u/paspa1801

Hi everyone, we have a 9 week old Labrador who is general is a joy. The only slight thing we have an issue with is that we live in a condo with a shared garden with other dogs.

We are doing potty training on special grass patches on our private terrace. Our little guy often gets REALLY distracted outside and starts trying to chew and rip up the edges of the grass patch. This means that even when he CLEARLY needs to poop (as in literally starts the little poop circling) he starts playing with the grass instead.

Over the last couple of days we have been working on leave it with him and he is actually very good with it given the short amount of time he’s been doing it. The problem is I don’t want to potentially make him start chewing it MORE because he then thinks he’ll get a treat after.

I have some bitter anti chewing spray that we got just in case he was a major chewer of furniture etc. I tested it a bit on an old cable I was going to throw away and after smelling it he didn’t even try to chew it so it must have a strong scent. I also tested it on myself and it is very unpleasant to lick.

Would it be fine to liberally spray just the edges of the grass patch with the anti chew spray or do you think it would then put him off actually doing his business on the patch? He has heavily used the middle of the patch for toileting already so he is used to going on it but I’m worried that the spray would stop the toileting as well as the chewing. It would just be the edges we would need to spray as the thing that seems to be fun to him is lifting up the edges and dropping them back down.

Any thoughts? Happy to hear any other suggestions also :)

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Hi all!

Wife and I are preparing to bring home a gorgeous lab puppy and are researching foods to consider (obviously when we first get him we will stick to breeders food and slowly transition!).

I’ve not had a dog in yonks so went to chat to the lovely man who runs our local town pet shop and he mentioned cold pressed food as being a newer option and that he feeds his three German shepherds a mix of raw and cold pressed.

Never heard of cold pressed before but it looks like a good mix of convenience and nutrition so went on all about dog food and am leaning towards the brand DARF.

Was wondering if anyone here has tried them and has options either positive or negative? Opinions on cold pressed food in general would also be very welcome!

P.S Can you add hot water to cold pressed food and make a sort of mush? I used to do that with kibble and then freeze it in a Kong and old dogs loved that!

I’ve been having medical issues over the last few years that have been getting progressively worse and I have been working with my GP surgery to try and find out the problem. I’m not going to bore everyone with the exact medical issues because it’s not actually relevant

After many many appointments, I finally managed to convince the doctor that a specific condition could be the likely cause and they agreed to refer me to the hospital to get the test performed. I was advised that the current wait time was up to 5 months (in the UK so free NHS treatment takes longer to access than private medical in the states for example) which was fine. This was back in mid February.

Things have still gotten worse to the point where I had to be taken to A&E a couple of weeks ago due to fainting and hitting my head (fainting is the most annoying of the various symptoms). The experience was scary and it reminded me that it had now been over the 5 months max wait time I was told.

I decided to call the hospital I was being referred to to see if they could give me any update on my place in line, but they had no record of any referrals in my name.

I called my GP and it turns out that while the doctor made a note on my file to say they were going to make the referral, they forgot to actually submit it :(

I got an insincere apology and told that they would now submit it, but they couldn’t do anything to move me up the list so it will again be months.

I’m probably going to just end up paying for a private test because I’m going crazy just letting my body get worse.

Been driving for a decade now and despite living in rural areas and mostly driving country roads, I had never hit any wild animals before. There are loads of deer where I live (Perthshire area) and have had a couple of close calls but have always managed to avoid or stop for deer (I come across them a lot as due to work start times I’m out really early in the morning).

This morning I was driving around a sharp corner on a country road and there was a juvenile deer standing right in my lane. I was only going about 35mph at the time due to the nature of the corner but still couldn’t stop for it or move to the other lane safely. The deer just panicked and stood there.

I drive a 4x4 with quite a high ground clearance so it went under the car but a tyre did run over its leg. There was an entrance to a farm track right ahead so I pulled in and put my hazards on to check on it.

The sounds were horrible, when I first got out the car it was squealing in pain, and when I approached it stopped screaming but was making a horrible groaning/wheezing noise.

Its leg was clearly broken but I couldn’t see any other obvious injury so I thought there was a chance it could be saved. I called the police to report it and the dispatcher said they were sending a team out with a “wildlife specialist” and that as long as my car was fine I could just leave.

Didn’t feel right to leave the poor thing in the middle of the road by itself to be hit again and I didn’t want to drag it to the side and injure it more. It’s a quieter road but I got my warning triangle out and put it around the bend on the approach to it. Then sat on the verge near it in my high viz work jacket to warn people until the police arrived.

Despite being in the middle of nowhere, the police arrived surprisingly quickly. The wildlife person they had with them assessed the deer and unfortunately didn’t think it would be able to be helped so they said they would “deal with it” but thanked me for staying.

Drove to work and am a little bit ashamed to admit that I had a bit of a cry on the way. I had obviously called them to tell them I was going to be late because I hit a deer but I got made fun of a bit when they found out I stuck around even though my car was fine. The only guy who wasn’t being a dick was an older chap who tried to make me feel better and said “there is nothing wrong with having an extra caring bone in your body” and it kind of worked but I still feel like I was being dramatic, idk.

Anyway, been feeling a bit numb the rest of the day and just feel like I’m a terrible person. Going to take a different way home tonight to avoid it.

Hope everyone is safe on the roads today.

We have found out that the breeder we were on a waitlist for has just had a litter of gorgeous lab puppies and we are super excited to welcome our little boy home in a couple of months!

We have started getting our home puppy ready but we have one thing we are unsure of. Basically we live in a condo with a shared garden and private terraces.

He won’t be able to use the shared garden for at least two weeks due to vaccinations and the fact that other dogs go potty there.

We are planning on buying something called the Piddle Patch which is essentially a large tray with special real grass squares.

We can either put this on our terrace, or store it in our garage and when we go to do potty breaks, one person goes ahead and moves the patch outside ready for him.

The terrace method would be much easier but we are worried that it will then teach him it’s ok to pee or poop on the terrace, which we don’t want him to do once he is fully vaccinated. We are also not wanting to use puppy pads as I think that also just confuses them about where they can pee/poop.

Can anyone offer any advice on what they would do in this situation? If him using the terrace will just confuse him then we will just deal with the extra level of suck for the first couple of weeks but wanted others opinions!

I always grew up with dogs but due to living in small apartments until recently haven’t had one in my adult life as it wasn’t fair on them. My wife and I bought our own home last year so decided we were now in a place to be a good home for a puppy.

Our beautiful puppy was born last week and will be ready in a couple of months. The last time I was living with a puppy was over a decade ago so I’m assuming a lot of training advice has changed!

What is the current best training plan online for puppies? I learn best from videos so that would be ideal but written material is also fine if it’s really good. Happy to pay for it if that’s what is required.

If it’s relevant he is a yellow working/American style Labrador. (His name is going to be Goose).

Should be obvious but I don’t want anything with “positive punishment” :)

I want to build the Q-Tune tuner kit and was going to make a custom train themed enclosure. I work in the railway and am British (pronounce Tuner “Chew-ner” so thought it could be a funny pun pedal.

I’m only going to make it for myself so it doesn’t matter too much but I’m struggling to decide on the name. Was hoping to bounce some ideas off of the sub! The exact way they are typed in the poll is how they would appear on the pedal, punctuation marks included.

View Poll

I’m getting so sick of people screaming “AI!!!!!” On posts online just because the poster can write well.

Over the past few months I’ve had people commenting on some of my posts saying that “this post was obviously written by AI”. Whenever I question them on why they think that, it’s usually always along the lines of “you use complicated words” or “there are many different types of punctuation” etc.

I’m begging people to realise that just because you don’t know some words or how to effectively use punctuation, doesn’t mean that nobody else can.

It honestly feels like a lot of people on the internet have adopted the “why waste time with many word when few word do trick” mentality. I’m sorry that I was actually taught how to write at school and that I read books.

A lot of these commenters clearly don’t understand that these AI models were trained with human produced works. Obviously they weren’t going to feed it Facebook posts written by illiterate morons, so AI will usually write stuff using more advanced writing techniques.

If you are one of those people that thinks anything with advanced vocabulary or proper punctuation usage is AI; I’m BEGGING you to please read a goddamn book.

I got a new mini multi effects unit thing so that I could practice my guitar on my work breaks and was playing a finger style version of “I will always love you” by Dolly Parton.

I was flicking through some presets and started playing with one that sounded amazing. I wondered what effects it was using and was surprised to see a chorus pedal there as normally I associate chorus with the real like seasickness sound. This was really subtle and just added a lovely depth to the song.

I played around with more songs and various settings and feel stupid for not trying chorus before. It’s so much more versatile than I thought and I’ve found some lovely tones with it. I fear that I will be blowing some money on a nice chorus pedal in my near future!

So, what effect did you avoid that you later discovered you really liked?

Wanting to consult the knowledge of the council to see if there is a pedal out there that does what I’m looking for.

Right now I have two compressor pedals on my board, one as an always on subtle thing and the other set to do proper classic country squeeze tones.

I would like to be able to reduce the footprint of my board so tried to see if anyone sold a dual compressor pedal. The only results I got were pedals that had a compressor side and a boost side, but I want two compressors in one pedal. Basically like dual drive pedals that have one overdrive side and one harder distortion side.

Haven’t found anything that looks promising but not sure if I’m missing anything glaringly obvious!

I get four hours of breaks a day at my job and have started taking a cheaper electric guitar with me everyday to practice during my down time.

I’ve been doing it unplugged at the moment because my amps at home aren’t exactly super convenient to lug in. I’ve decided I want to buy a dedicated small practice amp that will basically just be used at work.

Amp must haves:

1. Headphone out (don’t want to annoy everyone in the building)

2. Ideally small enough to fit in my guitar case, but if it’s small enough to be left in my locker that is also fine

3. Good clean and crunchy tones. Don’t care about heavier metal style tones as I don’t play that stuff

4. Good battery life, don’t want to charge it every day

I was originally going between the Positive Grid Spark Go and the Fender Mustang Micro Plus (yeah yeah I know, boo Fender blah blah) but the new black star beam mini is intriguing even though it’s not as portable as the other options.

Any thoughts?

Hi everyone,

I know this question looks stupid but I promise it’s genuine. I’m a guitar player and I normally don’t think about it but I realised today that all of my guitars have a real bone “nut” (strip at the top of the neck where the fretboard meets the headstock) and it tends to be seen as a premium feature.

There are synthetic nut options but people frown on those because of snobbish reasons so most higher end guitars tend to have bone nuts instead.

If you were wanting to get a guitar (or already have!) would you willingly choose a worse product simply to avoid the bone nuts? Would you get the higher end one and swap the nut out to a synthetic one (not sure what the point of that would be as the bone has already been used but idk).

Again I know this seems like a dumb question but it popped in to my head and I want your opinions!

Wife and I were visiting her family in the states and we went to a fried chicken shop for lunch. Placed our order and were told it would be like 15 minutes so we went to take a seat and saw a foosball table and thought it would be fun to play.

I went in to it expecting to most likely win, not just because I’m a cocky twat but because historically, I tend to be better at those table top style games as my wife doesn’t have the best fine motor skills or hand eye coordination (she will be the first person to admit this, I’m not telling tales out of school).

I was shocked when we started playing and oh my god, it was like I was watching the foosball version of Mr Miyagi! I’ve never seen anyone else play foosball that well. She would score goals before I even had a chance to think!

I’ve known this woman for 7 years and this came so out of left field that I was flabbergasted. I asked how on earth she was that good at foosball and apparently when she was growing up her parents worked really long hours (yay American corporate life) so she would go to this weird Church ran daycare after school. The only semi entertaining thing they had was a foosball table, so essentially my wife played foosball for like 4 hours a day, 5 days a week for YEARS.

So what other random skills does your partner have that shocked you at the time?

Hi everyone,

Hoping for some help, a few years ago I had to sell my pedals and amps to help pay for a visa for my wife. I have been using just a digital modelling amp since then and whilst it’s been perfectly serviceable, I want to have fun with proper amps and pedals again.

My favourite genre to play is country, but I also like blues and a bit of classic rock.

I’m wanting to make a good starter country board to use and was wanting input on pedals I should look at. I used to have a Brent Mason hot wired pedal but I think they’ve come out with a newer version since then and I’m not sure if there are better options out there so willing to take any suggestions.

The pedals don’t need to be available brand new as long as there is a reliable supply on the used market. The amp I’ve got is a Fender 68 Custom Vibro Champ Reverb.

Side note, any recommendations for power supplies? I had a cioks before but I remember it being quite expensive for a power supply so not sure if it’s actually needed!

I’ve managed to dial in some really nice clean tones but for the life of me can’t find an overdriven sound that doesn’t just sound muddy and horrible to my ears.

I just want something with a little bit of breakup but pretty much as soon as I add gain it just sounds bad.

I have the Spark 2 if it makes a difference.

I got a new telecaster a couple of days ago and I want to swap out the tuners from the stock fender branded locking tuners.

I’m trying to decide between the GraphTech Ratio locking tuners and the Hipshot Fender Directrofit locking tuners.

Both come in staggered or non staggered options so the main difference is the gear ratios. The Hipshots have a 21:1 ratio on all the tuning machines. Ratio tuners vary between 12:1 to 39:1

Has anyone experienced both tuners and have opinions on which ones are better?

I can get the Hipshot ones for around £85, the ratio ones for like £130. I am happy to pay more for the ratios if they are actually better