Some ideas:
starting from experience
That does work better, I think!
That would be funny, although I think it may have been closed down and converted to some other purpose. It was a vast concrete sarcophagus of a building. No windows or proper heating. Weird cardboard dividers for walls, so all classrooms could hear all nearby classrooms. Bizarre skywells on the upper floors with no cages or guard rails.
It was really a building suitable for any purpose except a school :D
Haha, yeah…
I did the classic overachiever route and finished my thesis pretty fast, focused on a specific career. Then still ended up with a shitty full-time job, so took on three more jobs and started a nonprofit. All that still got me exactly nowhere. I was ridiculously stressed. One time I didn’t sleep for 3 days and had to check in to the hospital.
Hopefully this offers some comfort. The things you consider mistakes, are the things I wish I had done. Even spending more time with my parents. So perhaps nothing is so serious :)
My “nuclear option” was immigration. I sold everything and (just barely) got a business license in the developing world. I’m basically Ozymandias from watchmen, but less fit and I don’t own tights. Also none of my friends are blue. Splicing genes and splitting atoms, I will admit to though.
Anyway the point is, what matters is what happens next. I don’t recommend immigrating to the developing world (it’s acutely distressing), but it’s surprising how much we can influence the outcomes of our lives if we radically commit to a course of action. If the exact details of your course of action aren’t optimal (or even borderline insane), I think that’s OK, it’s being radically committed to improving your future that matters. The context isn’t exactly irrelevant, but I think it’s secondary.
So no need to stress. Better to spend that energy doing. Anything reasonable will do. Start a side hustle, learn programming, design websites, learn to do taxes for yourself and others. Degrees are OK but I don’t value them any more personally. Get used to starting at square one over and over – it’s a good habit and you will eventually know how to do many things. People who can do many things are rare and valuable.
Not exactly! I just sort of take finely chopped apples (for pectin), onions, mango, and dried raisins or dried apricots. Then I boil, adding (a little) vinegar over time until it looks like chunky jam. Then I flavor it with soup stock and cinnamon to taste. Some nutmeg too, if you like. Finally I adjust acidity and sweetness with more vinegar or some sugar – but that’s usually not necessary if I add things in slowly.
If it’s too acidic, boil it longer, adding a little water if it gets dry. Vinegar (acetic acid) is a gas and will evaporate out slowly this way.
Mix frequently.
I save them up all year, and come Christmas / Lunar New Year, I bake cookies then hand out jars filled with cookies to coworkers and neighbors.
It turns out that my wife and I consume exactly enough jam in a year to balance out the jar egress for the maximum number of social connections we can sustain.
If I have a spare, I might make mango chutney. It doesn’t need to be vacuum sealed if you just make one jar and eat it reasonably soon.
I suppose you could engineer them to be solar garden lights too. There ought to be enough room for the panel on top of the lid, a battery and circuit on the underside, and then you hang an LED in there.
Just another day running a business in the developing world, haha. You win some, you lose some :)
The only videos that YouTube manages to convince me to watch are by clickspring. So satisfying to watch metal being machined, and much to learn too.
Yup, I do the same – although my remote desktop is just SSH, so even truly ancient stuff is completely fine. I’ve been looking at getting a portable terminal as an alternative to even a laptop, which is a bit of a pain to lug around if I’m on vacation.
This technique failed disastrously one time though. A billing dispute between the person renting me office space and the building owner meant my AI workstation got seized for a year once. That was a real pain – I never expected to see it again. Thankfully it did return to my possession. Eventually.
Calculator battery housing had a missing screw. Would have to squeeze it there for it to work. Did that for about a year.
Eventually broke entirely. So I soldered in two CR2032 cell holders and glued them to the back. Am now the proud owner of a Casio fx-4000p with an external battery. I made it rechargeable for a while, but quiescent current draw was too high and it was impractical.
I made a living pretty much just doing math for a short while. It served me very well. I refuse to get a new calculator.
Another time my DVD drive had difficulty opening. I’d have to press the eject button a lot of times before it worked, just did that for like 3 months. Eventually it failed entirely, so I took it apart, removed the magnet that holds the drive shut, cooked it on the gas stove to weaken it, and put it back in. Worked for another 6 months. Was glad I paid attention that day in Physics class.
I’ve always thought that learning the native language of a developing country would be a huge asset. Very few people do so, and outsourcing has a huge cost differential, so it opens up unusual career moves to capture that growth.
Hilariously, 12 year old me suggested this on the “what 3rd language would you like to learn” form in high school and somehow got in trouble for it. I guess they thought I was joking. Perhaps the joke was on them though, I immigrated to Vietnam and own a (small) tech company now.
Free computer operating systems are great these days.
I regularly spend hours designing electronics to be cheaper. Not worse – just cheaper. Electronic components sometimes vary in price by two orders of magnitude for the same performance, so it’s worth cramming datasheets in your head as a professional or hobbyist.
For tools, I’ve found good midrange Chinese brands, and stuck to them. I could never afford things like Tektronix and so on.
I don’t strictly require clothing to be cheap, but I do require it to be fungible – this works out similarly though. When I find something that’s good value for money and looks good, I buy a bunch and rotate them. That way I don’t have to think about what to wear, and it always looks decent.
I also prefer cheap laptops. I don’t need a supercomputer to work. When I do need a supercomputer, I rent one from google cloud for a few dollars an hour.
That hits close to home – I had it a bit easier though. They had emptied my bank account without my knowledge or permission and left me for dead in the developing world, while they ran off to a new country and job they had secretly set up. Robbed their family too.
So at least all the bridges were thoroughly burned and I could focus on rebuilding. That kind of focus is a very powerful tool and I was able to bootstrap myself into a middle class life within a reasonable time. I came to realize how much that relationship had been holding me back.
Nearly died of cholera though. Anyway, the things we don’t have the power to change legitimately hurt real bad, but I hope you will one day surprise yourself with how much you can affect the things you do have the power to change.
Volunteer work is my go-to answer in these situations.
I’m around 40, am always very busy with work, and I can’t hold complex conversations in the language that 95% of the population of my country speaks exclusively. My personal interests are extremely technical, and unusual (bordering on arcane). So meeting new friends is a bit of a challenge for me too.
It was still a very effective way to meet awesome people of all ages, some younger, some older! I even met my wife that way.
Both, but more often left than right.
I drive a motorcycle – in my country the law is that bikes and traditional vehicles stay to the right and cars to the left. So to the right is generally a curb. To the left I leave enough space for someone to pass me or for me dodge optimists.
I keep forgetting Lemmy has voting features. I never used them on Reddit.
Anyway, the key is attracting people who generate content. Finding people who consume content is comparatively easy. A good way to start is to generate content yourself, and leveraging that to convince other content creators to work alongside you. It’s a lot of work, takes time, and you can’t fake it.
I’m one of those weirdos that is happy to generate content somewhere like Lemmy even if no one sees it. I think I have two comments on my instance (and as far as I know, I run the only instance in my country, or at the very least the first). Although content only comes through when I have time to do interesting things. Feel free to link to it if that’s helpful to you, although it’s very engineering-focused.
I think that long term, native content is the only solution – things that originate here. Other platforms can scramble to repost our stuff if they want.
My understanding is that the purpose of the off switch is to disconnect the battery from everything so you can put the device in storage. The battery cannot charge (or discharge, much) when it is disconnected. This function is necessary so that the battery doesn’t become permanently dead in the store/warehouse before the device is sold to you. Adding in the feature as you describe it would cost more – profit margins on this kind of device are razor-thin so this is not likely a viable product – and there’s not much demand for garden lights in winter, so economies of scale would be difficult to achieve.
You could design it yourself to work the way you want though! It would not be that hard or expensive, probably you could fit it in to your current devices. A few ideas come to mind, although they all require some OK programming skills and basic PCB design skills.
These devices also tend to be highly cost-optimized – as a ‘cheap hack’ you could try taking two apart and putting both panels on a single device (in parallel, NOT in series. Be sure to observe polarity). It’s very likely that the panel and battery capacity are engineered to be just barely enough to serve as a summer garden light at the latitude of the target demographic (again, razor-thin margins). This is most likely the fundamental reason the light does not behave the way you want it to.
An additional consideration is that the performance of many rechargeable cell types decreases with temperature.
Anyway, I hope that, er… sheds some light on the issue!
NaN. I live in the tropics, socks aren’t really a thing.
If I have to wear silly formal shoes for a function or whatever, I wear them maybe two hours.
Oh yeah, all the time. Not for anything I need though. Just for private jets, million dollar pieces of industrial mining equipment, and centrifuges.
Ubiquitous surveillance means constant opportunities to provide wrong data.
I only occasionally see that here in Asia. It exists, but I feel like it’s much less. I immigrated here maybe 12 years ago from the West. The overall level of violence is much lower than I grew up with (even in Canada).
Most young people I know consider handling guns more of a chore. In Vietnam, learning to disassemble, clean, maintain, and reassemble an AK-47 is a mandatory class. My wife got top score :)
Anyway, we stumbled on a great way to make guns uncool, I think. Personal possession is illegal here except for shotguns, it’s for some very specific scenario that I don’t exactly recall. I knew of some remote workplaces with one, in case of wild animals. We get some, but not many, illegal firearms.