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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  22d ago (text post)   436 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for April 29, 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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Compared to last week I'm at:

  • Make the "subscribe" button work
  • Add a script to download content from the subscribed to profiles - This one will need cleanup / optimization, and I just barely cobbled it together for now.
  • Start on reorganizing the database architecture to optimize performance.

So I only managed to wrap up the second point. In other news, got meself a new laptop, and spent a lot of my tinkering time setting it up the way I like it.

How have you been doing @Southkraut?

I had a bit of a week.

The marriage breaking up and coming back together in the space of twelve hours, deciding on a new Kindergarten and then putting that at doubt again, trying to polish up my rusty French because I'll have a visitor soon, having 13 hours of meetings in the space of two work-days, realizing that I optimized my work-code prematurely and its performance is far in excess of what justifies the complexities introduced by my optimization measures, going to a two-day HEMA event including a tournament and realizing that I still love fighting no matter how rarely I get to do it, finding out that being hungover and dead tired can be fixed by running into an old friend and starting a spontaneous grappling match as if the last five years hadn't happened (though I almost puked my guts out by the end of it), hearing that my old fencing club was in dire straits for lack of instructors so I went and tried to badger a friend into stepping up and assuming that responsibility only for him to volunteer me as if I were still active and us finding a compromise in which we would both volunteer only to find out the next day that in fact the previous instructors had no plans of stepping down and it was all a big misunderstanding, then an "awareness" training session that everyone assumed was about wokeness but that actually was about preventing sexual abuse of minors and anyways attendance qualifies me to organize club events so that I can host weekend fencing sessions that don't require me to finagle the 4-hour drive into my work-week, I signed up for another tournament at the end of May, discovered that my historical peak HEMA ranking was actually a lot higher than I assumed (in the top 600s worldwide, at a time when I was decidedly not fencing, which shows merely that lockdowns screwed everyone over and that those rankings are worthless) and then hayfever season started and I bittersweetly discovered that levociterizine works but also pretty much knocks me out for a few hours.

Right now I'm tinkering on how to handle the aforementioned weekend fencing sessions. Can't be too often because I need to keep an eye on the homefront, so it'll be at most monthly, perhaps rather quarterly. I have no idea who would even show up on weekends, so I don't know whether to just provide a time and space for free fencing or a more structured event. I'm no didact, so even with structure it would be simple: Some medium-intensity warm-up, maybe half an hour of non-technical exercises, and then proceed to sparring. Events with low attendance risk degenerating into chatty layabout sessions, and I'd hate to sacrifice half a day just to babysit a bunch of people sitting around and shooting the shit, so maybe some structure might be good. But seeing as I'm neither an instructor nor otherwise very respectable, I might not have the authority to motivate people to exert themselves, so having a pre-defined program might help. But again, with too few people it'd be no good. There's also the issue of novices: If I invite everyone regardless of experience and equipment, then any commmunal exercises need to be feasible for those with less experience and protective equipment. If I restrict it to those with a little more experience, there's a higher risk of not enough people showing up. There's also the question of when - I favor a Saturday morning time-slot, maybe 9 to 12. That puts it two days away from Thursday and Monday practice, and people can still go about the majority of their weekend without needing to cut it up too badly. But maybe I'm overlooking something here. Another issue my own frankly atrocious state of fitness; I probably won't be able to motivate people very much if my pitch is "do as I say, not as I fail to do", so it may be advisable to look for a date at which at least one other very motivated fencer is available to pick up the slack. But first of all I suppose I need to either talk to the club leadership or join one of the organisatonal sessions to hash out the parameters and procedures to organize the event. Step number one to increase my visibility and modest respectability is to show up tomorrow for the big tournament the club organizes and help out as much as I can.

I love May. What a beautiful month. Warm as summer on a good day, everything's green and in bloom, bright, so very bright.

Parts arrived for my TRON helmet/vest/bike lighting project. I spent the weekend reading about ESP32 programming, buck converters, logic level shifters, etc.

I spent a long time trying to diagnose problems with the logic level shifter before just skipping it. Then the LEDs on the lighting strip lit up fine with the ESP32 driving it; got a basic POC working. Next it's time to pick a battery pack and also find a project box I can cram everything into. I guess also figure out if I want to use clear heat shrink tubing to protect the LED strips or get silicone diffuser tubing.

Also I'm getting a bit annoyed that everything I need comes in a 6-12 pack that costs $10 on Amazon. Prime shipping has it's down sides I guess.

Also there's, like, a lot of annoying one millimeter misalignments to deal with? My ESP32 doesn't fit into my breadboard, and neither does the buck converter. Only the logic level shifter does. Cool. Guessing it'll be some different annoying combination of issues with a protoboard?

It would be really nice to walk into a store or sit at a small electronics work bench just to see what all of the options are rather than blindly guessing at what I might need off of a web site.

This is what I mostly don't enjoy about small electronics hacking, feels mostly like you need to be very familiar with catalogs to avoid wasting a ton of time or making a lot of compromises.

Yeah, once Radio-Shack turned into a consumer electronics store rather than a hobby electronics store there's a market that just stopped being served. There's more people into it now and somehow we manage with online stores, but it's one of the markets that would be better served by brick and mortar stores. The items are too low value and small to be worth shipping in individual quantities.

It's odd that this is so underserved a market. I would expect it's not a huge money maker but plenty of Magic the gathering / game shops stay afloat and they're not raking it in.

There's an electronics shop in my town actually but it seems to serve a slightly different market, they pretty much never have what I need but there's always people in there with some kind of antique electronic device they need help fixing.

What fashion or stylistic choices are you making to avoid a fate of becoming the next Tron Guy[1]?

[1] https://tron.fandom.com/wiki/Jay_Maynard

wdym?? that guy is peak sigma male

more seriously I'm thinking something closer to Cyberpunk 2077 motif, I'm saying TRON because it's more widely recognized and still involves the same tech tree from a lighting perspective

Working on replacing a couple of the hundred year old double hung windows in my house. Not really that challenging as far as home improvement projects go, if you order prefab vinyl pocket replacements. But I'm at the point now of being ready to install the new windows and am wondering is there is a better way to seal it on the outer stop than applying a thick bead of caulk and then working fast as hell to shim it true and square as is reasonably possible in such an old house.

New construction usually just spray foams from the inside (low-expansion kind) after installation -- depends a bit what your reno situation is.

What are you trying to accomplish with this sealant exactly? I do think I've seen guys slap some sort of cheap latex on there before installation; open time on that is plenty to get your shimming done. I've never been sure what the point was supposed to be though.

I'm not replacing the outer stops, which are rather rough and still have some old paint. The new window pushes up against it from the inside, so the caulk would, I guess, create a seal between the stop and the window. Granted, I'll also caulk between the edge of the stop and the window on the outside so maybe it's not that necessary anyways. It's just what the installation instructions say to do.

I think I see -- yes, that would be a good place to caulk. Reno guys around here typically come from the outside, I was confused.

You could test fit and get your shims (at least the bottom) figured out first I guess, but I think you'll have lots of time. Probably don't need any super high performance caulk in there -- you should use pretty good product for the outer bead, so that space will be dry and dark.

106k words on my NaNoWriMo project. If I can maintain the pace I've been writing at for the past two weeks, I'll have a first draft by May 21st.

Last week’s issues: I delayed sending a birthday gift due to anxiety and emotional avoidance. No point in self-blame now—just need to act.

This week’s goals:

Must complete:

1Send the delayed birthday package.

2Systematically think through (and possibly write about) the Western romanticization of Japanese and Korean culture, and my personal discomfort with it.

3Book a dentist appointment regarding my wisdom tooth issue (growth spotted, no pain yet, but CT scan shows problematic angle).

Optional tasks:

1Watch Adolescence.

2Avoid burgers and fried chicken for the week.even if it happens, don’t beat myself up or force myself to purge.

3Buy a new t-shirt.

4Apply for a Korean 5-year visa just need to bring basic documents—stop overthinking.

Notes: Small tasks, but after weeks of spirals and hesitation, any forward motion is valuable.

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