Still Unfinished Shield
This is more of an update than a showcase since I intend to finish this project and make a separate post at that time. I forgot in my calculations of whether or not I would finish that my in-laws were coming to town, and that the time would change so that I wouldn’t have light to work outside after work, and then I went ahead and bought Victoria 3 to distract myself even more. However, I got the green half the way I want, and learned a lot about how best to use the acrylic on this kind of surface, which you can see here.
There’s some actually finished projects over on Tildes, if you want to check them out.
Largely true, but I think that makes the discussion all the more interesting. A lot of people act like the way the wealthy invest is what made them wealthy, but the data generally shows that is not true, and that the alternatives they invest in often don’t generate any additional risk adjusted return. If that’s true, and the decision is being made by financial professionals who should know that… then why do we see the investment patterns that we do becomes a fun rabbit hole.
I really want to post this to my neighborhood email list where all the people complain about subsidized housing that the city wants to build, but since it shows price appreciation I am afraid that this will feed their confusing view that dense cities are unaffordable because they were built densely, rather than being built densely as a natural response to rising land prices.
My apologies for falling off the face of the earth for last week’s update. I started a new job that week, and ended up on travel for most of this week for work, so progress has not been what I had hoped. Realistically, I don’t think I am going to be able to finish everything before Monday, but I might be able to get something respectable before the actual showcase thread next Saturday. Anyway, what I did accomplish:
- Made cuts on the main body of the shield and the handle. The shields outer and inner curves are definitely not perfect, and I somehow managed to cut the handle too long? But I think it won’t be too noticeable in the finished product, and a too long piece can always be cut down.
- I made one attempt at attaching the linen facing, but went about it all wrong. I tried to spread glue over the full surface and lay it down all in one go, which I had some misgivings about but thought would work. When I went to add more glue on top of the linen to complete my composite, it bubbled horribly.
- I made a second attempt at attaching the linen, this time gluing down one section at a time, pulling the fabric taught as I laid it down on the glue, using an old library card to push out bubbles, and waiting about 60 seconds before moving on. This worked quite well, and I was able to add more glue for the top surface without issue.
- I trimmed the excess linen. I started with scissors for this, but because of the glue in the fabric, a box cutter ended up being the more appropriate tool.
- I applied my primer to the whole surface of the shield to make sure my paint sticks nicely.
- I applied a coat of green to approximately half of the shield. I think this will need at least one more coat to get everything reasonably even.
Pictures of my progress so far here.
I am also participating in a parallel Make Something Month on Tildes
Well, even though I had two days off this week, very little progress on my shield. I was able to get a metal bowl that I think will do nicely for the boss, and order from some Etsy sellers for the leather carrying strap and rawhide edging. Most of my time actually ended up going towards caring for my SO, who scratched her eye and has thus needed a lot of assistance the last few days. She is doing much better now, so I can hopefully spend more time on the shield.
So this week I want to buy all the things for my shield, with an aim to do a lot of assembly work next weekend since I am taking some time off. My purchases so far:
- Plywood sheet, 15/32 in by 4 ft by 4 ft, sanded
- Cheap corded jigsaw
- Nicer jigsaw blades, I went for some for finer cutting
- 1x2 board, my local big box store accidentally charged me $40 for this and I had to go back and complain
- Variety pack of sandpaper
- Boiled linseed oil, to finish the handle
- Wood chisel set, to shape the handle
- Wood glue, to attach the handle maybe and also the linen facing
- 1 yard of linen to face the front
- Red, green, and black paints to paint the front
- A paint brush set since I only had some detail brushes before
- Some primer to help my paint stick
- Some 1.5 in nails to attach the handle and the boss
- Some 0.5 in tacks, to attach the rawhide edging and maybe also the carrying strap
You can see a mandatory haul photo of my purchases here. I still need a few more items:
- A rawhide bone from a pet store, to soak in water and pull apart to make the edging
- A leather strip to make into a carrying strap, might end up being pleather. Local big box craft store only had some pretty flimsy pleather straps and some more substantial woven straps, so might look online for this.
- A metal mixing bowl to serve as the boss. This is tricky because I want something that is as hemispherical as possible, something which does not have rubber on the bottom to help it grip, and something that has a rim that I can use to attach it to the face. I think I saw something online that I can pick up at a fancier kitchen store near me though.
Overall good progress, I think I will have a time to get or at least shop for the rest in the next day or two. I also noticed that my neighbors down the alley have some sawhorses in their carport, so I might knock on their door and ask to borrow them. They look kinda old, but they are definitely going to be easier (and safer) than whatever else I might be able to come up with.
I’ve posted about this on similar topics elsewhere online, but I was an early pandemic hire at my (soon to be former) employer, so I completed the entire interview and worked for quite some time remotely before being able (and required) to go into the office. As a 5’ 6" man, I am solidly the shortest person in the office, even including the few (because RIP gender equality in STEM) women. There are a few people who I would estimate at over 6 feet tall, from a smallish group. I have often wondered if I would have gotten a job here if I had been able to do an onsite interview, and if my choice to switch to more remote work in the future will benefit my career because no one knows my height.
Cooking is a good one, although I am not sure if my attempts fall into the healthy category. I have been working on sugar work, with caramel and fudge, with the added constraint of using dairy substitutes so my SO can partake. Maybe not an all the time thing, but something like that could be a good Make Something Month project.
This year I am going to be making a Viking round shield! I am basing it off of a book I read as well as instructions I find online. My hope is to finish construction with enough time to paint some kind of crest on it, featuring a boar and a lion. These represent my current pets, some adorable guinea pigs, as well as the pets I hope to have in the near future, kittens.
This first week will likely be dedicated to the most thrilling aspects of all: sourcing and budgeting. I am probably going to make the shield out of plywood rather than the much more traditional boards, as that simplifies construction and reduces the number of tools required immensely. That said, I don’t really see a way around buying some tools, in all likelihood a jigsaw compatible with my current cordless tool batteries, and a probably some kind of wood chisel(s?) for shaping the handle. In an effort to make sure that I don’t spend too much, or run around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to get everything, I am going to make a plan.
This is wild to me because my SO and I, who are both Gen Z by some definitions, think about how much meat we are eating very frequently. On top of that, we think about what kind of meat it is, since it is my understanding that of the huge amount of environmental damage caused by meat production, the bulk of that is caused by beef in particular.
Always happy to find another person who loves the posts on ACOUP! It really is a treat to find a historian who is so knowledgeable in both the field and gaming and is willing to use all that knowledge together. I think the pedant label is more in reference to a lot of the earlier posts, which look at battles/events in popular fantasy media like Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings and do have a bit more nit picking to them, but are great reads nonetheless.
I actually understand where he is coming from on the football team vs office job perspective. When I think about my current work, my feeling is sometimes that it doesn’t matter, but if I actually consider what I am doing and the nature of the project, I realize that my efforts do affect the course of the project going forward. Contrasting that to my experience running competitively as a high schooler, I did not matter there at all, I never raced fast enough to score, in the rare event I was in a race where the score mattered. But despite that, I still feel some connection to the team. Whether that is different because of the physical nature of the task, the social elements, the fact that I was young and certainly still developing socially at the time, or that sports coaches have an approach that just hits differently than office bosses, I can’t say. I think I have enough capacity for self reflection to not go chasing the way I felt during that time of my life, but I can understand how someone would come to feel that way and why they might want to generalize that feeling to other parts of their life.
Okay I have watched the video, it was very interesting! Broadly, the diet he described matches what I thought I should be eating, though I was not aware that eggs are more broadly uncontroversial these days. Emphasis on should, as I did have a donut for breakfast time morning, not sure if walking to the store and back to get it cancels out at all.
As far as weight, I actually just went to the doctor for a checkup. By their scale, I am right at the bottom end of healthy BMI, and if I measure at home without shoes/clothes/etc then I am in the upper 17s. I have been about this weight for a while now, as the result of losing some muscle from being a fairly intensively trained high school athlete to now being someone who works out for like an hour a few times a week when I get the chance. My SO on the other hand, has a lifelong history of gastrointestinal issues with accompanying food restrictions, and since moving in together has been up in weight and more stable, but still only manages to scrape into the healthy range. I am not sure how height factors in, since I know there is some concern with BMI skewing for the especially tall and short, and I am short, and my SO is quite tall, but the trend remains. So, with that as my context, I’m not really worried about current weight so much as making a well intentioned diet change that puts either of us into an accidental caloric deficit and does make either of us underweight proper. Your point about iron intake is something I should keep in mind since we have been trying to reduce the amount of meat we eat, and maybe not increasing the corresponding dark leafy greens sufficiently.
The drinking liquids thing is oddly timely, because my SO actually just started making smoothies in place of some of the food they would normally eat at lunch, and has found that they are delicious and help to avoid some of the discomfort they find they get when eating many other foods at lunch time specifically.
Okay I am going to try to summarize what you wrote and linked to be sure I understand:
Artificial sweeteners may have measurable health impacts, but those health impacts are overshadowed by the health impacts we are certain about with added sugars, so replacing sugar with a non sugar sweetener is at worst fine, and at best may reduce the drawbacks associated with eating added sugars. All of this being caveated with the difficulty of researching nutrition in general and a lack of as many studies as one would like directly comparing the two alternatives, and the fact that different non sugar sweeteners will impact individual people differently.
If all that is correct, then should people who are relatively healthy make the substitution of some of the sugar in their diet with non sugar sweeteners? My SO and I are still young, but we are definitely people who struggle more to keep weight on, so I think we would have to find a way to eat more other food if we were to replace sugar with something lower in calories. I guess that would probably be healthier, assuming the replacement food isn’t potato chips or something (large risk tbh), but is that a health intervention that is worthwhile over something else of similar effort? I feel like this is a question that is solidly veering into the unanswerable, but I think it could be an interesting discussion.
Yeah I have no concept of how much data they have, but I know services like Backblaze barely charge anything for cloud storage, most of the cost is associated with upload and especially download. Regardless, as I saw pointed out on some other discussions, $1 million is what, a few engineers annually for a company like them? It feels like not enough money to be a big deal for them.
EDIT: Looks like it wasn’t enough money, decision at least partly reversed.
Interesting. It would still probably be helpful if you posted the output of lscpu, which should give some information about what processor you have.
One other thing that could be important, but I’m not sure about, is that I know in the past Nvidia has been restrictive about allowing consumer cards to do what they consider enterprise level things, like GPU passthrough. It has been awhile since I was looking into it closely, though, so things may be different now.
One thing that I think could be interesting with air conditioning and load balancing is using the air in homes and buildings to shift peaks and make more efficient use of base load power where available. If there’s a bunch of solar power in the early afternoon or wind or nuclear in the middle of the night, it could make sense to cool buildings down further than normal, say instead of just 78 F you cool when there’s excess energy down to 68 or 70 F. Then there’s less need to run those air conditioners when there’s lots of other demand, especially if you insulate well. The nighttime cooling even has the added bonuses of the refrigeration cycle being more efficient over a smaller temperature gradient and many people preferring cooler sleeping temperatures.
In this case, given the grounding in actual journalistic sources, I would consider the video factual content. Even that aside, it’s entertaining to me because I think Elon Musk is a person who seems to do a lot of bad things, or do good things badly, and seeing him caught in the act of trying to use the right wing grift machine to avoid legitimate criticism is amusing.
First, I would strongly recommend creating a bootable USB drive and booting to it instead of using a VM if you are looking to test hardware compatibility and drivers. If this isn’t something you are familiar with, just let me know and I can try to point you in the direction of some useful resources. The virtualization pass through can add an additional set of headaches that is not representative of what your experience will be after installation, and you can reuse the bootable drive later if you decide to go forward with installation. There is no risk to the data you currently have on the machine, unless you decide to do the installation process or otherwise deliberately muck about.
It is also possible a suitable driver is already in the kernel for this device, since it looks to be a fairly standard USB Wifi adapter, in which case you might learn that you don’t need to mess with driver installation at all. In my experience, I have only needed drivers for Nvidia hardware, and when I have been trying to do something unusual with AMD graphics hardware, but I also have never heard of the company for your particular adapter, so your mileage may vary. Regardless, if you are continuing with your VM testing, make sure all of your USB pass through is being handled correctly so you aren’t barking up the wrong tree.
As far as the drivers themselves, it looks like if you go a few directories down, there is some documentation, as in a Readme.txt that just contains a list of changes made to the software in various versions. I think if you dig down in the extracted zip file into WIFI-FE-2(Other Driver)/Linux Driver/DPA_MT7601U_LinuxSTA_3.0.0.3_20130313/ you’ll be in more or less the right place. From there I think on the command line you can just do make and things should get compiled by your system toolchain, and then when that hopefully finishes successfully you can do sudo make install to get everything where it needs to go. Those are fairly standard steps for installing from source on Linux, though they are typically preceded by a command to Automake or CMake to fully configure the build system. I don’t see any evidence of those tools being present, but that’s something to check out if the commands I mentioned throw up an error of some kind.
Anyway, good luck! I hope that Linux on the desktop impresses and you make the switch, but if not I hope you at least get the chance to learn more about your system. And don’t hesitate to respond here or in a DM if you have other questions!
I have an older HP laptop with a similar trackpoint style pointer. They are not as good as the real TrackPoints, because they lack the middle button in the buttons at the top of the track pad, so there’s no way to scroll while using that pointer. It doesn’t bother me because I am much more used to using a track pad anyway, but it’s definitely not interchangeable.
Now that I know this is a possibility, I want it so bad. It is the most entertaining option!