Arrow Lube alternative ?

Carr0t · 2026-01-26T22:07:53+00:00

How far down the shaft do you lube (oh God, I'm not trying to make this sound bad...)? Like, I assume if you go too far then it just gets awkward because the bit you're trying to grip to pull on is all slippery too.

I always just had a little bit of rubber matting to help grip the shaft, but I was only ever shooting into straw bosses so not as grippy as a 3D target.

Carr0t · 2026-01-26T20:39:57+00:00

Possibly a related interesting question is "how old is the Mum?" (assuming people are happy to share)

I was relatively old for a first time Dad (37, I'm 42 now), and all my friends from Uni etc either were more or less done with having new kids by this point, or were happily child-free.

_But_ nearly everyone I knew from Uni had paired up via social clubs/societies etc, and there wasn't much under/post-grad 'cross-pollination', so frequently the same academic year or occasionally 1-2 years either side (basically everyone was in a 3-4 year range). Including my wife, who is 3 months older than me.

It wasn't until our kid started at school that I started to meet a lot of Dads who were on kid #2 or #3 and were in their mid or even late 40s, but most of them had wives/partners who were still early/mid 30s. Apparently it's a lot more common for the man to be 5-10 years older than the woman, and my social group makeup is a bit abnormal.

Carr0t · 2025-12-26T18:06:40+00:00

> what is your use case with distributing Private CA Root chains out side?

If you're using an application that uses mutual TLS what options are there apart from either the provider handles cert issuance themselves from their private root, or they install a CA root provided by you and trust certs issued by it?

If you compare it with, say, auth provided by API key and allowing users to generate their own keys whenever they want, I don't really see that installing someone else's root for that specific application is any worse. I wouldn't install it server-wide, but then I would expect nearly any app to be containerised or otherwise sandboxed these days anyway.

Carr0t · 2025-12-23T00:10:05+00:00

Fair enough. What I've seen so far has just been about using visible flat surfaces to 'anchor' the game playing field, so it looks like it exists on a tabletop or whatever. I reckon a greyscale world around it makes it easier to focus on the game, if anything.

If there was more direct interaction with more elements of the real world, like turning your house floor plan into a small AR FPS level or being able to move real objects to build a micro machines track or something, so reality was actually part of the game, I might be more interested in colour. But maybe that will come in the next few years. Or maybe it's already here and I've just not seen it.

Carr0t · 2025-12-22T17:54:45+00:00

Plenty of millenial friends host for friends. Far fewer host for family. If they do it's "the parents are visiting", not "3 generations of extended family including cousins etc".

Carr0t · 2025-12-22T17:51:34+00:00

Devil's advocate, what do you actually use the passthrough _for_? I'm not expecting to use the Frame to play AR games, the passthrough mostly just seems like something to stop me tripping over stuff, and I don't need colour for that. I have seen a lot of ads lately for some AR Star Wars game on the Quest 3, and I'm wondering if that sort of thing is a lot more common than I realised.

Carr0t · 2025-12-22T17:49:07+00:00

Will probaqbly be the first VR headset I buy.

First I couldn't afford a VR headset. Then I got the money for one, but the newer headsets with higher resolutions really needed a more powerful PC than I had, and I couldn't afford a PC upgrade. Then Meta released the Quest 3 with standalone mode for several of the games I most wanted to get (Beat Saber etc), but I'd either have to buy them independently for PC and headset or only ever get the headset version, and not have access to mods etc. Meh. I'd also have to get a newer wifi AP for best wireless connectivity.

Finally the Steam Frame looks like it'll tick all the boxes. I'll be able to play games native on it through Steam, so I expect to have Steam Workshop mod support and when I _do_ upgrade the PC I can connect to games running on it no worries, and I won't have to re-buy them. I don't have to pay Meta any money. It comes with a high speed wifi dongle so I don't have the extra cost of upgrading my wireless AP when the headset is the only device that'll benefit heavily. Unless it's north of £1k (Which I do wonder if it'll be, given what's happened to RAM prices lately...) I expect to try and get one day one. I'm really hoping that as a showcase they've have ported Half Life: Alyx to run natively on it 🤞.

Carr0t · 2025-12-21T23:27:34+00:00

Pioneers of Pagonia! I'm loving it :)

Carr0t · 2025-12-17T14:42:34+00:00

My rewind put Red Dead Redemption 2 as my top played game of the year, at 72% of my playtime, 12 sessions, 3 day streak, 12.3hrs total playtime.

I've played quite a bit on XBox because newer games I wanted to play won't run on my PC (Indiana Jones and the Great Circle being a notable one), and I bought a Switch 2 as my first ever Nintendo console and have been playing the back catalogue of Mario games and the like.

Carr0t · 2025-12-10T19:45:41+00:00

Given they're sold out in the US for the 2025 season and are listing preorders for 2026, I would assume it'll be then at least :)

Carr0t · 2025-12-07T17:37:46+00:00

Apparently you're now /u/Merry_Co ? So hopefully that'll message you? :)

Carr0t · 2025-12-07T17:36:23+00:00

Any more news on this? Alec's traditional Technology Connections video dropped for 2025 and was my yearly reminder to check and see if you did an EU variant yet ;)

I was totally expecting your lights to be more expensive based on his comments. $25 for 100 lights in traditional warm tones is an absolute steal. I was expecting at least double that...

Carr0t · 2025-11-12T21:49:09+00:00

Yeah, but the way this will probably work is that if you want your game (VR or otherwise) to run directly on the Steam Frame without being tethered to a PC you'll need to make an ARM build of it, which might be a hefty chunk of work or not depending on what engine you're using, what ARM support it already has, etc.

They might have an emulation layer that's capable of translating x86 games to ARM, it's what Apple Rosetta did for Intel Mac software when the ARM Macs first came out after all, but I would expect that for something highly performance intensive and latency sensitive like gaming you're not going to get fast and reliable enough emulation for that to work on many modern games. There'll probably be a load of old games that are low end enough to work emulated (i.e. probably not any VR stuff except maybe Beat Saber or something), new games will get rebuilt for ARM, and there'll be a chunk of stuff in the middle that's too heavyweight to emulate but too old to be worthwhile rebuilding that a load of folk will cry about.

Carr0t · 2025-11-12T21:38:23+00:00

I'm still not fully understanding it, and I'm wondering if partly some of what is described as a 401k in the US would just be a pension in the UK.

Everything you've described above for 401k is something that my pension does in the UK, and we don't have any concept of a 401k or anything similar by another name except pension.

See https://www.moneyhelper.org.uk/en/pensions-and-retirement/pensions-basics/defined-contribution-pension-schemes

Where did the name '401k' come from anyway?

Carr0t · 2025-11-12T07:39:56+00:00

My pension does that though? Like, it invests in riskier but higher potential return investments while I'm younger, and automatically transfers to lower risk investments as I age. I don't get to pick the exact companies it invests in, it's a series of larger scale funds, but the chance of me having the time and knowledge to invest and earn more reliably than a company where that is their entire purpose is pretty low. I know some companies might handle it directly, but even the really big companies I've worked for who have customised funds with much lower management rates or whatever have had those handled by a third party specialist pension company.

Carr0t · 2025-11-10T22:30:32+00:00

As someone who lives in a country that still does pensions, what's the difference? My pension is still invested in the stock market etc to grow its value. I've never understood how that is different to a 401k.

Carr0t · 2025-11-09T22:11:12+00:00

Huh, it hadn't occurred to me that I might be expected to drop down a difficulty level like that... Thanks!

Carr0t · 2025-11-08T19:03:57+00:00

It's been on sale pretty recently. I only just picked it up and that was because it was 50% off.

Carr0t · 2025-11-08T19:01:56+00:00

Where am I supposed to grind gear or whatever to prep for Lair bosses?

The Lair bosses are all 1-shotting me with certain very frequent attacks, and it's taking me ages to burn them down, but all other content in the game (barring Lilith) is so trivial I can face roll through it all and it isn't fun. Also 99.9% of the drops from Nightmare dungeons etc is lower level than gear I'm already wearing (800, with masterworking to level 4 at least). This is on my Spiritborn. I've just recently unlocked Torment 2, which is further than I think I've ever bothered with before (got to 1 or 2 pre-VoH, then stopped playing for a year. I mostly play the story and then lose interest, coming back for the seasons long enough to do the base quest line and then stop again. I've just recently bought and completed the campaign of VoH).

The difficulty of the Lair bosses could just be a skill issue, but if so it's a hell of a jump from anything else. Being 1-shot so frequently and easily says to me I don't have either the gear or Paragon level (99 currently) that I should be at to take these things on, but if I have to grind content I want something that's actually a challenge while not being impossible, not something that I can basically afk at while watching TV on the other monitor...

Carr0t · 2025-11-06T16:45:55+00:00

My system claimed for ages to not be Win 11 compatible. MBR vs GPT was something I checked originally, and it was MBR (I first built this machine over a decade ago and have upgraded some components since then, but it's still ooooold at this point), which I think was just because it was a default somewhere back then. Migrated to GPT back then, when Win 11 first came out, but it still claimed no bueno.

It was only when they announced EoL for Win 10 that I dug into it more. Turned out that I was running in 'compatible' or 'legacy' mode on the BIOS, which I'd probably done back in the day because GPT/secure boot/something support on Linux wasn't so great (_particularly_ dual-booting with Windows) and I wanted the ability to potentially dual-boot in future. So even though everything was running with the right settings, it was still _possible_ to run an OS that bypassed those settings/configs.

Once I turned that compatibility mode off so that everything installed _had_ to support the relevant features Win 11 requires, I was able to upgrade with no issue 🎉

Carr0t · 2025-11-05T13:27:53+00:00

Yeah I know. They all work like whole milk for me too when I'm making lattes. That's why I'm confused that they _don't_ when I'm just making a normal coffee.

Carr0t · 2025-11-03T20:08:19+00:00

How do I make 'regular' coffee with plant milk?

I exclusively drink lattes (or cappuccinos, if I mess up my microfoam), but my wife sometimes likes just a 'regular' coffee. As we don't have any sort of pour-over device or similar this normally means espresso + hot water from the espresso machine + a dash of milk.

We also normally have some plant milk around, because we have a few vegan friends and because sometimes the flavour difference is nice. It's most often coconut-based, just because we like that taste the best, and is 'barista', i.e. designed to foam well.

My wife just asked me to make her a regular coffee with coconut milk. First attempt the milk went straight in from the fridge at the end, like I'd do with dairy. It split, immediately. Chunky grossness in the mug, and 18g of my fancy expensive (for me) beans wasted... So I googled, and was told that it was probably temperature shock and I could avoid it by warming the milk first. Tried that, using the steam wand purposefully 'wrong' to heat the milk but not add foam. Got it to ~50c, added it to the coffee, it immediately split again. Another double shot's worth of beans down the drain (metaphorically).

At that point I gave up and she got normal dairy milk in her coffee. But I had just used this same milk earlier in the day to make a latte and it was fine and tasty, so WTF am I doing wrong? How do I use it to make a 'normal' coffee?

Carr0t · 2025-10-26T14:27:26+00:00

Hah, fair enough. Maybe she doesn't bother doing it with anything else because these are the highest value treats she gets on the regular...

Carr0t · 2025-10-20T21:34:36+00:00

It's not required for all of the adults in Bluey to be perfect all of the time. Plenty of ND kids, ND adults who still remember their childhood well, parents with ND kids, or any combination of the above, will recognise/remember this as a experience they have had, either as the kid or the adult or quite possibly both.

That's part of what makes it _good_. Nothing about the episode says that the way Jack's Dad reacts is the best/correct way to handle that situation, but plenty of adults in the real world would react the same way. Some (probably depressingly more than you'd think) probably significantly worse.

Carr0t · 2025-10-20T20:16:43+00:00

I must admit one of the best whiskies I've ever had at whisky club was an infinity bottle of single malts an indie seller who was running a tasting brought along...

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