09:36 – We got quite a bit done downstairs yesterday, moving inventory from boxes in the finished area onto shelves in the basement and getting counts. Until now, we’d been tossing boxes and packing material into the recycling bin. As of yesterday, we started breaking boxes down into flats and storing the packing material in yard waste bags for our eventual move up to the mountains. (Incidentally, bubblewrap is good to have on hand for winter storm emergencies. A couple layers duct-taped over a window, inside and out, is surprisingly good insulation and doesn’t cut down much on the light. It’s very useful if you need a “warm room” during a winter storm that knocks out power.)
Barbara is cleaning house this morning and I’m finishing up the laundry. This afternoon we’ll be doing kit stuff.
Good morning. Site still sluggish, as seen from here. Today, I’m trying to clear enough space in my garage so that I can put my lathe back into service after moving house almost three years ago. Good luck with your eventual move – I couldn’t face another just yet (or hopefully ever). I have a number of “honey-do’s” that require using the lathe, so I might as well get it set up properly while I’m at it, which means I also need to install a couple of electrical circuits from the distribution board, one with sockets for the lathe and related powertools (maybe I’ll also add a 32A circuit for a welder) and another for high-brightness workshop lighting.
@denis,
you probably know this already, so think of it as a gentle reminder. Be sure you use an incandescent light over your lathe. Fluorescent and most LEDs strobe rapidly, instead of constantly being on. At certain spindle speeds this can result in the work appearing to be NOT spinning. People have been known to injure themselves reaching into the spinning work thinking it was stopped.
I’ve got my workshop so full of junk that I can’t use any of it. My tablesaw is doing a fine job of holding up boxes. My lathes (metal and wood) have stuff piled on them. My counters and work surfaces are piled up too. It took years of neglect to get to this stage and it is taking much longer than expected (and a lot more mental effort) to dig out from under.
Good luck to you setting up. That is an exciting stage, and I envy you!
nick
Encouraging; I’m gonna be setting up a really basic workshop upstairs in the attic, with just a drill press and router, probably a Dremel kit and assorted firearms-related tools.
Just dropped Mrs. OFD at the airport; she’ll be arriving in Greensboro, NC this afternoon.
I’m on straight-out house to-do list this week, plus breaks for online courses and other assorted Fed paperwork.
“Be sure you use an incandescent light over your lathe…”
Thanks, nick. I have a couple of 300W halogen work-floodlights which I intend to use for exactly this reason. I figure that since the rest of the house has LED lighting, and the rest of the garage is fluorescents, I can justify the consumption of the halogens for the few hours a week (or month) I might spend with the lathe actually running.
Now, time to make myself a sandwich, and get back to setting up the lathe…!
A little video to get the flashlight wars started again.
Here’s how to make a phenomenally bright 1000w eqiv. LED flashlight!
It’s designed to be operated with just one hand, with easy control of brightness, and can be powered by either batteries or an AC adapter. Can be built for around £25 if you get the CPU cooler for cheap.
Oh jeez, thanks a lot, MrAtoz!
And I can just imagine toting one of those buggers around at night when someone is hunting your ass down; why not paint a giant bulls-eye on yer ass? ‘swhy I’m not a big fan of lights on guns, except inside buildings and then only in strobe mode.
OK, y’all, have at it again; I want solid engineering data here to back up your hocus-pocus claims and the financial spreadsheets posted accordingly. Let’s make it U.S. cents per lumen, shall we? Or dollars per level of blindness in the subject you’re pointing it at.
Well my RBT recommended cheapo arrived from China this week, and I promised to give it a fair shake.
It is very lightweight, and feels flimsy. It’s an aluminum tube, so it can’t be ACTUALLY flimsy, but it feels that way. It has a lot of sharp edges. The push button is squishy silicone feel, and works ok. The action if very crisp and firm. Mine cycles Hi-off-lo-off-blink-off. Quick soft pushes cycle directly thru the lit modes. The blink rate is slow. There are some sort of electronics in there as it uses PWM to dim for low power.
It puts out a surprising amount of light. Unfortunately the light is very blue. You won’t want this for your first aid kit. Looking at the light with a spectrometer, it is very short in red. I didn’t put it on my colorimeter and brightness meter yet (and prob won’t bother) but my suspicion is that the blue color make you perceive it as brighter than it actually is.
That said, it’s a nice flashlight for a couple of bucks. I think the best use is on low, zoomed out big, sitting on a table pointed up as general lighting during the blackout. Or, walking the dog during normal times. I can not imagine using this as a weapon mounted light. The inability to switch it on or off without using the button in the tailcap is the deal killer. A weapon mounted light is NOT for looking around. It is for identifying your target. Far too many people have found this out to their dismay and the unfortunate death of innocents.
I’m a bit surprised by this light. It is better and nicer than I expected. However, if I found it in the $2 bin at Harbor Freight, I’d still probably put it down without buying it, even though it is generally worlds better than those flashlights. I won’t be buying more of them. I like a light with a broader spectrum white, and I like the pen light form factor for EDC. For bedside, vehicles, etc, the medium sized lights that go onsale at Costco for $4-5/light in a 3 pack, including batteries, are a better deal and I think a better fit in the hand.
If you don’t already have a flashlight stashed in every BOB, vehicle, bedside table drawer, etc, a dozen of these will fill that niche. But I think they are firmly in the ‘backup’ realm and not a primary light. They are far far better than nothing, but they don’t compare well to lights from the major tac light brands, and there are inexpensive options that are much better too.
So much for my 2c….
nick
Huh. You got a different light than I’ve been talking about. Mine have none of the bad points you mention. They also have a simple on-off switch and no blink mode. I checked one for color against a Fenix and a Streamlight, and I couldn’t tell any difference by eyeball (and my eyes are pretty sensitive to minor color differences in light, going back to the days when I did a lot of color printing with a dichroic color head on an enlarger). If anything, the Ultrafire Cree was maybe just a tiny bit warmer than the others, but that was probably my imagination.
That’s weird, my comment didn’t post that time either.
something up with comments?
nick
Well, the no comment comment posted, but my other didn’t. I wonder if the link I included is a spammer and it’s getting gobbled by askismet?
Here it is w/out the link:
“You got a different light than I’ve been talking about”
That is one of the most common complaints in the reviews for the link you posted. It seems that you never know what you will actually get from those guys.
I do think it fills a niche. It is WAY better than similarly sized and priced lights that have 3 visible LEDs in the lamp holder, even in the version I received.
The color difference is pronounced even by eye. Every other LED light I have (with the exception of some early AAAA powered streamlight penlights) has a much more full spectrum, and whiter light. The spectrometer makes it possible to quantify the difference.
I have this one sitting in my closet from an earlier project. It works quite well. [excised link] I didn’t buy it from the guy at the link. I may have even ended up buying it after RBT recommended it, since it has astronomy applications. I don’t remember how I found it.
I’ve got an expensive colorimeter I use professionally but I need to get it out and hook it up to the laptop to use it. Other demands on my time today….
nick
That worked.
Try searching for this “project star spectrometer” if you want to see the el cheapo spectrometer. It’s the blue mostly triangular thing.
nick
The current temperature here in the Land of Sugar is 84 F. The pool is 83 F and the hot tub was 102 F last night.
And I can just imagine toting one of those buggers around at night when someone is hunting your ass down
Think of it as a “light” cannon. Add a remote and you could place it to blind Dr. Bob when you go to steal his food. lol
I’m thinking of giving a trial build.
You got a different light than I’ve been talking about.
I ordered one from the link Bob has posted in the past but haven’t received it yet. What I saw on Amazon was that even though I selected the “1 Mode” option from the item main page what got added to my cart was a “3 Mode” light. Tried doing the same from several different suppliers and always wound up with a 3 Mode light in my cart. Will be interesting to see what arrives.
That DIY light canon was awesome. See the comments from the EE about changes to the controls to make it more robust, even a bit brighter, and less likely to burn down your house.
The guy has a great voice, and easy to follow delivery.
nick
“Add a remote and you could place it to blind Dr. Bob when you go to steal his food. lol”
I’m not that crazy. Between all his chemical concoctions, armaments, and that mutt of theirs, I’d be a fool to even case the house.
Don’t forgot the snakes.
Oh yeah, forgot; the snakes alone would keep me away from there. Seen enough of them buggers during my sentences in TX and SEA. From copperheads, coral snakes, rattlers, on through cobras, kraits, and big fat yellow rat snakes hanging down from the trees above our heads. Cobras in the friggin’ bomb dump bunkers. Monsoon sends them all uphill to drier ground, with the irrigation ditches, etc., overflowing.
http://smg.photobucket.com/user/irarunyan/media/Wildlife/YellowRatSnake_9675.jpg.html
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0uyXnoguFR4/UBUblwYvOdI/AAAAAAAACak/U1cguQDq9eg/s1600/King-Cobra-Wallpapers.jpg
Only venomous snakes up here are down in the state capital, the Snake House.
@Lynn, land o sugar is about to get clobbered. Looks like it will pass south of me.
NWS has issued a tornado watch until 10 tonight.
Stay safe.
nick
@Ray from yesterday
You said: Just purchased a Surface Pro 3, 256 gig SSD and 8 gig memory.
I have been looking at these for my wife. My problem is trying to know if the i3 has enough grunt or if the i5 is a must. I will not splash-out on an i7 for this. Given what you are doing in it and your comments on responsiveness knowing what you bought might give me some indication on what is needed. What core did you get?
You said: Everyone that is running W7, W8 and W8.1 is supposed to be able to upgrade at no charge. I do wonder how that is going to work. A complete reinstall is not going to happen on my work machines. Hopefully MS works out the upgrade path and the software won’t have to be reinstalled.
The Windows Update this week had an optional item that is for Win10 upgrade.
MS has had upgrade paths for a very long time. The last one I did was from dreaded Vista to Win7 and that worked just fine. There were major changes in drivers but by the time I did the upgrade all those were under control. I am sure there will be an upgrade. I am counting on it so I can standardise on 10. I just hope I can upgrade all 32 and 64bit to 64 bit at the same time.
What core did you get?
I got the I5. The I3 only comes configured with 4 gig of memory and a 128 gig SSD. That was going to be too small for my needs, in particular the memory with Photoshop requirements. The I7 was $250 more and actually runs slightly slower. You do gain more cache in the I7 but with an SSD that becomes less important than with spinning platters. There are some other differences in hyperthreading. But the overwhelming majority of my needs involve the user interface being the slow factor.
MS has had upgrade paths for a very long time
Indeed, and some did not work so well. Especially true when skipping an OS level. Most of my machines with the exception of the Surface are running W7 skipping W8 entirely. There is a lot riding on this upgrade for Microsoft so I suspect they are putting a lot of effort into making it work properly.
I can upgrade all 32 and 64bit to 64 bit at the same time.
I doubt you can go from a 32 bit environment to a 64 bit environment. You cannot currently but I don’t know about W10. There are a lot of people still running a 32 bit version of W7 with systems only having 4 gig of memory. A 32 bit OS was not really required. With MS wanting to standardize, reduce the number of versions to support, plus make it so that apps developed for the phone will work on the desktop, perhaps the conversion will be to a 64 bit OS. I just don’t know.
I have been looking at these for my wife.
I had been looking for awhile myself. The Surface was on sale for $150 off and that seemed like a good time to commit. The price also included a case. I had been considering the new MacBook Pro and waited until those arrived. They may have been part of the reason for the MS sale on the Surface.
I went to Best Buy (hey it was close and I knew what I wanted) and tried the MacBook Pro and the Surface. The Surface was slightly heavier and was certainly thicker. The Surface worked with touch, the MacBook did not. The MacBook keyboard is always attached and cannot be taken off and that may be an issue on airplanes. The MacBook was heavier. I would have needed to reacquired a license for Lightroom, I have a Mac Serial for Photoshop. Had I needed to acquire new licenses I would go with the Creative Cloud which is $120 a year, about the cost of a Lightroom license.
Add in that I have copies of Word, some photo management applications and other utilities it just made sense to go with the Surface. I am not a MS fan boy, I just need a tool. The Surface has gotten good reviews with the primary complaint of not including the keyboard.
One additional thing I liked was the Surface power supply brick has a USB port that can be used to charge any device that uses USB charging such as your phone. The MacBook had none, unless you paid $80 for the adapter to convert from the new USB format to the older format.
So far I am pleased with my purchase. I have messed with my photo apps and they all run well. I did acquire a Bluetooth rodent that is very small. I can now use the stylus or the mouse. The keyboard is not the greatest but in my opinion keyboards on smaller laptops, including the MacBook, and not the easiest to use.
I did go to the Microsoft website and get the recovery file in case I have to go back to factory condition. There is a recovery partition on the Surface that can be used if the SSD is working properly. I need to make a recovery USB file but that requires a 16 gig thumb drive and I do not have any of those available.
“I am not a MS fan boy, I just need a tool.”
Indeed. Whatever tool works for us to do what we need it to do.
Mrs. OFD has a Windows 7 notebook and we have a Windows 8.1 desktop, but that is mainly because she simply must have Office, though I suspect her and a lot of others really just got used to their spreadsheet or PP slide working via the few things they needed to learn and don’t wanna mess with anything new. If not for that, I’d dump all the Windows stuff here in a haht-beet.
Now hanging on four different IBM gigs, one University of VT gig, and a fifth gig doing hands-on Cisco networking stuff, probably also at IBM. No one gets back to me, no one calls, no one emails. Par for the course. So continuing on the web dev and firearms objectives.
I suspect her and a lot of others really just got used to their spreadsheet or PP slide working via the few things they needed to learn and don’t wanna mess with anything new
As evidenced by the flack that was received when MS changed from the menu bar to the ribbon. The ribbon is actually better and makes more sense. Anytime someone sends a Word, Excel or Powerpoint file you know it is going to open with MS Office. Hard to argue with that.
I’d dump all the Windows stuff here in a haht-beet.
I said I would never own an Apple product because of my despise of OS/X. I still don’t like OS/X but a lot of that has to do with my awkwardness in dealing with the OS. I had a learning curve with IOS and now I do OK. Again, the iPad and iPhone are just a tool, same as the Surface.
The Surface is going to be able to process my pictures as easily as a MacBook and at a much cheaper price point. My experimenting with some pictures is working just fine, speed is excellent, trying to get used to the pen by using the Surface as a tablet, something the MacBook did not offer. Certainly easier than a trackpad but not as easy as using a mouse.
I think W10 is going to be a good OS, probably one of the best that MS has produced for a desktop/tablet OS. I also think that without Linux and OS/X that MS would not be producing such an OS. Competition, quality competition at that, is driving MS to produce a better product.
If I am wrong the ever optimistic OFD will gleefully remind me.
“The ribbon is actually better and makes more sense.”
Agreed. I never had any problem with the ribbon but to hear people howl you’d think they made them all go back to 300-baud dial-up modems or turn in their freaking cell phones. They howled in state gummint and law offices when they were standardizing on Word instead of WordPerfect back in the day, too, when arguably the latter was the better product (its fanboyz and fangrrls touted the “Reveal Codes” most often).
“If I am wrong the ever optimistic OFD will gleefully remind me.”
Gleefully. Nah, I don’t even care what Microsoft does anymore; I’ve written them off, pretty much. Server 2012 is pretty good but I have no use for it here. We don’t really have a use for 10, either. I could sail along pretty good with just Linux but of course YMMV and you have other usage concerns.
A not-so-fun read here:
http://freedomoutpost.com/2015/04/marching-into-hell-a-blunt-message-to-the-young-people-of-america/#lVk3TMRx4Th0D2Gx.99
I grew up with WWI and WWII vets and served with some of the latter in CONUS and SEA.
For Dr. Bob and Mr. nick and anyone else, does look about right to y’all?
http://modernsurvivalonline.com/how-to-make-injectable-lidocaine-hcl/
“Each year with this obscene White House Correspondents Dinner the true collective face of the Establishment presstitute media is exposed for all the world to see. It is not the noble visage of intrepid crusaders for truth, but a sagging countenance, oily and obsequious by decades of lying and servility to their masters.”
https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/white-house-correspondents-dinner-tonight/
@Lynn, land o sugar is about to get clobbered. Looks like it will pass south of me.
Yup, we got another inch of rain while the wife and I were cruising the Walmart aisles. Just what we needed.
“Top scientists start to examine fiddled global warming figures”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11561629/Top-scientists-start-to-examine-fiddled-global-warming-figures.html
I love the manipulated weather station data over 60 years from no warming trend to a district trend upwards.
Figures lie and liars figure?
I think that if I bought a car from one of these so called global warming scientists that I would check the odometer for rollback very carefully.
@ofd,
It seems pretty straight forward, and he was willing to try it on himself…
I can certainly see the need. If you couldn’t get some thru some other means, it might be worth stocking the materials in case of extremity. It didn’t look particularly expensive.
There are LOTS of things I wouldn’t try unless I had to, and this is probably one of them. I AM going to print it out though…..
nick
I hear y’all on the workshop front. I’ve been working on this seemingly endless project, finishing out a large basement room, with a couple of unexpected setbacks on the way. Meanwhile, all the stuff from that room got piled in my workshop, and once a pile starts to grow, it seemingly doesn’t stop.
At the rate I’m going, the project may be finished by Fall (optimistic) or Christmas (realistic). Then I can finally try to recover my workshop. I hope to have the intestinal fortitude to sort through all the stuff and throw half of it away, rather that just blindly moving it back. Time will tell…
About the lights: I know flourescents flicker, but I never thought it of LEDs, since they are driven off of DC. Just went and read up – and I see that many manufacturers cheat: instead of actually producing DC, they just half-rectify AC and drive the LEDs off of that. Giving either 100hz or 120 hz flicker, depending on where you live.
Seems like a dumb tradeoff, because it means you won’t be getting as much light out of the LED as you ought to. To produce the same amount of effective light, you need more, or more expensive LEDs. Is that really still cheaper than adding a proper power supply?
– – – – –
On a totally different topic, I am idly thinking about ordering a new PC for my main desktop. I went browsing the Dell site, which is where we usually order from. Two reasons: first, they are one of the few that don’t up their prices just because they are selling in Switzerland. (A common practice, but stupid; the shops then complain when people cross the borders to buy in Germany or France.) Anyhow, the other reason is customizability: you can pick and choose individual components to build the PC you want.
Well, anyway, you could. I’d been wondering what differences we’d see, now that Dell has been taken private. It looks like they are reducing the number of models available, and trying to push standardized configurations. I’d think that a mistake: there are lots of discount shops competing in that market. It was precisely the easy customizability that set Dell apart.
re: lidocaine
Last resort? Maybe, but I’d sure rather make friends with a dentist and/or a veterinarian.
This was already one of the things on my list as a last-resort item, along with several others like epinephrine and diphenhydramine HCL for anaphylaxis. But am I going to put stuff like this in the book? No way, other than perhaps as a casual mention.
The guy who wrote this doesn’t sound as though he has much clue about aseptic procedure. Hot water “sterilization” as he proposes doesn’t kill everything, and I’d hate to inject a never-get-over. Autoclaving would be much better for drugs that can stand that level of heat. Alternatively, cold filtration using a 0.02 micron or better absolute filter to remove all microorganisms.
“I hope to have the intestinal fortitude to sort through all the stuff and throw half of it away…”
You must be RUTHLESS, Mr. brad.
“It was precisely the easy customizability that set Dell apart.”
Why not roll yer own? Config it exactly based on what you need it to do. I just wish the major companies had been selling bare bones PCs all along, even down to the hard drives, so you could format them however you wanted and put whatever o.s. on there you liked.
Good info on the lidocaine; last resort, got it. Let’s hope enough doctors, dentists, veterinarians and nurses stick around to be of help.
“Why not roll yer own?”
I suppose I could – certainly I used to do a lot more stuff like that. But the time investment (which case, which power supply, which motherboard, which…) is pretty daunting when I’m already trying to simplify things.
You’re right about being ruthless – this house has a lot of storage and it’s all full. Granted we have a business in the same house, and that’s a lot of it, but still – we could fill containers with stuff we’d never miss. It’s just a not-fun task :-/
“…we could fill containers with stuff we’d never miss.”
I’ve found that’s key; we’ve lost stuff accidentally and barely realized it was missing. RUTHLESS purge and later you’ll have forgotten most of what you had and never or rarely used anymore.
“…the time investment (which case, which power supply, which motherboard…”
Agreed, it’s kind of a time sink; I’d get the most barebones machine I could find and then mod it to your needs; i.e, the case, mobo, power supply, CPU. Add your RAM and drives accordingly and any other peripherals. I’d max out the RAM and get at least two SSDs. Stuff like monitor, keyboard, mouse, whatever, is anyone’s preference, of course.
After trying all kinds of weird keyboards and wireless stuff, I’m back to cheap-o standard keyboard and mouse again. I like big-ass monitors, though. My workshop up in the attic will have a huge one.
There is just no substitute for a wired mouse and wired keyboard. Otherwise you are just chasing batteries and weird interference all the time. Of course, I have not played with a wireless mouse in years. Maybe a decade come to think of it. I’m old!
Brad, if you want, I will be happy to list the items that I use to build a PC nowadays. The only real advantage of building your own now is just that there is no crapware on it. Stuff like:
http://www.amazon.com/Antec-Sonata-III-500-Quiet/dp/B000QAVVAM/