I just wanted to talk about this a bit. Get it out of my brain and onto paper so to speak.

I'm away from home as I often am. Never with the same crew, though sometimes there are familiar faces. My career attracts the more "rugged" or close-minded types. I won't say bigoted because that isn't often true. Just... If it isn't sports, drinking at bars or stereotypically "manly" it's grounds for nitpicking. There's also a meritocratic rank structure and matching uniforms. I'll let you all deduce what that means on your own.

Anyway, we all made our introductions, talked about the work ahead and went our separate ways. I've had great experiences with tabletop gaming at various locations and stages in my career. I was introduced to D&D by a long time friend and regularly play with a group of people from work.

So... I figured I'd make the offer to the group in our text group. I told them if anyone was interested ever, that I brought a bunch of D&D stuff with me as well as some Warhammer 40K stuff and would love to play. We're here for 8.5 months after all. Might as well play some games.

Immediately I'm met with rude comments by the most senior member of the group (who is not present) that he can't wait to meet me to bully me for being a nerd. I joke that I'll save him a spot at the table and another person chimes in that it's going to be a pretty empty table.

Not many others chimed in. A few laughing emojis were shared and so on. Whatever.

I'm not completely disheartened but it's certainly a kick in the nuts to make an offer for friendship or be open with people who are just as far away from home as you are and be met with that treatment.

I know in time as others get to know me more they'll open up or want to join in. I've met more nerds and geeks in this line of work than I have outside of it.

I'm also telling myself they're just afraid of things they don't know. I won't disparage their hobbies so I'll praise my own:

A few times a month I get to sit around a table with some of my closest friends, family and sometimes new faces. I get to create a world with them where we can be free from the endless news cycle, algorithms shoving consumption in our faces and we can be happy together even for just a couple of hours.

Sometimes I sit down at a little desk that I built myself and glue little army men together while my wife sits and crochets next to me and we talk about how our days went. My dog nestled at my feet and cats watching me diligently.

I hunt, I fish, I play rugby, I work on my motorcycles, I powerlift and go shooting. But sometimes its nice to just sit down and enjoy the company of my friends free from social expectations, have a drink, smoke some pot and have a few laughs. I'll be missing that for nearly a year.

I'm happy to enjoy the things I enjoy. I don't need other people to validate my enjoyment but it would be nice to have people be kind about it so I don't have to be made to feel so alone.

I think that's the feeling I'm trying to get out in this post that's getting so long now. It was such an isolating feeling. It didn't have to be. But people who are uncomfortable with what they might see if they looked inside themselves for a moment projected those insecurities on me and isolated me for some cheap laughs. Over a decade in this line of work and I've never been met with such revilement. I've gamed with some tough and outwardly "scary" motherfuckers. I've never been bullied before. I'm in my 30s ffs.

Thanks for reading.

Pretty much the title. Like, get those handheld scanners and attach them to the carts. I scan items as I put them in, roll up to a "register" where the cart is weighed and verified by a cashier. I just hand over the cash then leave. Or even better, install load sensors in the cart.

Usually I like to pack my groceries into my boxes as I get them into the cart. Keeps things orderly and neat and I also don't buy more than I can carry home. But this means I have to unpack them to place on the belt then pack them all over again after paying. It would be kinda nice to just pay by the cart load.

My first ever fully painted miniature that didn't come free in a box with paints.

Paints used:

1. 2:2:1 Black Templar:Lahmian Medium:Ultramarine Contrast (Citadel)

2. Pure Red (Warpaints)

3. Skeleton Bone (Warpaints)

4. Greedy Gold (Warpaints)

5. Cobalt Metal (Warpaints)

6. Skeleton Horde (Citadel)

7. Nuln Oil (Citadel)

I've got some places I definitely want to touch up. Places where my brush control was lacking for sure and I'm not happy with the tone on the belt. I find it mixes too much with the gold. I'll be adding some more layers to that as well as touching up any spots I missed with paint.

Overall I'm pretty happy with it. I'll be continuing to edge highlight with the cobalt Metal on any exposed armour and will attempt my first OSL from the eyes.

Funny thing is, this isn't even from my main army. I have 2500 points of Nids I need to prime and paint. I've just been having a bit of the winter blues so I forced myself to paint something to try and kickstart my engines. Building has been really therapeutic though and painting was even moreso.

Quick and dirty is this:

Running a new dual boot system. Windows boots fine and fast. Grub bootloader grinds and grunts to startup. Systemd checks point to Fedora waiting on the Win10 disk to boot (+45s!!!). Obviously, I don't need that drive to run, but Fedora/Bootloader thinks it should.

Disconnected the Win10 drive, Fedora booted in 3.6s.

So... Windows bootloader knows to ignore the Fedora OS drive and launches fine. Fedora Bootloader insists it try everything to get that Win10 drive running to my own detriment.

Is there a way to just ignore the Win10 drive the way Win10 ignores Fedora?

Been scratching my head on this one for a bit to be honest.

EDIT: Seems the issue was caused by RAID incompatibility from my internal backups for Win10. The RAID drives wrongly pointed the finger at the boot disk because the only thing I could really make sense of in diagnostics was the Win10 boot stalling for 45+ seconds. Once I disconnected all the drives and incrementally reconnected them I quickly realised it was the backup drives and not a boot disk conflict as I wrongly assumed.

Hey folks, I recently found a 1980s Yamaha PX-55 turntable for $20 and figured I would give it a go. Only issue with it is that its missing the entire headshell. I figured this would be an easy fix as they're (mostly) plug and play.

Now I'm looking at universal headshell and realising I may be SOL. The tonearm connector is as pictured

Seems there's no space for the captive pin on this tonearm. Now, I don't have a spare headshell to check... Is that pin removable?

Do I need a different type of headshell/will a universal connector even work with this tonearm?

OR

Will I have to replace the tonearm connector to a universal type in order to get it all working nicely?

Any help is appreciated. Happy to discuss as required. I'm somewhat familiar with electronic repairs but new to turntable repairs, parts and terminology.