captain_aggravated

joined 2 years ago
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As far as I can tell that's the one genetic advantage white folks can genuinely lord over the other phenotypes, our anomalously high rate of lactose tolerance. Hell of a basis for naming a master race.

I think it's a good bet that if the wood is in usable condition, it probably needs to be dried. Kiln drying takes months, air drying takes years. You're not going to cut the tree down, saw it into planks or slabs, and then make something out of it that week.

If it's not leaving your property, we'll assume air drying. Rule of thumb is 1 year in the barn for every inch of thickness, so if you want a 6 inch slab, expect to let it dry for 6 years. That's a rule of thumb, I have no experience or study air drying lumber of that size. You're off the edge of my map.

I don't know how much a slab of that size will warp as it dries, especially with the pith in it.

I'll grant you, cutting it up and re-gluing it does add a WHOLE lot of jointing. Building a slab top workbench is a lot of work with hand tools no matter what you do.

You might have to rip a few inches out of the middle of the slab to remove the pith anyway (and you'd wind up with a couple quarter sawn boards doing that).

Mind you, a 6 inch slab is pretty thick for a woodworker's bench. 4 or even 3 inches would be more typical. I've seen workbenches made of laminated 2x4s that wound up 3 inches thick that take holdfasts just fine.

Keep us up to speed, let us know what you find once you've got the tree knocked down.

It is a fascinating question, isn't it? Why specifically did the left edge of Europe, and basically no one else, take over the world?

I totally get that the New World just didn't stand a chance because by some quirk there are basically no domesticatable animals native to the Western hemisphere. Imagine trying to bootstrap yourself to the iron age without the horse, cow, pig, chicken, sheep, goat, donkey, dog or cat. So when Cortez landed on the Yucatan with steel weapons and armor, firearms, horses etc. he encountered civilizations on par with the Old Kingdom of ancient Egypt, and that was the most advanced it got in the New World.

But the Old World, AfroEurAsia, had been in contact with each other basically forever. Why was it that Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands and Great Britain became world dominating global superpowers when, say, Japan, Korea, China, Southeast Asia or India didn't? I can understand why the coastal and island nations on the left edge of the "world" might invest in sea power and start sailing the world...why didn't the coastal and island nations on the right edge do the same?

Yeah the Western empires grew to global supremacy via colonization which is still echoed in the present day, the United States of America, former colony of Great Britain, is still the most powerful and influential nation on Earth. Britain sailed so we could fly. Why didn't anyone else in the world do the same?

Well, it seems that Western Europe had a lethal combination of three things that no one else in the world had:

  • Vested interest in sea power. Relatively small home countries with huge amounts of coastline, boats are important.
  • Knowledge of, and desire for, foreign made goods. They knew of the existence of Asia, knew of silk, porcelain, spices etc. And wanted to go get them for themselves. Meanwhile the Asians didn't really want anything from Europe they didn't already have.
  • Extroverts. Everybody else was focusing on their own territories and consolidating internal power, maybe duking it out with neighbors. The Japanese, a race of people congenitally incapable of doing anything halfway, took their isolationism to such an extreme that travel abroad was outright illegal. Meanwhile in Britain, traveling abroad was a possible punishment for a crime.

So it turns out that in the entire world, only the Western Europeans had the means, motive and personality to travel the world by ship. Asians and Africans had the means, but not the motive or personality, and nobody in the New World had the means. Fast forward a few centuries and the result is the petrodollar.

[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 7 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

Behold the power of my ancestors to...digest lactose into adulthood.

[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 6 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

I can think of a few reasons not to use a single 6" slab from the middle of the tree.

  1. Drying a slab that thick has got to be a pain. A sawmill can almost certainly cut that, but are you having it kiln dried? Can the kiln dry it?
  2. Transporting such a thing is going to be a nightmare. How are you planning to haul it home?
  3. You probably don't want the pith in the middle of the tree. The weak center in the middle of the bullseye. There's a chance it's going to be rotten, and even if it isn't it's almost certain to be a bit weak.
  4. How stable is a sold slab compared to several segments glued up? Get some quarter sawn 8/4 or even 12/4 and glue up the bench from those. It should stay flat forever.
[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I have done pretty much exactly this very recently.

For some knot holes and cracks in the tops of the walnut cabinets I've recently posted about, I used System3 Mirrorcast. It's a 2:1 volume mix, it comes in a 1.5 quart size, and it's a crystal clear casting resin "Designed to fill knots, cracks and voids with minimal shrinkage." Freshly mixed it has the viscosity of maple syrup or so, maybe a little thinner, it will self-level, and wicks into cracks.

I dyed mine black using their CastFX colorant which is designed specifically for their casting resins. In the pot it looked a little translucent but once in the wood it's just inky black, looks great against the walnut.

The one downside it has, it takes forever to cure. The TDS claims a 1 hour working time and I think it's actually longer. It takes 7 days to fully cure, and it remains thin and flowing for several hours after the pour. It can wick into wood.

If you can get a paintbrush into the void you're filling, I suggest mixing a small batch, waiting a good 15 to 30 minutes, then painting it on the surfaces of the void to be filled. Let that cure for a good 12 to 24 hours, and then doing the full pour. Again, when doing the full pour, mix up the batch, and then just let it sit in the pot for half an hour.

Make sure the upper surface of the board is level to gravity. Pour it so that it just slightly protrudes above the surface under surface tension. A cabinet scraper is about the best tool for leveling it with the surface once it's cured. As you sand it, it'll take on a grey scratchy appearance, but it'll look clear (or black) again when you apply finish. I can confirm it urethanes well.

^ Winner of the thread.

Torvalds, looking at Linux From Scratch like "Bish please."

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

How the hell are we down to two meaningful web engines and two meaningful search engines?

There's Firefox and everyone else, and everyone else uses Chrome.

There's Google and everyone else, and everyone else uses Bing.

I agree, a machine for doxing people in general is misanthropist, a machine for doxing men specifically is misandrist.

The article linked above asserts that it was a "legacy portion" of the database that got leaked, and that all the leaked data is from February 2024 and earlier. So this vulnerability apparently existed for at least 18 months. The timing of the leak coincides with a spike in popularity which brought wider attention down on it, and finally someone without the desire to implicitly trust it gave it a look.

Which says to me that in the few years this app has existed, it was never scrutinized, not by anyone on the dev side and not by anyone on the user side. That's fascinating to me.

 

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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