Nuke

the x-files is a show that i never really could get into, even though i tried watching it when it originally aired. probibly watched a third of the episodes, and the movies, and tried watching it when they tried to bring it back and didn't care when they killed it again.

if we start tapping tidal energy it should in theory have a slow barely measurable (unless taken to some extreme) effect on the moon. im not sure if it would reel it in or out. but you are adding resistance to a natural process. i have a similar concern about geothermal. you start tapping core, you accelerate the cooling down of the planet interior and the inevitable shutting down its magneto.

i still think this is moonbase stuff. people dont care if you nuke a barren airless wasteland. i wonder if a bigger version of the chopstick rocket catcher would work. granted you couldn't do that anywhere with an atmosphere. and you would probibly still need to armor them with consumable ablative blast shields.

m*a*s*h gets my vote. had this been "the best scifi series ever made" i think id have to give it to the expanse.

yea probibly.

you know when my sister was married to her former husband, they were talking about getting some cattle. they had enough land for grazing, however the usda kind of makes that difficult, as you would have to ship the meat up to palmer for inspection and processing. and the logistics for that are practically non-existent, other than have your cattle live on a barge for 6 weeks, and then the animal rights people would be all over that. story of alaska, its rich in natural resources that you cant touch because of down south bureaucrats and people who want to protect the nature (around these parts nature usually wins). alaska does have a dairy or two, but again logistics kills it. alaska is bigger than people think it is. our grocery store has theirs flown in which no doubt is why the price is so high.

here in this part of alaska, milk costs something like $8 a gallon. i usually get a half gallon for cooking. i was never big on dairy anyway, except cheese.

i think i got one of those. problem is you only get 16-bit if you use double ended mode, which means you need to cut your channels in half for lack of i/o pins. otherwise you only get 15-bit single ended. and you usually loose a bit or two to noise. double ended is not terrible and it allows me to calibrate out some of the dead bands at the extremes. i got some double ended 12 bit adcs (i just went nuts and bought 2 of everything), i think they are 1112s, but idk. i also got a 14 -bit joystick board with a usb interface. its kind of a drop in solution if you dont want to build it yourself or write any code. but i find that reduces possibilities. it was also a bit pricy. i already have a 16-bit capable joystick arduino library on github somewhere. it works with any atmega32u4 based arduino, and inexplicably also works on my due and an stm32 board, even though i never actually wrote it for those. i think the smallest thing ive soldered successfully is a tqfp with a 0.8mm pitch. i tacked down two corners on opposite sides for alignment and did drag soldering using solder wick. worked out pretty well, it was a microcontroller and it ran after the operation. i can do home etch but my process is not as precise as id like. it was good enough for 0.8, and 0.5 isnt that much of a stretch. i think the boards are less than a square inch, so maybe make a panel and pick the best ones.

thats the lazy way out, lol. actually part of the reason im doing a diy approximation, short of the fact that ive been sitting on a working design for years, was that these kind of things were, at the time incredibly expensive. i just never got around to testing their linearity until a week or two ago. actually my design is pretty nifty and dirt cheap too, i just need to miniaturize them a bit.

our state representative, don young, has died. i didnt always agree with his politics, but he was one of us.

id still run 7 but i cant get drivers for my newer hardware. my 2 most recent builds pretty much forced me into win10 for want of 7-8 drivers.

the only reason i don't like apple is because you are locked into proprietary hardware. i have a similar hang-up with proprietary pcs. ive always built my own. the linux-windows debate has started getting interesting lately. windows 11 is really not something i want on my system. ms keeps pushing their hooks in deeper and i dont like that. forcing clouds into places they dont belong, tieing everything you do to a 3rd party server you dont control. windows does to software what apple does to hardware (and software). linux is starting to become the only option. the os is always improving and gaming is getting good. linux keeps things open. im already somewhat ok on linux, ive learned a lot messing with pis (to the point where im writing my own hardware drivers) and am comfortable with its way of doing things. there is also a fourth option on the horizon, and thats reactos, pretty much an open source windows clone that will work with windows software and drivers. its not even beta yet, and the project crawls along at a snails pace. linux is probibly my next os, though im on win10 now. i have older pcs that are still stable and useful, oldest is about 10 or so years old, if not older. another one i gave to my mom and it does what she needs it to do. i got two on my electronics bench one handles 3d printing. the other has its psu and usb abused on a regular basis that i use for embedded dev, stuff id rather not run on my daily driver. ive plugged the thing into a rat's nest of breadboards and wires, exposed dev boards, and caused a few crashes by exceeding the port specs or shorting things that shouldn't be shorted. however when i disconnect whatever contraption i was working on and rebooted, it runs crash free and all the ports still work. i wonder how an apple would handle that use case. anyone on a pc that has stability issues probibly did something wrong. im sure apple has those users who find themselves at the genius bar every week shelling out for repair work (and they frown on diy repair). i feel like my accumulated computer skills would be wasted on an apple. it is still a valid option for a certain use case, its just not my use case. it could be worse though, you could be one of those people who do all their computing with a phone.

show of hands who all made corned beef and cabbage yesterday? i only made a small one. simmered it for several hours, in the last hour i added four potatoes, a bunch of baby carrots, and half a small cabbage (will use the other half when i make a stir fry this weekend). i threw in extra mustard seeds and pepper corns (it was pre seasoned). its one of those stables with an excellent easy:good ratio. i like to use dill on my eggs. got that trick from james t. kirk none the less, and it works. how i like my eggs depends on what im serving it with. over easy if im having them with hash. scramble them with some fancy cheese black pepper and dill if im serving bacon or saussage. i have half a dozen go to omelet recipes (really i just throw in whatever i can find, sometimes it conforms to one of the standards). sometimes il just make filling for a breakfast burrito.

i know there is a hexapod logging machine that you can buy.

this touches on my post in the other thread about the linearization of my hall sensors. while ive had really good results, ive had to tweak my sensors half a dozen times to solve an issue where the shaft was binding up. its coupled to the stepper motor with a length of rubber tubing, which slips if it encounters friction. so getting all the hang ups out of the system is critical to it being in good calibration. i also had to tighten things up, which meant putting some flats on the shaft to better accept a set screw and generally keep the play out of the system. keeping it tight to avoid axial motion is also critical as that changes the position of the magnets. there is a 3d printed housing which accepts a pair of small ball bearings, through which a shaft goes, on one end of that shaft goes an armature with my magnets in it, the other end accepts a spacer and an aluminum gear (this engages a larger gear on a military surplus cast aluminum joystick module that you can use as a flail if the situation presented itself). at the magnet side a small pcb with the hall sensor on it fits into a small recess and is held in place with a couple screws. in the process of getting the friction out of the system, ive had to take the things apart half a million times. anyway there are a couple tiny washers that keep the bearings from binding up. and i keep losing the damn things. i had like a dozen when i started and somehow im down to 3 as i cant take it apart without flinging at least one across the room. somehow i managed to get two sensors working without any friction. i had to make some substitutions of course. what are needed are thin low friction washers. i ended up putting some lock washers in a vice to flatten them out and then file them down to make them thinner, and soaked em in machine oil. it works but its far from perfect. for one i designed the whole thing with a thin washer in mind, so its pushing the hub of the armature into the hall sensor chip, and its grinding. i came up with the bright idea of filing down the chip package all the way down to the edge of the die. lets hope they still work, id hate to make more sensor boards. its rather involved. these ones were made with files and pcb blanks, i could also do a home etch, but my process is not as precise as id like. the file method i just score a line, drill 3 holes, and then use where those holes end up as a guide to where to put the edges and then file in the gaps between the traces (its just a 3-pin sensor a header and a decoupling cap). i thought about having a whole panel made at a chinese pcb mill not near you. if i was going to do that i think id include a footprint for a high res adc and a small microcontroller to store/apply calibration data and to provide interfaces. of course you can get a hall sensor with a built in dsp and eeprom so you can apply calibration data on the fly, and then output pwm which you can read digitally or use with a low pass filter to go back to analog. i kind of want a drop in replacement for standard resistive pots so, or a purely digital interface. so these chips are a good 'do all the things' solution, but it turns out programming them is a little involved. an smd tiny85 would do the job, and i already know how to work with those. if i could find a microcontroller with a higher res adc, that would be awesome too.

while(gettingPaid()==true){ if(!fixed) hitIt(); }

today i decided to characterize the linearity of my diy hall potentiometers. i had an idea to put a stepper motor on the input shaft and tick through at regular intervals, and sample the pot with the adc on an arduino. two arduinos actually. i got a cnc shield on my old duemilanove which is flashed with grbl. unfortunately grbl does not support analog probing (stop giggling) so i needed a second second arduino to actually get the data out. initially i wrote a simple sketch to output the adc value to the terminal on a button press. that got tedius fast. then i noticed a pin on the shield simple labled "coolant". if you were using this to build a cnc machine, as was the intent, this would connect to a coolant pump to squirt oil or whatever on the tooling. however its just like any other i/o pin. there is a gcode to toggle it on and off and its simply a matter of detecting the rising edge at the other end and sampling the adc. and along with the jog command i could run the whole test with a gcode macro. i printed up a fixture so i could run the test. really just a platform with a rail system and a slot for a square nut, and i designed it so i could adjust the spacing as well as change out the bracket for some of my other pot designs. one ive been working on would fit in the old school analog pot form factor. i of course printed two brackets for both designs, and can add more in the future if need be. the only stepper motor i had was a cheap one with only 48 ticks per rotation. with 16x microstepping i can get that up to 768 ticks a rotation. thats less accurate than id like but it will do for a mere 10 bit adc. id want to source a better stepper if i plan on using that 16-bit adc in my parts drawer. that said i don't need to sample every possible angle. just a few at regular intervals. a linear approximation is generated in a spread sheet, and i compare the actual values to the approximation to generate a delta. this actually is neccisary to compress the data down so it will fit in an mcu's eeprom where real estate is very limited. storing absolutes would need a 16-bit int, but storing deltas would only need an 8-bit int. i can then subtract the deltas from the actual reading to get the linearized value. if i have a value that was not linearized, i just find the values that bracket it and lerp it. its an approximation but enough to make those non-linearities go away. there is probibly enough variation between the sensors ive made to require individual calibration of each. less i find a way to get my tolerances tighter. anyway my hobbies made a scientist out of me. my room is a mess, it will take me an hour to put everything away so the cats dont destory it.

i like the idea of a nuclear engine that can refuel anywhere. if you are at mars tank up with co2, out in the kuiper belt, grab some ammonia ice, water ice at saturn, hydrocarbons at titan, etc. grab whatever remass you can get. you may get better isp with some fuels than others. but so long as you have enough remass to make it to your next rendezvous you can stay flying.

you got to test the waters. how can you develop a relationship if you never meet the person? even strongly religious people date. my friends with benefits gal (also my longest relationship, which means yes it was disastrous and meaningless) was raised by a preacher and was strongly religious. im not (unless you count the ancient egyptian gods of cuddles and lacerations). just make sure you inform them about your intentions and, more importantly, listen to theirs. some women want to play around and others want to start families, some dont know what they want yet, others never will. dating need not culminate in physical affections, and dinner and a movie with pleasant company can still be something you both enjoy. a long term relationship was always my intention, i was pretty fed up with the fwb thing from the get go, but opportunities present themselves and one goes off objective (road to hell...etc). that happened enough to turn me into the jaded sob you see before you.

while ive had some relationships most were short, disastrous, or meaningless (pick two). way i figure it, women claim to want a lot of things from men, but present them with a man who can do all these things, and you will get a resounding meh. however there is one thing women cant resist, and that's something another woman has. dating for me came in waves. i once dated this party girl, a couple times. this did not go anywhere. however i got bombed by the flirtations of almost every one of her friends, all of which immediately ceased the second we broke up. there was a girl i dated before that, she was a bit more introverted. that relationship was both short and disastrous, despite the fact that we got along really well it ended tragically because of circumstances out of our control. anyway i ended up dating her best friend and a couple of her other friends, except i didn't know this at the time. also i turned 40 last year and i have to say the motivations change as you get older. in your 20s hormones pretty much run the show (this was where most of my dating took place). when you get to your 30s things get pragmatic. shared expenses, income, having someone to have your back, for women the need to procreate, and taking care of children if you already have them. i haven't been 40 long enough to know what relationships look like at this point. im not really closed to the prospects of a relationship now, but im not going to pursue it it with the same fervor as when i was younger. relationships aren't all they are cut out to be and ive had better relationships with my cats (and they express their affections with ample use of claws and teeth and the occasional drawing of blood). as for "we", i have to admit i still live with my mom, but more in a caregiver role and not in the more stereotypical loser living in the parent's basement. she has a balance disorder and a couple years ago she mangled her arm and while they were able to put it back together she still doesn't have full use of it and can no longer use a walker. i don't really get paid for this so my resources are limited, but i do get room and board and all the crypto i can mine and it frees up a lot of time for my various projects. recently one of her nurses made a comment about wishing she had someone to cook and clean for her, to this i made the comment "im available". that shut her up really fast.

i made some mongolian beef yesterday. thing is i made it for breakfast so i don't think it counts. i keep weird hours. idk about the instapot. ive never owned one, i barely wanted a microwave. i mean i have pans, skillets, utensils, an insatiable love for meat. im sure all those things were available back then. i think the biggest issue with 200 years ago would be the availability of high quality ingredients. you couldn't get out of season crops or ingredients that come from across the globe as cheaply. you would have to go shopping more often to get fresh meat and dairy (or give bessy a squeeze and check under the chickens, livestock ownership was more common back then). its entirely possible cavemen were cooking some variation of my ribs recipe.

back in my system integrator days, we had a contract with a charter school to supply them with machines. thing is they kept coming back completely dead. we discovered that they decided to use a hundred year old historical building as the computer lab. the wiring in that place was not good. i suggested line conditioners. part of a power supply's job is to provide a buffer against brownout conditions. big capacitors in the psu provide that. i strongly suggest over specing your psu in those situations as those higher wattage supplies will give you more capacitance. figure out what you need and tripple it. a line conditioner will add even more stability, and a ups will add it for longer. we get a lot of brown outs here, especially when the squirrels take to using the power lines as a highway system or more recently when we had some record breaking snowfall. i have a mining computer plugged into a line conditioner and it seems to handle any short duration power sags quite well. it tends to shut down all the older computers, especially ones with lower speced supplies. my new computer didnt even notice as i bought a 750w so id have the power budget for a 3070 that i never got, and its just plugged into a basic surge suppressor.

i know they are maintained to spec, but they are not tested due to test ban treaty. we probibly have some warheads who's designs have never been tested.

i live in a place that is pretty far from any potential nuclear targets. but i very much doubt that the aftermath is something anyone wants to live in. though it does make me question what the actual state of art in ballistic missiles and anti missile systems is. also many of these warhead designs come from the 50s so im curious if the warheads even work anymore.