My favorite BG3 item is the bent wand of fireball. It allows you to cast Fireball, but only at melee range.

I once gave a player a ring that did something similar. It was a cursed ring of jumping. The player was able to jump 16 feet into the air, and/or 30 feet in distance… The curse was that the player was only able to jump 16 feet high/30 feet long.

Just need to hop over a small 5 foot wide pitfall trap? You’re taking a flying leap and slamming into the wall that is 10 feet behind it. Want to hop over a table during a tavern brawl? You’re slamming into the 12 foot ceiling of the tavern, hard enough for everyone to stop fighting and stare for a split second before resuming the brawl.

If you use it often, sure. If you don’t smoke and just occasionally need to light fires, get a butane conversion. It’s a replacement for the wick, which pops into the Zippo shell. It doesn’t evaporate over time since it’s sealed.

Yeah, Ryobi had a bad reputation for a long time, because they’re old (dark blue) tools were hot garbage. But when they were bought out by TTI (and they changed the color to the bright green) all the tools started getting made on the same production line as Milwaukee (also owned by TTI). The QA is a little looser on the Ryobi stuff, but it’s all sourced from the same place as the (much more expensive) Milwaukee tools that many people swear by. If I remember correctly, TTI also owns Ridgid.

It’s basically the Lexus/Toyota thing, where they’re both owned and manufactured by the same parent company, but the Lexus brand is much more expensive just because it’s marketed as luxury. You can get a Toyota for half the price of a Lexus, and find the same quality as a Lexus. And for the insanely cheap price and wide range of available tools, it’s hard to go wrong with Ryobi. The Ryobi may not stand up to the same level of abuse as other (more expensive) brands. But the average person isn’t a construction worker using and abusing their tools for 9 hours a day. The average person just needs to occasionally drill a hole in the wall, or cut the occasional piece of lumber. And for that, the Ryobi is the way to go. Hell, even if you’re a hobbyist in the garage, Ryobi will likely be fine for what you need.

Just avoid their larger power tools, like the vacuums and lawn mowers. From what I know, those have a range of issues that haven’t been worked out yet.

Also, it means you can easily repair/modify the hardware for whatever reason you might come up with.

The ironic part is that you’d need a second soldering iron to do that.

If you’re a musician or audio tech trying to get started, the Shure SM58 and SM57 are the first two mics you should grab. 58 for vocals, and 57 for anything that doesn’t need a screen (like an instrument or guitar amp.) Both have the exact same mic capsule, but the 58 has a larger filter that will make it a little warmer and less prone to popping on plosives.

Are there fancier mics out there that sound better, or are made for specific purposes? Yeah. But there’s diminishing returns on audio quality, you can’t use them for as many things, and more sensitive mics are also more fragile. For $100 each, you can get some mics that will be passed down to your grandchildren. If you’re trying to cover the widest possible range of uses, the 58 and 57 are your go-to mics.

Whenever you think of a stereotypical 🎤 microphone, you’re 100% thinking of a Shure SM58.

I use an Altoids tin for my first aid kid, for similar reasons. The damned things are basically indestructible as long as you’re not going out of your way to crush them. The one in my pocket right now is probably 5 or 6 years old. I prefer the smaller form factor, because I typically only pack for a few blisters or scrapes; Anything larger would be referred to the full first aid kit in my car.

The Kobo and Kindle are functionally identical in terms of hardware, except for a few things that are specific to Amazon. But Amazon has been increasingly hostile towards Calibre in recent years. It used to be supported almost natively, but it seems like each update from Amazon locks down something that used to be accessible, or breaks existing functionality.

For instance, you used to be able to edit collections directly in Calibre, but Amazon broke that because they want everyone to use their collections (which are only included on books purchased directly from amazon) instead. So for instance, if you uploaded the entire Harry Potter series, you used to be able to tag all of them with the series and they’d be added to a collection together. You can’t do that anymore, and have to add them manually one by one on the Kindle’s laggy touchscreen.

They have also started breaking included cover art, because the Kindle automatically polls Amazon to download art instead. And when it doesn’t find any, (because the book isn’t from Amazon,) it wipes the included art instead of just falling back to it. Luckily this has a fairly simple fix (just unplug your kindle, let it index and break the cover art, then plug it back in so Calibre can push the cover art back to the Kindle,) but that means you need to actually take the extra time to do that every time you upload something new.

The Send To Kindle email functionality has recently been broken to where every .epub file you email just gets sent to Documents instead of Books or Newsstand. So if you have Calibre set up to grab news every Sunday, or to send new books to your Kindle, they won’t actually land in the News or Books sections like they’re supposed to. The only way to fix that is to plug it in and upload them via USB. Additionally, they have the same issue with broken cover art. So you need to plug your Kindle in to update the cover art, even when emailing your books. Which kind of defeats the purpose of emailing them, because you’d most likely do that if you don’t want to plug your device in every time.

The kindle’s indexer also has some weird issues, where certain books will just crash it and new books will stop appearing entirely. And there’s no way to see which book is the issue. So if you uploaded a bunch of books to your kindle, you’ll have to play guess-and-check to see which one is the issue. This may not be exclusive to the Kindle, but I haven’t experienced the same issue on the Kobo.

Something something Dunning-Kruger Effect. Dumb people who know very little about a topic will tend to overestimate their knowledge about said topic. As you gain more knowledge about the topic, the more you realize you don’t know, and the less confident you are about it.

In extreme cases, it ends with the person having Imposter Syndrome. When a person is very knowledgeable and experienced in a certain topic, but believes they aren’t qualified enough to be considered an expert. They feel like an imposter who will inevitably get outed by someone more knowledgeable than they are. So they have a lot of anxiety about speaking on the topic, because they’re afraid it will result in them being outed as an imposter.

Depends on how busy the laundromat is. In an ideal world, yes you’re correct. But there are some days where you’re lucky to grab a single washer and dryer.

The time sink is honestly the biggest part. At least when you’re doing laundry at home, you can do other things while you wait on the laundry. At a laundromat, there’s not much to do except maybe bring an iPad or e-reader. Once you’re done folding your current load of laundry, you’re just kind of stuck waiting for the next load to be done.

It always feels a little bit like when you show up 2 hours early for your flight, but then there’s no line at security and you get to your terminal in like 5 minutes. There’s nothing to do except wait. At least at home, you could go hop on your computer and get some work done, get some other cleaning done, or boot up a game console.

Yeah, I love everything about my Kindle except for the fact that it’s tied to Amazon. Calibre goes a long way in bridging the gap, (I have a fairly large personal library that isn’t tied to Amazon), but it’s no replacement for native support. If you plan on using Calibre, you should seriously consider a Kobo.

You can tailor your news feed to different countries or continents. Though I’m not sure how well the other areas are reported on, since I only have experience with the US news side of things.

The nice part about Ground is that they take the event being reported on, then show the news sources and how they’re reporting on them.

For instance, let’s say a white cop shoots a black jogger. Ground will take the news sources for that event, and line them up on a left/right bias chart based on their historic reporting records. So you can see how the two sides (and the center) are reporting on the same story. For instance, AP (historically just left of center) will be very dry, and only report “police shoot black jogger”. Far right outlets will post something about a heroic officer protecting communities, being forced to shoot a fleeing black man. And far left outlets will post about white supremacist cops gunning down an innocent black man.

It’s because the training materials aren’t aimed at the typical Lemmy user who knows how to dual-boot Linux and built their own hackintosh for fun. It’s aimed at Jim in accounts receivable, who is 2 years away from retirement and hasn’t learned any new tech literacy skills in the entire 23 years he’s been with the company. It’s aimed at Pam in HR, who panics and says the internet is broken because she deleted her Chrome desktop shortcut for the fifth time this week. It’s aimed at Jill in accounts payable, who called IT to say her computer wasn’t working, (the power was out in the entire building, because a trash truck hit the power lines across the street.)

IT deals with a lot of BS, from users who don’t know anything about how computers or modern scams/hacks work. KnowBe4 is aimed that those users, because an organization’s security is only as impenetrable as its dumbest “oh hey I found a USB drive outside the front doors. I’m gonna plug it in to see what’s on it” users.

While I agree with the sentiment, return policies on receipts is a pet peeve of mine. On registers is fine. Even better if they also post it at the entrances. But if it’s only on the receipts, and you can’t read the policy until after you’ve made the purchase, then it’s a fundamental power imbalance between the consumer and supplier.

I’m an event planner. People won’t return my emails or phone calls about the most basic things. Oh, you want a full stage crew to be at your show? And you’re only telling me this the day before your event starts? Gee, it’s a good thing I’m good at my job, and already planned for your last minute request.

Because when I asked about your labor needs two months ago, a month ago, three weeks ago, two weeks ago, 10 days ago, 7 days ago, 5 days ago, 5 days ago, 5 days ago, 4 days ago, 4 days ago, 4 days ago, 3 days ago, and 2 days ago, you didn’t seem super enthusiastic about giving me an answer. But now it’s suddenly the most important thing in the world, and I’m expected to just pull an entire show crew out of my ass to have at your event. Believe it or not, those workers are people with their own lives, and they appreciate being told more than one day in advance if they’re going to be working.

We’re on the same side here. I want your event to go well. I don’t want to be bothered with off-hours phone calls because your event is a dumpster fire. So help me help you. My entire job is to help you get in the door, and make sure the (adequately staffed) crew has the right gear for the job. But I can’t do that if you won’t even tell me what type of event you’re planning, or what time it starts.

It’s really up to the individual organizations to fix. There’s not going to be some global “congrats, we pushed and update and now everything is fine” patch, because the crash is preventing a patch from being loaded. It requires manual intervention on every single affected machine. If it’s a large organization with a lean IT team, that could mean days or weeks until every single machine is actually fixed; They’ll be prioritizing the mission-critical systems, so they’ll triage. Start with the wide reaching systems, then the most important employees. The intern will just have to wait.

Just an FYI, Windows likely just moved your files from users\[username] to users\[username]\OneDrive instead. When OneDrive sets itself up, it basically grabs all of the relevant folders and moves them into a single “OneDrive” folder. Not a huge issue if you’re setting up the PC for the first time. But if you’ve been using the PC for a while, it’ll break everything because now all of your local files have moved and none of your systems are pointing at the right location anymore. For instance, your desktop is likely black because your image file got moved into that OneDrive folder.

Oh this is honestly a good one that I wouldn’t have thought of. Just obscure enough to be unknown, but still solid.