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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  29d ago (text post)   483 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for November 18, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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Due to the ratcheting restrictions on internet use I decided I'd try to make a free VPN using Oracle Cloud free tier to run a Tailscale exit node.

Now I'm stuck waiting for Oracle to "provision" my billing services so that I can upgrade to the PAYG tier because it turns out the fully free tier is so horribly oversubscribed and botted that it's basically unavailable.

Okay, I set up my new OS and dev environment more or less the way I like it, and I'm slowly getting back on track. Wrapping up the refactoring work I found one part I was hoping to optimize away. The old version had different views for browsing entries via external APIs and one for browsing the imported entries locally. Part of the refactoring is merging them, and that works fine, but there are a bunch of states (like "is read", "favorites") I'm saving locally, that obviously the API has no way of knowing. A lot of them used to tag-based, which meant I just needed one extra query to fetch them all, and attach to the API-retrieved data, which meant I could display that info pretty easily no matter which view was being used... but it turned a few important ones are actually stored as fields across multiple different tables, so now I'm trying to figure out if I want to come up with some bespoke way to fetch all that info and enrich the data fetched from the API, or just show is as blanked out, and load it on-demand when the user interacts with it.

How have you been doing @Southkraut?

Sorry, missed this one.

Anyways, made some progress. Cleaned up my codebase a little, managed to generalize some logic and eliminate some special cases. Objects now spawn in where I want them to, attached to what I want them to be attached to, colliding with each other correctly. Apart from some minor regression hiccups, I'm pretty much at a point at which I can get to work on what I want to do, rather than forced to work through my ignorance of the Unreal Engine.

I also did deal of rudimentary non-code design work on some systems and content. Even did a little 3D modelling, though it's beyond crude.

All things considered, there'll be nothing to show off for a long time yet, but I'm having fun.

I fundraised $500K for the nonprofit I'm running; it arrived a few days ago in our bank account. This means I get to run my small intelligence agency for another year.

One year?

For some reason I got the impression you were running it by yourself and all online.

The drafts I sometimes post on Thursday are by myself, but I have a larger team that does other things (e.g., parsing Twitter, reddit, making sense of stuff when wars start, etc.) We also wanted to have an emergency response team.

Glad to hear. A few friends sent me links to your application for the emergency response team when that came out, sounds like a fun gig, hope you can get funded to spin that up as well.

Wow, $500,000 for TheMotte? Great work man.

I realize that this probably is a joke (and if so it's a hilarious one), but just to avoid confusion I will link to the actual website.

The Motte is a pretty good intelligence agency though :), I wonder how we'd do in the case of another covid/world war/civil war/memetic strain/AI bamboozlement/whatever

I am attempting to build a pair of ski boots for the Hock.

My starting point? Some Fischer Travers CS ski boots. I've upsized three mondo sizes, ripped out the stock liner, and put a hefty 15mm Intuition liner inside. This was an improvement from the cheap Scarpa Nero liner I'd had during my January 2024 solo of Mt. Washington, NH; I got NFCI in my right big toe then in 0 degrees F and 40mph wind. Fairly modest conditions, at least compared to those I might encounter out on the Hock.

The goal now is to obtain some aerogel Slentite panels or SolarCore aerogel foam and put that on the base of my boot, between the liner and the plastic shell, in order to provide more insulation. I might be able to replace some of the foam in the toes with SolarCore aerogel, although at 32.6 mW/mK it is maybe half again as insulating as something like neoprene or (probably) the closed cell foam that makes up Intuition liners.

Then, I want to make an overboot, which I am calling the Great Unholy Boot or GUB, out of:

  • Aerogel foam panels (if I can get them...y'all got any SolarCore aerogel layin' around?)
  • Neoprene
  • Cordura fabric
  • Apex ClimaShield
  • Coyote fur

This overboot, at least according to ChatGPT, may be able to keep me warm down to very cold temperatures, like 40 degrees below zero.

The first thing to do at this point is:

  1. Attempt to source SolarCore aerogel foam
  2. Build mockup of Slentite panel for professional boot fitting using EVA foam, rubber mats, or other items
  3. Have boots fitted with Slentite panel mockup in.

What is the best way to test these boots, living in the northeast US and therefore not having access to Alaskan or Interior Canadian-level cold? Buckets of dry ice?

Is my plan generally sound? Essentially, I'm using aerogel Slentite panels to provide more insulation than otherwise possible (half again to twice as insulating as a regular foam insole) plus aerogel foam around the boot to provide less bulky warmth.

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Is my plan generally sound?

No.

What is the best way to test these boots

I already told you - put the liner back in and sell them; put the funds towards a (properly sized) pair of these:

https://www.baffin.com/products/3pinm002?variant=8572562702387

Or similar; I think Alfa makes something like them? Either way, you don't need to test them because people have already tested them extensively in actual arctic conditions.

Even putting insulation and sizing aside, tech bindings are quite a bad choice for the trip you are proposing.

Still "planning" on doing this stupid adventure two years later?

When last I left you I had the cases made for my bookshelves out of birch plywood.

It's been a hectic two weeks, but I managed to mill the soft maple for the faces. A two, a three, four. Also drilled all the holes for the adjustable shelf pins. Using a jig and getting those done was the most economical method over trying to install six foot rails. I couldn't find a local supplier for them, and having them shipped incured freight charges on account of their size. Plus this saves me having to route out channels for them.

I am noticing more that almost none of the pieces I cut are perfectly square. Not massively so, and you really can't tell. There is maybe a 16th an inch of wobble that some shims will take out. The floor of my basement isn't exactly perfectly flat either. But in the future, if I ever redo the cabinets in my kitchen, I think I need to invest in a tracksaw to break down the sheet goods. Also the pocket screws, despite copious clamping and jigs, still walked on me when I drilled them in, pulling the whole box slightly out of square. Once again, maybe a 32nd of an inch, but it's every joint, and those errors compound. I think in the future I'm just going to suck it up and route rabbet joints. Should invest in some route bits that are perfectly sized for plywood thicknesses.

I did a test stain of the black, and I think I hate it. Tried out a black walnut stain I have, and I like the warmness of the brown tones a lot more. Think I'm going to go with that instead. Probably also worth doing a prestain treatment because the plywood was a pretty blotchy. Probably from the manufacturing process. I swear you can see where the rollers didn't apply preasure evenly across the sheet how the stain absorbs. I also got my last sheet of plywood mostly broken down into the widths I'll need for the shelves. The side cases get 4 shelves each, the top middle gets 2 and the bottom center gets 1.

The next week I aim to get sanding done, headers and footers, and if I'm lucky all the shelves and trim pieces. I doubt I will be lucky.

I recently did some "woodworking" this last week as well... putting up light-duty shelves in my garage for storing bulky items. The shelf itself was made of 1/2" OSB plywood, with a piece of 1x2 screwed down to make a reinforcing lip. Shelves were 18" deep, 16' long. I used some cheap shelving brackets bought off Amazon and screwed them into the studs. Overall it cost me about $60 and 8 hours, not too bad for an extra 24 square feet of storage in my cramped garage.

I'm curious - what drives you to build something elaborate like that from scratch? And how do you mentally draw the line between cost/effort/time and aesthetics? I find it interesting that two people can work with their hands in a similar manner, but come at it from completely different angles. My creation ended up being all function, zero form. Even the paint job on it was a single coat, as quickly as I could do it. I can hardly imagine staining a $100 piece of wood and having to live with any errors made.

I'm curious - what drives you to build something elaborate like that from scratch?

A lot of my shop furniture isn't that different from your OSB shelving. Lots of stands thrown together with 2x4's and half-lap joints, glue and brad nails. A chest of drawers that are just 1/2" cheapo plywood, not even cabinet grade, with pocket screws, rabbet joints, glue and brad nails. All naked and unfinished. Quick and easy can be remarkably satisfying.

For the more labor intensive projects, I donno what to say. It's like when a Dwarf craftsman in Dwarf Fortress goes insane and simply has no choice but to build the masterpiece that's been plaguing his dreams. Often I get an idea that simply won't get out of my head, no matter what. The only way to get it out is to make the damned thing, no matter how extravagant and useless. That's what happened with my wooden 486. Although I think it went better than that with my walnut gaming table and dining chair set.

My daughter is a huge encouragement too. She's always so amazed every time I make something beautiful. And we've been making lots of memories sitting around the table I made, in the chairs I made, playing The Hobbit: There and Back Again which I got her for her birthday. And how do you put a price on making beautiful things to make memories around with your family?

And how do you put a price on making beautiful things to make memories around with your family?

Perhaps that's the key there. I find that the things I do or make for myself are very spartan, but for my family it has to be polished. I have a child that's too young to know the difference, but perhaps someday they'll be the reason why I put in the extra effort. We make things beautiful for other people I suppose.

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Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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