• 8 Posts
  • 446 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 14th, 2023

help-circle

  • hahaha see! All kidding aside as long as you have an RO system you’re probably fine. I went for years making a gallon or so at a time with a sink adapter and collecting rainwater, but my background is in water and control systems, so I got bored and took it to far.

    If you DO go for a full bog, I recommend those concrete mixing tubs you can get at home depot, and some bulk head fittings from amazon. A few things to watch out for are:

    1. Sizing plumbing to avoid siphoning/annoying gurgling
    2. slime mold/algae abatement.

    I have all my “residents” in individual pots with sphagnum, so there’s quite a lot of water, and lots of room for algae growth. I’m in the process of replacing one of the bays (the mixing bins I mentioned) with an artificial media I can grow a living moss bed across (no sunlight to the liquid phase means no algae), but I’ve noticed that does encourage slime molds. It also encourages fungus gnats but it being a carnivorious plant bed… that hasnt been an issue.








  • Mimicking what others said here, but there is one very important thing: you and your wife need to be on the same page on this.

    Owning a business involves your whole family, you can get better at it, but there’s no way around it. Whatever your reasons are for taking this path, make sure they understand. When there’s friction and you need to prioritize the business it will help a lot. The key that helping is to have it be a “we” decision though. You may reach a point where one of you wants to continue and the other doesn’t. You will fight about it. But fighting about if this is getting you where you want to be better than an alternative path is a lot more productive than just fighting about stress.

    Re: time: I always say that it’s usually not the hours (although sometimes it certainly is), it’s that you’re never really off. You’ll start to fall into rythem and realize what is critical and what can wait. It gets easier but it never gets easy.

    For construction in general, without knowing the type: be very careful to set yourself up for success. Do not get saddled with loans for equipment that you don’t need. Do not be afraid to rent on a per job basis for a while. If it helps you avoid oversizing/buying the wrong piece of equipment it’s well worth it.

    Grow your client base intentionally. You’re going to have shitty customers. My best friend does a mix of residential, muni, and private. The shit developers have pulled on him is astounding (“I need to sell a house before I can pay you”). They will grind you on bills because they know their ongoing expenses are less than yours; you’ll cave if they wait. Make liberal use of late fees (usually capped by state) and property leins. The art of “playing the game” and not getting rolled over is hard learned. When you get good clients that pay their bills on time and don’t grind, do whatever you need to keep them. especially now, make sure there are material cost escalation and availability clauses in your contracts.

    Last: avoid “the lifestyle”. Do not judge your companys success on the fanciness of the equipment or what it’s name is on. Judge it on the balance sheet. You have no idea what other firms books look like. Be intentional about your networking time. That vendor that hosted a golf outing, did you really get good connections out of it or did you go because you needed a break and could call it “work”? If it’s the latter, would you have been more recharged taking a break with your wife around the house? Networking is intangible, you’re going to be the only one who can make that call.

    You will fuck all of this up, thats how you learn. But you CAN do this.




  • Exactly. Whats funny is facebook could have done this in like… 2010. Like I’m fairly certain I had “group pages” back then that were a very small number of people. But you’re right, the channel thing is crazy useful. Like my one group has 3 people, but we’ve got like 50 topics. It’s gotten to the point there are archives, ie: the “thanksgiving” channel moves from the “archive” group to “general” group around mid sept.

    I’ve also been lucky enough to avoid having it be work related. Like I have slack for work, that notification noise is the devil, where as the discord notification noise means my buddy is posting pictures of his kid.


  • 1000% agree. Like I use it for some spread out family (one server) and college friends. There’s <5 people in each. I think eventually forums will adopt the fediverse infrastructure. I’m on an old school forum for my vehicle, and it’s great. It’s direct out of 2010, it wouldn’t suprise me if those kind of sites brought in all the code that the fediverse runs off of. As a casual observer, that’s really what lemmy seems like to me: “what if 2005 internet, where people managed their own webpages, but it ran on a common architecture that made it easier to cross-link with other sites if you wanted?”




  • American not Canadian. Grew up in a border town and live farther away now. I routinely tell people “I get home sick for a country I’m not from”. I hate this shit. I’m not going to rattle off every little trite thing, but damnit, this shit kills me. If there is a silver lining, it’s that I’ve had concerns about our disease spreading. I’m hoping maybe we served as your inoculation.





  • For anyone in that spot of being savvy-ish but having fellow users that finally got used to plex:

    A work around is Xteve and owncast. I was successfully able to make an owncast broadcast into a “DVR channel”.

    Its cluegy but it does work. My tech level in this stuff is spotty. I’m used to stacks of tech but more for physical control systems (NOT consumer facing). But I was able to get that to work.

    Edit: little bit of clarification: Xteve will let you add DVR to your plex server. It’s possible to tie owncast into Xteve. That allows users to cue into a “DVR” channel which is kind of “simulcasting” whatever you’re pointing owncast to. In my case it was a screen share of sportsball, but it could be whatever.