Leaderboard

This was a few weeks ago, but just got pictures after installation today. It's a floating bench that a customer asked me to build to match their dining table. It's 8/4" Rift Oak.

Cinnamon roll. One of a set. Made from some enriched oatmeal and whole wheat dough.

this is a put together chassis of a specific size. where he bought the chassis i do not know, but it completely comes apart, all 4 sides, the round corner pieces etc. Then he had the front,back and top all machined. all panels are .2 inch thick. And the front wood piece is esentially a stick on made of unknown wood. absolutely every single thing about this is fucked to the max. broke the anti-spin pin off the pot and did not even bother to drill a single hole to prevent the pot from spinning. Some of the work was definitely done by an nc mill, and a really shitty one at that. on the mill i used, everything was accurate to .00001 inch, and it really was at least this accurate. this thing is barely accurate to .008 inch. nothing on either inch or metric boundaries. and the holes for the power supply board were drilled by hand, and blind tapped, 2 of the 4 holes went all the way thru the panel. But the worst is the way under-rated power transformers which were potted with definitely the wrong stuff. And wiring all the filaments together. And the stax jack it turns out is also massively fucked. And force held in with rubber o-rings. Gold plated hex screws with the gold coming off. And the tube sockets were really low quality garbage, as bad as the russian crap that mikhail used. The 3 boards from jlcpcb were a total of $65 with shipping. and shipping was half the price. The hand dremel tooled boards were so utterly fucked, no reason for any of this. Somebody really high on really bad drugs did this. Not even mikhail or mike bean (hennyo) could do something so utterly and completely fucked. Wow, i gave hennyo a compliment, yikes. The 300v tube supply is actually pretty clever and kind of unique, but also utterly fucked because he had the pass tube cathode wired to ground when it had to be connected to 300v. And the bias supply with a 100k series resistor. Guaranteed to kill your headphones. Its not my money going into this, so i will continue till its either completely finished and working or the tube diode power supply cannot be made to work. Looks like the repair price will be about $1500 in parts, plus the original purchase price of about $5k. All the improvements to the amp board are in the new board. There are places for solid state diodes on the power supply just in case. There is no reason for any of this. So far i have about 30 hours of labor in this. The mikhail es1 ended up about 50 hours of labor. Yes i'm fucking nuts. all you have to do is take my board files, have them made, stuff with parts, slap into chassis. how fucking hard can it be.

Work is affording me the opportunity to try this: Lot's to both like and maybe not like about it but given that it isn't my financial risk I figured why not? It had to be a Win-based machine and for mobile presentations and marking up submittals/schedules/etc. it could be a game changer.

Remember to follow all weapons health and safety instructions.

Was talking to my Mom on the phone, when something flew in the front door. I caught it out of my peripheral vision. Assumed it was a big moth, so I kept talking to my Mom. Once I hung up, I went into the bedroom to investigate. Whatever it was, Suzy had it trapped under a nightstand. I flushed it out, to find it was a big ol' scrubjay. Took a little work, but got the poor bird back outside relatively unscathed.

After seeing the new hotness it is pretty wild going 20+ years back in time to the older gen destroyers.

Where's the nipple mouse? Indeed.

My fancy coffee spoons arrived.

boards actually fit. well shit.

I certainly don't use dark roast for espresso. Concentrated burnt flavor isn't my jam.

Fleet week in SF with Grahame. USS Michael Monseur first up.

For those of you playing the home game, my 2015 Macbook Pro went tits up a few months ago. Since then I have been wrestling with the idea of a replacement. Apple's current lineup is ...old and kind of crap. Their recent "California Streaming" event was a massive disappointment (I will not be doing my radio show from a smart phone, KTHX.) More broadly, I'm kinda done with Apple's anti-repair bullshit. I'm not done with MacOS, but I think for the next period of time I'm going to be sticking with stationary Apple products (I still have an iPhone, which I dislike but view as an inescapable evil like taxes and leaf blowers.) I have never owned a PC laptop. I don't particularly like Windows. I mean, it's fine for video games and a few specific audio apps (Exact Audio Copy, Foobar 2000) but as a primary OS? shudder With all of this said, I'm seriously considering making my next laptop a Framework. There have been a bunch of positive reviews of them from prominent tech toobers. A certain Bob-the-Tomato-sounding Canadian who is prone to making heaps of cash and dropping things liked Framework so much he invested in the company. I don't have the operating capital of that high pitched hyperactive YouTube content machine, but as I said I do have a strong need for a new laptop. Linus squeaks out some good points in this video and the other one he made. iFixit did a far less, ahem, infotainment focused review, but they also really liked it: So far I have one beef with Framework's design and it's not a small one. The keyboard: What. The. Fuck. Are. Those. Arrow. Keys. It's 2021, not 1985. This is a laptop, not a shitty wireless keyboard meant to be used with smart TVs. That arrow key arrangement is utterly unacceptable. I'm so bothered by it I'm almost not willing to make a purchase. Keyboards are an important matter for me. I learned to type on an IBM Model M in the 1980s and the buckling spring permanently affected the way I interact with and view keyboards. Also, I have freakishly large hands (Canon pro DSLR bodies feel too small for me) and tend type with entirely too much force. I have broken ...3 laptop keyboards, including my current one. Again, Apples "fuck you" attitude about repairs is sufficiently annoying that a model with a replaceable keyboard (even with horrid arrow keys) is basically a necessity to me at this point. Framework's prices aren't too bad either, at least for someone who has been in the Tim Apple ecosystem for the last dozen+ years. I have a few major fires to put out in the next week including property tax (see above), car insurance (ibid) and two Eat Static album re-issues (a man has to have priorities.) When the dust from the above as settled and assuming our short-bus-on-bath-salts elected officials manage to raise the debt ceiling and not crater the world economy, I'm probably going to buy one.

Voice = Spongebob Narrator "Two Months Later" I got an idea how to resurrect my radio show even without a laptop. Stay tuned.

Sofa king awesome!

I wish I had Bordeauxs that old. Happy birthday Wayne!

^ I’m interested in that Surface as well. Let me know what you think after you’ve had a chance to play with it.

Thanks, guys. Just seeing this now. Been AWOL for a while, but doing great. Birthday was kind of a blur, driving from Illinois to Florida to get my pickup back into storage and then to return to Cayman. Back now, getting ready for jolly season. 59 and thankful for every one of them so far. At some point I'll need to cave in and admit I've become an old fuck.

by their lineup I'm assuming you mean their intel lineup. Because the m1 laptops are brilliant.

Hario Electro solo and adapter for the Option-O also arrived. Seems to work great, if slightly janky (some RTV sealant in the adapter should fix said jankiness).

Should we set up a holiday bean exchange? Cincinnati has a couple really good roasters and I would be happy to share. Now that I think about it, I’ll likely be in North Carolina in December, and I found a very good roaster in Greensboro too, so I could share from two areas.

I almost exclusively drink light roast.

So more than 30 minutes to disassemble the front panel, 10 minutes to get it aligned into my emco fb5, and 10 seconds to put in a fucking hole that should have been there from the start. Notice the fucked up stax jack and the shitty finishing on the wood.