Soldering/electronics repair enthusiasts: I am in need of a soldering iron/station for electronics repair and wiring, preferred budget is under $150, perfection can raise the budget to $250.

First line of this post is all that's really needed if you just want to provide advice on what to buy (which is just fine, people don't need to know how a car works for me to explain that they probably just need a minivan).
Below is what I have gathered thus far if perhaps there's more that you'd like to know about what I've seen and perhaps misunderstood so far.

At present I have a no-name, non-adjustable, extremely basic soldering iron that is more fire hazard than anything and a Weller soldering gun that is obviously not meant for electronics and small wires. The iron has been good enough for the occasional need to solder a couple of wires together to get something broken back up and working, but is not something I'd use on anything critical.

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

I recently heard something that I didn’t like. It was about the growth of fascism in the US, and it said something that I was uncomfortable hearing; ignoring it is the same as acceptance.

I am not subscribed to ~society. I was automatically added when it was created but I quickly noped out. I had already lowered my news consumption to a minimum before Trump won the election, but after I have actively avoided even those few programs that I thought were good. I didn’t have the will to hear about the terrible things on the horizon.

So now I am thinking about what I should do, and right now the thing that seems like the most concrete action is to buy a gun.

Honestly, though, I hate guns. I’ve done a shooting range a few times when I was a kid and I guess they were kind of fun but the idea of using it against people sickens me. On the other hand, we are living in an age where police forces are paramilitarized, the president can and will use CBP as a military force within the US border, and our civil rights are being pried apart.

But what would I actually do with a gun? What difference will it actually make? Bring part of deadly violence is the last thing that I want.

I like to play games, but lately I've been avoiding certain types because I think they are not good for my health. At least, they don't make me feel well afterward. For me, this is a particular type of game that requires a very high level of skill, concentration, and dexterity.
I noticed this years ago when I would play online multiplayer. After the game, I would feel extremely aggressive and I could tell that my blood pressure must have been much higher than normal.

More recently, I notice this on very difficult games such as Elden Ring, specifically the boss fights. After playing for a while I have the same feeling that I would have if I had just walked away from a near fatal accident or something. Then sometimes that evening I would have trouble sleeping.

I'm sure my physiology is different than other people. I seem to retain adrenaline/cortisol levels longer than most others. And I know that some people find the adrenaline high to be one of the main points of gaming. Still, I wonder if in general it isn't good for people to stress themselves like this when they aren't burning it off with physical activity.

I read about this online a little bit. There seem to have been some studies about it that were mostly inconclusive. Most of the findings are more interested in games being a substitute for more physical activity, so gamers may be more sedentary or overweight than normal.

Ok, this is one of those thoughts I have in my brain and that I can't quite get rid of.
It breaks down into a couple of questions. For the purposes of this, I'm aware that what eyes see is the reflection of light bouncing off objects, but I'm curious the impact on the visibility of both objects and other lights.

A. If eyes emitted any light, could they still see anything at all?
B. If eyes emitted, for example, red light, could they see everything except red items? What about red lights? Does this change if the light is green or violet?
B.1. If they can't red things would they just be invisible?
B.2. If they can't see red lights, would it matter if the red light they're seeing is brighter or dimmer, and would it still be an invisible/blank space?
C. I'm not sure how infrared interacts here but I know animals that sense infrared do emit it, is there a reason that's different, if it's different.

The internet is mostly not super helpful with this, since eyes don't emit light, just reflect it and look glowy, but yeah, anyway... thanks for entertaining my weird fixation.

Recently my wife was complaining how her phone has been getting overzealous when flagging incoming phone spam, and as a result she's missed some important calls. It made me think about how easy it is for me to avoid spam calls, despite using a 3rd party dialer on my phone without any kind of spam ID features.

It's because around 15 years ago when Google started letting you pick your own phone number through Google Voice, I (for various reasons) needed to change my phone number. I ended up choosing one with what I thought was a really cool area code, and I've ported that number to every new provider I've swapped to so it's stuck with me since then. It turns out that all the spam callers, bless their hearts, like to spoof incoming phone numbers with the same area code as the number they're dialing. It means whenever I see a call coming from the same area code as my number it's ~100% guaranteed to be spam, and if I see a call coming from the same area code that I actually live in it's ~100% guaranteed to be something actually important (doctor, pharmacy, kids' school, something like that). It wasn't my intent when picking the number (I just wanted the cool area code), but it turned out to also be the perfect spam call ID system. (At least so long as I never move to the place that matches my area code.)

So I'm curious if anyone else has similar stories, where you did something for one reason but it turned out to actually be awesome for an entirely different, unexpected reason?

It’s been about a month and a half since our big Kagi trial giveaway, which means most people are probably about halfway through their trial periods, so I figured we were due for a follow-up.

To those who started using it recently, what are your thoughts?

What do you like and dislike about Kagi?

Do you think you will continue your subscription past the end of the trial?

Note: I’m not affiliated with Kagi in any way besides being a happy customer myself. I’m asking this entirely out of curiosity.

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.

This is the tenth of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. Our next book will be Born a Crime by Trevor Noah at the end of February.

I don't have a particular format in mind for this discussion, but I will post some prompts and questions as comments to get things started. You're not obligated to respond to them or vote on them though. So feel free to make your own top-level comment for whatever you wish to discuss, questions you have of others, or even just to post a review of the book you have written yourself.

For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.
And for anyone uninterested in this topic please use the Ignore Topic feature on this so it doesn't keep popping up in your Activity sort, since it's likely to keep doing that while I set this discussion up, and once people start joining in.