captain_aggravated
@captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works
Linux gamer, retired aviator, profanity enthusiast Took a temporary honorary demotion of one grade to honor Captain Kori.
- Comment on Important update: It's 10 poptarts 10 hours ago:
It’s a Borzoi. Narrow dog with a white coat and a hose nose.
- Comment on Sexualized video games are not causing harm to male or female players, according to new research 1 day ago:
Every now and again you’ll see a Tomb Raider cosplayer who has stuffed a box up her shirt and it’ll never not be funny.
- Comment on Sexualized video games are not causing harm to male or female players, according to new research 2 days ago:
The Box Bra, by Croft.
- Comment on breakfast 3 days ago:
There was an early episode of House where a clinic segment had a white chick in hemp clothing bring her baby in for a runny nose, proudly proclaimed that they “weren’t vaccinating.” House goes on about baby coffins. I did not see that issue slop so hard to the right.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 3 days ago:
A template or jig, yeah. If I’ve got more than one part to make, especially if they need to match in some substantial way, I set up a stop of some kind.
At some point I may attempt to build a project to a scored storey stick rather than to measurements, but on the other hand I may not.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 3 days ago:
The fun one is a nautical mile. Which is 6076.12 feet. How’d we get there? A nautical mile is equal to a minute of latitude, which happens to be just a bit bigger but on the order of magnitude of most “miles” to include the US statute mile.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 3 days ago:
I’ve banged on about this at length before. I prefer woodworking in inches because I have to divide by 3 and 4 a lot more often than divide by 5. It turns out that the fractional inch system evolved alongside woodworking for a very long time and it solves a lot of the problems woodworkers actually face…as long as you’re not a European scraping in the dirt for something to feel superior about.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 3 days ago:
The first time I ever took a non-pressurized aircraft to 10,000 feet was an interesting experience. I noticed myself breathing…not heavier, that feels like the wrong word, because I had the opposite problem to “heavy.” I needed to breathe noticeably deeper and faster just sitting still at the controls of the plane doing maybe slightly more work than typing this sentence. Somebody from a lower area going up to Denver (about half the altitude I flew to that day) to play a sport has an elevated chance of Not A Good Day.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 3 days ago:
“High. You put the stove on high.”
- Comment on xkcd #3139: Chess Variant 4 days ago:
That’s an aspect to Star Trek’s 3D chess, you can move the smaller platforms around in lieu of moving one of your pieces. I have no idea if it adds or subtracts from the game.
- Comment on A Love Letter To Internet Relay Chat 4 days ago:
My dearest Tokenring,
- Comment on xkcd #3138: Dimensional Lumber Tape Measure 4 days ago:
These boards are factory planed, not sawn.
- Comment on ICEBlock handled my vulnerability report in the worst possible way 4 days ago:
There are attempts to make state-wide meshes, there’s one in North Carolina. Most of the traffic on this mesh? “Morning mesh!” --no answer-- Most of the conversations you see between members? On Discord. Probably because Discord actually works.
I dig the idea of a communication network in which individuals can own the infrastructure. This doesn’t seem to be it, though.
- Comment on More people are joining the military. A shaky US job market could be boosting the numbers. 4 days ago:
The US constitution implies we’re not meant to have a peacetime army. It gives congress powers to “raise” an army and “raise and maintain” a navy.
- Comment on ICEBlock handled my vulnerability report in the worst possible way 4 days ago:
I live in an East coast pine forest where the average urethra has longer range than sub-watt UHF. What range testing I’ve done with the two nodes I own shows I can get about 3 blocks with one of my nodes on my roof. Around here, you’d need adoption at a truly impossible scale to get any use out of LoRa as an infrastructure protocol.
I know of three projects that use LoRa as the carrier technology: Meshtastic, Meshcore and even Reticulum (which isn’t strictly LoRa but I’ve seen it extended across LoRa). Meshtastic is probably the worst, and most popular, of the lot.
- Comment on ICEBlock handled my vulnerability report in the worst possible way 4 days ago:
Having played with it a bit, I have very low hopes for Meshtastic.
Being UHF it’s very line of sight, and things like trees absorb the signal significantly. They like to talk about long range, but it really isn’t.
Meshtastic doesn’t really do intelligent routing, so it’s not great as a single large public net.
Meshtastic has a lot of little features like telemetry and such which are half-baked and broadcast on the Primary “channel.” Settings to send automatic or telemetry data over secondary channels is absent in the very half-baked software are of course missing.
It’s less secure than shouting in the street. Looking at the design of the thing, it looks like it’s a man-in-the-middle attack that’s had a chat app built around it.
And you’re not going to get normies to adopt it. It’s a garbagefuck user unfriendly chat app that you need to spend $50 on a little radio to even use, to talk to…nobody. I’ve seen the idea of “Let’s use it to communicate during our hike!” I can think of fewer practical ways to do that, because now you have to have the Meshtastic node and a phone with you, if one or the other battery dies you’re fucked, and it’s possible you’d be out of radio range of your partners before you’re out of shouting range. Somebody’s gonna walk out into the woods with a meshtastic node, fall into a hole and their body will never be found.
- Comment on Step 1: Delete 5 days ago:
There’s nothing funny about this. And yet I’m laughing at it a lot. Like, there isn’t a constructed joke here. The headless but not faceless cat shaped object is ridiculous. But it was already ridiculous in the original post. I need to analyze this with a team of scientists.
- Comment on Like a heart 5 days ago:
one threads in clockwise, the other threads in counterclockwise.
- Comment on Is there no good inexpensive CAD software? 5 days ago:
I have had FreeCAD crash apparently because of something I did. Like it couldn’t handle some operation and couldn’t fail gracefully.
- Comment on Is there no good inexpensive CAD software? 5 days ago:
The Ondsel project seems to have died. Their apparent business model was they were going to bolt cloud shit around FreeCAD. Hilariously stupid business model but at least some of the money they wasted went to open source software. They shook out a few of the open source tumors, like the sketcher now has a semi-intelligent dimension tool, I think they tackled the topological naming problem and we’ve finally got an official Assembly workbench that even sort of works I guess. But it’s still FreeCAD and if something can be unintuitive, it will.
- Comment on Misogyny or something... Idk 5 days ago:
Especially since the operation.
- Comment on xkcd #3138: Dimensional Lumber Tape Measure 6 days ago:
48" / 5 = 9 3/5" = 9 9/15" ~= 9 9/16" or 9 5/8". Dividing by five gets a little messy, but I divide by 2, 3 and 4 a lot more often than I divide by five.
I’ll give you a real world example. I recently built this dining room cupboard and hutch. The absolute overall width of the cabinet is 4 feet. The tabletops overhang the edges of the carcass 7/8", and the legs are 1 3/4". So the area between the legs that the doors fill is 3’ 6 3/4". The upper doors are 1’ 2 1/4" and the lower doors are 1’ 9 3/8". In reality each is 1/16" narrower than that to allow for some space for the doors to swing open and closed. The drawers have a 3/4" thick bulkhead between them, so each opening is 1’ 9", and the drawers are 1/8" narrower than that to allow a 1/16" gap on either side so 1’ 8 7/8".
The leg dimension was chosen so I could have two layers of 3/4" boards, one for internal structure one for the outer rails, doors etc. and still have the legs stand 1/4" proud to make the legs look like legs (which they are; they’re genuine posts) and to hide any impreciseness in fitment or milling of the rails, doors, drawers etc. The top overhang on each side is half of the leg’s thickness, and then every dimension after that comes from the plan of the cabinet.
Tell me that wouldn’t have been a pain in the ass to do in metric.
- Comment on xkcd #3138: Dimensional Lumber Tape Measure 6 days ago:
Okay, a simple mortise and tenon joint. If I cut my board to 3/4" wide, if I want a tenon that is half the width of the board, it is 3/8" with 3/16" on either side. All my tools have these markings, I have router bits and such that are these sizes, easy. If I want a tenon that is 1/3 the width of the board, that’s 1/4" with 1/4" on each side. Also quite easy to find tools for.
In metric land, they often mill wood, or manufacture plywood, to 19mm. Because that’s quite close to 3/4". Show me a half, or a third, of 19mm on a metric tape measure.
You’ve got a 4 foot cabinet with 3 doors in it. How wide is each door? 1 foot, 4 inches. You’ve got a 400cm wide cabinet with three doors, how wide is each door? 133.3333cm.
- Comment on xkcd #3138: Dimensional Lumber Tape Measure 6 days ago:
There is, now, a separate problem where 2x4s specifically are made of very inferior lumber. most will have either pith or wane, and I’ve seen them have both, which means the tree they harvested is maybe 5 inches in diameter and they might have gotten 3 2x4s out of one log. Even compared to when I was in carpentry class in high school the quality of construction lumber has decreased.
- Comment on 6 days ago:
You mean the one that’s listing menacingly to starboard as if the mounting bolts on that side didn’t actually hit a stud?
- Comment on xkcd #3138: Dimensional Lumber Tape Measure 6 days ago:
Frankly, using a base 12 measurement system solves more problems for a woodworker than a decimal system does. It works very well for the task of woodworking. I’m familiar with and use the metric system for other things but I’m never building furniture in centimeters.
- Comment on DIY restaurant 6 days ago:
I’ve always seen “fried egg” refer specifically to an egg cracked directly into a hot pan with the intent of keeping the yolk intact. “How do you like your eggs?” “Fried.” means not scrambled. You might be more specific and specified a “doneness” from sunny side up to over-hard.
- Comment on DIY restaurant 6 days ago:
As opposed to scrambled.
A lot of restaurants won’t do over easy eggs anymore for food safety reasons.
- Comment on xkcd #3138: Dimensional Lumber Tape Measure 6 days ago:
My sawyer showed me a measuring tape graduated in tenths of a foot. Someone manufactured that for some reason.
- Comment on xkcd #3138: Dimensional Lumber Tape Measure 6 days ago:
Wood does shrink while it dries, and that is the reason why a “2x4” is actually 1.5x3.5, but you’re missing a lot of detail in there.
To make a tree into boards, first a lumberjack fells the tree and bucks off the branches. It is then taken to a sawmill where a big clumsy saw slices it into kind of rectangular shapes. I will gloss over some nuance here about the algorithm chosen to do that and how it relates to the growth rings to produce boards of different qualities. You now have green boards, VERY wet. If you were to build something from these boards, as they dried they would warp and twist and pull the assembly apart. So it has to be dried.
At commercial scale, this is done by stacking the boards with spacers in between so air can circulate through the pile and letting it sit outside for a few months, and then the piles are taken into a kiln and heated for a couple weeks. The weight of the stack, or perhaps straps holding the stack together, has kept the boards relatively straight, but they will have warped a little. Before they’re used for much, they have to be more precisely cut so they are straight, square and true.
Woodworkers making fine furniture tend to buy their lumber rough cut and mill it themselves, so that the lumber is as flat, straight and square as possible. Let all warping happen while the board is rough and mill it as a first step in building so that the pieces are very precise, and then the finished assembly holds itself true. Woodworkers buy wood per unit volume; it’s usually priced per board foot. A board foot is 1 foot long, 1 foot wide and 1 inch thick, or 144 cubic inches. A 1 inch thick, 6 inch wide, 8 foot long board is 4 board feet. Checking out at the lumber yard requires a bit of middle school geometry homework.
Carpenters building houses or sheds used to do the same. In the early 20th century, lumber companies shipping lumber long distances by rail started shipping wood pre-milled. It doesn’t really matter if the boards are a little warped; the worst boards in a stack can be cut into the smaller pieces you need, the better ones used whole for studs or plates. Pre-milling the boards at the sawmill means that it’s cheaper and more efficient to ship the lumber, the sawmill now has the sawdust/shavings/chips to make particle board, OSB and other engineered lumber products out of, and the carpenter gets a commodity product he can buy and use rather than a raw material that needs further processing. Because they’re all the same size, they’re sold at a price each. It was a true 2 inches by 4 inches in the kiln, and the milling has been done for you.