Tomatoes are weird little dudes. Especially indeterminates. But, with a sunny spot in the back yard and some cages you can do a lot better than the grocery store can.

I haven’t used it in awhile, but OnShape I think had the best UI, for being in a browser.

There are some macros out there I’ve found that make FreeCAD a lot better. I kinda wish they had a half-decent reference for macro writing; they’ll point you to their unfinished out of date wiki if you ask.

In my area they will. My vines tend to die in December. Maybe’ I’d have gotten more tomatoes if I’d have bought more plants last month? But our bean crop fell through so I had some trellis space for some extra maters.

On FTL: I want that game’s primary loop, but in a Fallout-style role playing game. Have a universe you’re free to move around in. Rather than a single person gaining stats and abilities or whatever, you install equipment and hire crew. Kinda similar to the existing game, where having a leveled up medbay allows for certain actions. But make it one longer game you can sink your teeth into rather than a roguelike.

I gave up on the final boss of Minish Cap. I was playing the game on the Wii U.

Idiocrat

That blade guard almost certainly mounts to a splitter, which does pretty much the same job as a riving knife. The technical difference is a splitter is mounted to the table, a riving knife is mounted to the motor/blade assembly. Those serrated tails are called anti-kickback pawls, they are indeed meant to arrest a board (sheet, really) during a kickback by digging into the stock by digging into it.

So, the guy who invented the saw brake went around trying to sell that technology to other manufacturers. None wanted it because they didn’t want to sell a safety feature on premium saws as it would make the lower range look unsafe. So he started his own tool company. Bosch built a different system that achieved the same result, and got sued.

Modern routers scare me even more. They have things like soft start and such. I’ve got this little Craftsman cordless palm router, bout it at Lowe’s, it’s got plenty of power for a trim router, it cuts fine, it’s got soft start and it runs quiet when the bit isn’t cutting. It’s terrifyingly friendly. I’m scared someone out there isn’t going to pay it the respect it deserves because of how gentlemanly and courteous it is and end up spraying phalanges across the shop.

That’s what we call a good start. You may want to make one or two of various designs. The push stick that comes with a lot of table saws tend to have small bird’s mouths, you can get or make some that are much longer and better for holding stock down, or flat paddles useful for certain ripping operations. I mentioned it in my dissertation but a featherboard is also a good tool for work guiding.

Well there’s lots of reasons why you might.

On my table saw, you have to remove the riving knife to install the blade guard and splitter. They plug into the same port.

You can get wide and narrow riving knives for my table saw to match wide or narrow blades.

On my table saw, the biggest reason I remove my riving knife and run it without is for dadoing. A standard saw blade is 10 inches in diameter, a dado stack is 8 inches in diameter. The riving knife is too tall. On my saw it has to come out for dado use, on others it retracts. It’s not hard to forget to reinstall/extend it.

Sometimes you’ll use a table saw with jigs or fixtures that would interfere with the riving knife, so you remove it. In those

You’ll also see folks remove it for use with a zero clearance insert. There’s a large hole in the table top that the blade comes out, it has to be fairly large so you can change the blade. Most of it is filled with a removable plate called the throat plate or table insert. PLastic or metal ones have fairly large gaps around the blade which can present a problem, thin offcuts might fall in there. So folks will make them out of wood, and simply raise the blade through it with the table saw running to cut the slot for the blade. Well the riving knife won’t cut its own hole. So you either have to do that some other way or do without.

Oh, it’s worth mentioning: Riving knives have only been required equipment on new table saws since 2003, in the US at least. A lot of table saws out there don’t have the provision to install one.

It’s called a riving knife. Sounds like a Klingon wedding implement but it’s a massively important safety feature.

I moderate woodworking@lemmy.ca. Please join us there.

Table saws are dangerous tools. Healthy caution and a big amount of respect is warranted. A circular saw of any type can maim you in ways doctors can’t fix, and the table saw by its nature is most likely to do so.

Do me a big personal favor and always wear your safety glasses and hearing protection. Believe you me, the fun stops when you’re halfway through ripping a board and your eyes reflexively shut because you got sawdust in them. Also: table saws never have anything interesting or useful to say. Don’t listen to them.

Okay that last part is me trying to be humorous, actually do listen to the saw, if you hear strange noises it can be indicative of problems. You can hear those through approved earmuffs or plugs.

Something I would do: practice hitting the off button. Get to know where it is, by feel. With your hand and your knee. You’re unlikely to put your fingers through the blade during an otherwise safe cut; it can happen, but that’s an intuitive problem. Push sticks solve that problem. I’ve cut myself on the push stick thousands of times with table saws. Doesn’t hurt at all. Push sticks are If you can touch the blade with your thumb and the fence with your pinky, use a push stick or push block. Also, get or make a featherboard and learn how to use it. Another useful device for keeping the fingies attached.

The unintuitive problem is kickbacks. Watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7sRrC2Jpp4 If a piece of wood is trapped between the fence and the blade, and isn’t well constrained by the fence, it’ll pivot, dig into the back, rising edge of the blade, tension builds up, and then it gets thrown backward. If you’re holding onto that board when it kicks back, it can take your hand back through the blade with it. This is why they tell you not to use the fence and miter gauge together: The severed piece is now loose and unconstrained between the fence and the blade near the far edge of the blade, it almost certainly will kick back.

“Don’t crosscut with the rip fence.” I hate that phraseology, I’m gonna cross it out, because I’ve seen an injury caused by it. I enjoyed it a lot at the time because it was my high school bully that hurt himself, but I still learned this lesson: He was manufacturing rectangles of plywood 3.5 inches wide by 2 feet long. He ripped strips of plywood 3.5 inches wide, and then set the fence to 2 feet to cut them to length. I warned him to set up a stop block. He goes off on me about how it’s plywood, there’s no real grain direction so “crosscut” and “rip” don’t mean anything. I go back to what I was doing, not five minutes later I hear his saw strain, I hear a bang, I turn around to see him doubled over hugging a piece of plywood. It has nothing to do with the grain, it has to do with the shape. That same kickback could happen if you’re cutting acrylic, which is an amorphous solid.

Don’t use the rip fence unless you have AT LEAST 12 inches of contact between the fence and the board/sheet. If you can’t do that, you may need to use a sled or a panel cutter instead of the fence.

Start out with basic operations, do a crosscut with the miter gauge, hold the board and the miter gauge with both hands, feed it gently. Then try some rips.

Oh, one final thing about ripping: The edge of the board or sheet that touches the fence must be rather straight, you don’t want to put an apprentice’s jigsaw job against the fence because the board might not be well constrained, it may pivot and kick back. There are ways to straighten that edge if needed, learn them.

Look up how to use FreeCAD’s spreadsheet.

No, all CAD software sucks. I use FreeCAD myself and just got used to the jank.

You know Andy Weir, author of The Martian and Project Hail Mary? He wrote a comic strip back in the day with a villain who was, by religion, a stereotypical movie bad guy. So his fortress is in a volcano with his face carved on it, and it’s full of flagrantly convenient air ducts.

The Matrix references are dated but not the Lion King references. Or the 1970’s movie it ripped off.

There’s a Youtube channel called Ben Eater that does a great job of explaining computing from first principles. He built a computer out of discrete components on breadboards. He also has a great series where he wires up a 6502 microprocessor and basically builds a little 8-bit microcomputer around it, again on breadboards, in a way that you’ll get. He sells them as kits, so you can play at home if you want. They’re also just nice educational evening calm time viewing.

“Work” computers will often have legacy ports because maybe you need it to connect to some old printer.

There are a lot of places still using old-style dot matrix printers or other weird old hardware. Point-of-sale systems made to this day often come with a bunch of serial, or not quite serial, ports.

You mean the bank?