My father once told me of an old IBM machine, I think it was the System 3 model 15D or one of its contemporaries, or maybe the original System 38. It had some amount of memory, like 32k of memory (I’m going to get these numbers wrong), and to upgrade it you could spend many thousands of dollars to have IBM come install a control board to upgrade it to 64k. The memory was already physically in the box; they manufactured and delivered it to the customer, and sold the memory control board as an exorbitant cost option, when it was the RAM (it might have even been core storage) that was the expensive part to make.

To a lesser degree, I’ve been hearing about cars that install cost options on all models, but they don’t hook them up on the lower tiers. Like apparently all Lotus Exiges have power mirrors, they’ve all got motors in them, but they don’t give you the switch unless you pay for it. You can go to a Ford dealership, buy the right switch and just pop it in and it’ll work. I suppose it can make some sense to reduce part counts, but it’s getting to the point where it’s "we installed the option in the car, it’s hooked up, it’s perfectly functional, we’ve already put in the expense, and we’ll allow the software to turn it on if you pay for it.

Let me clarify this part of my thinking: That line has moved a lot since the lifetime of Thomas Chippendale.

When you think about what it would take to build an ornately carved mahogany highboy with a high gloss varnish in 1750 versus today, including logging, transporting exotic wood around the planet, the actual woodworking…hell, just compare applying a shellac french polish versus spray lacquer today.

I could run a fairly decent woodworking racket given 10 cubic meters a year. Does that include branches and such?

Ten cubic meters of free wood a year. Huh. That’s an oak or two.

When it comes to rich people, pretty much yes it is.

On my main desktop I’m using Fedora KDE. Arrived here by process of elimination.

Linux Mint Cinnamon didn’t run particularly well with my hardware, I was looking for a distro with decent Wayland support so I could run my high refresh rate monitor properly. So that pretty much meant a switch to KDE. So who’s implementation of KDE?

I’ve spent much of my time on the Ubuntu side of things, but Canonical has been pulling so much diet Microsoft shit that I’d rather not use any of the *buntus themselves, so Kubuntu is out. Neon? Kubuntu again. I’m not terribly interested in the forks of forks of forks of forks, I’ve been around long enough to go “Remember PeppermintOS? You don’t, okay.” So I’m looking for something fairly near the root of its tree.

I’ve never really seen the appeal of Arch and every time I’ve tried running Manjaro it failed to function, so forget that. I don’t know shit about SuSe, that basically left Fedora. So here I am.

Yeah, see: when you’re looking at these highly ornate antiques, it’s not the wealth of the craftsman on display; it’s the wealth of his customer.

Are you yourself a craftsman?

I have been rendered incapable of seeing beauty in ostentatious displays of wealth.

Okay so there are layers to this question:

Why does antique furniture usually have carved feet?

First, antique furniture tends to be the fancy stuff for rich people. Modest furniture made out of a few boards for the unwashed masses usually isn’t considered for preservation, but the fancy shit rich people bought got kept.

Rich people tend to like to show off how rich they are. And one way to do that up until fairly recently was through furniture. Maybe you use exotic wood, but even if you don’t do that you pay a woodworker to waste his life carving useless intricate details like pineapple newel posts or ornate table legs.

The claw-clutching-a-ball design apparently comes from China, it’s supposed to be a dragon’s foot clutching a jewel. The British adopted it in the Queen Anne period because it’s ornate, fancy and foreign exotic. Rich people get to brag that they got their table, or a taste for the style, “during their travels.” Ball-and-claw feet specificall would fall out of fashion with the Chippendale era though fancy schmancyness would hit an all time maximum, and then the industrial revolution happened.

It used to take a skilled artisan to make carvings like that with a chisel. Now, we have duplicating machines that can batch them out dozens at a time. This episode of the New Yankee Workshop shows this off. When building his Lowboy, Norm doesn’t even try to carve cabriole legs, he buys them from a company that makes them, and we get a little footage of the factory. This is why you don’t see the Zuckerbergs of the world showing off ostentatious carved furniture: ornate carvings are commodity items now. You can buy furniture with cabriole legs and arch cornices at any of those big warehouses out by the highway with a “Going out of business forever” sign out front.

Is it only ornamental?

95% yes. Speaking as a woodworker I can tell you, people overwhelmingly like looking at tapered legs. Our own legs taper, so we tend to copy that. From fancy cabriole legs to simple shaker furniture. A flared foot of any kind is mostly ornamental because again our own feet flare out, but there is a bit of a practical purpose: A larger surface area with a rounded edge is easier to slide across the floor than a small, sharply edged end of a board. It doesn’t tend to dig in as much, particularly on carpet. Also, the rounded features are more difficult to chip and splinter.

Why are they usually webbed feet?

It’s meant to be a dragon’s foot, so somewhere between reptilian and birdlike. It is also furniture, not a statue, so it’s rather stylized and not very anatomical. Edit to add, sharp, deep crevices like you get between, say, the fingers of a balled fist, are difficult to carve; The deeper and thinner the crevice, the longer, thinner and more delicate a tool is required to carve it. A craftsman may design around the limitation of the tools he has by, say, making webbed feet rather than trying and failing to do distinct toes.

Possibly my biggest adult fear moment was when my cousin was in the hospital having had a brain bleed.

I was going back to school in a dumbass bid to alter course in my career, it was the last day of the semester, lunchtime. I was sitting in my truck eating lunch with my girlfriend at the time, I get a call, it’s from my oldest cousin. “Hey, [middle cousin] is in the hospital. Duke hospital. In the ICU.” That was a rough winter, spending a month watching someone you grew up with as their brain very gradually reboots. She survived, by the skin of her scalp. She lost some vision, has near constant headaches, had aphasia pretty bad but that’s eased a bit. At first it was like the nouns fell out of her dictionary. My uncle said to her “What do you want for dinner, babe?” And she said “Oh I want the, you know the, with the, ugh!” and she got up and started boiling some spaghetti.

The most certain I was going to die was one night when I went up for a night currency flight.

Some of the rules pilots have to follow are weird; pilot’s licenses in the US don’t expire, but you have to log certain recent experiences to be eligible to fly solo or to carry passengers. To carry passengers at night, you have to have performed 3 takeoffs and landings to a full stop at night. I was 18 or 19, I took off to do exactly that, just three quick trips around the pattern…it was windier than I’d ever dealt with. I took off and that Cessna bucked in ways that I’d never experience before, in the pitch black of night. I remember thinking “I’m going to die tonight. I’ve always wondered how, now I know.” I did make it to downwind, basically training had kicked in, I was going through the motions, and I noticed out ahead of me in town some flashing blue lights, and I thought to myself “Uh oh, someone’s getting a ticket down there.” And that little moment of casualness allowed me to re-center. I thought about it for the rest of downwind, came in with 20 degrees of flap and a LOT of left rudder for a textbook upwind wheel landing. Taxied back to the ramp, tied the plane down, then sat in the cockpit until my hands stopped shaking and I could write down the hobbs and tach times.

I have very little experience with Arch. I ran Mint for a decade before coming to Fedora KDE for Wayland’s wider support for variable refresh rates and such.

A lot of my opinions on the matter have more to do with KDE vs Cinnamon. But as for Fedora vs Mint/Ubuntu/Debian, I have one major one: Software availability is nowhere near as good.

On Mint, a shit ton of stuff can be found in the APT repos, plus Flatpak is there. If the package you want isn’t in either of those two places, there’s probably an Ubuntu-style PPA (remember those?) or, if you’re resorting to downloading and compiling from Git, they always include Ubuntu instructions and they work.

On Fedora, the standard repos via DNF have half a moldy butt in them. They maintain their own Flatpak repository, and there’s Flathub. There have been a number of times where I’ve had to just give up having a piece of software I was used to because it’s not packaged for Fedora. Build instructions are rarely written for Red Hat/Fedora, and “Well I’ll just say DNF install instead of APT install” is usually “cannot find package.”

I’ll probably be moving on at some point, but it’s working for now.

They keep implementing things I did years ago.

I asked for it to be in sh.itjust.works’ bylaws. No commercial spam.

I just finished my third and fourth cutting board this week.

I went to high school shortly after Columbine. We didn’t have active shooter drills.

I’m looking forward to our first proper mystery like The Most Mysterious Song On The Internet or Celebrity Number Six. We’ll know the Fediverse has 5 years to live max when this becomes the place to post that kind of thing.

no not today. a few days ago.

I mentioned it in our main community, and I think they ratcheted up the security about it to the point that it’ll throw a “not found” error if I even click on links to the Nicoled community.

So I will mention I got a few of the standard Nicole spams (picture of girl alive and well, the familiar text) originating from days old accounts on sh.itjust.works. At least two accounts, each sent the message more than once before I blocked them, each were a couple days old with no other activity. Easy to believe the original actor opened a couple accounts to spam from.

Didn’t see this move coming.

Yeah something like they got 20 people, 10 with and 10 without Parkinson’s, she gave them the sniff and detected 11 people with, correctly pegging all ten with Parkinson’s and one from the without group…who was shortly thereafter diagonsed with Parkinson’s.

Figure out what chemical she’s detecting and then make a detector for it and you’ve got a diagnosis machine.