Nuke

linear actuator project has hit a snag, literally. my method of shortening the timing belt has introduced a lot of friction in the system. so much im drawing 4 amps just to turn the screw, completely unloaded. best h bridge module i have can only handle 3.5 amps. and idk how to get rid of it other than to go the ak-47 route and make it bigger so the parts can move freely. so i have to re-print the biggest part with the longest print time. at least the good news is im getting really good signal out of my quadrature encoder. i havent even put on the filtering caps yet. i might be able to up the resolution. of course that means further re-design of the biggest part, as that will change the angular displacement of the photointerruptors. e: decided to go up to 128 ticks per rotation. it occured to me that whatever microcontroller i use to run my pid loop on is probibly not going to have float or hardware divide. so having a rotational position fit into 7 bits which should help make the conversions easy with fixed point math. eg if i take my threads/inch and multiply it by my tick counter and right shift the result by 7 i should get integer distance traveled or skip the shift and mask out the lower 7 bits to get 128ths. whether i use freedom units or not really depends on the thread pitch. if you thought thou was a cursed unit, wait till you meet fractional centemeters.

am i a bad person for putting german sausage in a polish dish? its like 1939 all over again.

i find it odd that spacex is asking for more regulators rather than less regulations.

theres a reason i dont post gwar videos.

sorry in advance. do yourself a favor and dont try to interpret the lyrics too much.

the math for whether a recipe is good or not is something like e=g / (d^2). where e is how much i enjoy the meal, g is how good it is, and d is the number of dishes i have to do. if g is really high, then it makes d slightly more tolerable. but if you can put a pork chop on the end of a stick and hold it over a camp fire for 20 minutes, you will have a god tier meal in my book. pro chefs get high values of g, and ignore d by paying somone else minimum wage to do it. but in my kitchen its bottom of the barrel swill because im the one who also does the dishes.

i dont even think ive seen beef ribs in either of the stores. alaska has this weird problem where you have to ship meat down south for usda inspection and then have to ship it back for sale, so it ends up being really expensive. so you just buy import beef instead. it really keeps livestock farming from taking a hold. you can get locally farmed beef but its usually a cash under the table arrangement. one thing they do is they are always sending us beef catalogs but none of them actually ship to alaska, which makes me question why they even bother to send us catalogs. i think i could make beef ribs tender, it would just take a 6 hour precook at a lower temperature. ive reduced my preecook with pork down to 3 hours, i used to do 5 but tweaking some oven settings i found a way to do it faster without compromising results. il optionally run them through the grill if the weather is nice, but the broiler works just as well for the finishing pass. if i had a better grill i could slow cook that way, but the one i have has 2 settings, too damn hot, and exploding in your face.

^ thats pretty much project marauder from the '90s.

im tempted to ban holiday feasting from this house. i just want a plate of ribs and some beans.

the alarming thing was it walked right up to me, i was waiting for a date to pick me up and it was dark out. so it was late, and all i saw were the eyes. i thought it was the neighbor's tabby, who was also friendly. my hand was maybe a foot away before i noticed the quills. abort launch!

i once tried to pet a porcupine thinking it was a house cat.

ive come to the conclusion that the forever internet is just a myth. bit rot and neglect are real, and capacity has its limits. information theory has a lot in common with thermodynamics, namely entropy. storing data costs energy (not as much as moving data) and the things you store that data on are subject to wear and data loss. data can only be kept indefinitely in so far as people care to as it requires some effort in backup and verification. and while keeping your data alive is what everyone tries to do, at some point it will be someone else's problem, and they may as well just delete it to make room for their stuff. thus my preferred backup solution is deletion. say bye to all my bad code from the '90s.

current project is making a slow dumb linear actuator fast and smart. originally it had 2 limit switches at either end, but no way to tell how its positioned. i removed its motor and gear box, and printed a new motor mount. also increasing the actuation speed, original gearing used a worm drive, i switched it to a belt drive. i went ahead and put an encoder wheel on the pulley attached to the lead screw. should get 48 ticks (make that 96, using a quatrature and forgot it was 4x instead of 2x) per rotation. i need to measure the tpi of the screw to figure out how that translates to ticks per distance traveled (my calipers always seem to be on the wrong floor). got an h bridge driver somewhere. i also built the circuit board for reading the photointerruptors so i just need to find an arduino now. only thing i haven't figured out is what i need a smart linear actuator for.

fortunately my cats aren't picky eaters, and at least in the case of lizzy, it shows. this is useful when you live on an island and have exactly 2 stores to choose from, neither of which can stay on top of their stock. anyway vlc is a great media player, it can play practically anything. however when you try to use the streaming features, you get really inconsistent results. having a 2 floor apartment gets troublesome when i want to use the 3d printer on the top floor, but my caregiver responsibilities require i spend most of my time on the lower floor. so when you start a 8 hour print, running up and down stairs 50 million times to make sure the part didn't loose adhesion gets extremely tiring, especially considering my bad knees. so a webcam and some streaming is the obvious answer. except the camera is really cheap and the stream drops a lot. also its really hard to set up, you cant load the settings in a way that you can click an icon and the camera just starts streaming, it requires a complicated setup, and forgetting a small detail, like what the multicast address is, or the port number, or to allocate enough bandwidth for the damn thing to even function can really break things. trying to save the playlist file doesn't seem to start streaming anything when you run it. so i will probibly need to figure out the command line for it.

im thinking some kind of pulse jet. you have bombardier beetles that produce hypergolic fuels. you can contain the explosion in kind of an inverted shell. perhaps excrete fluid into the chamber through pores in the shell wall that keep it from overheating via evaperative cooling and also to expand as steam. shoot in the hypergolics from other pores in the shell. the creature would use it to launch itself in the air and would use short bursts of thrust in addition to flapping and catching thermals to maintain altitude. making large quantities of the hyperbolic chemicals might be metabolically unsustainable unless they eat constantly sort of like humming birds. so they might prey on another flying creature and use the energy to gain more altitude and extend their glide. if prey is plentiful they could stay airborne indefinitely.

then we want to hit rocks with sticks on mars or the moon. and thanks to some smuggled golf clubs and balls it finally happened one day.

i got a trainset in my closet. i think its o scale but im not sure. i never use it because cats.

satellite internet has been a thing for a long time. starlink made it better. i think there will be competition eventually. really the problem with monopolies is when they lobby the little guys out of existence. and in the world of space flight there are no little guys. there's a reason the spacing guild also ran the banks.

so i take it we didnt have a beachball to big to get in the hatch problem again.

just from a regulatory standpoint, getting into international waters removes a lot of red tape. does bureaucracy cost more than an ocean platform? probibly.

it used to be something you had the option to do, but i cant for the life of me find it.

maybe dont run such old versions.

at some point i think they should give large oceangoing platforms or rocket catching ships a revisit.

was curious about this with the decaying state of the forum. at the time of the ksp release i had avoided steam like the plague, but now i actually have amassed a small library that id like to consolidate. ive backed up the installers for the last 3 major versions at least.

before there was kerbal there was freespace. while i enjoyed such an epic space sim from the late 90s. i was very heavy into modding. after producing a small fleet of soft-scifi ship designs, i wanted something more realistic. the game was open sourced at some point and a lua based scripting system was added to the game. so i took it upon myself to undertake a semi-successful attempt to add a newtonian flight model (and atmospheric forces simulation) to the game. back then if you wanted that kind of thing you needed to play orbiter. but such games were seldom fun, and there weren't many (orbiter, space combat, elite 2 and ffe come to mind). so i may be the only freespace player to ever orbit a small moon in the game. if only somone could make a fun realistic space game. enter kerbal. kerbal let me scratch that itch and i scratched it to the point of bloodletting (or rather rocketfuelletting). i conquered space and projected thousands of kerbals into the greater cosmos. some of them even got to return home. eventually i got into the modding but not as deeply as i did with freespace. i found myself more interested in real world projects than virtual ones. i am still quite fond of the little green men and their explosions, even though i seldom find the time to play it anymore. on top of a great game i think i increased my knowledge of space technology a thousand fold since ive been a member of the community. learned how orbital mechanics worked a lot better than i did with orbiter and how to get the most out of a tank of fuel. this i believe is more valuable than the game itself.