Not long ago I won a beautiful brush handle from Peter at Wolf Whiskers in a charity raffle. It came with a great synthetic knot, but it was lofted too short for me. I decided to remove it so I can put something else in.

I emailed Peter and he confirmed that all of his brushes are assembled with epoxy. I didn't want to risk steaming the handle, but the Discord chat convinced me to try a 5 minute steam, which I did... 5 minutes isn't long, and it didn't work.

Not wanting to further risk a total failure (the handle is in 2 pieces, plus it has a coin in the bottom), I went back to plan A - mechanical destruction.

Picture 1: I used a box cutter with a fresh blade to slice most of the hair off

Picture 2: I used a combination of a small cutoff wheel and a grinder bit on a Dremel tool and started slowly chipping away at things.

Picture 3: This bit worked the absolute best. It's small, so it took a while. It also created TONS of dust, so I had to do this outside.

Picture 4: This is pretty much the end result. It was very difficult to know when to stop. The end of the knot/epoxy and beginning of "handle" was never really obvious. In the end, the hole was 15.5mm deep, and 26.5mm wide.

I did mess it up in a few spots. The keyless chuck on the dremel has some knurling which made contact with the ferule a few times, despite me trying to be careful. I was able to buff them a little bit and they're only noticeable if you're looking closely at it.

I still haven't decided which knot to put in it, but it's a beautiful handle!

I went on this beautiful ride last week. I'm a relative n00b and the ride easily exceeded my skill level, but it was fun!

Sup everyone. Hope you're all enjoying the season of decorative gourds.

I know a lot of you just use mobile apps (yay, mobile apps!), but for the few that also use a web browser, I've been slowly rolling out alternative "front ends". The normal URL (https://sub.wetshaving.social) has the default front end. It is honestly pretty good, if not a tad dated.

Most recently we brought online https://old.wetshaving.social, which is designed to look like old.reddit.com. Even though I'm used to that layout from real-reddit, I'm still finding it a bit lacking for Lemmy, especially from a moderator point of view.

Next, we want to introduce the Alexandrite front end. @sahenders@sub.wetshaving.social already uses this, accessible from https://alexandrite.app/sub.wetshaving.social. Feel free to check it out there until we get ours behind https.

Anyway, we want to run our own instance of Alexandrite, which will be locked to our lemmy server, simplifying the experience for people like @sahenders@wetshaving.social.

All that is to say, we need a URL to put it behind.

So far, the suggestions are:

gem.wetshaving.social - Alexandrite is named after a gem on the devs wife's ring, and of course there's the GEM connection with our hobby.
alx.wetshaving.social
new.wetshaving.social - simply the opposite of old.wetshaving.social

Please leave your ideas, good or bad. Often our worst ideas turn out to be great, so don't be shy.

THANKS!

Do you miss the layout of OLD reddit? Do you wish Lemmy looked liked that? Well, check this out... https://old.wetshaving.social

Maybe someone will find it enjoyable to use.

There are some limitations to this front-end, but I don't know enough about it yet to give any advice.

Technical details:

This front-end is called "mlmym". https://github.com/rystaf/mlmym

Like everything else with Lemmy, it might break in the future. All it does is change how stuff is displayed. Think of it like a theme.

There are other front ends available, but this is the only one that we've implemented so far. There's one that makes it look like an old-school forum (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB), and one called Alexandrite that looks very interesting https://lemmy.world/post/1095076. I might play with that one in the future.

A new report by the U.S. intelligence community on Tuesday says Russia sought to help former President Donald Trump in last year's presidential election. But the document also emphasized there was no indication Russia or any other country attempted to alter actual votes.

Republicans are reeling from Trump’s undisciplined approach to the opening stages of his race against Harris.

I have multiple things running through a reverse proxy and I've never had trouble accessing them until now. The two hospitals are part of the same company, so their network setup is probably identical.

Curiously, it's not that the sites can't be found, but instead my browser complains that it's not secure.

So I don't think it's a DNS problem, but I wonder what the hospital is doing to the data.

All I could come up with in my research is this article about various methods of intercepting traffic. https://blog.cloudflare.com/performing-preventing-ssl-stripping-a-plain-english-primer/

Since my domain name is one that requires https (.app), the browser doesn't allow me to bypass the warning.

Is this just some sort of super strict security rules at the hospital? I doubt they're doing anything malicious, but it makes me wonder.

Thanks!

Also, if you know of any good networking Lemmy communities, feel free to share them.

I still get updates for things I have installed, but I haven't seen any new integrations or themes added in some time.

After wanting a modern mountain bike for the past 5 years, I finally went and got one. It's a lot of fun.

This is replacing a ~2006 Schwinn Mesa that I never ride anymore, because the trails are too rough for it where I live.

The dropper post is compressed if you're wondering why it looks like the seat is too low 😊

'Sup?

Anything fun or exciting going on in your life?

From the artisan:

Apple of Aetherwood

This is our first 100% original scent in way too long. It starts with an opening of apples and bergamot, with hints of sage, ginger, juniper berries, and geranium, with a base of amber, tonka beans, cedar, vetiver, and frankincense.

While this may sound rather heavy, it's a rich, but still summery scent that is well grounded, but no so heavy and sweet that it would be overwhelming on a hot day.

Coming later this month!

Anyone planning on giving it a try?

Share your shave of the day for Saturday!