What did I expect from a $50 chair, but now it works.

18th century joiner plane. All it needed was a little flattening, and sharpening of the iron and chip breaker. It takes a beautiful shaving now.

I am working towards building my own workbench. When I moved in there was one in the garage already but the top is MDF, and it's way too wide at like 5 feet. I hate that I can't walk around it or reach the other side, it gets mad dirty back there.

I am going to make a fore plane next, but before that I need to make floats. Then I will be all set.

We have these 2 paver steps that are awkwardly tall. I'd like to add 2 steps to this by adding another layer of pavers to the lower step here, then adding 2 steps going off of that.

Would it be a bad idea to just lay the new steps directly on the existing ground level patio steps?

I've seen mixed guidance on using construction adhesive vs just polysand. Any thoughts on that?

I bought a cheap router at a flea market and thought it would be good to do some shop shelves as a learner project. These are the rails for the shelves that slot into the legs with lap joints. I was going to drop some 2*4 spreaders in to the top and cut the grooves on the wrong goddamn face and now I have to redo them, and of course, don't have the material so I have to go to the fucking hardware store now

Diy rule of thumb, take the time estimate for completing a project and multiply it by 3... Or 12 lol

Some people collect stamps, some people collect baseball cards. I have realised that I collect spices. My small spice cupboard is full of jars, bags and bottles of different spices and it is a giant mess. I always have to take ten different things out of the cupboard to get what I want. It is annoying and takes a lot of time.

I would like to have some boxes to put inside the cupboard. Then I could just take the box out, get what I want and put it back.

I could buy some plastic organising boxes and be done with it but there are many spices and the cupboard is small so I can't afford to lose any space. I need something that fits snuggly in the cupboard so I have to make it myself.

I would like some good ideas on how to make the boxes. Ideally they would:

• Be made of thin material not to take up space
• Be strong enough to hold a box of salt or a bottle of soy sauce.
• Be easy to clean, or at least able to withstand being wiped with a damp cloth
• Be easy to make without access to a proper workshop
• Be cheap

I don't know if any of this is possible. Thin wood would be nice but it can get quite expensive and would need more time and tools than is feasible for my situation. Cardboard covered with something moisture resistant would be easy and manageable to make but I'm not convinced about it being strong enough or about if it is able to withstand cleaning. It would be cool if you could make custom-sized plastic boxes but you can't do that, right?

This is a really cool project he's been working on for a while. I love how he's keeping it extremely low tech too.

https://subium.com/profile/eustace.link/post/3kw3a43u33a2q

This dude is experimenting with some neat stuff here. He created a stable, non-toxic PCM that can be recharged with the cold of a basement (or a hole in the ground!) using inexpensive ingredients (food-grade sodium sulfate, table salt, water, and xanthan gum) that reheats more slowly than ice.

He shows how to make little packs you can use in a cold vest and larger, torso-sized packs that could help a person with heatstroke using a towel soaked in the PCM and contained in a trash bag.

I think this is pretty exciting and could be a great project for mutual aid groups - would be awesome to have some of these cold packs to give out with a FNB meal.

hello comrades! It's been a minute! I'm back with my first tech update since upending my entire life and getting re-settled! Let's talk

What I've been up to

See for yourself, pictured is the first alpha of the Sphynx Lite. Schematics are on git, go check it out (and if you want to set up KiCAD to view or edit but aren't quite sure how, say so in the comments and me or someone else will help you out!)

Issuing guidance on the usage of these things is complicated. I'm always going to be a little apprehensive recommending that people use this, because I'm a very cautious person. For now, I think my official guidance is:

• you should understand the circuit
• you should have basic debugging equipment
• you should have the time to work with it extensively
• if you meet all of the above, I provide this with no warranty and no guarantee, knowing you full well have ideas as to what you might want to use it for
• If you have a decent working knowledge of electrical engineering and want a walkthrough, I might make a Matrix so I can actually communicate with people looking to get it going??

As it gets more mature and I revise and revise until I drop the alpha, I'll trust it more.

This was a push across the finish line. I optimized for getting something testable done with the correct topology, layout is a little dicey (cut off silk screen in the bottom right ) and subject to change, I just needed something to test on. I was gone for over two weeks from my last post here, mainly because it was just a lot of work with nothing intermediate to report. But now it's here! This has all the working parts of the last boards merged into one, with the new additions of:

• power conditioning
• 9V battery holders
• additional safety measures, like the redundant current limiting JFET
• configuration jumpers! and test points!! !!!

Oh, and I whipped up a cute lil logo. :3

Schematics

schematics in here

Board Layout

board layout in here

Board Renders

board renders in here

Next up

I have a lot of really good work from y'all that I need to capture and incorporate. Particularly, my immediate plans while this board is fabricated and shipped are to:

• Incorporate @ComradeEd@lemmygrad.ml's patchset porting the site to Jekyll - really thank you so much for this, I've been extremely focused on the board, and now that I have a minute, I can get the site going so I can use it to show off, post guide, aggregate educational resources, etc. This is going to be absolutely necessary for the project to have the reach and accessiblilty I'm hoping it gets. Thank you.
• Build a probe per @YearOfTheCommieDesktop@hexbear.net's work into coming up with a probe holder. I have a handful of the Yasutomo's to experiment with. This is going to be a game changer, currently I'm doing self-work with an alligator clip and it's extremely irritating. An ergonomic and reproducible probe with an extremely cheap parts list is critical for the project to function. Thank you.
• More of you provided meaningful help than just these two, these are the two who's work I'm directly interacting with this minute. Thank you to everyone who has stopped by and made suggestions, I've read them all.

The next post will be me building this out and reporting on how well (or whether) it works, and documenting changes for the Lite Alpha 2.

I also badly need to make a BOM. With some effort, anyone who's built a board together can buy all the parts for this and make one, but it'd be a thousand times easier if I just made a single cart that you can buy that includes every single component. If you want to make an alpha board for fun or debugging, maybe hold off until I have that out.

Any ways to help?

Honestly, those of you who are following this pretty closely have a good read on what's going on, what's needed, and what's upcoming - keep being interested! If anyone wants to make one, I do recommend waiting until I release a BOM, but very soon we miiight be at the point where other people besides me get one of these in their hands.

I could also use some polish on the logo. It's fine, but it could be cuter, and the lines are a bit funky. I'm going to put SVGs on git soon and if anyone feels like cleaning them up, rearrange the kitty cat face so it's cuter, fixing my wonky paths, let me know!

Also, and I simply cannot stress this enough - when I've been exhausted, when I've been deep in executive dysfunction, when I've been not feeling up for it, I've read through all your encouragement and support throughout the duration of this project and it's helped me to keep pushing. I would unquestionably not be this far without y'all. Thank you all so much.

As always, stop by, hang out, say hi, ask questions, tell me what you've been up to, design review me, however you'd like to be involved is good by me! I'm thinking I want to make the expected cadence of posts once every two weeks, just because I'm busy and I don't want to cause alarm when I miss a week. I can always surprise y'all with more frequent posts too.

P.S. - I have no hair regrowth in test areas.

These parts are not compatible my ass. I'm riding a regular sized V-Brake with Short-Pull STIs on the front, it works, it's a cable that pulls things, you just have to fine tune it more. Oh the rear dropout on this steel frame is 130mm and my wheel is 135mm? Guess what, steel bends, this fits now. The screw from my front side pull caliper brake is too short? Guess what, I put a new one in there and it took me like 15 minutes at most. My axle is too short to affix a front rack? It's a threaded metal rod, fuck you, I purchased a threaded metal rod and now I could affix 8 of the fuckers stacked if I wanted to.

I piss on your compatibility lists, it's a system of screws, pulleys and parallelograms, I can get this shit to work

I scored a mitutoyo dual caliper, micrometer, and bore gauges. I also got a fowler indicator, stand, and surface plate. Managed to get everything for $50.

Also pictured is the poolish I have fermenting for bread I'm going to make tomorrow.

Like the title says I fixed my remington shaver/clippers today. It started behaving especially badly a couple weeks ago after sitting unused for a bit.

It didn't seem to hold a charge and would fade until the motor stopped dead within 5 or 10 seconds, and seemed to be getting worse. I'm a pretty repair-minded person so I took it apart and took a look around at how it was put together, and grabbed the battery size while I was in there. 1 or two plastic clips broke but ultimately it came apart okay.

So, not seeing anything else obvious I ordered a pre-tabbed replacement battery online and set it aside.

Yesterday I received the battery and tried to install it (a whole other issue, the tabs from the factory were offset on one end so it was tricky to snake the new straight tabs through the pcb). I finally got it in, and voila.... oh wait, it still doesn't work. same issue.

That is why you should always troubleshoot before you buy parts! A quick voltage check on the old battery would have revealed that the battery was full, and not sagging too much under load.

I got back to it today, and after poking around for a few mins with a multimeter, I found that the battery voltage was great, and that the issue seemed to be with the surface mount PTC thermistor that was in series right before the wires that went off to the motor. I removed that thermistor and temporarily bridged the contacts (should be relatively safe in the short term, there is other protection circuitry in there incl a thermal fuse on the battery), and the shaver works great again (I also took the opportunity to remove the insane amount of hair built up in the head of the shaver, which is far too open on this model, allowing things to get inside)

I highly recommend people who are interested get into repair! with a little know-how, plus soldering and desoldering equipment (nothing fancy), you can do quite a bit of little repairs of devices that would otherwise be disposable for no reason

Bought a house at a discount from a lady that 8 dogs that seemingly predominantly used the bathroom inside. The piss was enough to sting your eyes when you walked in. Pretty nasty stuff.

I really wanted to do a move-in ready home, seems like I always have to do a bunch of work to a place, but it's saved me some money.

Subfloor repairs were pretty significant, but it had to happen anyhow. 70's house with mdf under it that was piss logged, and I laid tongue and groove bamboo anyhow.

I got pretty nervous after demo because I was still getting a urine smell, but it's out now. Got most of the new floor in, but still gotta finish a closet and a bedroom.

Not a terrible project, ended up looking really nice. The bamboo is hard as a brick. Took some trial and error to get the stapler right to not split tongues but to also get the staple all the way through.

It also functions as a portable Gameboy cartridge player.

This thing's 20 years old and has plenty of tears on it. I've used duct tape on it but rain and butt sweat keeps peeling it off.

It's really comfy though so I don't want to get rid of it.

Pretty slick little repackage of a UV-5R

Made of 10 awg copper wire and 18 awg silver plated wire. Copper work hardened more than I thought, wish I went with 12g instead, but it does make the final result sturdier.

This article is oldish, it was written all the way back in 2004. I just wanted to share this because it shows another facet of the submersibles world, where every day people build their own submersibles from kit plans. I remember kit plans from back in the day before the internet, when passionate people would subscribe to magazines like Popular Mechanics and (usually) use tons of fiberglass and other materials to build whatever functioning contraption their hearts desired. This is on other end of the spectrum to billionaires descending thousands of meters below the ocean surface, but as of the date this article was written (2004), there were no fatality accidents involving certified submersibles. (I don't know if that safety statistic has changed since 2004, but I was quite impressed with that record either way.)

Here also is a link to one of the main personal submersibles communities, called http://psubs.org/ Personal Subs dot Org.

There are many other resources out there. I've been spending a little time celebrating them and learning something about this fascinating hobby and community.

Cheers.

edit: Here is a list of known incidents involving submersibles since 2000. With the exception of Titan and Nautilus (The Danish submersible intentionally sunk as part of a murder plot, in 2017) , all have involved 1 or more submersible (most often appear to be submarines) involving naval vessels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_submarine_and_submersible_incidents_since_2000

Cool and useful video for electronics stuff

Not as polished as the other video I posted, but still a neat project and it's always cool to see open source and printable board games and toys.

Very cool free and open source board game that you 3D print.