That’s exactly why I preferred cash when I was in my 20s, but there’s a catch. Completely avoiding the credit system isn’t good for longer term finance either. In the US at least, no credit can be worse than bad credit. This makes it hard to escape the poverty trap even if you get finances are in order.

Obglatory not OP, but… When I was younger and pretty broke I preferred paying cash. It was very easy to keep track of my spending rate and there was no risk of getting declined.

This whole reply was top shelf!

I am not sure that I completely understand your premise. Products are generally available during a depression. The best financial course of action today is to save money… unless the dollar becomes devalued too, which will make imports more expensive.

In terms of finances, doing things to lowering your fixed monthly bills is always a good idea - looming depression or otherwise. Since you’re in Texas and you’re all engineers, perhaps look into solar and/or battery storage for electricity? Do the math first obviously. A small(er) garden can help save some $$ but you have to be careful how much you spend on it.

If you’re coming from the perspective of wanting to provide value to your family, simply helping out around the house (cooking, cleaning, etc) and taking on projects you’ve all been putting off will probably go a long way. Your labor might not be cheaper than a builder’s now, but… Doing home repair/improvements, landscaping, building an out-building, building some outdoor shade, etc could be really appreciated.

If you’re looking to earn some $$, farming seems fairly depression proof, but should a depression hit people won’t be buying cash crops. Relative to labor input farming will likely not be very lucrative. Starting a side hustle/business might be a better option. It seems like the demand for repairing basically everything would go up. People will also be looking for cheap local distractions.

The YOLO option is to buy a ton of imports from a country you expect will have their currency strengthen relative to the dollar and then sell those items once the cost of them goes up, but this sounds super risky.

It’s good to hear that you have equipment already. If the wooded areas of your property have been that way for a while, odds are the soil in that area is pretty good. Granted, clearing the trees could take some work.

Before buying anything I suggest focusing on your goals and planning. If you’re more on the hobby vs commercial side of the spectrum I suggest starting small. Our garden is only 175 square feet of beds and pots, but it greatly reduces the amount of produce we buy during the summer and fall (yay zone 6).

I have another idea, but am going to break it out as a top level comment.

If you’re thinking about growing anything start considering:

• Your goals. Are you looking to sell some/all of your crop? Is this meant for sustince? A supplement to groceries?
• Land management. Do you want to let fields go fallow? Rotate crops? Grow cover and/or summer/winter crops? Till or no till?
• Equipment. Do you need to buy anything to help with maintenance, plowing, planting, harvestint, or processing the harvest?
• What you intend to grow. Do you want a few main crops? A ton of verity? Do you care about how easy it is to store? How do you want to balance calory density, nutrition, and flavor? Are you looking for single year or multi-year crops?
• What grows in your zone?
• Layout. How are you going to layout the planting area(s)? Do you need to worry about fencing? How about irrigation? Do you care about containing crops and/or weeds?
• Required inputs. Things like water, fertilizer, herbicide, pesticide, etc. You will want pest and fungicides even if you’re going organic

Note that all of the above are strongly interrelated.

We have a decent size fruit/veg garden that’s mostly annuals. Despite having done this for 10 years, the last thing on my mind for the next season is whether or not I should buy fertilizer now.

A final suggestion: go in open eyed to the amount of effort this will take. The amount of labor required by our garden follows a boom and bust cycle. On some weeks I’m out there once for an hour. On other weeks I’m out there multiple times a week. If you’re not able to devote continual time to the garden then your crops, and yeilds, will suffer. Harvesting and processing is time consuming and is greatly influenced by what you grow. Doing something with perishable crops before they go bad can also be a challenge. Even with 40 sq ft of raspberries our family of four can’t keep up so we have to jam/can/freeze them or turn them into compost. The same is true of tomatoes and a bunch of other produce - especially if you plant crops that actually taste good and you pick them when ripe.

For passive, and even now some active loudspeakers, very much so.

Links for passives: https://sites.google.com/site/undefinition/diy https://www.zaphaudio.com/ https://www.madisoundspeakerstore.com/speaker-kits/ (etc)

Active speakers are usually things like this and use commercially available parts with commercial software. But if you want you can build a DIY DSP and DAC and DIY amplifier. Note that there are tons of other designs for both available.

The DIY audio community is very vibrant. There are tons and tons of forums collaboratively iterating. You can build DIY headphones and DIY headphone amplifiers. Hell, you can even build DIY speaker drivers.

Anything I missed was not an intentional omission, lol.

Operating temps? Generally speaking, ICE is fine once started. Consider piston aircraft, it’s nippy up there.

Starting temp is where the real challenge is. Fluids (oil, gas, coolant) will be thicker, which makes the engine turn over more slowly - or not at all. Diesels especially struggle with this as their fuel can gel when it’s cold enough. The battery will also be cold, which makes the engine turn over more slowly - or not at all.

Ha, you’re right. Thank for the catch.

I too grew up with these and remember discovering DriveSpace, a Microsoft utility let you “compress a disk”, including floppies. This would often double their capacity.

That makes a certain amount of sense if you’re in the northern hemisphere where it’s currently winter. Odds are local bell pepper production is down, if not completely stopped, thanks to the cold. This will be true of all produce, although stores will offer loss leaders like bananas. Hardier produce (apples, potatoes, carrots, etc) will have smaller price fluctuations.

In general, processed food will cost more than its unprocessed counterpart. It’s true that some “healthy” food can be expensive, but you can still save money and avoid the salt and fats in processed food by buying low cost one (or few) ingredient inputs like dry beans and grains, in season fresh fruit/veg, canned/frozen veg, etc.

That read like a mix of “enough with pixel density”, smaller sensors are actually really small and don’t expect a ton out of them, and a clear the need for better marketing units. Unfortunately, consumers gonna consumer.

I do think this camera is a good example of Sony showing a willingness to go off the beaten path and push boundaries, but would not point their UX as the reason why Sony is doing fairly well in the mirrorless race, lol. The E-mount Alpha series has been plagued with folks complaining about the UX with gripes starting with the OG A7, continuing with the A7III, and people are still complaining about the A7R V. It’s basically a trope at this point. TBH I find the A7III and A9II menus much more intuitive than my old D40 and D5300, but I could be a weirdo.

IMO Sony did a few things right:

1. Purchasing Milnota’s camera division in 2006, giving them a functional DLSR system to start from
2. Developing their Single-lens translucent system, which consisted of a pellicle mirror, electronic viewfinder, and phase-detection autofocus system. Some of these ideas weren’t novel, but putting all three into a mainstream camera system certainly was and seems to have set them up well for their move to mirrorless. Micro Four Thirds was the first mainstream system (2008), but E-mount wasn’t far behind (2010)
3. Mostly¹ opening E-mount up for third party glass (¹ see restrictions on burst rate with autofocus)
4. Their tracking autofocus, which debuted on the a6400, A9, and A7III, made focusing on moving things super easy

3 and 4 are the reasons why I shoot Sony these days. I don’t really like the way their bodies handle and spent a decent amount of time seeking alternatives (I tried the OM-1, X-H2s, and Z6ii) but the A7III and now A9II proved far more consistent in getting the shot and the back catalog of first and third party glass is very welcome.

A quick search turned up an “official” CNC mount for cartographer and stealth burner. There are also instructions covering another mount, but I didn’t spend much time looking at them.

If you’re comfortable with CAD it shouldn’t be hard to model a mount that uses the klicky attachment points on the stock SB carriage. I found an existing model that looks like it does exactly this.

I didn’t spend a ton of time digging in, but I think the thing that gets the mainstream handhelds with AMD integrated graphics are the custom drivers. Maybe if a less mainstream device uses less custom components it’ll have better compatibility?

Thanks for the suggestion! I will take a look once I make some more progress on my rust project. Time is tight these days, so I need to limit the quantity of things I attempt to do in parallel.

I dunno, my first functional programming language really through me through a loop. I am starting my first Rust project and so far it doesn’t look to be that horrible.

I suspect the down votes are coming from folks not understanding what the camera is.

The FD7 was released in 1997 and records 30 images to a _2.5" 3.5" floppy disk. Yes, really. Later Sony cameras had built in mini disk CD-R drives. At the typical 1.4 MB disk size you could fit 40 standard sized JPEGs. These images were captured using a 640x480 sensor that sensor was originally intended for television cameras. In order to hit 640x480 it needed to capture and interlace two different frames.

Early digital camera days were very inventive. Thankfully people bought them. If they hadn’t we probably wouldn’t have made it to where we are as quickly as we did, if at all.

Not to ask the dumb question, but if your main pain point is tap why not just swap tap for cartographer or even klicky? Klicky, combined with Klipper Z Calibration has been pretty reliable on my build and gives me a very consistent first layer.

yes

After the Department of Justice released thousands of files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in a tranche on Friday that included a number of decades-old photographs of former President Bill Clinton, a spokesperson for Clinton on Monday called on all of the files relating to Clinton to be released.

“Accordingly, we call on President Trump to direct Attorney General Bondi to immediately release any remaining materials referring to, mentioning, or containing a photograph of Bill Clinton,” Ureña added.

Haha, that’s one approach. Be sure to pour the hot water all around the door frame itself is often frozen shut too.