My friend and I routinely have conversations about factory design.

His ideal factory ships every ore in its raw state to a single building, which can then move the ore to different floors/sections for processing. He goes further than most and separates each product into its own "room", so all steel bars are made in one room then shipped to the steel beam and steel pipe rooms. Importantly the factory should be designed so that you can "infinitely" expand a room if you need more of that resource.

I prefer what I call "microfactories", where each component is created in a small, independent factory and the result is shipped to a main repository for builder use and for the space elevator construction. If you need modular frames, for example, you would find a group of ores and build a small factory on it and build every sub-component you can in it. Ideally, it would not rely on any other microfactory's outputs, but sometimes that's easier said than done. Often I will have a small cluster of microfactories all dedicated to shipping their output to a final microfactory for processing.

So what do you all use?

Note: He claims his design is more analogous to microservices (from software architecture) than mine, and that mine is something apparently called "pirate architecture". I think he's out of his mind on that one.

For me, it may be that the toilet paper roll needs to have the open end away from the wall. I don't want to reach under the roll to take a piece! That's ludicrous!

That or my recent addiction to correcting people when they use "less" when they should use "fewer"

I've recently started digitizing my mother-in-law's collection of home movies. What I would love is some recommendations or tweaks I can do to improve the quality and remove any combing or minimize static. I am not particularly concerned with audio quality, but I'll list it below as well.

And so far I'm enjoying the processes. It's really fun to see old videos and to learn a bit about video formats and encoding. I'm an amateur when it comes to these kinds of things so I'm learning as I go along. Each tape I make the picture clearer and the file size smaller!

Recording

• Sony Handycam (DCR-TRV27)
• Various DV 60/90 cassette tapes
• Seemingly ran in standard recording mode (tapes are 60 minutes)

VCR

• Elgato USB Analog Video Capture Device
• Handycam's VCR mode connected via S-Video Cable and 3.5mm audio jack\*

\* I have ordered a A/V to RCA cable which is the manufacturer's recommended connection, but unsure about the effects on quality

Software

• OBS for recording the VCR feed
  • Downscale Filter: Bicubic (Sharpened scaling, 16 samples)
  • Deinterlace - Linear 2x
  • 720x540 @ 29.97 FPS (NTSC) (upscaled from 720x480)
  • "Indistinguishable Quality, Large File Size"
    • .mkv format with H.264 encoder
  • Audio Encoder AAC
  • Audio 48khz steroe
• Handbrake for re-encoding
  • 720x480 @ 29.97 FPS
  • H.264 (x264) MKV format
  • No additional deinterlacing
  • "Constant Quality" set to 20
  • Audio Encoder AAC

I got an Elgato capture card and a VCR off of EBay and have already digitized three tapes I've found at garage sales.

Any advice for cleaning up the image and audio? I recall there were VCR cleaners but never was confident of their efficacy.

I want to become a more knowledgeable gardener, and besides research and studying, I think a fun way to enhance my knowledge would be a fun gardening game. Are there any that are particularly accurate or relaxing?

Garden Life looks pretty chill but maybe not challenging or accurate to reality.

And to clarify, by accurate I mean you need to plant in correct lighting, water an appropriate amount, and fertilize to optimize for stems, flowers, fruits, etc.. Bonus points for having the option to pick your planting zone!

Hey all, I've created a catio (cat patio) for my two cats in a window well next to my desk. They absolutely love it, but I would like to make it even better for them by using real grass. Currently, I have a pretty good artificial grass in there that they love to lay in and stays green year 'round, which is fine enough. But I would really love to give them some real grass (or moss) to lay on and maybe even munch on.

So, with that backstory, I would love to find a grass that has the following traits.

1. Comfortable and safe for cats (both internally and externally)
2. Stays relatively short since I can't exactly get a lawn mower
3. Doesn't require a lot of sun

It would also be a bonus if it were okay with more arid climates, because I would prefer to minimize watering as much as possible.

My mind goes to something like Spanish Moss since it stays relatively short and is pretty comfy, but I'm not sure if that's the best option, so I wanted to ask people more experience than me.

Picture of the window well in its current state and one of its occupants for reference below.

And for anyone concerned, the well is closed in with a grate and some chicken wire so they can't slip out. They are not outdoor cats, but we do take them out on harnesses for walks. They are treated for pests like tics and mites as a precaution.

!

Thanks anyone who answers!

Reached 30 and the wheels started falling off. Gained 20 pounds and back pain out of nowhere, it's like a damn sitcom. I feel uncomfortable in clothes I've worn for a decade so its time to put in effort. Better late than never I guess.

I want advice on good beginner resources. I'm talking really beginner, like how many reps to do, how long between reps, what machines to hit, etc. I've been to gyms before but just kinda rode the reclined bike them made shit up when I got to the weight machines. I also am terrible at not doing too much with my back, which is almost certainly where my back pain originates from, so extra instruction on how to properly engage my core is a bonus.

The one advantage I have is that I'm very good at tracking calories. I've just gotten lazy since Covid. So I've downloaded MacroFactor to try out some new technology. I've used Waistline recently but it's just too cumbersome to add food, and I lose motivation.

Appreciate the help in advance!

P.S. the one upside to turning 30 is that I can grow a beard now. So at least I've got that going for me

Around two years ago I was on a really small team, just two or three developers, and the other developer decided they wanted us to use Rider. Because I didn't have a preference, I used Rider and rather enjoyed it. However, that developer has since moved teams and now it is just me (for the time being).

So I was considering moving back to Visual Studio or even switching to Visual Studio Code, but I wanted to see some arguments against this.

Here is my list so far, but it's probably out of date since I haven't used Visual Studio in a long time.

Pros of Rider:

• Much faster than using ReSharper
• Less sharp interface with a better font
• I'm used to it at this point
• I have a Nyan cat loading bar which is kind of fun

Cons of Rider:

• Enterprise license is expensive (probably)
• New versions of C# aren't immediately supported
• Refactorings are becoming less necessary with the rise of AI assistants
• Don't really like their source control manager

Wanted to hear what other users think. What keeps you using Rider?

Oh and banned for rule 1 if you disagree

The Praying to the Gods achievement requires you to kill the fanatic 10 times "without drinking any potion which restores prayer" and without leaving the wilderness. Simple solution is to pray on the nearby Chaos Altar or to take the obelisk down to a less busy altar near Ferox.

However, do you think the spaghetti code takes into account Stat Restore Pot Share or butterflies? Could you cheese this one with a friend?

I would recommend everyone try this. Just sit down, bend your knees, throw a blanket over, and show them the entrance. Just be warned they will not leave unless you make them

My favorite way to develop applications is microservices, or at least smaller services that can separate concerns a little bit. In our current application, there is an API we've created with an OAS document and an auto-generated .NET SDK based on the document. We then have a web console that makes calls to the backend API using the SDK and, ideally, customers would also use the SDK.

So my question to everyone is: what is the best "flow" to develop a NuGet package?

Currently, we have pipelines which publish the NuGet package of the SDK to our internal NuGet repository on every commit within a merge request. We have a manually incrementing semver with an additional build number tacked on (for example 1.2.3+abc123).

Now this works pretty well, but we often run into problems where a tester's NuGet doesn't pull down the latest version based on the build number if it detects it has the proper semver number. For example, if we create 1.2.3+abc456 NuGet won't pull down this version as long as it has the original 1.2.3+abc123 in its .nuget/packages directory. Testers and developers have to manually delete the version from the packages directory and do a fresh restore.

So, is there a better way to do build numbers? Or should I be deleting the NuGet package from the private repository every time (doesn't sound ideal...)?

The other part of this question is what is the best way to develop and test NuGet packages locally?

My current flow is a PowerShell script which will create the new .nupkg file, publish it to a local/filesystem NuGet directory with some random semver number (i.e., 9.9.9), update the .csproj with the version (temporarily), and then do a fresh dotnet restore on the target project. However, this can be cumbersome and feels like something that should be built into the dotnet command. Am I missing something, or is this really the best way to develop locally?

You can add Ecosia as a search engine to Firefox Android by going to Settings - Default Search Engine - Add then entering the following:

• Name - Ecosia
• Search URL - https://ecosia.org/search?q=%s
• Complete URL - https://ac.ecosia.org/autocomplete?q=%s&type=list

This will also allow you to use the Firefox Search widget on your home screen to search Ecosia.

I tried using the Addon to no avail, so I had to manually add the search myself.

Thanks for creating the community! I had forgotten to use Ecosia on Android for a while now. So much missed opportunity