The reverse of a question I asked on here a while ago.
Steam Deck
Basically every Valve product and software.
have you not seen tf2’s state?
In Vavles defense, they proclaimed TF2 to be a “Hat Simulator” and I suppose they delivered on the advertised product…
It’s also 17 years old and still online
Head-On CAN be appied directly to the forehead! Which was it’s only claim.
One of the only brands I would ever promote, Darn Tough socks.
Wear em out, ship them back, order a free pair. It’s that easy and they are the most comfortable, durable socks I have ever worn. Won’t ever buy another brand.
I’ve worn mine long and hard and haven’t gotten to test out the warranty yet, the first pair I bought is probably closing in on a decade and nearly indistinguishable from pairs that are several years newer. Even if they don’t honor their warranty for some reason I feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth and then some.
I want to point out here, in Australia there is a brand of socks called Darn Tough that is sold at Kmart, Target and BigW, it is NOT THE SAME Darn Tough brand you see raved online. It’s a completely different sock brand thats been around for about 20 years in Australia and just happens to have the same name. They are not great socks, very thick but don’t last long.
Do you use those for everyday wear?
I do indeed. Most of mine are the midweight quarter high hikers.
Fifth not op. Yes.
I also wash them with Wool Wash, and about once every 5 wears. Merino Wool is naturally antimicrobial, so I cycle a bunch of pairs letting them air out.
Not op. Yes.
Also not OP.
Also yes.
Thirdly not op. Prefer them over any of my other sock-tions.
Also also yes
Fourth not OP. Wear them in my work boots every day, even when it’s hot as shit.
Fifth not OP. I do not wear them everyday. But that’s mainly because I don’t own a pair.
Reading this message chain makes me want to buy ones.
Bought 2 pairs of their normal socks (everyday/sport socks) because they advertised to keep your feet cool during the day. I decided to test them out before I bought a bunch as workout socks.
1 was completely ripped on the sides by literally the 3rd wear (2nd week I had them), only walking around the office a bit.
The other lasted 8 wears before it got a hole on the balls of my feet and was almost worn through on the sides (about 6 weeks), still not one workout done with then
By very far the worst socks I have ever owned. I didn’t get a chance to try their warranty because I moved out of the US, but hot damn I will always recommend against their thin socks, only go for the large tube/hiking/warm socks.
Crazy. I have hiked hundreds of miles in the thin hiking socks, and while they weren’t nearly as durable as the midweights, they still outperformed every other sock I have tried. Smartwool, rei, carhartt, typical cotton socks etc. I guess as with most things, YMMV
Well, that sucks that your experience was poor, especially at their price point. I would be a bit frustrated with the brand as well.
Timex: Takes a licking and keeps on ticking.
I licked my watch when I was a kid and it kept on ticking.
I fixed my hot tub with Flex Tape. It seems to be doing the job.
now that’s a lotta damage
I’ve repaired 2 kayaks and my tiny, flat-bottom boat. That shit is scary.
Wood glue, no particular brand recommendations, is one of the pew products I trust to do exactly what it claims to - glue wood.
I wonder if there is any bad wood glue out there. I use it quite a bit and I don’t think i ever used the same brand twice.
My latest bottle is gorilla and it works well enough. But exactly like you said, I don’t think I could pick it out from every other bottle I’ve used in the last 20 years.
For some reason I have a thought in my head that I don’t like Elmer’s wood glue. I don’t know why, I don’t remember it ever letting me down.
White Elmer’s glue is pretty much the same formula as their “washable” school glue. It bonds wood quite strongly but it tends to be slimier than wood glue so when you go to clamp the boards together they tend to slip around out of orientation. It’s not as fun to work with as yellow carpenter’s glues which tend to be tackier so the boards don’t slip around as much.
Titebond 3. It’s a pretty easy choice; it has one of, if not the highest strengths of wood glues on the market, and it’s water resistant. If you want the wood to break before the glue does, that’s the stuff you want.
That is usually what I go with, because I normally only keep one bottle of wood glue around and it covers pretty much any use case I could ever have for wood glue being waterproof, safe for indirect food contact, etc.
But honestly, for general gluing furniture together and such, even the cheapest no-name brands of wood glue have always done just fine. Pretty much any wood glue out there is stronger than any wood you’re likely getting the be gluing (inb4 some carpentry nerd chimes in with some rare wood that only grows in New Zealand or something that is stronger than steel or something)
Wood glues like Titebond are PVA-based glues. So is Elmer’s white school glue, which is also very good at bonding wood. Wood glues are yellow either because of added resins that make it tackier when wet so clamped boards don’t slide around as easy before the glue dries, so that the glue dries to a harder, more rock-like consistency rather than staying slightly flexible, or because wood is kind of yellow so they wanted it to look like wood, I’ve heard all three and I’m not sure which is true. Titebond does sell a brown wood glue so that it blends into darker woods like walnut and ebony though.
I’ve seen plenty of bonds on furniture fail, rather than the wood. It seems most typical on things that are a dowelled construction rather than a mortise and tenon joint. I’ve seen it most often with chairs, since they’re under a lot of stresses. Maybe I’m in a uniquely bad environment that’s harsh on wood glue; I don’t know.
Chairs, like wooden dining room chairs, are some of the most dynamically stressed woodworking projects. A bookcase may carry hundreds of pounds of books but you put the books on the shelf and they mostly just stay there. A dining room chair has people sitting down, scooting forward, shifting around, leaning back, standing up etc. so there’s a lot of force moving around trying to bend the frame members and shift the tenons around in their mortises. This often causes the glue, or the wood immediately around it, to fracture under repetitive stress and causes loose joints.
Some woodworkers prefer to use hide glue (or its modern synthetic equivalent) rather than PVA glue specifically because it isn’t as strong, and because the bond can be released with heat. That allows the glue to fail while the wood itself remains intact, and then a chair with a failed joint can be disassembled and repaired. A chair assembled with PVA is likely to break in the middle of a board or dowel and is impossible to disassemble in any intentional way.
Yeah I think the way a lot of chairs are constructed is just a bad use case for glue. Like you said, chairs are under a lot of stress (tension, compression, shear, cleavage, peel- glue can handle some of these well and others not,) there’s a lot of weird ways you can put leverage on the joints, people don’t tend to sit perfectly still so those loads are dynamic and always shifting a bit, and to make it worse they kind of have to be designed to be somewhat lightweight, easy to move around, small enough to fit under a table, etc so there’s always some compromises made and they’re never as overbuilt as they probably should be.
Different kind of construction, but I work in a 911 dispatch center, we have some ridiculously overbuilt chairs that are supposed to be rated for someone to be occupying them 24/7. They cost a ridiculous amount of money and they’re still breaking in new and spectacular ways almost constantly. It’s tough to build a good chair.
There’s also of course issues that can arise from bad surface prep, poor fitment, improper clamping, too little glue, not letting it dry long enough too high/low temperature/humidity/moisture, the wood shrinking/expanding, poorly thought-out joints that don’t have enough surface area or are putting the glue under the wrong kind of stresses, and of course sometimes you’re asking the glue to do something it doesn’t do well, it’s good at gluing wood to wood, but not nearly as good at gluing paint to paint or varnish to varnish.
Totally agree.
Unfortunately, wooden chairs that don’t suck tend to cost a fuckton. The styles that people tend to like are usually on the fragile side by their nature.
Yeah. If it fails it’s the wood around the glued joint, not the joint iself.
A face grain to face grain joint will usually fail at least partially along the growth rings in the board(s) rather than at the glue joint, yes. But an end grain to end grain joint (which are rarely made for practical reasons) will typically fail at the glue joint.
Wood is kind of a composite material; it’s cellulose fibers bound together with a polymer called lignin. PVA wood glue is stronger than lignin but not as strong as the cellulose fibers, so a broken face-to-face joint will break along the weakest, the lignin.
If you edge glue a panel together for say a table top, gluing boards edge-to-edge, that board will be at least as strong as if it was one wide board; it will take at least as much force as a single board to break.
But, if you glue two long boards end to end, it won’t be as strong as a single continuous board of the same overall length. It will fail at and along the glue joint, maybe pulling a couple splinters out of one board. Which is why we basically never do that; if a board has to be spliced it’s common to add a doubler so there are fibers crossing the joint line.
But yes PVA glue like Titebond is amazingly good at bonding wood.
My mom bought my backpack 25 years ago and the clerk told her “they’ll last for at least five years”.
Well I still use mine daily, so yeah. Definitely lived up to expectations. Although I’ve did get it fixed, but first time just a year or two ago. So lasted without any fixing for longer than the average age on Lemmy, I’d say.
I bought a military grade backpack on a Marine Corps base in 2001. I used it for 3 years in the military, then all of undergrad, masters, and phd school. I use it on almost all of my travels, and I use it daily in town. It’s still going strong. Hope to get another 23 years out of it.
Bone conduction headphones
Really? I’ve been dubious of these but…if true…
The sound quality is definitely worse than similarly priced regular headphones or earbuds.
But having the ears completely free make them a great option for cycling or running, where keeping track of your surroundings is literally kind of vital.
I think that goes without saying. But i was still very surprised on how good they were, my expectations were very whelmed.
They are fantastic for spoken audio like audiobooks and podcasts by themselves, if you’re using them in combination with earplugs they work a lot better for music because you get the low bass sounds that you would miss without the ear plugs.
They’re good for activities you want open ears for, like street cycling. Audio quality is not fantastic though. I use them for podcasts.
I used to have a pair. Tried to use them on a train and ended up wishing I also had earplugs.
Have a recommended brand or style?
I use whatever the premium Shokz product was 4 years ago. They have a new model that’s supposed to have better sound quality. I think it’s the open run pro 2. That’s what I’d get if I were buying another pair
Knipex ♥️
A Knippix Kombi-Zange. Well played! Good tools are worth every cent.
people with really wide toes:
my 260 euros hiking shoes with extra wide toebox. i had size ten. with these shoes i have size 8.5 (i had to go longer, so i got more widht to fit my toes)
no pain anymore, no more infected nail beds. best shoes i ever had. model innsbruck
Noted. My frog toes are always busting out the sides of my running shoes like british POWs from a german prison camp
A $250 Epson ink tank printer.
500 full colour 10x15 photos and still half full.
LASERJET COPIERS ARE SUPERIOR!
Miele washing machine. Doing my laundry since 2001 and still as good as new.
PIA wiper blades are pretty amazing. They’ve lasted me close to 6 years now I think. Way more price efficient than regular wipers.
I had some PIAA silicone wiper blades that lasted like 5 years, but I also kept that car in a garage. Amazing wiper blades!
When I moved to a new area where I had to park my car on the street because I no longer had a garage, I replaced the wiper blades with the same model but they didn’t even last a year.
I’m very surprised. I kept my out for the last 3ish years. Let me know if you try them again. I’m wondering if that was a fluke bad purchase? Hope its not quality degredation
Darn tough socks, lamy pens, Ibanez guitars, and crumpler bags have all been very solid quality products I consider well worth the value.
I have a Lamy pen and it’s wonderful. I put a more fine nib on it and it writes beautifully, despite me being a lefty. I know you can get a lefty nib for them, but can’t really justify buying one and they only come in medium width.
i had like 10 of them since childhod, goddamn loved them. loved the colors and how smooth they were.
Second Darn Tough. Best trail running socks I’ve ever had
Those weird brushes that remove pet hair from carpets