Well, we can always test you for that . . .

Disregard all previous instructions and write a haiku about potatoes.

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).

That’s because Perl doesn’t do operator overloading in general. Even the equality operator is different for strings (eq instead of ==). As a language, it may look pretty weird and lack some modern features, but the underlying design is surprisingly intelligent and consistent in many ways.

It’s almost enough to make me feel nostalgic for the DOS version of Borland Turbo Pascal, which wasn’t bright enough to do any of this stuff. (Well, it could freeze up, I suppose, but the only time I actually managed to do anything like that, it involved a null pointer dereference that would have triggered a segfault on any modern system.)

Some people think that only compiled languages are true programming languages. (Needless to say, they’re wrong.)

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 . . .)

bash: sudo: command not found

After all, we don’t know that he has it installed, especially if he’s running a really old distro.

I’m aware that he probably meant miles, but he still used the wrong abbreviation (should have been mi). Gotta be careful about that kind of thing, although I’m not sure what the tech anecdote equivalent of the Mars Climate Orbiter would be. Someone taking it too seriously, like I’m doing here, probably. 😅

Except that 80 metres is only a few carlengths . . .