captain_aggravated

joined 2 years ago
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If your motherboard comes with a separate IO shield, install that in the case as the very very first thing you do. Many mobos come with them permanently attached these days but some don't.

Be very careful with the USB plugs, they can be kind of fragile.

Many CPU coolers come with a protective sticker over their contact patch. Remove this.

It looked to me like dripping dollops of some kind of purple substance running down maybe a translucent surface, then I looked at the top and my brain recognized the tines and the image sort of popped inside out and yeah I can't bring back the "original" image.

[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 5 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Farmers used to just let their critters loose into the forests to eat the chestnuts off the forest floor because there were just so many. Now I think every American chestnut tree alive has a name.

[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Would that mean we could vaccinate for them?

Because the disease has become endemic to American forests.

The American Chestnut was the dominant tree in the ecosystem of the forests of Eastern North America. Per Wikipedia, "it was said that a squirrel could walk from New England to Georgia solely on the branches of American chestnuts." In the late 19th century, Japanese chestnut trees were imported, and they brought with them Asian Bark Fungus. American Chestnuts are quite susceptible to this fungus, and it largely wiped out the population.

The fungus infects the above ground portion of the tree, killing it. New shoots will emerge from the stump as the below ground portion of the tree isn't affected by the fungus, but the new growth doesn't get very far before the fungus kills it off again. We have no hope of eliminating the fungus from the forests.

So we've got these zombie tree stumps that will grow enough of a plant to keep the fungus alive and running (it also survives on other species of tree), but not enough to grow large and reproduce. There are some remaining adult trees here and there but the species is considered functionally extinct in the wild as it really isn't able to thrive because this fungus is among us. So unless we can hybridize or otherwise breed fungus resistant chestnut trees, we ain't got no American Chestnuts.

American chestnuts are also susceptible to ink disease and the Chinese Gall Wasp.

A lot of problems were caused by importing plants to North America; tumbleweeds aren't indigenous, they're Russian, and a massive fucking problem.

[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 19 points 5 hours ago (6 children)

Woodworking: An entire log of American Chestnut.

About a century ago, the species was all but wiped out by a blight that came from Japanese chestnut. Some three billion trees died. The blight actually survives in the forest living on but not damaging oak trees, so American chestnuts are struggling to reclaim their historic habitats. The species is critically endangered and efforts to rehabilitate the population are underway, including trying to breed large surviving individuals or to genetically engineer blight resistant trees. Logging is of course completely out of the question.

American Chestnut is an excellent lumber, with many of the properties of white oak in a faster growing tree. It is straight grained, hard and strong, easy to saw and split, rot resistant due to tannins. A fantastic choice for indoor and outdoor furniture, structural timber, even telephone poles. Reclaimed chestnut timber from old buildings is highly prized, and what woodworker wouldn't love access to a few hundred board feet of freshly kiln dried American chestnut...if it was possible to ethically source.

To clarify, would you consider this specific individual watch the holy grail, or one of that make, model and spec?

If your job is to inform the Joint Chiefs that the ruskies have a bomber with a canopy and ejector seat, two big honking jet engines and a tail gunner, this'll do.

No, you're about to be visited by three ghosts.

So back in the days of leaded gasoline and lynchings there was this show on CBS called Lassie. It ran from 1954 to 1974 and a total of 591 episodes. The show went through three major revisions in its history and honestly was three almost completely unrelated shows about the same dog, but it's best remembered in its earliest incarnation featuring a small family that lived on a farm including a boy named Timmy and a Collie named Lassie.

Sort of like Mr. Ed or Flipper, Lassie is an improbably smart animal. A typical episode of the show would be some backwoods shenanigans in which someone, usually Timmy, would be trapped somehow, and Lassie would have to solve the problem, often by summoning help from Ma or Pa. The following conversation is typical of an episode of Lassie:

Ma is housewifing in the kitchen. Lassie enters

Lassie: Woof.

Ma: What is it, girl?

Lassie: Bark. Bark.

Ma: Timmy's in trouble?!

Lassie: Woof. Bark.

Ma: He fell down Old Mr. Jones' mine shaft?!

Lassie: Bark. Woof.

Ma: Well let's go help him!

So, you know how Captain Kirk never actually said "beam me up, Scotty" even though pop culture seems to think he did? Same thing with Lassie. Even though it is a perfectly plausible plot for the show, Timmy never fell down a well. He fell off cliffs, into lakes and rivers, down mine shafts and into quicksand but he never once fell down a well.

[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 2 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Absolutely not. I'm staying right here, and they're going to have to kill me right here.

[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 1 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

I would call that a cruciform tail rather than a T tail. And it's a high wing, drawing has it as a low or mid wing.

 

The last one went commando, this one's got drawers on.

 

System is Fedora KDE, graphics card is an Asrock Radeon 5900GRE, display is a Gigabyte M34WQ (1440p ultrawide 144Hz refresh rate) attached via DisplayPort.

Despite being on a UPS (which...we're also going to have to talk about) my system was apparently shut down by a thunderstorm. I booted it up, and the display was acting glitchy. I would get two mouse cursors, and below the mouse cursor the screen would go a solid color, as if it was glitching on a pixel and then displaying that from there down.

Switching to a lower refresh rate made the problem go away, I've switched back up and it seems to be alright. A second 1080p60 monitor attached via HDMI didn't show any problem.

Some googling didn't turn up exactly what I was experiencing. Can anyone help troubleshoot this? It seems okay for the moment but I'm hoping I don't have a wounded GPU.

 

Possibly the wrong community for this, it was either here or casual_conversation which also feels like possibly the wrong community for this, but I haven't found anywhere better.

It is allegedly Men's Health Awareness Month, so instead of doing something lazy like post an image macro telling you it's okay to cry or other bullshit platitude, why don't we all hit the trails and talk about what we see along the way?

I went out to a trail around a lake local to me. Was almost tough getting any pictures at all without getting people in the shot. Used to be you could have the whole place to yourself, I'm not sure I was ever out of sneezing distance of someone the entire 2 miles. Used to be people would say hi as they passed, everyone's got earbuds in these days.

A deer! First of two I saw on this walk. Used to be you'd never see any deer or anything like that around this trail, too many people. But they've been clearcutting the forests around here left and right to slap in those godawful HOA housing developments or apartment complexes that we're running out of woods for the deer to live in. Used to be you'd never see them in town, but now there seems to be one living in the back of my yard. Not sure it's a great sign for the future that all the wildlife is being displaced.

The crik. Hope it don't rise.

I've always liked this spot, the path forks a little here and the lower path gives you this peek at the lake. About 20 years ago now I took the best picture I've ever taken at this spot, I was walking this trail shortly after sunrise, happened to look over, said "That's pretty" and snapped a shot with my LG EnV2.

Desire path? I don't fully understand this one, though I remember decades ago it was a lot narrower, like only bikes ever went to the right.

I don't know what this invasive species is but it's apparently not too healthy for the local trees.

So, now it's your turn. Go on a walk, talk about what you see out there.

 

I have a 3DConnexion Spacemouse. I bought it, and use it, for CAD work, but I'm drunk enough to think it'd be fun to play Satisfactory with. What do you think I'd need to do to map it to a controller or something? Am I gonna have to fuck around with the Python library? It's been awhile since I've fucked around with a Python library.

 

To be fair the poor little thing has had a few hot suppers, but it sometimes makes what I can only describe as a high pitched groan of pain? As it shuts down sometimes?

Well if it dies I'll just go to Harbor Freight and buy that dust collector they've been advertising.

 

I foreshadowed this one pretty good. I'm still working on the countertop but the cabinetry is done.

And here are some of those infernal hinges that are way harder to buy than they should be.

 

I park under a car port and the truck collects a layer of dust. It rained so I just backed it out into the driveway a bit. It didn't get all the dust, some of it's on there pretty good. I'm still gonna have to wash it.

 

Friends, fellows, lurkers, I have suffered a temporary field promotion. For the duration of this post you may address me as Major Aggravated.

I am building a sideboard/buffet/server/credenza/whatever you want to call a low cabinet for the dining room. Shaker style, mostly out of walnut. It features posts/legs at the corners to which the doors will be directly hinged, and the way I've designed this cabinet, the doors will be 3/4" thick, and sit 1/4" inset from the front of the leg. The leg is 1+3/4" thick, so there's 3/4" of leg inside the cabinet. There are other structural reasons I did it this way.

This complicates the matter of door hinges. I know of no pin-and-barrel hinge that will do the job, there's some weird specialty mortise mount concealed hinges that I'm just not sure if they'll work in this application, pivot hinges are too "too cheap for Ikea" for the project, and then there's European-style concealed cup hinges. I've known of these things for awhile but never really looked into them.

Until a couple weeks ago.

These hinges attach to the door with two screws and a big fuckoff hole. The offset from the edge might change slightly from project to project but the door half is pretty standard across the range.

On the cabinet side, there's like 8 different ways they can attach, depending on the anatomy of the cabinet, whether it has a face frame or not and if there are any offsets to consider.

The hinges actually come in two halves, the door side with the cup and the bracket for the cabinet side, and they clip together in a standard way, so that you can fuck up and mix and match parts in ways that won't work.

There isn't a European hinge made to attach to my cabinet as designed, because it sort of does and doesn't have a face frame simultaneously. The no-frame type wants to screw to a wall farther back than the leg, so that's a no-go, and the face mount type wants to attach to a face frame that is flush with the back of the door. They don't really make this easy to learn. They like to refer to the features of their hinges by marketing names that they never explain anywhere, and they don't really describe what they do. You just have to learn that "BLUMotion" means it has a damper through osmosis.

No website that sells these damn things organizes them well. Go shopping for wood screws, you get 90,000 results and you can then refine it by shank diameter, length, drive type, button or bugle head, self-tapping or no, self-countersinking or no, material/coating/finish etc. until you have 3 results, a 4-piece bag, a 50 count box and a 50 pound bucket.

Not these goddamn euro hinges. Nowhere that sells euro hinges in the Western hemisphere does it that way. It seems like a wholesaler buys parts from Blum, assembles them into kits, and these kits get dropshipped on eBay, Amazon, Rockler, the usual scumbags. So you don't get to query a database to narrow down your selection, you get to try to guess what search term will get you what you need and then look at the pictures, a practice that shall henceforth be known as "euro shopping."

You'll see the same marketing images on different platforms accompanied by different diagrams, dimensional drawings or installation instructions. Put it all together and they still don't tell you everything you need to know. I note that Rockler issues their own manuals for these things, not Blum's. Looking at Blum's publications, I can understand why.

I finally figure up what hinge set I think I need, given the little diagrams they provide. I order a few sets for my current and immediate future projects.

What arrives is not what I ordered.

The door side, the actual hinge, looks right. But it comes with the wrong bracket. I see they sell just the brackets, I can order those and get them faster than processing a return. I order some of those. They fit. I make a model out of scrap to make sure they'll work, and the reveal between the frame and the door is like a quarter inch too big. Because it turns out the curvy bit of the hinge is 9.2 more bodacious than what I need, and you'd only learn that by carefully comparing the hinge in your hand with two diagrams in their catalog.

None of the components are stamped with a model or part number. Hell, the people selling these hinge sets don't say "Contents: 2x 640449 hinges, 2x 630449 brackets" so you can compare to Blum's catalog.

It's the smell of ten million monkeys fucking ten million footballs.

 

It's very irritating. And I'm making a lot of it this week. Shut your tracts folks, this one's a doozy.

 

A surprising amount of cat hair, I think I need to brush her more. I just kept pulling balls of felt that had once been cat hair out of the workings of the scroll wheel.

It feels sooo much exactly the same now.

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