収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

This is a link to my new Greater Northshore bike connector map, built to link the long-maintained Seattle and new Eastside 2 Line Rail connector bike maps. Since we haven’t had one and nobody else is going to connect the dots, I decided I would.

The partially-covered white map at the bottom left is Seattle’s; and the lower-down equivalent on the bottom right is the very top of the 2 Line Rail Eastside map. Everything else is this map.

If printed at 300dpi actual, the map is 24″x10.4″ or 608x264mm in size. It should fold down nicely if you’re into that sort of thing.

NEW IN RC1:

• Steepness markings, measured using Google Maps data and trigonometry, with the single- and double-chevron steepness indicators pointing uphill and scaled as per the 2 Line Eastside map.
• A couple of very small corrections

What’s not listed: trails on private property and some completely isolated islands of quasi-bike-lanes that go nowhere.

Corrections desired.

Finally, thanks to the other contributors to this map:

• Erik H on Facebook (Bothell additions)
• @[email protected] (Shoreline additions)

#BikeTooter #BikeMap #maps #Shoreline #LakeForestPark #Kenmore #Bothell #Woodinville

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Anna and I were getting ready to bike first to exercise then to go to the grocery and I noticed this metal ring on the floor of the garage and looked at it and thought, “uh, that looks automotive,” which was bad given it was next to Housemate Paul’s car.

So I looked at it and looked at his car and didn’t see anything before I turned to where Anna had already gone outside with her bike, and that’s when I saw the big garage spring just kind of dangling there by the door – a place it should certainly never be.

(That’s bad.)

You know the little coils at the end of a long spring that is like at 90 degrees from the rest of the spring, and that’s where you hook it onto things if you’re using the spring that way? That’s what had broken off.

So I left it for the moment, but once we got back I started working on it, and it took a few tries but I settled on something which I think is a pretty good fix. The first couple of fixes absolutely worked, but I got worried about the tension strength and how it would interact with edges of connected materials. The spring does have a little bit of an arch now, but I think that’s actually okay? I mean, before, it had a 90-degree turn in the metal, and, well, that made fools of us all, now, didn’t it.

I also shortened the run a little bit to make up for the reduced spring length, and I got the tension pretty well equal with the rest of the springs. The door opens and closes easily now. But if I’m hideously wrong about something for a very specific reason, let me know.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

With Anna getting laid off/facing contract expiration, we’re pulling back hard on projects we’d hoped to do this year. But we did go ahead and order this last one, since it had been in the queue and was also not the sort of thing you want to leave forever.

So. The original owners some 20+ years ago built a smallish patio when they built the rest of the house. It was built on infill, so naturally it’d been sinking as well as tilting slowly ever since. While thankfully still intact as a slab, it had reached the point where it was impinging against upon the house’s siding from the side and kind of bowing it out, and had also kind of added an extra mini-step below the doors out to it. Plus the retaining wall holding up all the relevant fill worried me a little – because of all that settling – so we brought someone in to check everything out.

(The wall was basically okay. There were a couple of voids so they blew in some fill to be safe. It only took a couple of minutes – that and the slab both proceeded much more quickly than I expected, really.)

I’ve never seen concrete lifted before and it was really neat to watch. The holes they drilled through to raise the lab were a lot smaller than I expected, which was great, and watching a big slab of rock (concrete, whatever) lift itself off the ground was kind of startling and a little amazing. You could also see it flexing a bit as it did so, which was also really neat. If you don’t know this, concrete is supposed to flex; the ability to flex is what makes it strong in actual use. (If it couldn’t flex, it would shatter pretty quickly in actual use just from heat expansion.) But knowing all that from theory is really different to actually seeing it in person, so that was again really cool.

I think the biggest surprise was that I didn’t really expect the patio to look better? It wasn’t the kind of sloping that really hit you in the face, and it also really needs a pressure wash, which it’ll get after the concrete they used to fill the drill holes cures for a week. I was far more concerned about saving the house’s siding than looks.

But I guess it was enough slope to notice after all, because it genuinely looks better now. So bonus points to house House, and house Slabjack too, since they’re the ones who did it. I just got to watch like a housecat through the glass doors, honestly kinda fascinated.

Anyway, it’s nice to have that done before battening down for a while. Hopefully not too many whiles, because things are pretty yikes in tech right now, and, well, see my previous comments – the MAGAts really do want to crash the economy and blame it on Biden. Hopefully their major donors will yank enough chains hard enough to bring them back to heel.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

BEST THING: when your networked ancient but non-DRM laserprinter has been crashing on certain PDFs for months so you think there must be something new in PDFs and maybe it’s replacement time BUT

you discover your printer has room for RAM expansion so you check and it’s at minimum configuration so maybe it’s just running out of RAM so you buy some old compatible RAM off eBay BUT

before you install it you try to find some old PDFs that crashed the printer so you can know if new RAM actually fixed anything and you try printing them again before installing the RAM because you’re smart like that AND

…none of them crash it anymore.

goddammit printers

why

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Honest to the gods, the shit that can fall out from one (1) simple storage problem: the little container we have for small metals too small for the recycling bin. I take them to recycling events a couple of times a year.

For the first time ever, it filled up well before a recycling event.

Anyway, six hours later, the main level hallway closet, the upstairs linen closet, our bedroom closet, and MY INDOOR WORKSHOP STORAGE SHELVES have all been revised and I’ve solved several problems, which is great I guess? But jfc I just needed a place to put extra small metals until the next recycling event.

This is what emacs users are like, isn’t it? “I finally have my key bindings exactly how I like them.”

Again.

For now.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}.

Sphagnum Moss · @moss_sphagnum · 11:38 PM · Jun 16, 2022
I had a chance to go to this @VSOrchestra Orpheum Theatre built after the Spanish Flu to be *pandemic proof* and WOW. This ventilating system is FULLY OPERATIONAL. Huge crowd 1/n
[IMAGE showing CO₂ at 518ppm]

I rebuilt my house's HVAC to do this (filtration+air exchange) before COVID, for reasons.

Holy shit has it worked out for me.

This cuts COVID spread from indoor to near-outdoor levels.

We can and should do this everywhere.

Let's talk about the reasons. They were:

1. Allergies (I'm very allergic to grass pollen) and smoke season (which from a solution point of view is the same problem)

2. Cooling, in summer

Let's talk about #2 in particular.

Our house is really difficult to keep cool in summer because of where and how it's built. Lots of windows facing unobstructed east on a hill. We got toasty.

We'd been using two wheelabout ACs and attempting to cool down at night with fan-forced venting. It didn't really work.

I put a heat-pump Mitsubishi cooling system (240V AC) in on the top floor only, a bunch more ducting, full-time filtered air circulation (for allergies and smoke season) and, most importantly, a lot of temperature sensors in inside-outside pairs.

Beforehand, the house upstairs would be 10°F or more over outside.

Afterwards, well, this is with the air conditioning OFF:


We weren't even running the air-exchange cooling at full, because if we did, it would get TOO COLD INSIDE THE HOUSE.

In the SUMMER.

Again: that's with the air conditioning turned OFF, doing opportunistic cooling via air-exchange at the right times, as possible.

So with much better results, and much better indoor air quality at all times, and a much bigger AC unit in place, used when needed...

...our electricity bill went down by 40%.

In September, anyway.

That June had a record-smashing heatwave. The whole month was monstrous.

The hottest any part of the partially-AC house got in the areas with NO air conditioning was... 79°F.

And again, year over year, our electricity bill went... down.

That was pre-COVID. Post-COVID?

We had a housemate come home with COVID after visiting family.

He isolated. Filtration on, air exchange maxxed, but still, same house.

Nobody else got it.

Air exchange. Filtration. It works, it's cheaper, and it's better.

And we could do this EVERYWHERE.

So we have finally - much later than usual! - reached the end of heating season, and I've pulled prototype 3.1 out of service. I was expecting to be lucky if we could run it through March, but we made it halfway through May!

Functionally, it's worked out exactly as well as I'd hoped. It continued providing small but meaningful heat recovery throughout the operating period - enough to feel, and because of the way airflow works in our house, enough to detect upstairs at times - without overloading the house with humidity.

Based on observations from this single turnover period, I'm pleased (and somewhat surprised) to see that we don't in fact get humidity overages while the unit is still worth using for heat, even given a very wet end of heating cycle. (We've had a very wet May.) I did have to turn on a small secondary fan to push warm air out of the laundry room occasionally to prevent condensation on the window, but that's the worst it got, and we're obviously still coming out overwhelmingly ahead on cost even with that.

Also, the metal door retainer worked fine, preventing the filter from bulging much (it did a little, but a very little) and coming out of fit, a concern I had after Prototype 2. The primary filter overall shows very little sign of change of any kind, which is exactly what one would hope to see.

Structurally, the HTPLA held up very well, and the PLA feet also appear to have held up similarly well, and the plastic material I bought for the sidewalls also held up fine. But there's been one disappointment: while I used two kinds of specifically plastic-friendly adhesives, neither of them maintained a good grip on the sidewall plastics. I had to do emergency repairs on two of the four major side joints, and at the very end, a third side joint started to fail as well.

Because of this, I've only got one weekend so far of closed-face testing out of Prototype 3.1 - the weekend of May 21st-22nd. With the front face is closed off - something which in and of itself worked perfectly, no issues with the HTPLA front frame made themselves visible - the additional air pressure inside the unit made the third side joint failure visibly worse in a very short time, with an air leak forming fairly quickly. I was able to tape it together, but obviously, that's unacceptable.

Within the side-frames themselves, I'm entirely confident I can address this simply by screwing all sides together, as I did with the emergency repairs a couple of months ago. While the plastic in question is not capable of gluing adequately for long-term structural survival, the areas where no such load was placed on the object maintained their air seals perfectly well, so I think that will be a reasonable solution.

I also intend to improve the leg attachments a bit, despite the fact they held up just fine as they are. There's some unnecessary gapping that I can address, so I will, for long-term stability.

I'm more concerned about the HTPLA backplane's stability, given that it is also glued into place. Should I decide to build a prototype 4, I think I would find some way to router out a groove in the side components for structural support, given that one corner of that has adhesion issues now too. (Same cause, of course.)

Alternatively, I could just go with a different plastic for the frame, something that takes plastics glue properly. But it's quite unlikely I'll do that, given that there are summer tests I want to run with the basic design in place as it is.

So my immediate plan is a third iteration of Prototype 3, a Prototype 3.2. It will be a repaired and slightly-upgraded Prototype 3.1, using the same components. The primary changes will involve simple strengthening. It will then be reinstalled for a summer of leak, pressure, and lint collection tests.

And then we'll see what happens.

Okay so, just some shit I've done this week (and last week too I guess):

WORKBENCH:

0: Did I mention installing built-in bolts onto the underside of my bench, so I can hand-turn them so they extend out the top of the bench, which means I can bolt things like the anvil and the drill press and other stuff down while I'm using it? They retract back into the surface. It's pretty nice. Anyway, I did that like a week ago. ^_^

1: Better power leads. Shorter, full 15 amp, two of them for power at each end of the bench for safety. Also replaced the power-breakout brick with an identical model that I spruced up/cleaned up. It grips plugs much more tightly now.

2: Turns out some corkboards are made of felt, and I have leftover acoustic tiles from the refrigerator nook project, so how I have corkboard made of high-density felt over the workbench. I want that more than whiteboard, but fortunately, there's room for both.

3: Last week, I pulled the old latch off the chest that I'm using as part of the bench. This week, I wood-puttied over the holes where all that had been and sanded it down, and made a few similar repairs elsewhere. Second layer - should be the final - is curing overnight now. I'm using the strong shit that smells terrible while it's curing, but I'm reasonably confident it'll stay, so it's worth it.

(Yes I ran a filter and used a mask and opened the garage door.)

4: Printed and installed underhanging containers, one for nuts and washers for the bolts I mention above, and one for small metals recycle. I used the blue PLA for the latter, it's really quite pretty, and blue is recycling colour around here.

I was just going to use glass preserves containers I'd kept - they're really useful, I use them for many things - but I was worried about anything that might slowly unscrew itself under vibration. Plus, glass shatters when it falls onto cement. These slide into place and won't shatter if they fall, and so should be better.

5: We've had some mostly-full cans of latex paint that came with the house and I finally tried some of that solidification powder you can buy at the hardware, and it works! Now we can throw those out.

6: Not long ago, I noticed that the plastic shelving units I have that basically make up a wall dividing my tiny basement/garage shop from the bike parking have these really oddly sized channels within the shelves, open on the ends, going basically all the way through, and I figured out that if you had the right sized dimensional lumber (or metal bars, whatever) you could link the units together for additional stability, and, if the beams were long enough, substantially more shelf strength. I finally cut a piece of 4x4 down to the right dimensions and HEY it works!

I'm only going for the stability - linking the shelves together with shorter pieces, not pieces that run the full length of the shelves - as they're strong enough for what I need, and getting 4x4s cut down appropriately is genuinely asking kind of a lot out of my little table saw. But I would like to anchor the shelves to the ceiling for earthquake times, and linking them together would help with said stability. I hope.

7: I realised a couple of days ago that my "arms-reach" approach to bench organisation (thanks, Adam Savage!) combined with my own organisational style had lead me to put all tools on the left, and all supplies on the right, and that there was literally only one exception left, so I made it zero exceptions. So far, I'm kinda loving it, so for me, clearly, it works.


3D PRINTING:

1: I printed a lot of little modular drawers as test objects while I was trying to get that stupid, stupid eSun matte black PLA to print without sucking. This week I spent some more time trying to sand it into some sort of good appearance that went back to flat and matte, and... basically failed. So I assembled the best of them into a 2x4 array of very tiny drawers, with drawers. It's cute, but useless.

2: Realised that if I rotated an object in the slicer differently than I had the previous time, it would be a lot - I mean, a lot - stronger this time, due to how the PLA is laid down during actual printing. Bonus points: far fewer attachment points and SO much easier to remove. Bonus bonus points: looks better, because the smooth curves from the design are now smooth curves in real life, with no layer stepping! And the areas that do have layer stepping are dramatically easier to sand. Smoooooooooooooooooooooooooth xD

3: The way the heater works on this stupid thing is common in 3D printing devices (and also common to my hot air station) in that its heater works via lots and lots and I do mean lots of on-off cycles, as in several a second. (PWM heating. Christ. But that's what it is.)

This creates massive bullshit noise on our already stupidly noisy electrical system. It's only drawing 100 watts so is mostly harmless (particularly with some filters in place) but the dimmable LEDs in one fixture in the washroom Do Not Like It and flicker in protest.

But I now know if you put a good line conditioner between the printer and the rest of the system, it yoinks that shit right back out. In my case my test line conditioner is also a UPS, but I doubt you actually need that.

It also sounds like a hammer on a detuned AM radio. I may see if I can add more RF shielding.

4: The somewhat-quieter hot-end fan arrived today. Hopefully I can install it tomorrow. The factory hot-end fan works fine and isn't that loud - the real loudboi was the PSU fan - but it's the loudest part left, and this should be quieter enough to notice, so I'm going to try to fix it.

(It only cost $12+tax+shipping, so it's not an expensive experiment.)

Some people step the fan power down to 12 volts and use PC fans, but that's a bad idea here unless you go much larger and build a custom housing, because even the best 12V PC fans that'll fit the tiny (40x10mm) space just don't move enough air and you will get heat creep and that will screw you eventually. So I'm sticking with 24 volts and more air. Changing how the PSU vents really did change the whole noise game, taking it from... hm.

Oh, I know. I run a small HEPA filter when I'm using the printer, particularly with heavily-coloured PLA, just because who even know what they're using for the pigments, right? Anyway, it's not super quiet, but it's quieter than average for such a device.

Swapping out the PSU cooling system meant the printer went from being meaningfully louder than the HEPA filter to being meaningfully quieter than the HEPA filter. So the hot-end fan really is just icing.

But I like my quiet and I will do what I can to get more of it.


HOPEFULLY THE LAST OF THE POST-COMCAST FALLOUT:

So I went to a lot of work when we moved to cellular for the static/house line to be able to keep using my old voicemail/phone answering system, because the big feature cellular never gave us that land lines had was the ability to screen calls by listening to voicemail being left as it's being left, and picking up if you actually want to talk to the caller once you know what's going on.

Guess what silently died a few days ago?

So mad. I mean, 20 years is good service, but still. I fixed it last time, I can't this time - or well, maybe I could, but it's broken again and this time in a way that involves surface mounted blobs on a circuit board, so I think it's off to Telephone Heaven, by which I mean disassembly and electronics recycling.

Fortunately, thanks I imagine mostly to rural communities, you can still buy this old-school shit pretty easily. The new unit even has a couple of new features I like, the best of which being the ability to put individual receivers on silent mode on their own individual schedules. So now I have one near the electronics workbench on the top floor set to ring only for a very limited number of hours, and it won't wake us up if someone calls at 3am. So that's kind of an add, really? I used to have to run downstairs if I cared about the caller.

But goddamn I did not need that. It actively interfered with trying to schedule a contractor. Like, delayed something - fortunately a minor something - by days.

(Also, the new handheld receiver, while smaller than the old one, is still large enough to hold on my shoulder if I need to type something real quick while I'm on it without going to speaker or having to fuck with a headset.)

I did briefly consider trying to thrift and even-older answering system that used tape. But not seriously.

Well, not that seriously. I'm not foone. xD


OTHER STUFF:

1. Finally brought in the frost protector for the outdoor container plants, and cleaned and put away all the parts. It's been a very cool spring, but that's okay, the snowpack needed it and has benefited nicely. We weren't really in drought before, but we were dry last year. We're completely up to normal again now.

2. Cleaned up the bike parking part of the garage, which wow, it really needed. Landscaping tools/gardening and houseplant supply storage still needs some work, but it's a lot better than it was.

3. Made a little stack of tools, mostly landscaping, that need various degrees of work. That includes the old circular saw which works okay but the baseplate is bent - it came to me that way - and the housing doesn't inspire confidence.

Now I have a workbench big enough to fix all this shit for real, so I'm gonna.

I should probably start with that saw.

The chest part of the bench isn't going to be storage. It's a tool, in and of itself.

Combined with a heating pad, it's a warming chamber for the five or six months of the year when temperature down there is too low for too many materials. I can't get it hot with a heading pad, but I can get it more than warm enough to make glues (et al) work, and it's big.

(Though if I do buy myself that toaster oven, I may end up storing that in there. So there will probably be some storage, just not too much, because I don't want to have to unpack it to the ground to use it.)

My other accomplishment today was measuring the old garden chest that I'm using as half my workspace desktop and realising I could rotate it and not lose meaningful surface space - like, only a cm or so - and have the top lid function as a door that opens down, in the front, so I could use the inside of the chest for storage.

I'm going to put a supporting bar inside the chest to strengthen up the new top a bit more - I mean, it's the same thickness as the old top, but with one side not really supported. (Even if the other three sides are actually supported better. I'll just add a crossbeam, it'll be fine.)

Anyway this gives me a bunch more storage and I have some scrap lumber that'll work a treat for the job so I should be able to pop that into place tomorrow and it'll be good. ^_^