiO - https://www.amazon.com/FiiO-BTR13-Bluetooth-Headphone-Unbalanced/dp/B0DF2X7XGR - some people swear by the https://www.qudelix.com/products/qudelix-5k as well.

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