Wire stripping and crimping. Especially if you plan to do offgriding homesteading with solar but occasionally comes up in home applications when you want to revive a mangled extension cord or install a fixture. Specialized cables start to add up very quickly its much more cost effective to buy a big bag of connectors, a big roll of decent gauge wire, dig out an old set of wire cutters+needlenose and fire up a 2 minute instructions yt video. Like all other skills it takes time and error to get good at it but its not too terribly difficult as wel as very cool to essentially build your own electrical grid from the ground up with wires and connectors you made yourself…
About a year back I stumbled across these cool products that are a heatshrink sheath with a metal ring coated in low temp solder inside. They made all of my wire joining a million times easier. Just strip the end of two wires, push them into the sheath and blast them with a heat gun for 20 seconds until the ring contracts into a crimp and the solder flows onto the wires. Better physical and electrical connection than a crimp, with none of the futzing that comes with soldering and sheathing.
Thank you for sharing, this looks awesome! Will have to look into getting some.
These are so cool! Do you have a link to buy?
Edit: Found them! These are crimpless solder sleeves. Crimpless Solder Sleeve Heat Shrink Variety Kit - 90 Piece
I’d add simple soldering. It’s amazing how many little gadgets go bad because a little wire inside broke loose when it was dropped. I’ve fixed headphones, a temperature sensor, and even done things with the vehicles.
fermenting? to make healthy, cheap, useful, durable and more importantly delicious foods?
Got me on that one, I’m lacking. Made plenty of my own hot sauces from scratch, never learned to ferment.
For those in the US: Learn how to file your own taxes. It’s really simple for the large majority of people, and usually just consists of copying numbers into boxes off a sheet your employer made for you. After you’ve done it once, subsequent times you’ll probably have it done yourself in less than half an hour.
You can do it for free on a ton of sites unless you make significant income, freetaxusa is typically the most highly recommended one.
A better tip is to just maintain and monitor your finances on a regular basis. At least once a month sit down and quickly review all your income and expenses. Then at least two or three times a year do full detailed review just so you know where your money came from and went and when it all happened.
I wish I knew this earlier in life.
Think about it, what did you spend your money on two weeks ago? A month? How much did you make in the past month? What did you spend your money on?
Sure many people can give an estimate off the top of their head but it makes a big difference if you can see it all written out and documented in front of you.
Isn’t the IRS rolling out an actual free filing program this year?
Yes, I’m not sure if it’ll be ready by this year’s tax season or not, but it was happening. Last I heard they were doing some limited runs on it.
FreeTaxUSA is the best. TurboTax can eat my ass.
Intuit and H&R Block are the reason we have this depraved, inhumane, anti-consumer tax system. They’ve created the laws that make it necessary to use tax prep software. They should not be rewarded for this by getting business for that very tax prep software. Everyone should say no to TurboTax.
There are always a bunch of perfectly good competitors to them listed. Use those competitors. For most people it’s totally free.
Indeed.
Everyone should learn the basics of troubleshooting!
When trying to resolve a problem it’s really important to keep as many variables under control as possible so that you can find the root cause and fix it.
I see lots of people who try a bunch of things without isolating the issue first but can’t figure out what is wrong. Then because they messed with it so much it’s almost impossible to figure out.
This is important for car maintenance, home maintenance, electronics, computers. Just about everything that can break or stop working right in your life.
My skills at troubleshooting are pretty much limited to
“Turn it off and back on again. The slow way. Sometimes twice.”
But you know what? Mostly it works!
There’s also unplugging and replugging, that works a lot.
Your troubleshooting skills are above average, tbh.
You’ve identified that there’s an issue. You tried something simple to remedy. You even tried it again to make sure.
You didn’t make a bunch of crazy assumptions about what the problem was. You didn’t do a bunch of weird shit all at once to try to fix it. You didn’t do something to make the problem worse.
You’re doing great!
Oh I have to share what just happened! My husband’s power wheelchair suddenly wouldn’t drive. In tilt mode it would still tilt, but in the driving modes it had an error message. By asking in forums he learned that message could mean it thought it was tilted back too much for safe driving, even though it was fully upright. So he tilted way back, and I looked underneath for anything loose, finally tightened one loose screw that I frankly think was unrelated. Then he tilted upright again, giving it an extra couple seconds of push on the joystick, and I pushed forward on the back of the chair. Nothing moved, it was already fully upright. But it did the trick! It’s driving fine now.
Wonderful! And the lesson here is, just fucking try something, anything. Your story made me feel good. Fine job!
My dad can’t do this. I’ve tried to teach him but it’s like, a piece of equipment breaks and I’m like “What have you tried so far?” the answer is always nothing because he doesn’t know cars/computers/watches/lights, etc etc.
I don’t know half of those things either but I’ll go over and press all the buttons, if that doesn’t work I google it. I’ve showed him this so many times but it’s like it doesn’t go in and he’s like “But you’re good with these things!” Nope, I’m just hitting it until it works.
Print this out for him: https://xkcd.com/627/
How do I print this out?
I actually sent that to him, multiple times.
A lot of the issues learning to troubleshoot are surrounded around not understanding the problem/not understanding the system enough to determine where the problem is. Generally, if you have no idea what the issues could be, you end up trying a bunch of stuff and messing everything up more and people get frustrated you didn’t ask for help sooner, or you do nothing and people get frustrated you haven’t tried anything before asking for help. This may be a perpetuated problem if someone doesn’t have the foundational knowledge to understand the type of system, or if it’s just totally out of their wheelhouse and they don’t have them mental capacity to try and understand any aspect. This can be seen when people have little to no understanding of: cooking and/or baking, car repair, computer repair, fruit and vegetable farming, sewing clothes or clothes mending, etc. we can pay people to do these things for us because there is so much complication in modern life most don’t know how to do everything.
Learn about the concept of relational and transactional relationships. Learn to identify which ones are which in your life, and if they are one way or two way. You do not need anything other than two way relational relationships in life. Discard the others, they are deadweights.
For the creators, people have become leeches accustomed to only taking, and never giving back. It is perfectly okay to shut yourself off rather than bleeding your soul to death. For the leeches, it is a one way business. Might as well treat yourself like royalty. You have a limited amount of gratitude and need to refuel yourself.
Men need to hurry the fuck up and learn stoicism. Society does not care about a man’s emotional sanctity, which is the counterpart to a woman’s physical sanctity. Men are also far weaker emotionally and psychologically than women.
Be mighty AND be respectful towards others. If you separate these and be just mighty, you end up being an asshole that will fall just as hard. If you be too nice and respectful, people will make you a doormat.
Edit: I should probably add this, even if obvious from the last one.
Respect consent AND never worship anyone. This advice is directed largely towards isolated men who fall for redpillers, and/or end up taking extreme lessons regarding women. Be courteous and ask women. But also do not end up being a pathetic simp. On a lesser level, this advice goes for women too.
I disagree with your take on men being emotionally weaker. It’s merely an excuse to avoid learning emotional intelligence and it’s just a symptom of how they are socialised. Men don’t learn how to properly channel and express their emotions, instead being told to bottle them up or repress themselves from early childhood (stuff like being told “You’re a boy, stop crying” or “Man up and get over it”). It leads to a less empathetic world and makes people insensitive and inconsiderate.
This is not an excuse, but studied on a brain level by neurologists and psychologists. I would recommend you check Dr Daniel Amen, one of the world’s best psychiatrists who has scanned over 250K brains. He explains these things well, and people like Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus have consulted him.
His 2 hour podcast on Diary Of A CEO on YouTube is good. (Skip to 1:32:48 upto 1:35:24, 3 minutes, if you want to get to the part I am focusing on, differences between male and female brains. I recommend watching full though.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycTZ_t-aiuU The video has gathered 3M views in a month.
We can make the society better only if we stick to facts, and rebuild a foundation on that basis. We have an individualistic and apathetic capitalist society today. We are led to it, but we need to reverse the course, making the society collectivist, empathetic and knit together.
People in general can learn something from stoicism. From a philosophical standpoint it can be a good place to provide tools for improving yourself from within. However, I also find it hard to accept that men are inherently emotionally weaker than women for many of the reasons mentioned by LoreleiSankTheShip.
Modern societies extert incredible pressure on people to conform to unreasonable expectations which greatly repress individuality. These pressures start early and are persistent. Emotionally intelligent men exist and have always existed. I could easily believe many of these men couldn’t even begin to define or explain stoicism. Their emotional intelligence could have been learned from family, friends, partners or community.
A broad and over generalized expectation of modern men are that they be strong and courageous. That they act as independent individuals to care for their family or community. Traits which could be mistaken for a surface level of stoicism.
What we are seeing today in is very much a lack of emotional intelligence. There is a very noticeable deficiency in emotional intelligence in men when compared to women. Unable to reflect inwards about their motivations and outward actions. Unable to empathetically understand how their actions affect those around them. Unable to to identity, verbalize or express the emotions which are happening within them. As a result, men don’t have the proper understanding of themselves to begin the process of improving themselves. Trans men offer a unique insight into this as they have had the opportunity to experience two worlds of gender expectations.
But humans are social animals. Many mammals exhibit social needs. We can look to our closest friends such as cats and dogs and see how true that is. We’ve reached a point where our social communities are fragmented and broken. The ideal of a strong man is heavily expected to replace that missing sense of community.
It’s become and issue so deep and entangled that it’s hard to know where to even begin. I wish there was a simple -ism to unravel this mess but a person is complex. Eight billion people with eight billion unique perspectives is a level of complexity we just don’t know how to even comprehend or manage.
We can start by teaching emotional understanding from within, by being good examples, by creating and maintaining communities or by calling out bad behavior. Unfortunately, these actions can be attacked. It’s an uphill battle and the hill is looking very steep.
I do not trust Lorelei’s personal view. This is a fact coming from a famous psychiatrist, I mentioned in a reply to him. Consider watching 3 minutes of that.
A whole lot of 90s and post 90s people seem to have some kind of neuro disorders, like ADHD, neurodivergence, autism and so on. It also exists in older people, but we are the current and future workforce, and the older baby boomers have lived out their lives. The whole obsession with empathy seems to be highly simplified, and I think nobody explains properly why “mental health” and “get therapy” is such a big issue. I think I got the answer, thanks to Dr Daniel Amen’s podcast video.
Do yourself a favour, watch it, even better if you watch the whole thing. He has scanned over 250K brains and is a professional.
In order to engage you in meaningful discussion, I need to understand your thoughts and perspectives more from your own words.
Why do you not trust the personal view of another lemmy user? We are on a social platform made for discussing a variety of topics and we will always encounter different views. Hopefully this leads to exploring and expanding our own views on the topics we bring up.
I would also like to stay on the topic of men and emotional intelligence which was brought up by LoreleiSankTheShip. I currently do not see how neurodivergence and generational workforces fit into this discussion unless you can clearly state the connections for me.
I do agree with you that the importance of mental health and it’s approaches are not very well explained. However, empathy carries a lot of weight in the discussion of mental health and should not be undermined or under valued.
Lastly, it’s easy to link a video of an expert, but experts are human and can fall for personal biases too. If you can explain to me your interpretation of what this expert is saying, we can begin to have a thorough discussion. Otherwise, I fear we may be deadlocked and nothing more will come of this.
I did watch your recommended clip and am still struggling to understand your view point.
I do not trust the words of an internet user because the other guy has seen and studied (250K) more brains than anyone else in the world, and has studied brains of people like Muhammad Ali and Justin Bieber. The doctor is not just a certified professional, he is at the top of psychiatry field, the crème de la crème. I will never prioritise anyone’s observations over that kind of a leading expert.
If you want to validate yourself forcibly and feel deadlocked, despite knowing someone’s certified credentials and real world treatment results, then that is on you. I can only lead the horse to the water, horse can choose to drink or not.
If you went ahead through a 2 hour long podcast that gained 3M views in a month, maybe you would gain a lot out of it, considering we do not live in particularly the most encouraging times as far as attention span goes towards something as boring as 2 people talking on a gray table.
I should add that I just discovered I have ADHD, and am able to hyperfocus on topics I like to study and also have EFD, so I found incredible details in all the stuff the doctor explained.
Unfortunately I feel this conversation has become deadlocked for a number of reasons.
You have clearly dismissed a fellow person with a valid observation and left no room for open discussion. When given the opportunity to express why you do not agree, you continue to be dismissive.
You have ignored the topics that has been brought up and are being discussed. In this case emotional intelligence, particularly among men.
You have not made an attempt to clearly connect your various points into a cohesive argument.
You have not expressed what you have studied in your own words. To express ideas in your own words would show the rest of us how you perceive and understand a topic. This would be a great base for having a meaningful conversation.
Lastly, you have done nothing but blindly praise an individual on a podcast. If the words in your initial post are true, we should never worship anyone.
Taking a step back away from everyone and everything to think of why we react to other peoples words may help us to understand ourselves better. And that’s a good thing.
At this point I am done. As a fellow individual with ADHD (and Autism), I wish you the best on your mental health journey and I hope you approach it with an open heart and open mind. Thank you for giving me a new perspective for me to think about and hopefully understand in the future.
Amazingly said!
I agree in principle but this is a slippery slope and they’re not “easy” skills to learn as OP have asked.
Important matters more than difficulty. I wanted to get the message out.
Baking bread. At first, your results will be uneven. (brick like, over baked, underbaked, too much yeast, not enough kneading, etc.) Just don’t give up, the first time you get it close to “right”, you’ll be addicted to home made bread. It’s about training your hands and other senses until you don’t need a recipe any more.
Literally eating a homemade bun right now.
Can confirm, it’s addictive and my stomach is having a very conflicting love/hate relationship with me for it lol
Also check out the Bertinet Method. Slap and Fold, baby.
The one thing that got me into home made bread was getting a bread machine and using it exclusively for kneading. Machine made bread is weird and uneven to me, but taking the dough and baking it the traditional way makes brilliant bread and saves a lot of time.
I completely agree. Plus I like the shape from a tradional loaf pan vs the odd cube from the bread maker.
First aid.
Swimming. It could save your life.
If only it was as easy as getting to a certain point and learning. In which case maybe I wouldn’t have to say I can’t.
Taking regular breaks. Whether it’s a quick hourly stretch or a longer weekly break, stepping away from your activities can help you avoid burnout and stay on top of your game.
Surprisingly this improved my overall gameplay in competitive games. And I am not exhausted from work anymore.Apply the same at work
Taking breaks is a good idea, but it’s not a skill.
Skill - an ability to do an activity or job well, especially because you have practised it
Seeing that almost nobody around me can take proper breaks because of all sorts of habitual factors it does seem like something you have to practise. Also, it’s an activity of actively not focusing on a stressor is still an activity. (Debatable in a tricky zen master way I know, but are you actually a tricky zen master?)
Seems like a skill to me.
Technically not, perhaps, but I’d argue it functionally kind of is. Lots of people aren’t good at it, and it takes practice to get better at it.
First off, love this question!
Active listening and validating someone’s emotions. Relationship skills in general honestly! Like how to adress the core attachment need in a disagreement instead of just the surface issue.
Cooking
I learned one of my best cooking lessons from Hell’s Kitchen: taste taste taste!
As long as your food is safe to taste (i.e. not raw poultry or something), taste it, at every stage of cooking. You’ll find you get better at tasting foods and predicting what things your dish needs.
Some cooking is much, much easier than others. Making a pizza isn’t as much an issue as, say, preparing an exotic bird. Cooking involves a level of aesthetics and physics that I could never master for the very reason I could never scrape the iceberg of those two skills.
For me there are few feelings better in the world than having an entire meal not only cooked by yourself, but grown too! I love grabbing veggies from the garden and making dinner. Something so cool about being almost entirely self sufficient.
Also: cleaning. I’ve had flatmates who managed to take the same time for cleaning the bathroom or the kitchen and yet it somehow still wasn’t clean.
My mom was a fast order cook and when I was a teen she got me to help her run a fast food shop our family ran for a few years. She taught me how to work in a kitchen and how to cook.
Her basic rules were … if you aren’t cooking you’re cleaning, if you aren’t cleaning you’re cooking, and if you aren’t cooking or cleaning, get out of the kitchen.
If you aren’t cleaning as you go, the food prep area will get gross and unsanitary fast. This goes for cooking at home, too.
once I had a flatmate that every time he was cooking he was leaving the kitchen like a warzone and he had used every utensil available in the kitchen. He somehow thought that it was faster for him to focus only on the cooking and after it is completed, to do all the dishes, pots, utensils, glasses, oven trays, scissors, screwdrivers, hammers, drills or whatever else he may had used.
yes! It saves so much money if you can cook properly and don’t have to rely on expensive restaurants for “fancy” food.
I wish I’d learned a few useful knots earlier in life. Saves so much time when you know how and which one to use.
The ones I use the most are the square knot, taut line hitch and once a year the truckers hitch for tying down the Christmas tree to the top of the car.
https://scoutlife.org/outdoors/176401/how-to-tie-the-7-basic-scout-knots/
Video guides are nice, but I prefer Grog’s Knots. He even has an app for offline knot learning, say, when you’re deep in the woods and it’s raining hard and your tent’s rain cover blows off into the lake and you thankfully brought a tarp and rope but don’t know how to make one of those adjustable knots that you can just slip-tighten. You know, theoretically speaking.
On a side note and completely unrelated, bring one of those big grout sponges when you go camping. In addition to mopping up all the water in your tent, it makes a nice pillow if your inflatable pillow decides to run away in the night in a storm and go swimming in the lake.
TL;DR: I hate camping.
I love that website. The surgical knots were nice to have in place to reference.
TL;DR: I hate camping.
I was a boy scout in serious camping territory. Wow, do I hate camping, now. And, as a poor kid, winter camping can fuck right off.
Man I’m an Eagle Scout and I forgot how to tie the basic knots already. It takes repetition and practice, I mostly use the square knot so that’s the only one I probably remember.
Square knot, Trucker’s hitch, and bowline are the ones I use the most.
For others, I use an app, animated knots, where you can have a favorites list.
If you can’t tie a knot, tie a lot.
For me, it’s sheet bend, bowline, and round turn and two half hitches. I also tuck a lot of eye splices, but that’s more just for fun; a bowline will work fine most of the time instead.
Tall ships?
And if anyone is having trouble with that last one, here’s a useful video guide.
Learn a dance or two nothing too complicated but being able to bust out a dance at a wedding really impressed everyone.
Learn only to waltz, adapt to current melody.
How to change your vehicle’s tire SAFELY.
Basic home maintenance or at the very least troubleshooting and diagnostics when something breaks so you can give the repair tech better info when they arrive.
Basic home cleaning. This one might sound obvious but the number of people I’ve worked with who’ve never held a mop before astounds me. Learn to do your own laundry and clean your bathroom and kitchen well and efficiently. Learn what it takes to do a quick clean and a deep clean and do them on a schedule.
installing a privacy custom rom onto your android phone
Any good tutorials?
For some people it’s easy, for others it isn’t, and/or they’re afraid of messing it up.
This is the secondary reason why I created SwapMyOS, a GrapheneOS installation service that kicks back a percentage of every order to the GrapheneOS nonprofit to keep it funded.
Primary reason was to keep GrapheneOS alive and funded.
