efaardvark

Today I am pretending it is Saturday since I have to work on Sunday. (Unless Europa Clipper slips again, in which case I guess I'll have to put today down as a vacation day on my timecard.) Got my coffee and some toast, some laundry going, and I think I'm going to log in to do a bit of minecrafting later. I want to play around a bit more with the crafter.

Experimented a bit with crafters and made a simple logs-to-sticks contraption. Also replaced a few lanterns and torches with copper bulbs in my keep, just to see how they look with shaders. BTW, speaking of shaders, the popular "Complementary" shader now works with DH. Not exactly sure when that happened but I know it did not render DH's distant blocks in 5.0.1 and now in 5.3 it does.

Welcome back!

Finally got my minecraft mods all working together, a situation not likely to last long since I'm keeping up with the nightly builds of Distant Horizons but at least for now I have iris/shaders, DH, my favorite textures, and a couple other things cooperating on my system. Last time my shaders worked with DH was before the whole church/smithy/library buildout so I spent a couple hours wandering around just looking at things and redoing some of the lights..

Welcome!

Creaking mobs and pale gardens in the new snapshot.

Seeing preliminary coverage of the X870 chipset motherboards and trying to decide if they're worth it. Specs-wise they're not that much different than the X670 boards. OTOH the making of USB 4.0 standard hints at better margins on the electronics and - maybe - an overall better quality of build. In the non-chipset features category I'm also liking asrock's splitting off of the RGB crap to save on cost. Comparing the ASRock X870E Taichi LITE to the almost identical non-lite version keeps all the stuff I care about and doesn't force me to pay for unnecessary bling. At $400 price is still an issue of course, but I appreciate the effort. The non-lite version is maybe about $50 more, for no performance benefit whatsoever. I may in fact make this MB the new default for my future AM5 build as well since even at $400 its cheaper than the X670E Taichi Carrara that I've had there as a placeholder to date. But still, prices..

Quite likely. But I'm not quite giving up yet. I'm in the process of trying to find out if there's someplace in county where I can send the bill if I have it done.

Makeine is on my to-watch list as well but I'll probably skip Alya due to lack of time. (I actually could probably make the time but I've had a bit of anime-blahs lately so I've shifted more towards games and reading in my free time.)

There's a utility easement running along the back of my property and it has become overgrown with shrubs and brush. It is to the point that it is coming through & over the fence onto my property and creating a maintenance issue and fire danger for me. Rant on: So I'm spending today getting a couple quotes to have the trees trimmed and the brush cleared and hauled away at my expense, with an appointment for another quote on Monday.

Trying out Giji Harem. Based purely on the title I was so ready to not like this one and was primed to drop it at the slightest provocation. But it's actually not bad so far and I'll likely finish it after all. The OP, "アドリブ", or "Ad-lib" is apropos to the overall theme of the anime, which is about a girl trying to be all things to her crush while hoping/fearing that he'll recognize and reciprocate. Goofy and shallow, but nevertheless managing to be entertaining.

I've got a sister-in-law who's in Grovetown Georgia, just to the west of Augusta. She reports trees down, water everywhere, and widespread power outages there too. I also have a friend who's in Savannah. Sounds like that part of the country is a very not-fun place to be right now. I hear there's another couple of hurricanes coming up behind Helene too. Stay safe!

Welcome!

Got a handful of space-related pins today. Included were items for Psyche, Ingenuity, the Cold Atom Lab, Odyssey, and Neowise missions. Psyche is the one currently en-route to the metal asteroid of the same name. It is carrying a laser-based communications experiment and was launched about a year ago towards a rendezvous with 16 Psyche in 2029 after a flyby of Mars for a gravity-assist. Ingenuity is of course the helicopter / drone that has been the aerial companion for the Perseverance Mars Rover for the past several years. It recently damaged a rotor on landing so its flying days are over but it's intact and its electronics functional so it'll be sending meteorological data and images from its final landing site until its solar panels dust over and it goes the way of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. The Cold Atom Lab is an experiment that was carried on board the ISS for a while to study BECs or Bose-Einstein Condensates, an odd state of matter that forms when certain type of atoms get extremely cold and merge their quantum states together. Mars Odyssey is one of the oldest Mars orbiters still functioning. It is one of the key relay satellites for the mars rovers on the surface and the pin is commemorating its 100,000th orbit of Mars. Neowise is an end-of-life mission that was designed to identify and categorize NEO asteroids and comets. NEO stands for Near Earth Orbit and NEOWISE identified over 150,000 of them during its service life. NEO objects are of interest because they are the easiest to get to for scientific study and they're the most likely to be the ones to be able to cause harm by impacting the Earth.

I made a secret enchantment room in the library. Can you see it? The chiseled bookshelf didn't work the way I expected. It always outputs a redstone signal equal in strength to the position of the last slot that a book was taken out of or put into. I decided to just have an observer watching the bookshelf and pulsing a copper bulb. This both toggles the door open / closed and turns the light in the room on / off if you do anything with any of the books in the "secret" bookshelf.

My SIL just completed another build. This one is going to be the smithy. We'll probably put 2 each of armorer, toolsmith, and weaponsmith villagers in there. Maybe a couple more depending on how their trades work out when we level them up. Here's the youtube / tutorial version that she's working from. The pic above is the finished(?) result as it looks on our server. In case you're wondering this is a new survival game and we're building a "spawn city" near where the players start out. Instead of the usual "break a tree" scenario new players can immediately find shelter (yes, there is even an inn) and spend some time leveling up and gearing up before heading out into the rest of the world. We wanted a bunch of villagers to trade with but we didn't like most of the "trading hall" type buildings where the villagers are basically immobilized and trapped next to their profession blocks so we're taking larger buildings from plans we've found online and letting the villagers wander around inside. The buildings are large enough to have multiple merchants housed in each building, along with their profession blocks and even dwelling areas with beds. (Technically the beds are unnecessary but we preferred to do it that way for the aesthetic value.) So far we have a church, a library, and now the smithy.

Welcome!

I made a hole-digger. Shoutout to Simon, wherever he delves.

Mostly done with building a library. Still needs some interior work, including a secret room with an enchantment table, but the exterior part is done. We're planning to staff it with about half a dozen librarians and maybe a cartographer or two as well but we won't start on that part until we get the interior work completed.

Today I explored the limits of chatgpt.

A short stack of pancakes. Short but wide.

Foggy and cooler this morning. Hopefully that helps the fire situation. edit: for anyone in the LA area the alertla.org site has a map of the fire(s) and the regions affected by evacuation orders.

Hopefully not. Not any time soon at least. This weekend there was just the one fire, the "line" fire, and it was over 50 miles away. Thanks to the heat and dryness there are now -3- fires going, and one of the new ones is only about 25 miles away. For my area the danger is that the fire can burn basically unchecked in the nearby national forest areas. That area is steep terrain and plenty of trees and brush, which thanks to the recent weather is very dry and makes excellent fuel for the wildfires. It's hard to get anything in there in the way of people or equipment to fight the fire directly too. For the most part that area has no roads or water to speak of. The only thing they can really do is try to direct the fire with air drops of retardant and water. If they can get fire crews into a strategic position to cut gaps in the brush ahead of the fire that's another way to deprive the fire of fuel. If they can manage to direct it downhill or into an already-burned area where there is no fuel then the fire will sometimes go out on its own. Again though, given the terrain that's a hard, dangerous job, especially in extremely hot, dry weather like we've had recently The main thing to watch out for is if the wind picks up. If the wind happens to start blowing the fire in your direction then things can escalate quickly. So far no wind in the forecast though. <knock on wood> Still, they're telling everyone who lives in or near the national forest are to be prepared to go on a moment's notice if things start to get out of hand. Definitely something I'm monitoring closely, but so far the area that I'm in is in no immediate danger and no evacuations have been ordered yet.

Not nearly so hot today as it has been. It was actually quite pleasant at lunch today as long as you stayed out of the direct sun. We’re still on fire however..