No that's absolutely not useless. You're hanging with friends partying and realize there's no bottle opener for wine. Then you pull this bad bitch out of your pocket and save the day

This happened to me once, except that no-one had swiss army knife in their pocket. I'm carrying now one

The same way, you'll never know when knowing what happened in Paris 1764 will save your day

[–] spankmonkey@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (3 children)

So it happened once, but without the knife. Now that you have the knife, has it ever come up again?

I opened a bottle with a swiss army knife corkscrew once to see if it was a difficult as it appeared and it was an adventure. Maybe with some practice it would be easisr, but it shredded the cork because the tiny handle was hard to keep straight and the pulling action was hard to keep straight. Had to use one of the screws that sits on the lip to keep itself straight to get the rest of the cork out.

[–] Obi@sopuli.xyz 3 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

This is hard to read as a Frenchman. Opening a wine bottle is a basic life skill you learn as a child there, and a Swiss army knife corkscrew is a fine tool to get that job done easily. I can also get the job done with just a shoe (like a sneaker) if needed (except I've stopped drinking). I get it, it's our speciality, but still it's strange to read about not being able to get it done with a Swiss army knife, no diss intended!

[–] socsa@piefed.social 3 points 23 hours ago

You are supposed to use your hand as leverage to lever it up the first quarter inch or so, like a traditional wine key. Then pull from there.

[–] MutilationWave@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 day ago

Back in the bad old punk rock days, when we had wine on sale from Aldi, we'd jam the cork into the bottle with a screwdriver and catch most of the spray in the mouth. It was an art. Then drink directly from bottle as usual.

[–] starman2112@sh.itjust.works 1 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

I'm great at some stuff, but it's useless stuff. I'm awful at talking, so even when I'm good at something, I look stupid when I try to explain it

[–] starman2112@sh.itjust.works 1 points 21 hours ago

I'm decent at typing though, because I can go back and edit stuff. If you ask me in person how an equatorial telescope mount works, I will have no idea how to begin. But here on the internet, I can just say

An altitude/azimuth mount (like the dobsonian collecting dust in your neighbor's basement), rotates on axes local to you. To track a target with an alt/az mount, you have to continuously rotate the telescope left or right (that's the azimuth), and up or down (that's the altitude).

An equatorial mount rotates around the same axis as the Earth itself, which means that throughout the night as the stars move across the sky, you only have to rotate the telescope in one direction to track a target. It effectively cancels out the Earth's rotation, keeping the sky stationary (relative to the scope).

If I want to go a little deeper, I can try to explain right ascension and declination, but that's a whole nother paragraph