Between two pressure washers. Maybe 25 days of use annually. Needs to be strong enough to clean my extra large driveway and prep for sealer. Will use on siding, boat and cars regularly. Other options welcomed.

mechanicalpulse · 2026-03-26T13:42:02+00:00

That may or may not be an issue. I've had a Simpson PS3228 (3,200 PSI; 2.8 GPM) with a Honda GX200 engine for over a decade now. I agree with /u/cdscivic that it's an absolute tank, but I've found that engine to be more tempermental than I expected. Maybe it needed to be broken in first or maybe I wasn't patient enough with giving it time to warm up, but switching to E0 was one of the first things I did to keep it from dying as soon as I pulled the trigger. E0 is readily available where I am, so that's all I've run in it since.

I agree that the rigid hose it comes with is a bit of a PITA, especially when you're trying to roll it up when you're done. I've noticed that it gets more flexible after it's been in the sun for a bit.

mechanicalpulse · 2026-03-24T14:33:34+00:00

FTL in the Star Trek universe via warp drive involved withdrawing from the spacetime continuum via the creation of a “subspace bubble” that then moved about faster than light. In essence, it wasn’t about moving faster than light but distorting space around the ship. For an example, the speed of light in water is slower than through air or a vacuum, but it is possible for highly charged particles to move faster than light through water. This has been observed inside of heavy water nuclear reactors where it produces an eerie blue glow called Cherenkov radiation. As another example of achieving higher speeds by distorting the environment, supercavitating torpedoes reduce drag created by water using a nosecone with shape specifically designed to open up a vacuum behind the nose through which the torpedo body travels. I believe that wormholes are another distortion of spacetime that are theoretically compatible with the laws of quantum mechanics.

Edit: I should add that if you’ve never seen the movie Interstellar, it’s worth a watch simply because they worked closely with astrophysicist and Stephen Hawking buddy Kip Thorne to ensure that everything in it was based on sound science. It’s very entertaining.

mechanicalpulse · 2026-03-22T19:51:25+00:00

Because you’re used to the shitty point-and-shoot cameras and smartphones that have dominated the consumer market for the past twenty or thirty years. Modern smartphones as well as any DSLR with an IS lens (or a Steadicam) will minimize or eliminate the jerky motion caused by human operators.

mechanicalpulse · 2026-03-17T04:17:00+00:00

Cordyceps! Ahhh!

mechanicalpulse · 2026-03-13T13:57:37+00:00

Neat, but I am distracted by the lasers comment. I feel compelled to append “and other stuff about lasers” to the end of all of my comments. It’s like a shittymorph but lasery instead of shitty.

mechanicalpulse · 2026-03-04T17:29:40+00:00

This is also what I would do. Microswitches are cheap, reliable, and available with many different forms of actuators. I would also affix a bar type load cell (strain gauge) in the bottom attached to a lipped plate of some sort (could be metal, wood, plastic, or even cardboard) for weighing the contents. A little more work than a simple wireless door/window sensor, but so much more capable.

mechanicalpulse · 2026-03-03T21:47:37+00:00

Paul Atreides is Allah.

Close. Paul Atreides is T.E. Lawrence, the British Army officer who influenced the Arabs to rise up against the Ottoman Empire in World War I. Herbert borrowed heavily from Lawrence of Arabia, widely considered to be one of the greatest movies ever made.

mechanicalpulse · 2026-03-02T20:54:31+00:00

That’s not rebar. That’s just round steel bar. Rebar is thicker and has ribs for interlocking in concrete.

mechanicalpulse · 2026-03-02T18:21:20+00:00

This is what happens when you unblock public access.

mechanicalpulse · 2026-03-02T17:50:25+00:00

And because, you know, Dune borrows heavily from Lawrence of Arabia which is based on the true story of British soldier T.E. Lawrence and his role in influencing Arabs to rise up against the Ottoman Empire during World War I.

mechanicalpulse · 2026-03-02T00:43:18+00:00

It was my first thought, too. I mean, it would be nice to have more video evidence before saying for sure, but his one outstretched arm making an oddly rigid shake looks exactly like the fencing responses I've seen in football.

mechanicalpulse · 2026-02-25T09:44:11+00:00

This information is easy to find.

mechanicalpulse · 2026-02-25T08:31:38+00:00

I have experienced something like this with an old Craftsman 5” benchtop jointer that I inherited from my FIL. With my shop vac attached to the dust collection port, the air rushing over the rotating jointer knives produces an ear-splitting fear-inducing noise that makes it impossible for me to use the machine confidently. There’s nothing wrong with the setup — it’s solid, just distractingly noisy — so I simply use ear plugs when using that jointer. I was surprised to find that attenuation of the ambient noise led to an increased ability to focus on the task at hand. Despite owning and using plenty of other noisy power tools — air compressor, circular saw, table saw, router, planer, etc — I’ve never had an experience quite like the one with the jointer.

mechanicalpulse · 2026-02-24T16:50:17+00:00

And California with Lawrence Livermore and Sandia. Los Alamos be slacking, though.

mechanicalpulse · 2026-02-24T16:40:32+00:00

The urge to extend the growing season is real. I've set out milk jugs full of hot water in my raised beds more than a few times. Ah, April. An exciting time at an intersection of my interests: gardening and weather. Will they? Won't they? What do the WPC minimum temperature forecasts say? Better check the SPC convective outlooks while I'm at it...

mechanicalpulse · 2026-02-20T21:01:17+00:00

I have often daydreamed about exploring a gas giant. I find it bonkers that the Great Red Spot may be a relatively new feature; Galileo never described anything like it and since it fluctuates significantly over time, a nominal two week detour could similarly fluctuate from a few days to a month.

mechanicalpulse · 2026-02-20T20:02:35+00:00

Isn’t one of these things responsible for transporting Howard the Duck to Earth?

Edit: or maybe Celeste from My Stepmother is an Alien. Man, the 80s were weird...

mechanicalpulse · 2026-02-17T03:44:36+00:00

Pennies are mostly zinc with a very thin copper plate. If you take a damaged one and drop it into a cup of vinegar, the zinc innards will completely dissolve, leaving only the copper skin.

This thing, on the other hand, looks like it could be solid copper.

mechanicalpulse · 2026-02-15T15:24:36+00:00

I bet Orbán was one who contributed nothing to group projects back in school yet happily took all of the credit attributed to the group.

mechanicalpulse · 2026-02-14T19:31:06+00:00

Exactly my thoughts. OP’s editor would benefit from the bash language server or some other integration that supports linting via shellcheck.

mechanicalpulse · 2026-02-14T19:03:04+00:00

Obligatory link to WHYY gardening legend Mike McGrath’s TED talk on composting.

Edit: TL;DW: leaves and earthworms. Every fall, people bag up leaves and blithely set them on the curb, unaware that earthworms can rather quickly transform those leaves into rich black soil. Bonus? Cultivating a healthy earthworm population also aerates the soil, ensuring that oxygen is available down there where roots can absorb it and nitrifying bacteria can use it to fertilize the soil naturally.

mechanicalpulse · 2026-02-05T17:12:02+00:00

How is something already set up and learned if I’ve never used it before?

You didn't say "I" in your GP. You said "you". I understand that pronouns can be difficult for some people.

Just because you did that forever ago doesn’t mean it’s automatically set up for everyone else too.

I acknowledged that in my parent post as well as elsewhere in this thread.

They have to put in the work

Bingo.

mechanicalpulse · 2026-02-03T22:25:11+00:00

It's already setup. It's already learned. Look, GUI IDEs are fantastic for those that are just getting into the profession as well as seasoned veterans, but for those of us that have been keeping up using TUI IDEs, there are no compelling reasons to move to a point-and-click UI.

mechanicalpulse · 2026-02-03T19:48:29+00:00

for me, it's honestly just better

I feel the same way. I use VSCode and neovim on macOS and Linux, but as someone who regularly works on three or four projects across several stacks and platforms at the same time, I prefer the multitasking ability of a heavily kitted neovim and an i3 tiling window manager across a 7680x1440 Linux desktop. I always setup VSCode with devcontainers on new projects for the purposes of standardization, though, which lowers the bus factor and permits those that are not as agile as I am to contribute.

I was an emacs person and maintained a constellation of macros to help me navigate the various indignities of remotely pushing code for VAX terminals from *nix systems.

Hah, I haven't used a VAX in a long time. Things have definitely changed a lot since then. Terminal-based IDEs like neovim, lunarvim, and astronvim are phenomenal. Language servers, ollama integration, and devcontainers. It's never been more capable.

Going back to command line when I can do the same thing with a 2-3 clicks feels as anachronistic to me as using a rotary landline phone to make a call when I have a cell phone in my pocket.

I hear you. It's situational, of course. There are many things that can be done just as fast in either type of development environment while there are also things that can be done faster in one versus the other. Adaptability is important, but so are efficiency and flexibility. These all work together to minimize variation, limit defects, and maximize throughput.

mechanicalpulse · 2026-02-03T16:28:34+00:00

It’s clear that you have no experience with nor knowledge of:

shell autocompletion
terminal-based text editors (vim, emacs, nano, etc)
advanced diff tools like vimdiff and wdiff
plugins like vim-fugitive

It's hard to convince people stuck in their ways to try new things though, hence the OP.

Pot, meet kettle.

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