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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • I’ve never seen naptha (i.e. Zippo lighter fluid) do anything to any painted or finished surface, nor any of the plastics I’ve ever tired it on.

    I’d guess that it’s probably bad news for natural rubber. IIRC, naphtha is similar to gasoline, and gasoline will mess natural rubber up.

    That being said, I have a can of naphtha myself.

    kagis

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rubber

    The two main solvents for rubber are turpentine and naphtha (petroleum). Because rubber does not dissolve easily, the material is finely divided by shredding prior to its immersion.

    Sounds like it.

    One other thing to keep in mind is that it is (obviously, given that that’s how lighters that use it work) quite flammable in vapor form and the fumes aren’t great to breathe, so this is something you’d want to use in a well-ventillated area.

    EDIT:

    https://kleanstrip.com/solvents-and-thinners/vmp-naphtha/

    Klean-Strip® VM&P Naphtha can be used in place of Paint Thinner for oil-based paint, varnish and enamel when a faster drying time is desired.

    So I don’t think I’d want to casually get it on oil-based paint.




  • The reason many AI image generators do multiple images is as a simple way to trade compute cycles for quality. The idea is that you generate a couple and pick the best, using your human knowledge of what you intend.

    You could generate it in one place, copy the URL of the best image, and embed it in your response. That’s what I did when I pasted the links to the skunk engraving images in my post; the images were generated elsewhere. I just pasted all four rather than only one, to show what the response looks like.

    The syntax for an inline image on the Threadiverse’s Markdown variant is:

    ![](URL)
    

    I assume that either that syntax or a similar one will work on Mastodon, but I don’t know Mastodon’s syntax, as I don’t use it.











  • I agree that it’s definitely noticeable on many gamepads, but as to numbers…the difference is way higher than 1ms (not to mention the fact that retransmits and stuff make the latency variable on wireless).

    I just linked, in another discussion, to a database someone built after measuring input latency on a bunch of devices.

    https://gamepadla.com/

    The Amazon Luna there, which is one of the worse-performing gamepads…man. Even if you’re just taking average latency rather than worst-case, has average wireless latency about 18 milliseconds over the wired latency.

    Last time I was playing FPSes much, I couldn’t tell you just from feel if there were 1 or 10 milliseconds of network delay (okay, not exactly the same thing as input device delay depending upon how the game does input prediction), but I could notice performance differences over a 10 millisecond difference, how well I played.


  • Mouse for…graphics

    If you’re doing freehand drawing — which I rarely do, but obviously many graphic artists care a lot about — a stylus and tablet really beats the pants off a mouse. Try to sign your name with a mouse and a tablet in a graphics program, and it really drives home the difference.

    That’s before one even gets to graphics programs being able to use tilt- and pressure-sensitive stylus inputs to affect brushstrokes.


  • I’m definitely more accurate with a mouse than a trackball.

    However, there are some neat things that one can do with trackballs that one can’t do with mice. I’ve had a trackball of some sort around for a long time for those cases.

    I can lie down on a bed or couch with a trackball, whereas a mouse requires a flat, horizontal, stable, hard surface to work with.

    I can squeeze a trackball into a tiny space on a table, where a mouse wouldn’t fit.

    Depending upon the type of trackball, some permit for flicking the ball and letting it spin freely in a direction with one’s fingers up. A lot of software these days, especially on touchscreen-oriented devices, permits “flinging” to scroll and letting virtual inertia let something scroll onscreen to simulate a similar effect, but such trackballs had hardware device-level support for such behavior that worked in any software and worked the same way everywhere.

    Not really mice, but relative to trackpads, it used to be that trackpads with physical buttons were widely available. I vastly prefer those to trackpads with “virtual” buttons, but in 2025, there are very few laptop models that provide for physical buttons, especially with a Linux-friendly three physical buttons that don’t require chording to get a middle-click. Some Thinkpad models provide Synaptic trackpads that do this, but even those have become a minority of available Thinkpad models. Trackballs, on the other hand, have to provide physical buttons, and are a lot easier to find in 2025 with more than two physical buttons than trackpads.

    Also relative to a trackpad, I’m more-accurate with a trackball.

    I wouldn’t choose a trackball over a mouse for general use at a desk. And the very flat dimensions of a trackpad make it compelling for a lot of built-in laptop use — while a few laptops still are available with internal trackballs, the tight physical constraints force tiny trackballs. If I use a trackball with a laptop, I personally want an external one.

    But there are definitely scenarios where a trackball works better for me than either a mouse or trackpad, enough for me to keep them around.


  • I saw someone made an International community but couldn’t find it on my instance, so I made a Lemmy.ml one

    Your home instance will only receive posts to a community on a remote instance once at least one user on your home instance is subscribed to that remote instance’s community. If you’re the first one, you need to trigger a search for it, then subscribe, and then your home instance will start getting posts.

    I’m going to go to Lemmyverse’s community list to search for it:

    https://lemmyverse.net/communities

    I would guess that it’s !international@lemmy.world.

    It currently has no posts:

    https://lemmy.world/c/international

    Your home instance, lemmy.ml, doesn’t yet know about it. Here’s the link to your home instance’s view of it:

    https://lemmy.ml/c/international@lemmy.world

    The community international does not exist on this instance (yet). This can happen if you are the first person to try and open it in this instance. Someone will need to prompt this instance to fetch the community from the original instance. This task can be trigerred by entering the community URL (ex. lemmy.world/c/international) or identifier (ex. !international@lemmy.world) into the search page (reference).

    You can do this by clicking on the button below, and then coming back after some time. Don’t worry about the “No results” message, the fetch process would have started in the background. Alternatively, you can copy one of the codes above and do the search manually at https://lemmy.ml/search. You can also just view the community on the foreign instance.

    If you want it to, go to the above link I made to your home instance’s view of the thing, click “trigger a search”, and then subscribe to it, and if/when people post there, you’ll get posts.