Tools are a good idea. Probably should follow your lead on that…
godot
I’m mostly looking at whether I would have made any medium sized purchases in the next two yearsl. I might buy some little things in bulk, too, but if there’s any one time purchase where the price is going to jump $200, $300, $500, it’s time to make a decision.
For me that mostly means furniture. I already bought a pair of commodity IKEA bookshelves I’d been considering buying vs building. I might still build replacements, but I would still use what I just bought and domestic lumber won’t be directly subject to a tariff. I’m looking at buying a papasan chair and a mattress as well, probably in the next week or two.
I’ve also considered electronics, but there’s nothing I would buy in the next two years short of some PC components that I’m sure I’ll want. I bought a Quest 3 a while back and it’s been a great purchase.
I did go back through some of my online buying this year to see what I used. I’ll probably buy a few pairs of work shoes and some good soap.
Buncha dumb fucks. Get ready to learn about the Supremacy Clause, hicks.
President Vance is going to skullfuck you into twenty years of Y’allqaeda Law. You don’t get to pick which Republican policies you like.
Sunrise here, tomorrow, is around 7:30. When I take my morning walk, presumably just after I wake up at 5:30 because the walk is supposed to “get my brain ready to work” and I’m supposed to put several hours of work in during the morning, how do I “get sunlight in my eyes”?
I really appreciate your effort on this forum. I barely thought about Lemmy as a resource for the Olympics until it was too late, which looking back a huge bummer. I also didn’t watch nearly enough…
I am already looking forward to 2026. Going to approach it very differently.
Yeah, even the better boards struggled to break 3,000MT/s with Zen 1. They sure were fun to play with, though, one of the last times I felt like tinkering was actually getting me something.
I’d be curious how the more modern “default” 3600 kits do, I didn’t have a Ryzen system by the time they were popular and cheap.
Some B350m models did get Zen 3 compatibility. Not all, if I remember correctly, though I could be wrong. So whether it’s compatible I think is model dependent. Whether an old B350m has the VRMs for a chunkier CPU would also be a reasonable question.
I mentioned the R5 3600 because the prices on them are great. A 5800X3D does perform better, but I see completed eBay listings at $225+. They also needs a cooler. I see one 3600 that went for about $50 and several that went for $60, which isn’t too much more than a 16gb kit of DDR4.
I would definitely consider a Zen3 CPU for this upgrade, depending on budget.
First generation Ryzen struggles with higher memory speed. You very likely will not get the full 3600MT/s. There’s no real reason to buy slower, just be aware you’re likely going to hit a ceiling.
For gaming you might see bigger improvements from upgrading the CPU, maybe to an R5 3600. That and the memory are both going to offer big performance improvement.
Scratch patterns are in my experience a little overblown, particularly at high degrees of polish. The sharpener they linked you finishes on ceramic, which generally is fairly fine.
Pull through sharpeners’ biggest problem is that they can’t practically get a clean, consistent apex that follows the sweep of the edge. To get close the housing of the sharpening material needs to be extremely rigid, the pressure used needs to be consistent and light, the angle of the knife in the sharpener needs to be consistent from pull to pull, and the sharpening material needs to be very clean. Otherwise the act of sharpening, while perhaps polishing the bevel, drives the apex into steel residue or abrasive or shifts its angle. That will round, grind down, or rip tiny chunks out of the apex. Still gets a pretty sharp edge.
I don’t find pull throughs suffer much with regard to retention. They don’t get a knife as sharp initially, so they do start with a shorter clock. But from there retention is okay. They completely avoid wire edges, which is nice, so in inexperienced hands in a way they much improve retention.
For most knife steels and uses, pull through sharpeners are okay when used with a light hand. What I’m calling a “clean, consistent apex” isn’t practically necessary in pocket knives. The Sharpmaker and several cheap jigs can produce edges like that, though, and those edges definitely feel better in use. At the reasonable additional cost that’s worth it to a lot of people.
It is possible to sharpen a recurve edge on a waterstone with a rounded corner, but having wasted my time learning how I prefer the Sharpmaker. It’s near enough to the same speed, more intuitive, and more difficult for a new sharpener to make a mistake.
Some jigs have rounded stones specifically for recurves; I know there is a Lansky set. I haven’t used one, myself.
I suspect almost all heavy use recurve blades, carpet knives come to mind, are sharpened using pull through sharpeners. There are shaped sharpening stones specifically for recurves historically used in trade work, but they’re going to kind of suck.
Perhaps not a useful avenue for you right now, but my best results on recurves have by far been from paper wheels.
I know you asked how, but if you end up with only a few recurves paying a pro to do it is a reasonable option. Sharpening recurves is a niche inside a niche. No method I’ve tried of doing it by hand feels elegant or “right”.
The type of dice used can meaningfully impact this. The chance of a 2 or 12 rolling 2d6 is 1/36, the chance rolling 1d8+1d4 is 1/32. The chance of rolling 7 on 2d6, the most common result, is 1/6. The chance of rolling a 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9 on a 1d8+1d4, all equally likely, is 1/8 each.
Unlike you I can’t begin to remember the elegant way to find this. I also assume Randall would have it at least close to right.