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Can't stop losing points for tardiness
(31 Jan at 23:59) |
Oops! You can tell that I'm getting old when I don't even notice the end of a month coming and going. Also that I thought, "I should add a template on my blog for when post late and need to award myself negative points. It should be called {{penalty}}." and then when I go to make that template, I find that it already exists: -1,000 points
I spent the entirety of the month of January sick (presumably the H3N2), which means I haven't run at all since Christmas, which is no good for the spirit or the dad-bod. It does leave me with some additional time (if not energy), and I think my main accomplishment was to attend to a corner of my basement shop, which was an old rickety 2x4 stand that came with the house, covered in crap like sawdust, used COVID-19 tests, neoprene foam, and offcuts with impossibly useless shapes that I am nonetheless hoarding. I have no good "before" photo, but I can show you this picture of the crumbling sandstone foundation that was part of the impetus:
(c) 1906
The main problem here is that this 120 year old pile of rocks constantly sheds sand, spalled stone, and efflorescence. That's not a big problem for a basement shop, but what I wanted to do here was make a permanent home for a CNC gantry, and having sand continuously shitted into the ways, gears, and motors is just not good for the mechanism. But I also needed a nice sturdy surface for it and I wasn't benefiting much from the pile of used COVID-19 tests, so I built the rickety 2x4 stand into this nice chonky workbench:
Upgrade!
In the back we see the fixed-up wall. I repaired the mortar using the appropriate lime putty (don't worry; I'm a mortar chemistry snob now) and cleaned it up with a few coats of limewash. I've never used limewash before, but it is pretty cool for this kind of application (you can't use paint, since this old foundation needs to be able to absorb and exhale significant moisture). I particularly appreciated how easy it is to clean the brush compared to latex paint. The details of the bench are mostly not visible, but let me reassure you that its internals are high quality, with 3D-printed shock-absorbing TPU feet, mortise-and-tenon joinery on the 2x4s, and removable bolts into threaded inserts for the top, which also sits on two dados for registration. The joinery was cut on this CNC I was foreshadowing:
BenchPilot
I've had the Shaper Origin since launch but I may have never talked about it here. It's a handheld CNC router that uses optical registration (these domino markers) and can only move itself within approximately a 1" diameter circle; you do the coarse motion yourself with your big clumsy hands. It's a great little tool for a space-constrained shop and it can do things that other CNCs cannot (e.g. make some bowtie repairs or inlays in your hardwood floor), but it is not fast if you're trying to do something like cut eight mortise and tenon joints for your workbench build. The apparatus pictured above is their new BenchPilot gantry, which can move the normally-handheld part around coarsely, much like a traditional gantry CNC. Other than the modest working envelope, it seems like the best of both worlds to me. Here it's set up cutting some finger joints for some new drawers that will no doubt show in a future episode of Tom 7 Basement Shop Projects Radar.
One of the other excuses for forgetting the current date is business travel, conveniently scheduled during the enormous snowstorm that we covered the entire Eastern US this week. By coincidence I ended up flying on Southwest, which as the staff excitedly reminded us, was switching to assigned seating the very next day. (Southwest, the largest domestic airline, was distinguished by its unusual "open seating" approach where passengers vie in a strangely polite but clearly cutthroat mind game to appear as the most odious potential seatmates in order to score a solo row.) Since I did an 8:45 PST flight, it was one of the very last ever open seating flights ever. When we landed, these guys were already carting away the iconic line-up obelisks like so much fresh garbage:
Southwest ends open seating and immediately throws away their obelisks
I also made some progress writing up my most recent project, which seems like it'll be my SIGBOVIK paper and next video. It decidedly non-epic, but I think I need more non-epic projects in my life. I made a bunch of improvements to BoVeX in order to procrastinate that.
Over break my little brother convinced me to play Baldur's Gate 3 and I'm now 70 hours into that. Good for H3N2. I'll save my final verdict for when I'm done, but I definitely see what the fuss is about with this one! |  |
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| I also flew Southwest on Monday (but earlier than you). RIP Open Seating. I sat in so many exit row seats thanks to that policy. |
Open seating was the best if you had kids, because they clearly couldn't let you board last and sprinkle your kids around middle seats everywhere so they had to let you board relatively early.
Like the Southwest backwards facing seats, a memory that I will forever cherish.
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/2zpu7f/rear_facing_airplane_seats/ |
> It decidedly non-epic,
Do you give out reward cheques when people find errors you've made, and if so, does an insignificant typo count? |
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