andmaybegayer

[andmaybegayer]

made a trans 5-braid

[andmaybegayer]

yeah I'm just really into converting numbers into other numbers

[andmaybegayer]

space travel is actually cool as hell and it sucks that people are being negatively polarized against it for the sake of dunking on elon musk. a guy can be shitty without that immediately discrediting everything they have ever expressed an interest in.

[andmaybegayer]

>forgotten where I've left my keys

>no worries, I'm an intellectual

>simply stop, smug look to camera, and announce that I'm entering my mind palace to remember where I put them

>close my eyes and pinch my temple

>instantly find my consciousness transported to the entrance of my mind palace

>mfw I've forgotten my mind keys

[andmaybegayer]

[andmaybegayer]

Was looking at my energy use to get context on some Eat More Electrons posting. I used about 1.3MWh of electricity in the previous billable year, which is about 3.5kWh/day or 150 watts continuous average draw, which sounds about right.

That's not all my energy use. My hot water and heat are thermal central. Rough estimate would say I got maybe 1MWh thermal on hot water in various forms, directly or indirectly through my neighbours walls. No active cooling (yet). Emissions on direct thermal are messy because on the one hand direct thermal is a bit more efficient than thermal electric, but also CZ has an okay-ish nuclear mix. Don't really care though.

Then there's daily transport, which is. Hard to estimate. I'm on the metro and the tram and the bus. Mostly pretty efficient.

But yeah like. Electricity wise that makes sense. My house probably has an idle draw around 80W. Most of that is computers, my server and network hardware is about 60W non-stop. Not a lot of passive power consumption in the Thicket. PC+peripherals ramps up to like 150-200W when on but not in heavy use, and like 600W if I power virus it. Main use of power is probably cooking and computer? Which is a funny look at what kind of person I am.

I spend 6-10 hours a day at the office but that's not my problem.

Of course all of this thrown massively off by a long distance flight anywhere. Flying is so energy intensive. Vaguely estimated numbers here: A 777 is putting out like 27MW per engine at cruise, two engines, 360 passengers, 150kW per person, like 2 MWh per person for a 12 hour flight. Not directly electrical comparable but you get the idea.

[andmaybegayer]

I'm glad they fixed the release where chatgpt would tell you you're the greatest thing since sliced bread, but they need to go further. Stop telling me my questions are good. My questions are good, but you would be saying the same thing if I asked how is babby formed. You don't need to humor me. And you definitely need to stop humoring all those other people with worse questions. I've talked to them. Their questions are terrible.

[andmaybegayer]

A bridge troll: Buttercup Festival 3-331

[andmaybegayer]

It makes sense for me, because I have photographic equipment which often still relies on AA's for flashes, transmitters, etc. which you can burn through in a single afternoon, plus my VR controllers. Since I use them for that I may as well use them for everything. If your only batteries are like, remotes, mice, keyboards, alkaline is probably not much worse and maybe better.

I think it's cheaper than alkaline if you can get 3-4 cycles out of it which I almost always well exceed, Ikea rebrands high end eneloops at low cost so that's a good source of high quality cheap ones. There's convenience. Being able to just throw your dead cells in a charger rather than going out is worth something to me.

Retrofitting things to take LiPo/LiFePo4 is nice and works well if it takes 2xAA/A, but is otherwise kind of a pain in the ass. There's those really funny Lithium AA's with built in charging circuits, buck converters, and USB ports for charging, which I think would be another option for mice and keyboards if you really value convenience over all else. Just take it out and plug it in to your phone charger for a few minutes and then carry on.

You can rescue many seemingly-dead 0V NiMH batteries by hitting them with 1.5V for half a minute and then quickly jamming them into a charger, which will then take over. The one way to do this is just using another working NiMH battery but you can also use your oscilloscope's signal generator as- wait I was going to say "the most expensive DC power supply you've ever had" but this oscilloscope was actually so cheap it's cheaper than my old DC power supply. Which admittedly could deliver like 400W but the point stands.

[andmaybegayer]

NiMH is a pretty robust chemistry, it generally won't like, explode if you damage it, and if you can save it then that's pure upside, even if you reduce the capacity. It's not like, ideal, but it'll save a battery a good enough fraction of the time and the safety features of chargers will generally catch the pretty mundane failures NiMH can experience.

You can rescue many seemingly-dead 0V NiMH batteries by hitting them with 1.5V for half a minute and then quickly jamming them into a charger, which will then take over. The one way to do this is just using another working NiMH battery but you can also use your oscilloscope's signal generator as- wait I was going to say "the most expensive DC power supply you've ever had" but this oscilloscope was actually so cheap it's cheaper than my old DC power supply. Which admittedly could deliver like 400W but the point stands.

[andmaybegayer]

Last Monday of the Week 2025-06-02

Sumer.

Listening: I have had the Miike Snow track My Trigger stuck in my head for days because it's good.

This has the two guys from the other music video also, but now as the leaders of the USA and Russia doing some erotic nuclear deterrence.

It would maybe be too much to call this Hyperpop but it is close to hyperpop, and actually I think there is a CharliXCX feature on one of the songs in this album.

Reading: I have been both reading and listening to Song of Myself by Walt Whitman, downstream of some of my philosophy posting when I realized I was trending towards a kind of industrial transcendentalism.

Listening here provided by The Memory Palace, by Nate DiMeo, who did a reading of this before the 2016 elections, and which I had reached but not listened to as I have been going through those archives a few months back.

Several parts of this are compelling as part of the kind of industrial transcendentalism I found myself writing, like the rough boundaries of the self:

I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth, I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself, (They do not know how immortal, but I know.) Every kind for itself and its own, for me mine male and female, For me those that have been boys and that love women, For me the man that is proud and feels how it stings to be slighted, For me the sweet-heart and the old maid, for me mothers and the mothers of mothers, For me lips that have smiled, eyes that have shed tears, For me children and the begetters of children.

Or towards the idea that there is a history in all things, not just the things seen as good or successful

With music strong I come, with my cornets and my drums, I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for conquer’d and slain persons. Have you heard that it was good to gain the day? I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won. I beat and pound for the dead, I blow through my embouchures my loudest and gayest for them. Vivas to those who have fail’d! And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea! And to those themselves who sank in the sea! And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes! And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known!

Transcendentalism is an interesting philosophy because it is kind of a "this must hit so hard if you're stupid" philosophy but I do also get it, and I think it is particularly compelling as The American philosophy, something that can try to reconcile expansionism with multiculturalism, imperialism with cosmopolitanism,

Watching: At a good movie night, Zardoz, which is so much of a movie. Bad movie night is at times somewhat samey because the issues with the movies are so often technical, that they are not just bad movies, but bad productions. Zardoz is both a good movie and well produced, but it is also you know. Weird.

It is a funny look at like, 70's semi-fringe English politics. You can see how that culture would produce this.

Making: Galena modernization project, some PCB layout and more part hunting because I realized I had made some other poor choices and had to change supplier to DigiKey.

Almost done sewing the near-forgotten silk pillowcase, which will hopefully be finished tonight or tomorrow night. It's not hard but it is so easy to lose track of a project, you know how it is.

Playing: Beat Skin Deep, which was great. The individual levels are usually home to at least one capital P Puzzle but also just well designed to force you into odd corners. I feel like making it harder would defeat the point, part of the fun is not that defeating the pirates is hard, but that doing so cleanly is almost impossible, so it's important that they are easy to kill but very very very messy. Yes, I can take down a heavy pirate pretty easily, but doing so will probably wipe out every appliance in ten meters and spray fire and glass everywhere.

I hope that the increased visibility on this will lead to a healthier modding scene than the one I found when I finally got around to Quadrilateral Cowboy. A Modding Demo Museum is already available and I've seen some levels, so we can hope.

Tools and Equipment: I have been running a private headscale node for my tailnet for a while, but it broke and I decided to try out the Official Tailscale Experience for a moment. It's really nice! If you need a VPN Right Now and don't want to think too hard about setup, Official Tailscale is really polished, and has a generous free tier made possible by the fact that by design you send hardly any information to their servers. Obviously, headscale is more private, but this definitely has upsides especially if you want to use it for, say, ad-hoc adding people to your LAN for gaming or resource access. Tailscale is mostly just Very Smart Wireguard so it's not like it's too hard to understand.

[andmaybegayer]

NiMH cells (your generic rechargeable AA/AAA) are particularly susceptible to getting discharged down to near 0V or even reverse-charged until they hit 0V, at which point most modern chargers won't recognize that they're connected and won't charge them. The charger is looking for a low but non-zero voltage to tell it that a cellhas been connected. If you ever plug a cell into a charger and it just doesn't charge, this is likely the case.

You can quickly boost the voltage of a 0V NiMH cell up by just putting 1.2-1.7V across it for a moment which won't charge it fully but will temporarily raise its voltage to 0.5-1V. If you then quickly move it into a charger, it'll get detected and the charger will take over. You can either do this with just another working, charged cell, or with some external source, +V to the + end, and -V/GND to the - end.

Really, really cheap NiMH chargers (the kind that don't have much or any indicators that charging is occurring) also work, because they just hold a steady 1.5V across their poles no matter what, slowly trickle-charging the batteries, but those are harder to find these days because they take forever to charge the cells. Smart chargers use some simple logic to charge the cells faster but they need that initial indicator to turn them on.

Convenient Big Clive about this if you want another explanation

You can rescue many seemingly-dead 0V NiMH batteries by hitting them with 1.5V for half a minute and then quickly jamming them into a charger, which will then take over. The one way to do this is just using another working NiMH battery but you can also use your oscilloscope's signal generator as- wait I was going to say "the most expensive DC power supply you've ever had" but this oscilloscope was actually so cheap it's cheaper than my old DC power supply. Which admittedly could deliver like 400W but the point stands.

[andmaybegayer]

You can rescue many seemingly-dead 0V NiMH batteries by hitting them with 1.5V for half a minute and then quickly jamming them into a charger, which will then take over. The one way to do this is just using another working NiMH battery but you can also use your oscilloscope's signal generator as- wait I was going to say "the most expensive DC power supply you've ever had" but this oscilloscope was actually so cheap it's cheaper than my old DC power supply. Which admittedly could deliver like 400W but the point stands.

[andmaybegayer]

Have you ever wondered just how many kinds of screws are out there? Probably not, unless you spend your weekends like me: wishing that the hardware store carried an M8x12x1.25 bolt. Just need one, folks, that's all I'm saying. I'd pay anything.

Once, a long time ago, screws were all different. You'd go to a machinist with your project, and they'd just crank out whatever the fuck they wanted to do that week. If you came back and needed more screws for your project, then you'd be stuck buying them from that guy again. Much drama ensued – try asking a machinist to butter toast sometime, see how long it takes – which was not practical for the quick completion of weekend projects. Lots of folks had to walk to work in the 1800s because their cars were missing suspension fasteners.

Eventually, society overthrew the cruel yoke of the machinist. Industry standardized its screws. That's one of those lines that sounds like a cruel joke when you say it to yourself at 3 am, while wondering why this particular bolt in your hand doesn't look like any bolt you've ever seen in your life previously. That's why big automotive companies have an entire department dedicated to finding the engineers who specify custom bolts, and beating them with a rolled-up newspaper until they stop. Keeps costs down, too, probably.

Even so, every individual crazy bolt that they invent has to be replicated forevermore. Scientists now estimate that by the 2070s, we'll be right back to making custom one-off bolts. You'll call up your neighbourhood machinist, tell them you have a 1995 Honda Civic, and between four years and eight centuries later, you'll get that weird little bolt that holds the struts on. Wait, you have two struts? Dude, take it up with Charles Babbage.

[andmaybegayer]

Two Women Teaching a Child to walk by Rembrandt.

Circa 1640, sketch

British Museum, London

[andmaybegayer]

We're offering a large selection of slop and abysmal dogshit today if anyone's interested