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Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

designing myself a new desk. i have these great massive solid steel legs from my old desk cause when i moved i had to throw out the desk top cause it was way too big and heavy (about 6 feet long 3 wide). it was ugly cheap formica kind of material anyway. so am designing myself a new hardwood top that i'm gonna cnc on the router. debating what type of wood to use and how many hidden compartments to install

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Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

kwinkles posted:

a giant mess of relays and solenoids

pls don't post about my sex toys

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

WorkingPeer posted:

i've been doing research for my sous vide thing and holy gently caress ive fallen down a rabbit hole. every question brings more questions:

you could just do this

http://learn.adafruit.com/sous-vide-powered-by-arduino-the-sous-viduino/sous-vide

i mean yes you'll learn a shitload about the nitty details by rolling your own. but if what you want is a sous-vide that you can put together over a couple days/wees but still lets you hac all the pid stuff on your own time then this may be a way to go

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

01011001 posted:

re: arduino purchase

i tend to use teensys for all quick hacks nowadays cause they're cheap and light and small and can be usb peripherals too! also im pretty sure they have more flash than any of the regular arduinos and they definitely have more ram. to run them away from a computer you just need a 5v supply which can be as simple as a 7805 (though i bought a pile of $3 hobbyking switching ubecs that make a great alternative)

it's like yeah you can program a dip mega328 and put it on a custom pcb with the other components and make it all pretty but you're probably only making one of the things anyway so i just solder a bunch of flying leads and dead bug stuff to the teensy and stick it in a box

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

oh and for the really tiny things i use msp430s. you can program them with arduino code if you download energia and those chips are cheaaaap

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

today i fixed my dork hat that i use to track my head's position in flight sims. basically i was having a ton of problems with the overhead lights so i installed a sharp cut infrared filter on the camera but i guess it wasn't the same frequency as the ir leds i was using (grabbed them from the parts box a couple years ago) cause i lost about 90% of my image. ergo i had to buy new leds of the same frequency (850nm). this time upgraded to 10mm leds for a much larger spot at each vertex and sanded them until they're all frosty smooth so that i get a good image from all angles. so far: much smoother tracking and better viewing angles and i can leave the overhead light on too



power switch is kludgy but it works and the hat doesn't get a lot of abuse so eh

now time to go blast some virtual tanks or something :getin:

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

Cold on a Cob posted:

cool but for those of us that don't play flight sims, why?

well airplanes can't just arbitrarily change their direction like an fps man can, so if you are always looking straight forwards out the nose of the plane you'd have to actually turn the whole plane around to see what was behind you. so you have to have a control to look around inside the cockpit if you want to do that. if you're flying a jet airliner you can take your hands off the controls and just use the mouse cause those planes turn slowly and no one is trying to shoot you down, but in a combat airplane you constantly have your hands on the stick and throttle and are always fiddling with buttons and switches. the little point of view hat on top of the joystick can be used to look around but it's kind of crap when you're actually in combat because you don't want to be concentrating on what button to push to move your head, and plus those switches are usually used for airplane functions like radar or target selection or whatever. the head tracker lets you just move your head to look around and track things, and it's actually kind of ridiculous how much better it makes a flight sim.

like, example, you're in a corsair chasing a zero. your corsair is fast and heavy and doesn't turn very well, the zero is light and weakly armored but turns on a dime. you get behind the zero and it turns away. you can try and pull in after him to keep him in your front quadrant so you can see him, but he will out-turn you and make you bleed off all your airspeed because you can't keep up with those maneuvers for long, and then you're hosed. the proper maneuver is to blast past him at maximum throttle, gain a ton of altitude, then dive past him like a cannonball taking a shot in the 0.5 seconds you're in ideal range. then do that over and over again. he can't match your airspeed or climb rate so you're invulnerable while you're climbing and diving and you've brought the battle back to your terms. the problem is that in order to set up that long boom-and-zoom you have to know where the guy is at all times; if you let him get out of your sights he'll disappear and end up behind you again. with a head tracker you can just casually look out the window as you're climbing, always keeping an eye on his maneuvers, without having to shift your plane at all (which is good because every movement bleeds energy).

it also makes the plane feel less claustrophobic i find.

Werthog 95 posted:

always been curious about these, how weird is it to turn your head but keep looking in the same direction

and how excited r u for oculus rift

it's a little bizarre at first but how it feels all comes down to the mapping. easiest way is just to map 1:1 rotation, you turn your head 20 degrees and your viewpoint shifts 20 degrees, but then you can never look more than ~45 degrees off-axis while still seeing the screen. so you can set up a 2:1 or 3:1 map so that you can turn your head 45 degrees and look 90 or 135 degrees to the side, but that makes the center point really sensitive (you need to keep your head really rock steady in that case) and you hardly ever need to look that far off-axis anyway. so what most people do is program it with a curve that gives you about 30 degrees of movement at maybe 1.5:1 since that's where you spend most of your time, and then rapidly accelerates as you get further away from the center. hard to understand in words but it's surprisingly natural after a couple of hours.

i have no interest in the oculus rift until they make one that can do better than a 27" 2560x1440 screen two feet away, which is what i currently have


cheese-cube posted:

one day i would love to be able to play dcs a-10c but honestly it looks like a steep-rear end learning curve which takes time that i do not have. planes and copters are fuckin rad but i guess my place in life is to enjoy them from the ground.

yeh if you aren't already a flight sim person with at least a stick and throttle don't start with the dcs games. get a copy of il-2 for $10 off gog and play with that first, it's still the best wwii sim out there and older planes are a lot simpler to operate -- no radar, no navigation, no computer-guided missiles etc

mega :spergin:

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

WorkingPeer posted:

also i'm vista running on an apple cinema display. how dare u desecrate stebe's legacy like that? :mad:

it's windows 7 dumbass. and i do not desecrete stebe's legacy, i honor him by keeping that same drat 20" display for nearly a decade now even though the backlight is dimming and the pixels are getting sluggish cause it still has phenomenal color and viewing angles

also it's a really pretty design

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

Cold on a Cob posted:

yep but at least it's not a dotes, ty for explaining. still seems more difficult than having monitors to your side or whatever but i guess it's a compromise

is there a term for flight sims dudes like grognard for p&p rpg nerds?

well technically if you're doing combat flight sims you don't care as much about monitors to your side, you want lots of them in a big vertical stack over your head. that's where the lift vector is so that's where all your enemies are likely to be flying when you're following them. head tracker lets you look wherever you want with no blind spots though and you can assemble one for the cost of a webcam, baseball cap, coat hanger wire and leds. it's the next best thing to a bubble projector if you ask me

i dunno about a term for flight sim dudes, i've just heard "simmers", but there are a lot of historical realism weenies who form "squadrons" or "jagtdgruppes" or w/e and give themselves oberstfuhrer ranks and so on. like if i sound spergy....at least i'm not the sort of person who bans people from his server because they used the incorrect insignia for the mission date ("you're using 1943-winter style lettering and this mission is CLEARLY set in 1941!!! GET hosed").

or the kind who flies virtual airline simulators across the atlantic in real time. take off in new york, reach 1500 feet agl, activate autopilot, go and make dinner and clean the house and watch a couple of movies, return 5 hours later when the alarm goes off, land in heathrow. gg, good work everyone

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

icing kept loving me over in dcs black shark until i figured out what was going on. just climbing through some clouds, minding my own business, and WATCH EKRAN WATCH EKRAN *rotors fly off*

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

Jonny 290 posted:

i had to solder a couple wires in my car the other day and didnt feel like running an extension cord so i brought out an old screwdriver and a propane torch. old school style.

that's cool but get one of these. it's awesome http://www.amazon.com/Portasol-011289250-Piezo-75-Watt-Heat/dp/B003HHK7KG/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1377384414&sr=8-2&keywords=portasol


e: you only have a radio shack iron? fffuuuuuuuuuuuu a good soldering station will blow your mind. get a hakko 936 and that propiezo

(the 936 is the more badass looking heavier duty older version of the 888)

Sagebrush fucked around with this message at 23:50 on Aug 24, 2013

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

Dr. Honked posted:

that looks neat-o

e: i've lived my whole life using shitirons. i must get myself a decent soldering thinger

yah it's really good. it works as a torch, hot air thingy, hot knife and soldering iron. not ideal for tiny parts and the hot air thing is less powerful than you'd hope (ie for heat shrink it's way more effective to just pass the torch over it quickly). but it has a lot of heat output and being able to click it on and solder heavy wires in your engine for 2-3 hours without electricity is just wonderful

combine a good butane iron like that with a decent soldering station like the 936, fx-888 or wes51 and you're basically set for everything you'll come across in 99% of electronics work

e: i also think it's v. cool that the iron tips and the hot air are flameless. you ignite it for about 1 second to preheat the catalyst, then it burns out and the gas flowing onto the hot platinum makes heat and is completely self-sustaining. neato

Sagebrush fucked around with this message at 02:20 on Aug 25, 2013

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

yeh wet the tip before every joint basically. just a tiny drop, enough to make a liquid connection so the heat conducts

if the tip isn't shiny, and instead is dusty gray/brown/yellow with old oxides, it's hosed up. melt solder (rosin-core only) all over it and roll it around until you get a bunch of black dross rising to the top and the solder starts to stick instead of balling up. then keep adding more and wiping it off until the whole tip is shiny metallic coated. always make sure the tip is shiny and metallic before you start soldering

tip maintenance is like 95% of getting a good connection

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

i program out of passion so i can enrich my life ok thanks

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

i have a suspicion that a girl i went to grad school with was partly responsible for them locking down their api. she started her research in 2008-ish when the service was still catching on and decided that to do her studies she needed every tweet that was published. by 2009-10 she was pulling down something like 40gb a day (for processing, didn't store all the raw data, though she had something like 5tb of server space and was always asking for more). around that time twitter put out a release saying "people scraping our entire database will now kindly gently caress off, and that includes academic researchers" resulting in a gigantic lab freakout

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

kwinkles posted:

going to use the screen printing poo poo at tech shop to make that shirt that says "helvetica" but with one of the "e"s in arial next week

ahh that's gonna be the best hipster vs. actual designer shibboleth

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

PleasingFungus posted:

lol @ people who care about fonts

sorry, my mistake

you call them 'typefaces'

they're two different things

a typeface is "helvetica"
a font is "helvetica bold 12" or "helvetica italic 18" or "helvetica condensed roman 24" or "helvetica thin oblique 72" and all other size and weight and style variants of the same one (since in the past when you used metal type these would of course have been completely different sets of letterforms)

guess there weren't any questions about typography on that game show huh

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

do not shame posts in the idiots spare time projects thread

(except fishmech's)

e: wait i thought pleasingfungus is a fishmech/install gentoo alternate. c/d? drat all these namechanges are confusing

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

19/20

the mattel logo got me

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

i like to think about degrees as "if i went to the third world/the year zero/the post-apocalyptic future what could i do with this knowledge" because that's a pretty good rubric for how directly useful your skills are to humanity. if your skills are only applicable within a very specific societal structure you're sorta hosed

doctor: p. much always set for life wherever they go
mechanical engineer: could probably be a mechanic or inventor or something -- still some opportunities
computer programmer: math teacher at best
typographer: lol

tradesmen make out the best here obviously

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

nah artists will always have a job. it's just a universal constant that it never pays well and never really gets much respect

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

Moist von Lipwig posted:

i wanted to do a book like this for my thesis, bootstrapping from stone knives and bearskins to an industrial economy but it was waayyyy too much work for one person

you got beaten anyway (p sure this is what notorious bsd is referring to)

http://www.amazon.com/Build-Your-Metalworking-Shop-Scrap/dp/0960433082

starts with finding metal-bearing sand and smelting it in a charcoal foundry and goes up from there

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

one person wrote that whole series too so way to flake out on that

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

my stepdads beer posted:

wat about your puny frame and arms

see the interesting thing about human biology is that if you do something like blacksmithing for a living your puny frame and arms will grow to be blacksmith-sized. in fact they had these whole other categories called "apprentices" and "journeymen" so that you could do blacksmith stuff while your skills and body grew to fit the task

i know this is difficult to grasp

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

Moist von Lipwig posted:

this is kind of true but to an extent you'll always be limited by things like tendon and frame size

ya for that you need to get the person to start training before puberty (apprentices would start at age 10-12) so that by the time they're growing to adult size their bodies are being molded into the optimal form for the task

eg:

quote:

Skeletons of longbow archers are recognisably adapted, with enlarged left arms and often bone spurs on left wrists, left shoulders and right fingers.[23]

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

you could still be a blacksmith just not a really good one. no hattori hanzo

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

Miyamotos RGB NES posted:

"those CO2 tanks are not meant for food and will taste terrible and probably kill you" but i am just assuming that's Sodastream, Inc. astroturfing on wordpress comments :shrug:

either that or just regular idiots who don't realize that those co2 tanks are inside every soda fountain in the world. go to a bottled gas place and ask them for whatever fast food restaurants use and you'll be fine

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

if you're going to a welding shop get a bottle of hydrogen instead and see if you can make that dissolve in the water. then when you open the bottle of "soda" light it on fire

i would say helium for the voice effects but please dont waste helium

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

ol qwerty bastard posted:

Also I got the balls to cast shadows on each other but it's ridiculously computationally expensive so heres like 2 seconds of 480p video of it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVfmhD0JOQM

well yeah aren't you essentially writing a ray tracing algorithm? if you started messing with refraction you wouldn't be too far off from the state of the art in 1980 computer graphics

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

in general i think most co2 suppliers sell all-beverage-grade all the time, because it's a waste of time/effort to carry multiple uhh "qualities". don't hold me to that i'm not a gas supply expert

this is probably true, and for most industrial purposes (welding, chemical plants) you also want high purity, but i'd be more worried about whatever processing or handling they do than the gas itself. like if they use non-food-safe greases on their fittings and stuff.

that said eh what's the worst that could happen?

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

yes :thejoke:

when the two options are "food/medical grade" and "industrial grade" it is a pretty good strategy to only put the first one inside your body

eg: nitroglycerin

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

i was thinking about your project old qwerty bastard and i realized the next step. you can't get good performance from an interpreted language the way you are using it. but what if you turned an fpga into a python-specific dedicated cpu?

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

holy poo poo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oie1ZXWceqM

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

dur posted:

I've seen a lot of those before but man they are still just as cool and amazing. computers own.

that reflectance capture one is excellent, and the 3d printer object balancing one

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

duTrieux. posted:

man, i wish i were smart

go to sparkfun, get the $100 arduino starter kit, do the projects, now u also can start to be smart

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

yesterday's idiot spare time project: i fired up the unused foundry furnace in the corner of one of the shops and started recycling our aluminum scrap into ingots. goddamn that thing is awesome. you get it going with the blower running full blast and there's literally a tornado of fire shooting out the top, and everything inside is incandescent

fire good man

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

i bought another radio-controlled airplane. everyone around me is getting into quadcopters and flying around in first-person video mode but choppers kind of terrify me tbh. also there's something inelegant about them, whipping the air around and poo poo, instead of working in harmony with it

so i got a glider frame to put a camera on and soar around, s'cool

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

yah many of them already have. i had a rc helo years ago (like, real helicopter with a main and tail rotor and a cyclic/collective, not a quad or a toy) but i crashed it a bunch and every time i did the blades would gouge big divots out of the ground and it was p. scary. plus that guy in nyc kiled himself with his helicopter recently when it cut off his skull. so im gonna stay away from those

i have a little plane already but it's more of a stunt thing that always has to be on the power, like a chopper. i saw some videos of motor-gliders getting up to a couple hundred feet and then shutting off the motor and soaring for 20 minutes and it was super awesome so i'm gonna try that

the joys of being high income, single, no kids

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

jesus christ, the sound when those things go by

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Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

when i was in grad school we had a research project named in the form [thing]ville and after we published the first paper we got a nasty c&d from zynga because apparently we were diluting their brand or something. they claimed to have a general trademark on names of the form [thing]ville when applied to anything that has to do with computers. i didn't know you could trademark generalized language structures

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