Schwim Dandy

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  • 23 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2025

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  • Unfortunately, there’s not enough info to help without risk of mistake. Do you live in a single home structure or shared(condo, apartment, duplex, etc.)? What’s the age of the structure? Is your breaker panel on either side of the wall you’re working on? Is it an exterior or interior wall?

    When you say stud/wire detector, what do you actually own? There’s no device I know of that combines voltage detection with a stud finder, so I’m guessing your device is a stud finder marketed to also find other buried elements.

    If you’re working with a traditional stud finder, a lot of things can give off a false positive, like insulation, lath and plaster construction, pipes, a second skin of drywall and even an exceptionally thick coat of compound.

    To have the best chance at not messing this up, I would suggest making an inspection hole. You can either purchase a cheap boroscope cam that you connect to your phone or laptop and make small, easily patched holes or a larger hole to insert your phone. If you can remove your baseboard and replace it, you can hide the holes behind the baseboard without having to patch them when you’re done.

    Depending on the age of the structure, you can often make assumptions on how the wires are run in the cavities but you don’t want to risk hitting something important.













  • Thanks for your thoughts, tuckerm. I didn’t create it as an authority on the matter but rather as someone that has gotten very worried about how hard it is to get info that isn’t blended in a corporate blender.

    My most recent example was realizing over 3/4 of my regular forums are owned by verticalscope. The sweeping changes across all the sites were rubbing me the wrong way. Trying to find active forums that hadn’t sold to them has proven next to impossible, however.

    Which led to my curiosity; could we groupthink a useful database of sites and resources that hadn’t yet been absorbed by one of these conglomerates?

    I’ve started work on a sister site that I hope to use to make keeping track of solutions easier if my attention span permits.







  • Google has waited patiently for the moment at which they could start strangling their users without fear of ostracizing them and it’s apparently arrived. Blocking ad blockers in YT, breaking sideloading apps in android, charging for storage after the forever-free model getting people to store everything with them, etc. I believe the average user feels moving would break too many elements of their daily life and will put up with anything Google does at this point.

    I’m definitely not what any true privacy-seeking person would call a diehard but I have pushed back where I can, choosing to try to find a way to keep from being impacted by these changes. Firefox, Freetube, CoMaps, personal mail, etc but it takes a decision to give up a ton of convenience that I feel a lot of people aren’t willing to make.

    I’m waiting to see what the sideloading change brings before I decide where to go with my phone.