ubermonkey

Driving north through downtown yesterday, I noticed the Red Hat logo.

The hat in question is white.

I mean....

https://boingboing.net/2026/09/04/nigel-farage-filmed-celebrating-illegal-foreign-donations.html

I'm actually oversimplifying; we moved from Houston to NC in summer '25, and then from the rental to a home we bought last month. The x-country movers packed the turntable very very carefully, but the local guys didn't secure the tone arm as well. So I'm suspicious there.

Back in Houston, and in the rental house, my record-playing experience was pretty clear and clean. Surface noise was barely detectable.

In the new house, though, there's much more of it. I admit the first serious listening I attempted was with a new pressing of Phoebe Bridgers' Lost Weekend, and initially I was afraid it was a bad pressing. Unfortunately swapping it out for other vinyl I know is pristine didn't banish

Anybody else notice this?

It's not on their site at all, but the ads I see on Facebook or Insta are leaning heavy on Bible cases or church-focussed EDC folios or slings.

This is especially weird because I'm absolutely not religious or Christian at all, and my social media history reflects this.

Word for Mac no longer does proper autosave or autorecovery. For the first time in decades, I lost work to an app crash as a result. I guess it'd have been fine if I was saving to OneDrive, but I don't use OneDrive, so "autosave" is no longer an option.

(Long years of trustworthy autosave mean I no longer have the reflex to Cmd-S every few minutes, but learn from my mistakes: Trust no software.)

Now I'm done. I need something else. I don't care if I have to pay for it, but I don't enjoy subscription software. I do need stylesheet support, and ideally the ability to import DOCX. I absolutely DO need the ability to save to PDF for distribution.

I don't care if it's free or Free or comme

I have a nice tote bag we bought for a friend's son's graduation.

I'd like to have a custom monogram applied, but what I want is in excess of what LL Bean would do for me.

Who in town can do this for me?

I have an R58. I fucking love it. However, the bright blinking green light is an issue. Our kitchen is open to our living room. Our living room is a big open space with hallway balcony. Our bedroom is on that hallway.

The blinking green light in the kitchen bothers my wife at night.

Now, I guess I could just disable the timer on the machine itself and switch to a timed outlet, but I'd rather not. Is there some aftermarket dimmer or something I can apply to the green bulb? I figure I can't be the ONLY person to ever find it a little strident.

We've recently moved, and have decided that vinyl should live in the more socially-oriented greatroom while the main listening / home theater space remains the TV room.

This means I need some more toys. ; )

Obviously I could go to Crutchfield or whatever and look for two-channel amps with phono stages, but I've had my head turned a little by the seemingly endless variety of small, affordable, attractive amps advertised on social media & elsewhere.

I'm not throwing a TON of money at this (say, well under $1k USD). Aside from the big players here, what smaller firms should I be looking at?

The primary job will be vinyl playback, but it WOULD be nice if it had at least two other inputs

I kinda hated the finale.

It wrapped up nothing, and served only to introduce more complicating factors that are (IMO) pretty unearned at this point. It gave strong "just keep watching!" vibes instead of resolving any storylines.

I get it. They want to keep making the show. But stories -- well crafted ones -- have ends. A single-season show that tells a coherent and well-considered story is a beautiful thing. I was hoping that's what we'd get here.

Instead, the finale was just "but wait! come back next time!" together with, at least for me, a very very strong sense that the showrunners had no idea what was happening and were absolutely making it up as they go along. Seat-of-the-pants s

We just moved, and because all fiber providers are unreliable it'll be a few days before we have Internet. This allowed us to rediscover our physical media collection, and we're delighted anew -- even the DVDs look better than streaming has.

But now I want a new player. And because space isn't infinite I also want it to play CDs.

Something that annoys me about our current player is that it stops playing if I turn the TV off. This is annoying. I get why -- if you turn off the TV when a MOVIE is playing, that's a reasonable response. But I'd rather it were up to me, because there's no good reason to need a 65" panel showing basically nothing while playing Coltrane or whatever.

Who makes a

There's always chatter here about the use of ear plugs, how they relate or interact with helmet audio, and whether or not earbuds for audio or even ANC for audio / wind noise abatement is effective.

I just did a long trip. I experimented with something I saw on Reddit, and I'm here to share it works GREAT.

What I did before

Eargasm ear plugs + Cardo speakers for any ride of any real length. The definition of "long enough ride" is shorter on the Bonneville than it is on my big touring bike, but on both eventually the wind noise is tiresome -- and bad for you. So the plugs get used.

But audio quality is bad this way, and I honestly could NEVER really deal with spoken word audio in th

We bought a house, and are doing some reno, and have scaled up a little bit in a few other places. It's sufficient that I'm questioning whether or not I still want to do the Wolf GR304 I had in mind for the kitchen.

THAT room isn't getting much done to it -- it still has original custom cabinets and whatnot, and the quality is insane. It's just that the existing range is blah, and I always wanted a fancy one.

Trouble is: holy jesus those things have gotten expensive. I'm looking at probably $6500 here, whereas less-fancy options can be had for barely $2k.

What I WANT, though, is reliable simplicity. I've spent 30 years in software. The whole idea of putting an app in my oven strikes me

I've joined a group, and this group has events. Heretofore they just posted them as text on like 4 different places on the web site & separately to Facebook.

It sure seems like having a proper calendar would be a better choice, but it's not clear to me what platform would fix us best.

1. People need to be able to use it for free.
2. I'd rather not have to install and administer something.
3. People ought to be able to subscribe to this calendar from within their calendar apps on their phones or desktops.
4. Multiple people should be able to add things, but not EVERYONE.
5. It would be ideal if the club calendar was not tied to a specific member's account somewhere (ie, iCloud or G

Yesterday, on my way home from a camping trip, a spider crawled across my glasses while I was doing 85mph on the Interstate.

Amazingly, I did not panic and die. I pulled over and tore over the lid to try and find & expel the little bastard, but of course I couldn't find him. I rode the rest of the way home with the face shield open.

Obviously, I have to burn this lid now, right? EEEK.