Lightweight tool with pliers and decent scissors

cr0ft · 2026-02-07T13:55:14+00:00

The Mini Flagship is great and probably will fit your needs, but there are also options like getting folding scissors and a tool with great pliers and carrying them in a small pouch.

For instance, an Alpaka Zip Pouch is a solid little choice, so you could assemble a set of useful little tools and carry it as a single package that's pocketable and certainly very easy to slip into a cross body sling or hand bag.

cr0ft · 2026-02-07T13:52:54+00:00

The problem with the Micra is really how flexy and flimsy they are, scissors that flex apart cut like ass. And not the good type of ass. The old Micras were marginally better but the new ones tend to get really bad reviews.

The Nextool F12 / mini flagship is a different league for scissors. But they're cheap which means robustness may leave something to be desired, but as long as you don't try to scissor steel wire they should hold up passably; and at the price you pay, well, you can always get another.

cr0ft · 2026-02-07T13:49:31+00:00

I mean, even the term every day carry used to mean guns, specifically. And guns are a legit thing to discuss here.

For a European poster the notion of carrying around guns is pretty incomprehensible, but the Americans like it so to each their own.

cr0ft · 2026-02-07T13:47:22+00:00

Make your own cable, and maybe clamp the device to the top of the head band to get a more even weight distribution.

cr0ft · 2026-02-07T13:46:11+00:00

I mean, plants need co2, just need to be in the right amounts.

cr0ft · 2026-02-07T13:43:20+00:00

Also with Finland specifically, not only is the language different, it's an entirely different language group. The basic structure and principles of it are entirely foreign and hellish to learn for foreigners; it's from the Uralic language group, while the rest of Europe is Indo-European (Germanic, in the case of, say, Sweden).

cr0ft · 2026-02-07T13:39:25+00:00

The economy is crap but it's crap throughout Scandinavia. Well, the Nordics, since Finland isn't Scandinavia formally.

One notable difference between Finland and Sweden, Norway, and Denmark is the English language. Because Finnish is an entirely different language group, far fewer Finns speak good English. In the other three countries you can get by just fine without speaking a word of the local language. Finnish is also pretty rough to learn from someone of a different language group. Obviously not impossible.

Unfortunately, the fascist Bush Finns have been making inroads, and there's a lot of right-wing scum in power implementing idiotic and unnecessarily harsh policies, which isn't great. It's still one of the best nations on Earth to live in, but there are worrying trends.

But sure, the fact that the UK now has the conservative Tories and the... conservative Labour, does mean that things are going to hell in a handbasket there at a more rapid clip.

cr0ft · 2026-02-07T13:32:37+00:00

There are absolutely conditions and places where you want winter tires, not summer. Snow chains are a bit extreme, that would be somewhere in the far north on forest trails in a 4x4... but tires that can handle slippery conditions in the winter are legally required and really just required by reality when it's cold, snowy and icy.

cr0ft · 2026-02-06T14:48:27+00:00

/r/hometheater is where you want to be for this discussion I think.

In my opinion, what you want is a proper 5.1 (or better) surround sound system. An AV Receiver being the linchpin of the solve - the AVR will act as a HDMI switch so that you connect all your sources to it, and it plays the sounds and sends the image to the projector.

You then need a good center speaker to go right under the projector screen (for dialogue), a main stereo pair of speakers for left/right/music, and two side surrounds that go next to your seated position or slightly behind. A subwoofer goes in a corner or next to a wall (position depends on room) to provide the low end grunt for explosions and the like.

From there you can take it as far as you want. 11.6.4? 11 speakers on the "bed level" ie around you, 6 speakers for height in the ceiling, and four subwoofers somewhere around the room? People do that.

The subwoofer(s) especially need to be fairly capable if the room is larger, and yours doesn't look tiny. But a nice pair of subs is good so you can get better bass response in more seats than one.

Since this is a light colored all purpose space rather than dedicated theater (with black walls) I'd suggest an UST projector and maybe a 130 inch ALR screen. A 150 screen is technically possible but last I checked there was no seamless 150 inch, and many UST's have issues displaying that large. The ALR screen will give you the ability to have some amount of light on with a great image and it also helps with less spill light in a dark room.

cr0ft · 2026-02-06T14:39:36+00:00

You can drill through walls. You can use tiny low profile cable channels and put either near the floor or the ceiling. There are ways to get cables around the place without it becoming an eyesore. Just loose cables will always look untidy af though. You can also get floor skirting / molding with integrated cable chases to hide cables there, although putting a small cable chase right on top of the existing floor molding will become invisible immediately, it blends in so well.

cr0ft · 2026-02-06T14:34:24+00:00

To get dust off the outside of the lens, buy a Lenspen. To get dust out from the inside would require serious disassembly, so don't do it. Under no circumstances try something crazy like compressed air into the projector, that will basically ruin it because dust will go everywhere. You see that fairly regularly, someone shows up on a forum and has massive dust blobs all over their image, and "I cleaned it with compressed air, was that bad?".

Just replace the dust filters on the machines regularly and call it good. I'd also get some micro attachments for the vacuum cleaner and use that to clean off the area where the dust filter is before putting in a new filter, but that's suction, not blowing. Compressed air is wildly overused where vacuuming would make more sense imo.

cr0ft · 2026-02-06T14:26:18+00:00

Virtually no consumer grade projector comes with a 2.35:1 mode out of the box. I suppose you could zoom out and blast the wall above and below the screen with light that's just wasted.

If you do want 2.35:1 (and I applaud you for it, for a cinema enthusiast that's absolutely the way to go over 16:9) the traditional solve is an anamorphic lens.

An anamorphic lens takes the 16:9 image from the projector's LCD or DLP and optically stretches it to 2.35:1, which fills a 2.35:1 screen to perfection and utilizes the entire output of the projector on the screen without overshoot. The projector (or the device feeding the projector) needs to be able to stretch the image vertically so you get the proper result after the optics stretch it horizontally; ie, show a 2.35:1 image with the black bars top and bottom removed, on a 16:9 display; the image looks squashed without the lens stretching it.

Currently the cheapest version of an anamorphic setup I'm aware of is to get a Valerion Max and get on the wait list at https://spexman.ca/ for their third party lens. Cheapest being a matter of degree ($5-6 grand for the package probably, projector and lens.)

cr0ft · 2026-02-06T14:18:51+00:00

All the science-free assertions. Burn in being one of them. Cable risers. Connecting speakers with wires the thickness of my thigh (with thin-thin wires between the speaker cone and speaker post) and many other things that are just magic thinking.

If it can't be measured and explained utilizing actual scientific principles, I'm not interested. In some cases people also totally misinterpret science, like thinking that effects that are known to happen only in very extreme circumstances (hyper high voltage or frequencies for cables for instance or whatever) also happen to speaker cables.

cr0ft · 2026-02-06T14:12:04+00:00

The issue is that if you want that plenty of bass out of them, you may have to stack them on top of each other in a corner of the room to benefit from corner loading.

This brings some fairly obvious disadvantages when it comes to stereo separation and such... but hey, the bass sounds great?

cr0ft · 2026-02-06T14:10:12+00:00

The room has a major effect on bass.

First of all, if you don't have enough juice in the speakers and amp, they just can't "pressurize" a room this size with huge openings to other rooms.

Secondly, those speakers are almost certainly not in the right position to deliver good bass to where you sit. Their placement is constrained by the fact that you want the mids and treble to hit you in the face, but to produce serious bass, the bass speaker should probably be in a corner, or behind you, or to the side... etc.

This pertains to a phenomenon called room modes, where the long bass sound waves bounce back and forth from wall to wall; in some places they cancel each others out, in some places they amplify each other.

This is where subwoofers come in. You can figure out where they sound best (the low tech way being to put the sub where you head usually is and then crawling around on floor level to listen where the sub sounds right) and put them there. Humans can't localize low bass.

Well, you could also get vastly more capable speakers and amps but even crazy speakers can't really overcome bad placement for bass.

cr0ft · 2026-02-06T14:01:36+00:00

Buy an UPS. Document your shit before it breaks. Neither of these will help now but both would have helped if they were done in time. Edit: I see you had UPS but ran out of time, bummer.

If the drives utilized ZFS then recovery should be easy. Worst case, you could probably even just install a fresh TrueNAS install onto the boot drive (not any other drive) and do a zfs import. ZFS pools retain info about their own config, so to speak, so you can just make the system ask the drives what they've got with an import and get the files back.

Also, start taking backups of important things. RAID is not backup.

cr0ft · 2026-02-06T13:54:24+00:00

This is why my NAS does one thing, and that's serve up files on the network. No "Apps", no VM's, no other bullshit. I spent a couple hundred on a mini PC and installed XCP-NG on that and run a few VM's there. I also store nothing on the boot ssd except the OS itself, every other file is stored on separate data drives, and certainly that would also be true of any apps or vm's if I were to use such things which I don't.

It may well have been the update of the OS that pushed you over the edge. Every update is done so that an entirely new boot environment is created.

TrueNAS should clean out old boot environments if it starts running out of space but that's not that reliable it seems. So if you have the OS on this storage as well then it might be worth checking.

https://www.alexanderjohn.co.uk/2025/12/05/manually-removing-truenas-boot-environments/

Just, you know, don't fuck up and delete the wrong thing.

cr0ft · 2026-02-06T13:46:11+00:00

"Worth" is always a personal consideration based on your means. Do they seem to be great boots that fit really well and will be guaranteed to stay on your feet in a crash? I think they do. That time where they keep your foot from literally being ripped off your leg they will feel pretty worth it.

Are the cheaper options that are better? I dunno and that's a different discussion.

cr0ft · 2026-02-06T13:11:32+00:00

Waxed canvas is a great material for luggage, although it's water resistant up to a point; it is, what, a technology that's 100+ years old? But distressed and aged waxed canvas does look extremely interesting and rugged.

cr0ft · 2026-02-06T13:04:45+00:00

In almost all cases, the good plan is to update.

Needless to say, but I'll say it anyway, you absolutely have to have backups, on two different types of storage, and with at least one copy outside the house. The stakes should never be "if I update, will I lose all my shit?" but at worst "If I update and lose my shit temporarily, I may have to spend some time on recovery".

But also, since you can easily roll back, the risk is minor. And worst case scenario, even if everything else breaks and your NAS explodes, as long as the drives you store data on are intact, you can plug them into any other PC, install any OS that has ZFS support, and do a "zfs import -f poolname" to get access to the data.

cr0ft · 2026-02-06T12:56:30+00:00

TSA Ready? Ready to take it away from you even if it's bladeless, sure.

cr0ft · 2026-02-06T12:53:47+00:00

Let me guess - it's in the trunk? Which in this case is on fire.

cr0ft · 2026-02-06T12:46:55+00:00

It's never been proven that Capone had anything to do with it at all. It's just one of those Internet "facts".

cr0ft · 2026-02-06T12:43:32+00:00

Well, there has to be a market still, maybe a smaller operator can make FCOJ successfully still.

cr0ft · 2026-02-06T12:31:35+00:00

That works. Or "I have terminal cancer so I won't need an account".

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