I’ve got that one too. It’s excellent. Everything you didn’t realize you needed to know about how good furniture is put together.

Per the “ancient” “Chinese” curse, “May you live in interesting times,” I suspect.

(The phrase is actually the brainchild of a British diplomat who was posted to China for a while sometime around 1900, if I recall correctly.)

You can also do it the 3D printer way: most “wood” PLA has sawdust mixed into it, and the better grades are supposed to be able to take stain and such (I’ve never actually tried).

Another reason I’m not ashamed that I built mine out of 2x4s. If I manage to completely destroy it, I’ll just buy more crappy spruce, glue up a new slab, and keep going.

That looks like it might be a separate molding around the edge, mitered at the corner? See if you can figure out how it’s attached—you may be able to pry off the portion that would be running front-to-back in the photo without damaging anything, then cut off the mitered corner on the left-to-right length with a handsaw…

If it’s edging on a solid slab, pick whichever power saw you think is most likely to cut through in one pass and set up a guide to make sure the cut is straight, that’s all I can say.

My experience with cats: unless you’re willing to reapply the finish every couple of months as the cat removes it (in which case use a food-safe oil and keep in mind that cats notice smells) leave it unfinished. The cat won’t care, and we’ve had several that actually preferred raw wood (the current one is a cardboard junkie, though, so he’s happy with cheap scratching pads from the store).

Alas, my only holiday project is getting the three dining chairs whose crossbars have fallen apart fixed before anyone shows up to sit in them. Not difficult, except that not a single thing I’m going to need to clamp is flat and square.

If you don’t already have fabric you’re intending to use, you might also consider paper as an option. Paper of the type used in Japanese shoji screens, that is, not office bond paper.

Sounds like the person you were talking to may have been the confused one. (In all fairness, if they have no great interest in wood, woodworking, or furniture, they don’t really need to know that engineered sheet goods don’t count as solid wood.)

Experiencing a bit of plane envy here, since the only one I inherited was trash and yours looks very nice indeed.

Hmm. If I’m visualizing this correctly, and depending on the size of the table . . .

Two pairs of legs with stretchers in between, on pivots that allow them to fold up agains the bottom of the table, slighly offset so that the legs end up alongside each other when folded instead of interfering. If you want them to touch the bottom of the tub, set them up to fold at the “knees” rather than the “thigh”, if you see what I mean. The difficult part is figuring out how to secure them in the extended position. If you’re okay with putting in a couple of bolts whenever you unfold, you could add a couple of supports that link the stretchers to the underside of the table at an angle (pivot at the other end again). Or you could attach a length of wood to one stretcher with a pivot and notch the other end so that when the table is unfolded, it drops over the other stretcher and forms a tight cross half-lap joint.

All this requires gluing or screwing hinges or bits of wood pierced for dowels or screws to the bottom of the table to form the pivots.

Better too many clamps than too few. Use 'em if you’ve got 'em.

letting cats roam outside is objectively harmful.

That’s very situational. If you’re in a rural or semi-rural area that has small wildcats (or foxes or similar) already, adding a handful of domestic cats isn’t going to disrupt anything much. The only reason to keep cats inside in such a place is for their own safety (from larger predators like coyotes, and from highway traffic).

If you’re in Australia, Antarctica, or a protected island biome with no native small wildcats or canids, or you have a known endangered species in the area that cats are likely to prey upon, that changes the equation. If you’re in a highly urban area, that changes things in a different way, because the danger to outdoor cats from traffic and other human activity rises exponentially.

Very unlikely this person is a grandparent—up until about 40 years ago, most cats outside highly built-up downtown areas were allowed to free-roam, so an older person would see it as normal.

One thing that’s helped me a bit in similar circumstances was to find the manual (by searching on-line, since the paper ones don’t tend to survive in our household). Even 30-50 years ago, they were pretty good at telling you what to absolutely not do, in order to reduce the number of lawsuits flung at the manufacturer. Also a nice-to-have for maintenance purposes.

(Now if only I could find the one for that damned drill press . . .)

If your local library is no good, you can also try Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=woodworking. Has an exhaustively detailed book on joints in particular, plus an assortment of beginners’ manuals. A lot of hand tool stuff hasn’t changed all that much in the past century.

Saves a trip to the store, and the cost of a more expensive (because inflation) new can.

I ended up with a 103-key Unicomp New Model M (essentially the same layout as a 101-key, but with one Windows key and one context menu key stuffed into what would have been the small blank spaces in the bottom row between ctrl and alt—I really wanted a full-length spacebar). Linux is most often installed onto ex-Windows PCs, so it’s hardly surprising that it expects the Windows keyboard layout.

(I believe the current generation of Gnome devs is big on minimalism, AKA omitting or removing features. I can understand the appeal from a code maintenance point of view, but it’s never been a DE that I liked.)

You can buy keyboards with replaceable keycaps. You can also buy keycaps with Tux logos on them for at least some of those keyboards. You can decide for yourself whether your aesthetic dislike of the Windows logo is worth the rather higher price of such a keyboard.

Then, in my opinion, you would have failed to perform due diligence. Even if you’d thought C.O. was an adult, suggesting a woman strike up a private conversation with a man neither of you know is always something that deserves a second look (dating sites excepted), because the potential for harm is regrettably high.

Snapchat is not the only problem here, but it is a problem.

If they can’t guarantee their recommendations are clean, they shouldn’t be offering recommendations. Even to adults. Let people find other accounts to connect to for themselves, or by consulting some third party’s curated list.

If not offering recommendations destroys Snapchat’s business model, so be it. The world will continue on without them.

It really is that simple.

Using buggy code (because all nontrivial code is buggy) to offer recommendations only happens because these companies are cheap and lazy. They need to be forced to take responsibility where it’s appropriate. This does not mean that they should be liable for the identity of posters on their network or the content of individual posts—I agree that expecting them to control that is unrealistic—but all curation algorithms are created by them and are completely under their control. They can provide simple sorts based on data visible to all users, or leave things to spread externally by word of mouth. Anything beyond that should require human verification, because black box algorithms demonstrably do not make good choices.

It’s the same thing as the recent Air Canada chatbot case: the company is responsible for errors made by its software, to about the same extent as it is responsible for errors made by its employees. If a human working for Snapchat had directed “C.O.” to the paedophile’s account, would you consider Snapchat to be liable (for hiring the kind of person who would do that, if nothing else)?