efaardvark

Put up a semi-mobile orbital refinery in KSP.  I have a mining station on Minmus to mine the ore already and ideally the refinery would be in orbit around Minmus as well but the design was getting so heavy that I had to launch with most of the fuel tanks empty.  As a consequence it is still in a rather elliptical orbit around Kerbin.  The plan is to make an ore transport for ferrying ore from the surface of Minmus to the refinery as well, but I still need to build that.  When I launch the transport I'll probably launch a bunch of fuel with it, then dock it to the refinery, transfer the fuel, and send the refinery and the transport on to Minmus.  The miner already has a bunch of ore ready for shipping as soon as I can get the transport there to transport it so all I need in the way of fuel for the operation is just enough to get the transport to the refinery, get all those empty tanks on the refinery into a Minmus orbit, and then get the refinery down to the surface of Minmus and back with the ore.  Minmus is a tiny moon so it won't take much to get down and back, even coming up with a full cargo of ore.

Once I get the first load of ore back from the surface I'm home-free.  The refinery can make enough fuel (and oxidizer) from a load of ore to refuel the transport many times over.  At that point it just becomes a minor grind to ferry the ore from the surface as the miner mines it until the tanks on the refinery(/depot) are full.  Eventually of course I'll be using that fuel for future missions.  There's already a science outpost on Minmus as well, but it needs fuel to fly around gathering the science so the primary mission for the mining operations will be to supply fuel to the scientists, at least for the foreseeable future.

6 minutes ago, kamomesan said:

Same here. I had this happen to me the last two years I've been in NorCal, and I was hoping it wouldn't be as bad down in SoCal as well. Guess this is going to be something us California people are going to have to keep dealing with moving forward

There are options.  I'm currently* looking at upgrading and expanding a smallish (4kW w/10kWh storage) solar PV system that we installed about 20 years ago.    Amortized over 30 years like the power companies do the system cost us around $0.17 per kWh but it has already paid for itself at the insane rates SCE charges.  When we built our system the technology was just starting to be usable for normal residential service if you didn't mind doing all the engineering yourself and could convince the power companies to let you do the net-metering thing with a grid-interactive system.  Now prices have come way, way down and equipment is much more capable, with things like microinverters, Tesla PowerWalls, etc.  Much more mainstream too.  There's companies who will provide installation and service for PV systems the way other companies do for HVAC systems.  For the same $0.17/kWh I could build a system at least 3x as capable today as the one we built back then too.  At SCE's $0.42/kWh top-tier rate I don't need SCE anymore.  SCE is pricing themselves out of the market.

*no pun intended.

Still digesting from yesterday so I'm kickin' back and listening to this in the background as I drink my coffee and work on email.  Might have to play a bit of KSP later.   

Apple crisp cookies and chocolate-raspberry coffee for breakfast.   And so the Day of Eating..,  er, I mean Thanksgiving starts..

Getting a bit of windy going here.  Just got a text from the power company, Southern California Edison, that they might have to shut down the power in our area.  

(Ever since the court case holding PG&E liable for damages stemming from unmaintained electrical equipment the power companies have been “preemptively” shutting off power whenever there’s a wind/fire danger.  Guess that’s cheaper than actually maintaining their equipment.  Didn’t used to be that way but the state’s PUC is worthless when it comes to actually requiring the utilities to do anything they don’t want to do.)

On 11/24/2020 at 12:23 PM, Zila said:

I used to have an old Nook and disliked it for eye-strain. Not sure if it was broken or that's how they were made back then but the brightness was a little intense on the lowest setting.

I can't read "books" on an LCD display, at least not for more than half an hour or so.  Something about the backlighting starts to take it's toll after a while.  Any longer than that and I tend to get a headache from the eyestrain.  The e-ink displays (like in the non-Fire Kindles such as the paperwhite) I don't seem to have a problem with.  I've pulled all-nighters reading stuff on my Boox with no problem.  Well, nothing besides the sleep deprivation anyway.

I'm really interested in the full review of the Poke.  I like the 10-inch size of my Boox Note though.  If they can get me the color display of the Poke at the size and with the built-in wacom (and battery life) of my 10-inch Note Pro then I will simply have to get one. 

Ooooo.. KIS/KAS*is one of my favorite KSP mods, and now it looks like the actual game devs are putting the same functionality in stock!  In KIS/KAS you can even build new ships in space, as well as repair/replace things like antennas and solar panels.  As long as the parts all fit in your cargo bay you're good.  Not that I've personally ever carelessly broken those during an EVA mind you, but I hear stories... (Ok, maybe just a couple... dozen... times...)

Now if I could just find the time to play. 

https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/198324-ksp-loading-kerbal-engineers-are-stepping-up-their-game/
 

*Kerbal Inventory System/Kerbal Attachment System

Looking for a new webcam.  My old one was a Logitech 270C but a friend needed a new one because his was a POS so I let him have mine.  (Not exactly being altruistic.. his audio in Discord sessions sucked and his video was always black-on-dark.  I got tired of dealing with it.   Besides, I'm stuck working at work for the next couple weeks so I won't need it for webex etc. while working from home and I've been thinking of getting a new one anyway.)

I'm not looking for anything especially fancy.  Nothing wrong with the old one really but it was only 3 megapixel and didn't have a way to adjust the pointing horizontally when attached to the top of my monitor like I like to do.  The mic was mono too, which left the audio a bit flat.  It did have good audio processing to pick up the voice and not the background though.. I'd like to keep that.  It was also pretty good at auto-adjusting the color and light levels, though not so great in dim light.  I'm on linux so nothing that requires Windows drivers or configuration software.  (I wouldn't use such even on Windows.  Webcams should be like microphones.. plug them in and they work.  If it is more complicated than that then you're doing it wrong.)  Finally of course not too expensive either.  I think I spent like $30 on the 270 a couple years ago.  Nothing in the $200+ range.  (Well, unless it can actually attend my tele-meetings for me.  )  Keep it real.

I'd be ok with just buying the same old 270 (or step up to something like the C525) as a replacement but that was from a couple years ago and since everyone is working from home these days I thought I'd throw this out there and ask what everyone else is currently using.  Anyone using something that they either love or hate, webcam-wise?  Kind of leaning towards a Anivia Full HD Webcam 1080p at this point but I'm still in the talking-to-myself-about-it stage.

Looks like the cabling situation is more precarious than realized, meaning it is no longer considered safe to repair the antenna as was first hoped.   

Trying to hold out until the color e-ink displays get deployed but I'm already thinking about upgrading from my old Boox to some newer hardware....

2 hours ago, leinwandname said:

Browsing forums on the phone is often kind of a pain (even though there are apps for this) and I think many people browse the net on their phone for a significant amount of time. I think if forums in general want to gain in popularity again they'd somehow need to reinvent themselves to cater to a more "fast-consuming" audience, which would piss off the older members and they'd probably lose many of the veterans.

I think it is more about having the time.  I don’t have time to spend just hanging out doing real-time chat in discord.  I can’t spend a lot of time in forums either, but I can check a forum from my phone whenever I have a couple minutes.  I can type pretty fast too so what I often do in forums is make a pass with my phone to find anything interesting, then if I want to reply I come back later after I’ve had a chance to think about my reply for a while.  I can read just fine on my phone but I don’t like typing on those tiny on-screen keys so often I’ll wait until I get to my desktop system to bang out the reply, which I can do in just a couple minutes since by then I know what I want to type.

That kind of thing doesn’t really work in discord, which works better for socializing/chat but tends to be less focused, topic-wise.  I only go to discord when I have a lot of time to kill, which lately is basically never.

Flawless day-one game support for the new AMD 6800 GFX card(s) .. on linux?  Yes.  Now even gamers can forget the Windows tax.  Buy your own CPU/MB/RAM hardware, slot in your RX6800 (or 6800XT if you have the cash to burn), install the mainline Ubuntu 20.04 with its open-source "amdgpu" driver, install steam, and game on. 

I have to admit this is tempting.  Good linux support is one reason that I've stuck with my "old" RX480 card so long.  Not that there haven't been well-supported cards since the '480, but get past that and we have to talk price/performance. 

And speaking of that $600 price, I'll definitely be wanting to see that come down a bit.  I can wait.  (In fact, I'd have to... like the video mentions nobody can actually buy these cards now anyway due to low inventory.  I could not find any in stock at three places I looked, including Amazon and Newegg.)  I think I'll check again when the after-holiday inventory-clearance sales hit.

Been working my google-fu for several days (not solid, but off & on) trying to find a way to get Folding@home to use my GPU /and/ my CPU, instead of just my CPU. 

My GFX card is an "old" Radeon RX480.  I'm running the open-source "amdgpu" driver for this card because it works well for general gaming/desktop uses.   There is also a proprietary driver from AMD for this card but the driver doesn't work as well for 3d games or general desktop uses.  AMD (like nvidia) has also been removing support for older cards from their driver.  No doubt to "encourage" people to buy their newer, much more expensive cards.  My card is in the "barely supported" category in the AMD driver and could get dropped at any time so .. not really a viable "upgrade" option at this point. 

Distributed-computing projects like F@H also use a software library like OpenCL.  OpenCL works with the gfx card driver to access the GPU hardware for compute-processes like a regular gfx driver does for games and provides such applications a framework for submitting computations and getting results back instead of having something rendered to a screen buffer somewhere.  Projects like F@H generally require at least OpenCL v2.x.

The AMD-proprietary driver actually comes with AMD's own implementation of the OpenCL 2.1 spec so that would be ok if I didn't mind the closed-source option and the looming end-of-life decree from AMD for my card.   

Fortunately the amdgpu driver I'm using also supports/works with OpenCL.  Theoretically that just makes it a matter of finding and installing the right OpenCL drivers/libraries.  Ubuntu does ship with the mesa-OpenCL package, but there's a known bug in that library's implementation of the sortShortList code for my card that hits distributed-computing projects like F@H, causing them to pseudo-randomly break when confronted with certain work-units.  That'll probably be fixed soon (may have already been fixed "upstream"), but then Ubuntu will have to get around to updating their mesa-OpenCL package in the distro's repository.  There's a couple other options out there for intel- or nvidia-based GPUs that don't help me with my card. 

Best option is probably something like ROCm (Radeon Open Compute).  ROCm implements the OpenCL 2.x spec and supports my gfx card, but it isn't in the Ubuntu package repository and installing it looks to be a bit of a pain.  (I'd have to add the ROCm repository, then perform a series of package download/install/reboot cycles to get everything installed.  That or download the source and compile and install the whole thing myself.)

So the TL;DR version is I think I'll stick with just using my CPU for now.  Maybe I'll revisit the topic when/if I get a new GPU that's better-supported wrt OpenCL, or if a new version of the mesa-opencl code comes to the Ubuntu repositories.

Hey all..

This has absolutely nothing to do with anime but I was just wondering if anyone else here is doing the Folding@Home thing, and if so are you on a team?  I'm currently contributing my points to the PC Master Race but I'm a vagrant and occasionally switch teams just for the heck of it.    If anyone else here is on a team that needs points/WU let me know.  AWS I'm not so don't expect too much.  All I have is my desktop system but it does have an 8/16-core 2700X in there.  It averages maybe 50kppd if I just let F@H have my background cycles and up to 150k if I let it use all of it (and it is a cool day).  If you want it just send me your team # so I can tell my FAHclient where to send the points.

Looking at Craftopia on steam.. looks like something to keep an eye on.

A friend sent me this amabie pic so I thought I'd use it to bump the topic.  Now is not the time to be hoarding amabie pics to oneself after all.   

21 hours ago, MeandMyImaginaryFriends said:

Are there any challenges you place upon yourself, when playing games that aren't already part of the mechanics in place?

I do.  I don’t play many of those super-linear games anymore because then I feel need to play it “perfectly” to get a challenge out of it. Probably not explaining that well but it is just a personality quirk in my head that makes me endlessly replay games that I feel I finished too quickly or too easily until I get a perfect score or all the Easter eggs or all the bonus loot or whatever.

I also do things like “speed running” a game and trying to beat the clock.  If I’m playing (for instance) a game like sudoku on my phone that doesn’t have a score or a time limit I still feel like I didn’t successfully solve the puzzle unless I beat my old best time, or at least “within a minute” or some such arbitrary, self-imposed extra criteria.

23 hours ago, Beocat said:

indoor plumbing

I asked my grandparents A similar question once & they said the same thing.  Hot and cold - and potable! - running water, indoors, just by turning a lever was basically right up there with fire according to them.  No more hauling water from the creek or pumping from a well for cooking, washing, or bathing.  No more outhouses.  Baths whenever you felt like it...

6 hours ago, Brandonn said:

probably music,

I guess I too will miss being able to stream everything on-demand from services like Apple, Spotify, Crunchy, or Amazon if the 'Net goes out.   At least until the servers come back and the network gets rebuilt.  (If it even needs it given services like Starlink getting built out these days.)  But even if the 'net goes out and doesn't come back your player should still work for mp3s and such if you have local files and can charge it.

Personally I never trusted "the cloud" in the first place.  Stuff tends to disappear from streaming sites even now, pre-apocalypse.  Anything I really like I've always bought so I'll still be able to watch or listen to quite a lot of stuff, even if I have to build my own player.  I've got a whole bookshelf full of music CDs, and every time I get one the first thing I do is rip it to mp3s.  Same with video.. I have tons animes and movies on DVD, all of which I've ripped and put on my Plex server (Synology NAS FTW) and backed up to flash off-line.  As long as I have access to power then access to my music/video library should also not be an issue.  And I've got solar panels on my roof so...

I can do without most things.  I spend a lot of time on computers but I'm older than both the Internet and PCs so I can remember a time without.  Our family didn't even have a TV until my dad built one from heathkit.  (It was color & I  remember him rushing to get it done in time for the first color Miss America broadcast. ) IIRC I did a lot of reading back then.  I'd love to have a chance to try that again without all the modern-day distractions.

If you're talking about being bombed back to the stone age by asteroids or the Russians or aliens then I think the question is irrelevant since we'd be dead or too busy surviving to worry about such things.  Anything less & there will be computers and networking for me to work with.  The Internet itself was designed to survive damage from a nuclear war after all, and my electronics parts bin in the garage is metal - aka a Faraday cage - so I'm set there.  My major in college was electrical engineering so if I have the parts I can build computers or electronics gizmos from scratch if necessary.  Literally.  One of our class projects back then was to build a computer completely out of NAND gates.  (I even know how to build a NAND gate out of transistors.)  Tedious for sure, but possible.

I doubt it'll come to that however.  I have at least 2 Raspberry Pis, dozens of Atmel AVR microcontroller chips, quite a few Arduinos, an old laptop that I use for programming them, and large numbers of other assorted component-level electrical bits out there as well.  There's also a couple/few computers-worth of parts in my old/spare PC parts bin .. old motherboards, assorted PCI cards, etc.  One of my hobbies since my "tweener" years was buying surplused old circuit boards, desoldering the parts, and building new electronics gadgets out of those scavenged parts that tested good.  In any post-apocalyptic scenario I'll probably wind up being that weird old tech dude with the half-working robot working out of a tiny office/lab/shop in the shady part of town. 

The only thing I can think of that I'd definitely miss would be levothyroxine, since I'm missing a thyroid gland.  Not exactly in the "fun" category but that's the only thing I can think of offhand.  Kind of complicates my leaving-for-mars ambitions as well.

Got a mini-pc assembled and attached to the den TV.  Tiny little thing.. about 6" tall by 3" wide.  Came barebones so I've had a pile of parts sitting in the den silently staring at me for the last couple days but I finally put it all together and got it booted into an OS.  I put system76's Pop!_OS (basically rebranded Ubuntu 20.04) on it for now since I had a USB stick with the .iso on it already.  Might upgrade to 20.10.  We'll see.  Been too busy to actually do much with it yet but it boots & with just a web browser it can connect to the household Plex server, youtube, etc.  This is the last "TV" in the house, in the sense of old-school cable/broadcast TV+tuner.  Been doing the cable-cutting thing for years now & this is the last hold-out.

Note the blue glow.  Can't get away from the blasted RGB blinkenlights these days but the default display mode is understated enough that I'm not quite motivated enough - yet - to get into the BIOS and see if I can change it.

4 hours ago, EnviousEnvy said:

Omg some of you guys surprised me with your ages. Makes me feel like a child again, lmao.

I'm currently 28 and started watching anime when I was around 5 or 6 (with Pokemon and Digimon of course, lol). My first actual adult anime was Ghost In The Shell and Wolf's Rain and I think I was 11 or 12. 

“Anime” is like “books”.  There is no typical age.  Over the years the biggest determinant as to how much anime I’ve watched hasn’t been my age so much as how busy I’ve been with everything else in my life.  Recreational activities like books, games, or anime has to get a lower priority than things like job and family commitments.  The only thing that has changed over the years is the type of anime I watch, books I read, or games I play when/if I get the chance, not the desire to watch/read/play them itself.

Ok, so not a lot of astrophysics or science in this one but I thought it was cool nevertheless...

Looks like they’re finally done with remodeling of the lobby of the building at work..

You can’t see it too well in the pic but the ceiling is kind of trippy.  The ceiling tiles are black and have hundreds of LEDs in them, making the ceiling into a starry sky overhead.  Some of the LEDs are rigged to flash in a sequence that makes it look like a meteor occasionally flashing across the sky.

Lately I’ve been getting into a space-themed first-person sandbox game called Empyrion.  It is on Steam and just came out of alpha and still has a few rough spots but it has a lot of potential.  Not as ambitious as something like space engineers, but not nearly as buggy either.  It also works well with Steam’s proton on my Linux system.
 

Also waiting for the “cliffs and caves” update for Minecraft and still playing my old favorite, Kerbal Space Program, as well.  When I just want to relax and not be shot at or use my too much I’ve also been known to spend time in Stardew Valley.