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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Yeah just don’t go all in on any of those. Dip your toes in to see how long the interest lasts. In my experience, it usually lasts just about long enough to slow roll going all in on it and then it fades. So you don’t save any money, but you might get more time to enjoy it before it becomes another chore that must be avoided if possible. And even then, if you force yourself to do it, it can shift into a thing you enjoy but must stop doing as soon as a natural break occurs because there might be something else more enjoyable.


  • Yeah, when I made the switch, I checked a bunch of the games I played the most for steam deck compatibility and thought I had to give up on some of them, only to find that they were still fine because my desktop is much more powerful than the steam deck. Plus it has a keyboard; if a game requires a keyboard, it hurts the steam deck compatability score (how much depends on if it’s required for playing the game at all or just needed every now and then to enter some text).

    So treat “steam deck supported” as “works on linux” and “steam deck unsupported” as “maybe works on linux”.

    I think the better indicator of not supported at all on Linux is the “3rd party kernel anticheat” marker in the store, though I tend to avoid games with that anyways, so I can’t really say for sure.


  • Lots of good advice in here for the basics. Only one I’ll bother repeating is to get used to your clutch by slowly releasing it and getting the car moving without touching the throttle at all.

    Also never downshift into first. This is a bit of a soft rule since it can be done, but the speed you need to lose before you do is a lot more than any of the other gears. If it’s a 6 speed, this might even apply to 2nd gear to a degree. To figure out when it’s safe to downshift to first, redline it in first and check your speed. Never do it at or above that speed as a hard rule.

    For intermediate techniques:

    When shifting while moving, let off the gas a bit before pressing the clutch. The idea is to smoothly stop accelerating to reduce the jerk you’d normally get from going from accelerating, clutch (decellerating), back to accelerating once in the next gear. Your passengers will appreciate it if you can get this timing down, though if you’re on your own, it doesn’t matter as much since you can anticipate the changes in acceleration.

    On the opposite end of that spectrum, practice speed shifting once you’re comfortable with clutch timing and gear positions. It’s the same motions as a normal shift, just aiming to do it all as fast as possible. It’ll give you better acceleration when you need it (very noticeable if you compare one and the other when accelerating beside another car from a stop light).

    For stop and go traffic and traffic jams, instead of maintaining the same distance from the car ahead of you, try to figure out a constant speed you can maintain and let the cars ahead of you do the pull up (away from you) and then brake to a stop (while you slowly catch up to them). If you can find the right speed, you can stay in first gear instead of needing to get in gear, move up, then clutch. The “getting the car moving without throttle” skill from earlier can help here and sometimes you can go a while in a jam without touching the gas pedal. It’ll reduce the wear on your clutch and brakes if you can drive in a way that uses them less.

    And an advanced technique:

    Clutchless shifting. If there isn’t a lot of force on the gear, you can pop it into neutral without the clutch quite easily. And by force I mean if you aren’t accelerating or engine breaking. Getting into another gear is harder but also possible. The hard part is that you need to match the engine speed with the transmission speed for the gear you want to shift into. If they match, it’ll just slip in. But matching is easier said than done, since the car is decelerating and the engine also changes speed very quickly with no load. If the speeds are far from a match, it will feel like the gear just isn’t there. If they are kinda close, you’ll be able to find the gear but it will grind when you try to put it in all the way. If they match closely, it’ll just slip in as easily as it slipped out to neutral.

    Why would you want to know how to do this? Well, for one, it’s very satisfying to do properly. But I was very glad I could do it when my clutch died. I was able to drive for another week without a clutch because I was competent enough with clutchless shifting. Note that if you need to do this, you have to turn your motor off when you stop (unless you’re on a downward slope), put it in first and start it in first gear to get moving again (which feels awful and is awful for your starter and probably not great for the whole drivetrain, so get it serviced asap but this might at least save you from needing a tow).


  • Lemmy is only better than reddit in that it was designed to work around the fact that humans can be shitty, even if they were previously not shitty, so a platform that can spread authority around rather than consolidate it in the hands of a few will offer alternative options even if an admin or team of admins becomes shitty.

    It means that Lemmy has the potential to be more extreme in any direction as much as it has the potential to be less extreme in any direction. No one can dictate what all of Lemmy is but anyone can dictate what small pieces of it are.





  • If it’s maintenance they have to do regularly, there might even be a part of the pool tooled for it with arms for the floating block to sit on while they drive the lift on and off normally. Or a ramp with rollers where it gets launched like a boat and a winch to pull it back up the ramp to get out. That last one is my guess, since that whole setup could be portable as long as they had somewhere to anchor the ramp and winch.