Mike, First of His Name @mike@chinwag.org

Hi, new Chinwag arrivals! Been a while since I refreshed the pinned welcome post, so here we go!

First, welcome! Second, Chinwag is more of a community than a service. We're pretty chill and open, but the happiness of our current regular users is more important than future growth.

Our admins are moderately left-leaning by Australian standards, so if you're an American you'll probably think we're godless communists bent on destroying society. Just fair warning.

Please post pics of your cats.

Hi #Chinwag - please consider yourselves informed that @dolldolldoll is now your official "backup admin" if a hit-by-a-bus situation should occur - follow her main at @dolldolldoll if you want!

I've known Ivy for close to two decades now, we've co-sysadmined things previously and I vouch that you can trust her as you trust me.

Ivy will have access to all the backend systems and accounts, not to run things on a daily basis, but to ensure continuity of service if I can't.

#mastoadmin

Hey, I just wanted to say a quick #welcome to the recent Chinwag arrivals!

Chinwag's reason for existing is to provide communication tools for people, which is something I've always been interested in. I kind of target #Australian users, but welcome anyone from anywhere.

Please read our rules: https://social.chinwag.org/about/more

And our privacy policy: https://social.chinwag.org/terms

There's a basic guide to using Chinwag Social here: https://chinwag.im/social/

If you have any questions or concerns hit me up!

I have now put a chinwag.org sticker on my guitar, so I'm sure that will help heaps.

The big question with these modular tanks is how to stack them. For stability, a kind of staggered setup like this would be good, but it wastes a bit of wall space per stack, and it's kind of been sabotaged by the previous installer who did something a bit wrong.

The large openings on the right of each tank are only supposed to be cut out for the top ones, and only where needed. The last install was a 4x4 stack and they cut out every single one.

A very small chilli harvest today. I should figure out something nice to cook with these in the next few days. I wish I'd checked the plant yesterday, I did a fried rice thing last night that would have suited these really well.

Please note that our security policy has changed and your new password must contain both upper and lower case letters, at least one number and one symbol, and two named female characters discussing something other than a man.

Trying to work out how to make my water tank storage system work ended up with me driving to Officeworks, buying a whiteboard, fixing the whiteboard on the wall, and then realising I'd forgotten half the plan I'd bought the whiteboard to sketch out.

OK, I'm kind of stumped with being able to remove the belt from Gunter so I can pull the alternator right now. I just can't get any part of it to budge - which may be related to some leakage my mechanic pointed out when we had it up on the hoist. The whole tensioner assembly could be gummed up with who knows what.

So plan change - I've bought a used alternator from a wrecker, I'll rebuild THAT so I know it's good, then go down the mechanic and get him to do the swap with his better tools. 😀

I watched a lot of "total guitar beginner" videos in the last week, and I'm really enjoying this guy above all. A lot of them annoyed me on some level or another, but something about Justin's voice is really pleasant to spend time with for me.

Also my god, so much content just freely available and donation driven - no sign of surprise paywalls.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBNkm8o5LiEVLxO8w0p2sfQ

https://www.justinguitar.com/

Watching Highlander this evening, primarily for the soundtrack.

It's worth noting the service manual glosses over this entire thing by referring only to the 19mm bolt to compress the cylinder and saying to simply "rotate it clockwise".

No mention of how much leverage it might fucking take to do this. Hint: a lot. This thing keeps the whole serpentine belt in place and it wouldn't be very useful if it was going to slacken off every time you went over a bump.

I went to pull the alternator out of Gunter yesterday and couldn't budge the belt tensioner in the slightest, which was super annoying and stalled everything.

One thing that did come to me in the middle of my sleepless night last night was a vague memory of a video where a guy with a RAV4 engine on a stand showed clearly another bolt that might need to be loosened.

Well, after half an hour of throwing search terms at YouTube:
https://youtu.be/Kcaoi-j8McY?t=162

Thanks, Peter Finn the Car Doctor!

Had the worst night's sleep in ages. Woke constantly from dreams fighting zombies, searching for lost items, and at one point the first day of a job I'd just started and turned out to be such a disorganised mess that I needed to quit, despite having nothing else to go to.

Nothing like starting the day stressed out over a job that you don't have, and in fact doesn't even exist.