Life, The Universe, and Everything

[Doug Coulter]

Lions, tigers, and pandas, oh my? We're off to see the wizard.

I just edited the .htaccess file for the site to block 114.119.128.0/18 which I'm informed is all Huawei. A bunch of those are the top hits on the site and completely crowd out anything the looks legit.
Whether it worked is unknown, but after doing the edit and uploading it, it lets me in from the US...
We'll see who yells...
There's one from an Amazon instance that I haven't blocked yet...
And of course, once the top offenders no longer swamp my summary reporting, there may be more. We'll see how many users online are now reported, though - that will be the tell, I think.

[Donovan Ready]

Good morning, Doug, et alia. The Amazon range is poison, and should be blocked on general principles. They're a cloud crawler with no way to know who the originators are.

I hope all are doing well during this trying time. I hate not being able to go to the grocery, since my son can never find anything but meat when he goes for me... Oh, well.

[Doug Coulter]

I'm fine here, and normally have a ton of stuff in stock, so ... it's not real noticeable that I'm "social distancing" a little more than normal. I went many years without refrigeration - that's the big load if you're on solar - so I got in the habit of stocking things that keep well...and had those odd "prepper" class supplies, but a lot nicer than what the preppers usually stock - I figured why not get food I'll eat on purpose and even gain weight on - and I'm having fun rotating that stock.
Doing some playing with machines and firearms - can't do fusor all day every day. There's a new post on that on another thread. I'll have 6.5x55 swede rifles when I'm done. I figured if nothing else, I should change all those parts I had into something I could convert to cash, or just plain fun. The 6.5 if a fun round that doesn't bite the shooter much, is accurate at range, and that sectional density means even cast bullets go through feet of oak, even at low speeds...

I did block the chinese, and while Winnie may be still throwing pooh - it's not getting in anymore. Haven't blocked the amazon range yet. I bet you can tell when I did it from this screenshot...

Hmm, the Chinese were downloading this over and over? Scraping practice for noob hackers?

I'm with you - hope everyone is fine. I may have to go for beer in a week or two...otherwise I'm just hanging out, catching up on yardwork (after spring is here, its too late - nature is vigorous around here).
And having fun, my mantra.

[Doug Coulter]

Hope for the best, but plan for worse...

Hope all are well in these dire times...It wasn't just the economy for those dinos.

A little old-timey fun with vac - u - um.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDaexm0HM-A


When doing yard work to stay healthy (I needed the excercise), one should always be mindful that the weed patch that one is chopping on to improve the lawn might be full of poison ivy that
isn't obvious because the leaves haven't come out yet..and if one's bladder gets full, well, reaching for the obvious solution with urushiol on ones hands has consequences.

Happy Easter and ... enforced hermitage?

[Donovan Ready]

Dip your hollow points in urushiol?

Happy Easter.

Edit: Sorry, this was supposed to be in the Swede thread..

[Bob Reite]

ROFLMAO on that Dino poster! Now to watch Industry on Parade. Loved that show as a kid!

[Doug Coulter]

Well, Donovan, the real problem was that my hollow point did get dipped...

Given that the great recession was in large part caused by stupid investments enabled by easy money, and then papered over with yet more, which led to the current fragility in the economy...not that this blow is a minor one..sure, more of the same is what we need, right? We just get a bigger truck! Of course those who have been privatizing the profits and socializing the losses are demanding we recognize that without their financialization, we'll have short term pain, perhaps to distract from their role in incentivising the causes of long term pain? Sadly, I do have to pay a little attention to the world of finance to keep food on the table and this whole setup financed (good so far, but looking at the mess is icky). At least this time all the central banks are in it together, so we all get to Weimar or Zimbabwe as a group. That makes it better, right? And where's my check?

So, sometimes all you can do is laugh.

I think we just had the last freeze, and it'll be much more reasonable to heat up the shop and get back on "fusor2" which is really "ion trap for characterization of smearing and polarizing effects as we go from a few charged particles of all one polarity to more of a denser plasma" to see what we can see there. Maybe it leads somewhere, but so far, this is the only thing that has come to mind as having not been really investigated - it's kind of like the turbulence issue in hydrodynamics in that sense, there are only gross characterizations of it, not predictions of "whorl here, of x intensity".

Meanwhile, I have a winter project (or few) that have gone long, one of which is setting up an induction heater using one of those cheap Chinese FET oscillators, and some less-cheap accessories, like the 48v 20 amp supply, water cooling, various instrumentation and control stuff, fixtures....I think it'll be more than just a way to anneal rifle brass, some of that graphite rod I have would make real nice crucibles if bored out. And this will work in vacuum.

Funny, in my youth, just learning how to tweak and design 5 tube wonder "All American special" superhet AM radios, the idea of taking 120v 60 CPS (there was no hertz unit then), voltage doubling it to ~300vdc, using a variable duty cycle switch to create 40 or so kc signal at major power to push through a ferrite transformer, then re rectify it, filter it, use it in a loop to control the switching, then use the final DC to run a Royer oscillator to drive a crazy high C, low L tuned circuit at round 100kc to heat stuff up...
Would have made me ask "can I have some of what you're smoking? What color is the sky on your planet" or something similar, and I was already at the point of reflecting on the changes witnessed by my paternal grandma, born at the end of the civil war...
Predicting is hard, especially about the future...(YogiB)

And some things so boring I haven't been posting about them. My homestead data aq and control systems have been getting upgraded for reliability and maintainability, some have actually failed and been replaced. There were a bunch of raspberry pies, some with arduino help, running and reporting on this and that. That number is being reduced dramatically to one per active building, with ancillary ESP8266's, which requires writing a lot of code and a bit of re-architecting. Instead of each pi having its own database server, it's all getting pushed into one, which gets totally backed up to a NAS nightly (I'm using Odroid HC2's with 4 tb drives, running Linux, it's a very nice thing, and doing staged backups of my now-huge shares and each other on them - one runs the DB server for the fusor stuff, it's super fast and capable), and which will eventually also serve all the plot and controls pages (while it also streams jazz off the network and a few other things - and at that, it's loafing).
I guess I felt that the stuff was kind of boring, and better written up once done rather than scatter shooting it all as various lessons were learned in the process. Some of it is just thrashing to get a replacement up before tearing down the original, for example, the battery box machine now in use. There's now an ESP8266 in the box too, reporting to the main database, and as yet, no plotting from that set of sensors...and of course, rather than just diddling the existing code, it occurs to me to make the reporting software a lot more flexible to only show the plots I need now rather than a ton of windows of them...like I said, kind of boring until it's at the stage of being able to show it off.
Right now it takes a whole another multipane browser instance to show this stuff. See pic. And the data isn't as complete as I'd like. For example the battery plots only show net current. You'd have to know I plugged in my Volt to charge it, and that those other down spikes are my morning cup...nothing shows how much insolation (that's going to be that bottom window...) and so on.

Just now.

Keepin on keeping on.

[Doug Coulter]

Parts for the induction heater

Some parts for that induction heater project. I made that coil and painted it high-temp black to reduce the occurrence of shorted turns. It NEEDS water cooling.

Here's a pic of the patch (next to the truck) that was all weeds (including rose bushes, poison ivy, small trees, and other weeds with teeth), I have a nice batch of lawn furniture to put under that hawthorne tree, it'll be nice in summer. It sure is nice to have a test shooting range and bench just a few steps from the door.

Spring is sproinging

[johnf]

Good on you Doug
i was about to do a Doug ping

[Doug Coulter]

Hey John, I have a question for you, your input would be nice.
I've noticed over the last couple of years that the amplitude of the temperature swing of our seasons has been getting less, as evidenced by heating fuel requirements, and electricity for A/C use.
I've been paying some attention to weather in this location since around 1980.
We've always had our share of outlier extreme weather - microbursts, hail, high wind and so on. Maybe slightly more lately, but not hugely out of the normal noise.
But for the last around 2 years, we've had less extreme temperatures (super cold in winter or hot in summer), and it's been warmer in winter, and cooler in summer than the long term average.
In this case I now have some medium term (5 years or so) real data, but I'm going on my impressions and how much wood is left at end of winter, when's the last frost in spring, things like that.

For example, in all but the last two years, I've emptied my woodsheds all the way, and was starting with really good hardwood (locust, oak, cherry). This year, half is left, and most of the wood wasn't that great (poplar, maple...half rotten deadfall). Now this:

Some of this wood is getting old and insect infested!

I may have to cut back my deadfall harvesting, much less getting fresher stuff!
But this year we've also had a later freeze than the 5 previous years, and it's still chilly on sunny days now, when it would normally be pretty warm in the day (mountains are cold at night if it's clear).

Since you're on the other side of the (not flat!) earth, your input would be really worthwhile, as would others here from around my hemisphere, as the scale of this is unknown...
It's been my experience that things average out, at least on some time scale - witness the warm winter and cold spring - same last year, with summer also mild...

But longer terms, the seasons don't seem "as loud" lately.