efaardvark
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Everything posted by efaardvark
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I accepted a big $$ contract in KSP to land a 7-kerbal, wheeled "outpost" on the Mün... I think I'm going to name it Catbus.
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So there's currently an uproar in Japan about a "glasses ban" for women in the workplace. Discuss.. ( if you just heard, "ふゆかいです". )
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Just read that KSP2 has been delayed for a couple months. Not exactly unexpected considering the claims. It might even give me time to complete my latest KSP1 "career". I did my first major Mün mission in that and ran into .. unexpected difficulties. Mostly of my own making of course. I can report that all kerbals made it back safely however. Eventually.
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The second pic kind of looks like something from Azumanga Daioh.
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Designing a new ore transfer vehicle for surface ops, getting familiar with how some of the new hinge/servo parts from the Breaking Ground DLC work.
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I don't really get into the Christ mass-shopping season. If I can manage to take a few days off from work I'll be happy. Ideally I'd eat like a pig on turkey day, then go into hibernation until sometime around late February or early March, but my boss won't take a hint & just says I don't have enough vacation time. Been there, doin' that. This Saturday I took the shutters off the laundry room closet area where we hide the washer and dryer so we can get to the old machines and get them out and the new ones in. The guy from Lowes was supposed to be calling me this week to schedule delivery & installation.
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When you first watch anime
efaardvark replied to Scarlet Thunderstormz's topic in Anime Noobs's Topics
I don't even remember the first anime I saw. It was all just "TV" back then, and "cartoons". There weren't even any tapes to buy/rent back then, so no "anime" display section at the stores to help make a distinction. I remember the westernized stuff like "Tranzor Z", (Matzinger Z), "Star Blazers" (Space Battleship Yamato), and "Speed Racer" (Mahha GoGoGo), but also mixed in were not-anime cartoons all the way back to Felix the Cat and Casper the Friendly Ghost, and then later stuff like He-Man, Thundercats, etc. The whole saturday morning cartoon thing. As a kid I just watched it all. Only later did I start making the distinction between "cartoons" and "anime". Some of the westernized stuff was barely what I'd call anime these days anyway. -
Got the latest KSP (1.8.1) patch, the Breaking Ground DLC, and all but one of my usual mods installed. As soon as Kerbal Alarm Clock gets updated for 1.8x I'll be all set to make what will probably be my last career game runthrough before KSP 2.0 gets released.
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Looks like Spitzer project has set the date to end operations.
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I spent far more time than I should have today at lunch proving to myself that all these balls are the same color.
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Not a big fan of Naruto tho. Dr. Stone is on my list but I'm a post-season binge-watcher and I haven't seen it yet.
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Did not smell smoke this morning. That's always good. AND we still had power! Even better.
The clothes dryer was not feeling well however. Started the laundry and discovered it was taking forever to dry the clothes. Gave it a once-over but this is a (very) old dryer that has been repaired many times already so it could be pretty much anything. The dial to set the heat and one of the mode selector buttons don't stay attached. The lint trap bracket is cracked. The bearing for the drum that tumbles the clothes rattles and probably needs replacing. So does the blower. Etc. Etc..
So a not-so-quick trip to the nearby Lowes (hardware/housewares/appliance chain store) and I've got a new dryer set to be delivered and installed in a couple weeks. New washer too, since it has a number of issues as well. Got it at the same time as the dryer and it too has been repaired at least as many times. Expensive (isn't everything these days) but a new washer/dryer every couple decades isn't so bad. At least this way I hopefully won't have to deal with any laundry-related issues for another decade or so.
Meanwhile I also upgraded Ubuntu to 19.10 "Eoan Ermine" last night in a fit of madness. I was a little worried since 19.10 had depreciated 32-bit software support and updated the kernel from 4.18 under cosmic to 5.3.0 under eoan. Bash went from 4.4 to 5.0. Gcc went from 8.2 to 9.2. Bumps on the 3d and AMDGPU gfx driver(s) too. Lots of moving parts, several critical for the things I do. Net result: Looks like my local server running the RLCraft modpack is down for good.. probably a java thing. (1.8 -> 11.0.. yeah.) KSP is still fine however (checked that much before upgrading), as is my minecraft client/launcher (once I updated to the most recent version that is). Spotify, Discord, and everything else I've checked also seems ok. So far, so good.
Can't tell if I'm winning or losing this week.
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Definitely agree to this. As far as I know, I don't own any 'smart' appliance so far. I really don't see the point anyway. Also, one of the firs things they taught me in engineering was that generally speaking it's a great idea to use as few parts as possible, because it reduces the possibilities of dysfunctioning elements.
I am glad that there (still) are at least some things we can fix ourselves. I am given to understand that for example in apple computers it is usually not the case that you can even exchange simple parts. If I look at laptops nowadays with RAM modules soldered into it in a way that you can't really desolder it without damaging anything (at least with my primitive soldering irons), I really envy the days when I mainly used tower PCs. -
Heh.. be careful what you wish for. I happen to live in one of those places with a warmer climate. Lately I don't know from day to day if I'm going to catch fire or just lose power.
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Updated to Ubuntu to Eoan so I'm "testing" everything to see what broke. KSP did not break. Minecraft has issues. Had to download and reinstall the launcher even to launch local games and connect to realms. My RLCraft server won't start at all. <moment of silence while sad trumpets play in the distance> Probably just the newer java, but tbh I might not even bother. Like most of the high-end games (high in terms of hardware requirements) Minecraft is going to get some refactoring to enable better multithreaded performance over the next year starting with 1.15. Unfortunately the RLC modpack is based on 1.12, and I had a hard time even getting it all running in the first place. Maybe if they update the modpack to use MC1.15+ I'll try again. For now though .. it was fun(?) while it lasted, but I'm not going to waste too much time trying to get all the old mods running. If I was really that interested I could always go find or set up a public RLC server. I find that I am not. I need to get back to KSP anyway.
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I can see that, er.. you know what I mean. Actually, if we're talking special formats I guess I am kind of interested in some of the 4K+ work being done with 360-degree streaming formats. That + a good VR rig could be awesome. Even 4k might not be enough for HD-quality, 360-degree FOV. You want to talk huge bandwidth requirements though...
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All true, but I'm old enough that I can't even SEE in 4k, so until & unless somebody comes up with bionic eyes all that's wasted on me. Regular 1920x1080p HD is about my limit. They gave me 96dpi widescreens at work last time they updated my workstation & I had to increase the font size because I couldn't read anything anymore. Kind of a good news, bad news thing goin' on there. Anyway, for me the convenience of files trumps the quality of discs/players. I'll probably never upgrade to 4k or whatever they're calling the SCFE UHD resolution(s) beyond that. I literally can't see the benefits, and like you say the file sizes and bandwidth requirements are huge.
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A disc player?? How... retro. I can say things like that since I still have an old VHS tape player. Though these days I mostly rip all my discs to the hard drive as soon as I get them, then put the disc(s) on the shelf, basically un-played. (Plex and Synology FTW!)
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They're talking about my back yard here. Glendale city limits are about 5 miles from my house! I have friends that went to GHS, and I myself went to Glendale Community College after HS. (To get my GED stuff out of the way at a cheaper price than the UC tuition rates, since GCC had a transfer program to UC Irvine where I thought I was headed at the time.)
Actually, this is kind of how it was when I was in HS, now that I think about it. You know, cold-war mentality and all that.
QuoteBased on Brian Ralph’s comics series, this adaptation from co-creators Aron Eli Coleite and Brad Peyton imagines an apocalyptic aftermath where Glendale High School students have carved up East Los Angeles into territorial pockets. The cheerleaders, the 4-H club, and the athletes are just a handful of tribes who’ve staked out their own domain in an irradiated landscape. Adults in this “Daybreak” world are either dead or have become ghoulies, zombie-brained walkers doomed to repeat their last innocuous pre-explosion thoughts for the rest of time.
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Just started Ascendance of a Bookworm. Liking it enough that I think I'll tag it for a binge at the end of the season.
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Currently I'm researching how long gas stays usable when left sitting in your car's gas tank. I've had my car a full year now and I'm only halfway through my second tankful! (FWIW, according to my calculations I've averaged 372.3mpg over the year!)
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That's Hyouka. Chitanda and Oreki in the coffeehouse where he agrees to help her remember her uncle.
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So there's this gadget in the mall down the hill a bit from my office. It consists of 3 poles, atop which sit 3 arrows. The arrows have an LED matrix on the side that displays names of random stars, planets, and spacecraft. The poles spin around their long axis, and the arrows can spin as well, allowing the arrows to point at the named celestial body. Every 30 seconds or so the name changes, and the arrows on their poles do a little whirl which ends up with the arrow pointing in the direction of the celestial body currently displayed thereon. Kind of a mechanical performance-art thing.
Today I happened to be wearing my InSight hat (I have many hats
) and noticed as I walked by that one of the arrows was pointing at the InSight spacecraft (currently on the Martian surface), so I took a pic. The sun angle was wrong so I had to fiddle with the pic to make the names on the sides of the arrows visible and it turned the whole pic a little weird. But here you go:
(my cap ==>
)
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I got into the cap habit because my commute is straight into the sun both on the way to and from work and that sun visor thingy in cars always just annoys me without being terribly useful. The visor on a cap I'm wearing is easily positioned while driving so it works a lot better for me. (The other part of it is I'm also nearsighted, so I need glasses for driving, but I'm too cheap to get 2 sets of prescription glasses, one sun- for sunny days and one normal for not-sun.
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So granting them most-favored-nation status turns out to be a Bad Idea? Who knew? Seriously, anyone who didn't see this coming was.. naive. This has always been about corporate profits. China is/was one of the last big worldwide markets, not to mention cheap labor, and companies wanted to get in there to set up factories and make money selling stuff. The argument was that having the option to take the factories and jobs away from China if they behaved badly would be the leverage that would keep them in line and improve the human rights situation. Of course in practice we've never even talked about using that lever, and at this point the companies with assets over there would never allow it. Congress will talk of course, but they'll never use that big stick, and China knows it.
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Somehow I wound up (re)watching Log Horizon today. Not sure how I got started on it, but when the caffeine kicked in and the morning haze cleared I found that I was about 3 episodes in on the first season. I *think* I was looking for a particular scene, but somewhere along the way I completely forgot what I was doing and just started watching. So of course I had to watch the rest of it. Oh well, no harm done. I was just planning on playing with the new "Moar Boosters" KSP update anyway. 1.8 has a few bugs however, and the Unity update + the refactoring broke all my mods. Not a big deal if that effort gets deferred until the first bug fix. By then hopefully the modders will have updated their mods as well. There's worse ways to waste time than watching Log Horizon.
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I actually prefer to buy the stuff I know I like. Stuff tends to become unavailable on streaming sites. That said, I like the streaming sites too. Their role (for me anyway) is to help me find stuff I like. I'd never have found half the stuff I like (and then bought) if I hadn't first seen it on a stream somewhere. Who is going to pay to buy the disc(s) for everything that is released, when only a small percentage has any re-watch value anyway? It takes all kinds.
