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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It’s safer to back into a spot when parking than to back out. When you back in, you’ve just seen the spot and any obstacles while going forward, so you know what’s there, even if you can’t see it when backing in. When pulling out backwards, enough time has passed that any number of obstacles can have appeared, so you need to be able to see every obstacle in your way, which is much harder backing out.


  • It’s also safer for pedestrians for the same reason you pointed out. Your visibility is far better going forward, so it’s safer for everyone, especially pedestrians.

    You could argue “but its the same for backing in”. No, it isn’t. When you back in, you’ve just seen the spot going forward, so unless you have the memory of a goldfish, you already know what obstacles are there and you just need to keep track of ones you can see to back in. When pulling out, it can be several minutes from when you last saw any obstacles, plenty of time for kids, cars, carts, etc. to get in your way. But I guess with shitty GM trucks having a crap view forward now, it doesn’t make a difference.







  • It’s pretty damn easy to get a technician license, there are many organizations that will do the test for free if the $35 fee is too much to spend on a lark. It allows you to push that button and there’s lots of cool digital stuff you can do as well. Equipment can get pretty pricey, though. As true as it is that every ham has a baofeng handheld (or several) they tend to really suck to learn how to use and it very well could hamper your enjoyment of the hobby if you want to transmit. Listening is fine on them, so if that’s all you want to do it’ll be fine.

    If you do want to talk, I would actually recommend starting with GMRS, especially if you have family members you might want to talk to that wouldn’t want to get their own ham license. You buy a license instead of testing, and the equipment is basically just locked down ham radios and if your handy, you can use the right old commercial equipment and reprogram them for GMRS use. The community is a bit more newbie friendly since your license extends to your household as well and kids are more common, and a large portion of the community are hams as well.





  • Check out the makemkv forums on drive advice. The gui makemkv should work as well, not so much anything relying on the command line tools (arm ripper, etc).

    Handbrake is encoding software that works pretty well and can encode straight from disc.

    VLC can also do it.

    I have personally started dd’ing to iso then encoding the main feature from that for my server, and saving the iso separately just in case I really want to play those dumb dvd extra features and fbi warnings.

    Ripping can be a pain, there’s all kinds of encryption hoops to jump through, and I have come across a few dvds that I just couldn’t rip no matter what I tried.