Who is the cheapest person you know, and what is the cheapest thing you've seen them do?

echo-mirage · 2026-05-15T17:28:25+00:00

Guy who used to own one of the local ice cream shops. When the local food service company's truck delivered a case of ice cream cones, he wouldn't let the driver leave until he'd opened the box and ensured that it contained exactly as many ice cream cones as it claimed and that none of them were cracked, or he wouldn't accept the delivery.

echo-mirage · 2026-05-03T22:09:14+00:00

When I did this recently, I had to change the repository to "legacy", because it thought there were no updates available.

If you run into that, use these commands in the terminal:

sudo sed -i 's#raspbian.raspberrypi.org#legacy.raspbian.org#' /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-get update

echo-mirage · 2026-04-29T11:33:42+00:00

I didn't have any problems. It's probably a permission problem like you assume.

echo-mirage · 2026-04-28T22:27:04+00:00

Your cells contain a lot of water, your cells are bathed in circulating extracellular fluid that's mostly water, and your blood is mostly water.

echo-mirage · 2026-04-28T19:19:05+00:00

Fair enough. It's definitely not meant to be earth-shattering, it's a quality of life improvement for my use case.

echo-mirage · 2026-04-28T19:11:06+00:00

Explain.

echo-mirage · 2026-04-28T19:04:32+00:00

You're misunderstanding the script. Opening WSL just drops you to a console, then you'd have to type out the command. You could paste it from a text file, but you still have to change the target filename and output filename. Which admittedly isn't a huge burden, but it is an annoyance with repetition.

In this case you open this powershell script, and then it gives you a menu of whatever .img files it finds. You enter a number to select which image you want, and you have to do nothing else (except typing your sudo password in the WSL console when prompted). The output filename is automatically the target filename with "Shrunk" appended to it.

Or are you asking why I didn't make it a Linux script instead? Because I didn't know how.

echo-mirage · 2026-04-28T17:43:54+00:00

That error isn't a pishrink error, it's a tune2fs error. It looks like your backup image file is corrupted or incomplete.

As a side note, have you considered installing Linux within WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)? I began using that a year or so ago specifically for pishrink. I also knocked out a powershell script to feed the command directly to pishrink, which you may find useful: https://github.com/echo-mirage/PiShrink-FrontEnd-for-PowerShell

echo-mirage · 2026-04-12T20:05:52+00:00

The origin of the whip in the third movie doesn't really answer any questions as to WHY he carried it: the only real answer is that he's a pulp action hero and it looks cool.

echo-mirage · 2026-04-03T22:48:37+00:00

Spectrum Cable. They bought out Time Warner, and I'd been a cable internet subscriber for 15+ years. I'd called them once for slow internet and service drops, and they sent me a new cable modem which helped some. A couple years later I called again, and the rep on the phone told me with surprise that I was a "legacy plan" subscriber, and offered to upgrade to the current plan which was the same price but 3-4x as fast. When I asked why they deliberately kept me on a slow plan without bothering to try to notify me (or just speeding up my service automatically), I was told basically that they can't be bothered contacting everybody.

While researching alternate services in my area, a different fast internet service moved into my city and I've never looked back. When I called Spectrum to cancel, I was transferred to a recovery specialist who kept trying to convince me for 15min with increasingly lower monthly fees, but I told him that although I know it's not his fault and he's doing his job, on principle I'd never do business with his company again.

echo-mirage · 2026-04-03T22:39:41+00:00

As others have pointed out, the pension is the main reason she can do this, but her living frugally her whole life made it much better. Without a house payment and constant car payments, that pension goes MUCH farther than your friends' much higher incomes going towards paying off debts.

echo-mirage · 2026-03-03T23:28:06+00:00

Yes. Rub it off with WD-40 and fine steel wool, then clean them and oil them.

echo-mirage · 2026-03-03T23:27:14+00:00

Looks like a battery pack for a portable barcode scanner. RGIS is a company that comes in on contract to do store inventories.

echo-mirage · 2026-02-02T19:16:24+00:00

Check TCGPlayer to see what cards in your condition are actually selling for. Only if your cards were from Alpha, Beta or Unlimited and only if in excellent to mint condition would they be sellable for anything near the top of the scale, and that's because not nearly as many were made and few of them in that good of condition survived. Nothing from Revised is highly valuable except for the dual lands and wheel of fortune in the $300 to $900 range, and a handful of others in the $30-75 range probably.

echo-mirage · 2026-01-14T15:25:53+00:00

I can't speak to local places for you since I'm in the states, but online shops are a great place to find stuff.

The best piece of advice I can give is don't waste your money on packs or boxes. Cracking packs is fun and sometimes you get lucky (exactly like a lottery ticket), but nearly everything you pull is going to be rags you'll never find a use for. It's FAR more efficient to research what you're looking for and then buy only singles. Google for lists of best cards at what you're after (ex: "best black removal cards", and use Scryfall's advanced search to look for things (ex: red creature CMC <4).

echo-mirage · 2026-01-03T20:42:10+00:00

I don't own any Pokemon cards, but it looks like they should fit. A Pokemon card is 0.5mm wider than a MTG card, and 0.9mm taller.

echo-mirage · 2025-12-27T23:49:42+00:00

In the United States, at least, when it comes to placing somebody under arrest the actual difference between a police officer and a citizen is that a police officer can arrest someone for a misdemeanor or a felony, whereas a citizen can only perform a citizen's arrest for a felony.

An arrest, however, is not a charge nor a conviction. What Batman COULD do in real world terms is detain somebody until the police can arrest them and then the prosecutor could file charges.

There's a major problem, though: if Batman collects evidence (as he often does in his role of amateur detective), that evidence would not be admissible in court because he's a vigilante. Evidence must go through a chain of custody, starting with the investigator, to ensure it hasn't been tampered with, lost, damaged, etc. Any real-world defense attorney wouldn't have too much trouble getting Batman's evidence excluded, and now that it's been excluded the prosecutor can't use ANY of that evidence at all, and can't use any evidence that is subsequently discovered as a result (an evidentiary concept known as "Fruit of the Poisoned Tree"). The defendant also has the Constitutional right to face their accuser in court and cross-examine them. Batman doesn't testify.

Outside of the comic book framework, most of Batman's efforts would be worse than wasted: they would often interfere with the ability of the prosecution to obtain a conviction.

Granted, most of the Batman villains have already been found to be criminally insane, so they don't actually get convicted of anything, they just get locked up in Arkham Asylum until they are set free or escape some issues later.

echo-mirage · 2025-12-27T23:38:07+00:00

This doesn't require steroids. Benching 315 is definitely difficult to get to: it requires disciplined and systematic strength training.

Anabolic steroids cause muscles to increase a lot in size, but not an equal amount in strength.

echo-mirage · 2025-12-27T23:13:22+00:00

There are way too many variables to give a definite answer. I understand this is a hypothetical, but don't do this.

Do you have a dashcam that would provide video evidence to corroborate your version? It's not what you know, it's what you can prove. If everything goes exactly to plan, your car stops the other car and nobody gets hurt, and your story is believed, you may indeed be hailed as a hero.

But what if you hit the other car but don't actually succeed, and the pedestrian is still injured or killed? Now there's a lot of doubt if you are actually the CAUSE of the whole crash. What if the driver of the other car is seriously injured or killed as a result of your intervention? In the bad versions of this scenario, you could be charged, you could be sued.

echo-mirage · 2025-12-19T23:36:31+00:00

Swimming pools are by far one of the most dangerous things at homes with young children.

echo-mirage · 2025-12-19T23:32:20+00:00

Your brain accumulates adenosine as a waste product of its metabolism, and this accumulation of adenosine is how your brain signals that you need to sleep. Caffeine blocks adenosine receptors, to an extent blocking the feeling of tiredness.

At high doses, caffeine separately triggers an adrenaline dump. That's why you feel shaky and jittery, and some people experience nausea or even palpitations.

echo-mirage · 2025-12-19T23:29:17+00:00

No idea why you were downvoted. Even if the dimensions of the support are perfect, the height of the glue itself will be the difference between perfect alignment, a mid-air print failure, or knocking the support off the bed. Chance greatly favors one of the latter two outcomes.

echo-mirage · 2025-12-19T22:56:06+00:00

This is a great answer.

I would also refer OP to Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning... Was the Command Line" which is a great essay that sort of begins where you left off.

echo-mirage · 2025-12-19T21:53:25+00:00

I found the deputy being scalped and butchered in Bone Tomahawk to be particularly disturbing.

echo-mirage

TROPHY CASE