nyan

There are definite reasons why people who step up behind me and take a look at my computer screen either flinch or look at me funny (sometimes both), and I expect people here will have some . . . interesting takes on this as well 😅. The colour choices may make more sense if you know that I'm usually in a low-light environment, so even some "dark" themes seem fairly bright to me, and anything with a white background is like a slap in the face.

Trinity Desktop Environment 14.1.0 on Gentoo, homemade theme. For those not familiar with TDE, it is a fork of KDE 3, from the days before indexing daemons and other such CPU-eaters, so this looks old-fashioned because it is. The wallpaper is Digital Blasphemy's "Tropical Moon of Thetis", and yes, the font is the dreaded Times New Roman, presented here in all its jagged glory because I prefer to keep hinting and antialiasing switched off. The system monitor text on the left is from conky. On the right, TDE versions of konsole and konqueror (as file manager).

(And just to clear up one piece of misinformation about TDE that comes up regrettably often: the development team forked QT3 along with the desktop and is maintaining it. So: unsupported widgetset no, QT3 more-or-less yes, if you find a bug please file it, if you don't know of any bugs please don't spread FUD.)

I have an ancient and rather ugly office chair which I love to pieces. Unfortunately, on Thursday morning, the chair attempted to make that literal, as I sat down and heard a nasty splintering sound. Now, I got this thing secondhand, and it's always had a vertical split up one wooden leg. My brother had run four large carriage bolts through it in an attempt to hold it together, which in hidsight turned out to be a bad idea, as one half of the leg had split in the opposite direction along the line of the first two bolts. ☹️

Removing the bolts, applying a rather considerable amount of wood glue and some dowels, then clamping it, letting it dry, and cleaning up got me to the point shown in the picture (larger version here )

What I need to know is, is there anything I can do to structurally reinforce this thing any further, short of replacing either that leg (beyond my skill level at the moment) or the entire base (a new one would have to be shipped up from the US)? In particular, would "splinting" it with a piece of new wood along the damaged side (or pieces along both sides) help keep it from tearing itself apart? Or should I just redrill the hole for the castor further away from the end, put a couple of C-clamps on, and hope it holds long enough for a new base to arrive?

I want my chair back. 😭