Remote
Matthew Dockrey
@attoparsec@clacks.link
mastodon 4.7.3+clacksMaker of kinetic sculptures, public art installations, and random ephemera. Based in Seattle, Cascadia.
(AKA Fish)
1624 Followers
435 Following
50 Posts
Joined November 10, 2022
YouTube:
Portfolio:
Boosted by @trending@homestead.social
I've had this ridiculous idea bouncing around my head for years, and tonight I finally did it. Take that, overhanging greenery!
#biketooter
I just realized it's weird that most people seem to think that zero-gravity "Vomit Comet" flights achieve free fall by diving straight down, instead of following a parabolic arc up and over like they really do. Because that's actually a thing commonly done in everyday life, when stealing a bite of something drippy from a plate across the table. You do a little bouncing motion, and then move it up and over in an arc to your own plate, trying to keep everything in freefall so the drips follow the fork and don't fall on the table on the way. It's the exact same maneuver!
I think I'm going to be here for a while.
Still not quite as far along as I was hoping, but the frame is painted, the fridge tray, rear trailer jacks and deck all permanently mounted (that is, with lock nuts or loctite), and the chain cleaned and cut down to a better length for the tiny front sprocket I switched to for lower gearing.
I'm beginning to resign myself to having to do some of the hexayurt assembly once I get to the playa. I'm not even 100% sure it will fit in the uhaul with the roof attached. Ugh, I hate this kind of slapdash rush.
Replying to
It's been raining on and off for the last 12 hours, turning the lovely dust into the stickiest mud known to science. I've instituted the lifeboat contingency, and will be hiding in the back of the uhaul until conditions improve.
And honestly, it's not bad! I've got enough supplies for at least a week. More importantly, I've got data, and enough in the solar accumulator to charge my phone for 99.8 hours straight even without any sunshine. I can even stand up and pace and sit with back support. Now we just wait for several hours of sunlight to dry this all up. Could be tomorrow, could be next week.
It's only tacked together, but the hexayurt is complete.
Still to do:
Fully tape up the seams, except joining the roof, as it probably won't fit in the uhaul with that attached.
Connect the walls to the deck, add the tape loops to the roof for the straps which provide much of the strength.
Figure out how the solar panel mounts.
Pack. Buy food. A thousand other things.
Don't quite tip over into burnout.
Replying to
P.S. Free mnemonic for remembering which is which: The warp is warped up and down, and the weft runs weft and wight!
Newton could predict mountaintop observatories, but not adaptive optics.
Replying to
@drwho@masto.hackers.town @josephcox@infosec.exchange We've handed our entire civilization over to trickster spirits.
At what point does it become millimobility?
This weekend I finally cut down the cargo trike's rear axle so I could add the differential. Luckily each side was already supported by 2 bearings, so no other serious modifications were needed. This also meant adding a pressfit sleeve to what used to be the undriven wheel, to add enough thickness for a keyway to firmly couple it to the axle. I'm a bit nervous if that will hold under real torque, but that will just need to be answered empirically. It's not quite ready for that yet, but at least I was able to get it back on 3 wheels for the first time in about a month!
Replying to
@mralancooper@hachyderm.io And more vulnerable to being cut or whittled away to nothing, too.
Aw yeah, that's the shit.
It's a bit hard to see because only the debug LEDs are installed, but I just got real Conway's Life behavior running on hardwired circuits on modular boards! It's a classic blinker, the simplest oscillator possible, discovered by Conway himself in 1970. It alternates between | and —, between the middle column being on and the middle row being on. The clock signal is manual, half a cycle with each click. Watch the lowest of the three LEDs on each cell to see the pattern switch back and forth on every pair of button clicks.
The heavy duty drawers are done! The rotary table and the collet chuck finally have a permanent place to live! The 4-jaw chuck and the faceplate also moved in, for the community.
My punch card cyberdeck from last year got a nice mention in this Make blog post:
https://makezine.com/article/technology/computers-mobile/destroy-big-tech-with-a-salvaged-cyberdeck/
I'm so old I still sometimes call this thing a DMM.
It is hard to exaggerate just how common autonomous cars are here.
It's too wet out to continue today, but I at least got the cargo trike frame stripped and ready for painting when possible. Which means I need to decide what exact color it should be, beyond my primary goal of "dear god anything other than that hideous mint green". I originally intended to lean hard into the RV look with Winnebago browns, but now I'm wondering if a cream base and the "Berlin" urban camouflage scheme would be interesting. I'm really not a camo guy, but it's almost a muted form of dazzle, and I've been looking for an excuse to use it ever since learning about it.
Replying to
I seem to have fallen behind on my Palme d'Or posts. With only 4 left to go, I need to keep on top of this!
The Square (2017)
It seems like a harmless satire at first, but there is deep and ugly cynicism under it. The most interesting thing is the mcguffin event at the very beginning, then it's just 2 hours of watching a rich asshole reacting to things without conviction.
Shoplifters (2018)
A really nuanced and deceptively positive exploration of found family, lovely and charming and profound. It's been a while since I've been so glad this project forced me to watch a film I might never have gotten around to otherwise.
Titane (2021)
Absolutely incoherent. Is it a psychological thriller, is it body horror, is it trying to say something about gender, is it a Ballardesque statement on technological alienation? If it had put more effort into any one of those (particularly the last one) it might have at least been interesting.
Today I'm driving out to eastern Washington to see some visiting family.
Does anyone need a 38" x 52" x 7" granite surface plate? I know of a dead CMM in the LA area which is going to become landfill if they can't find anyone to take it off their hands.
Tonight I've been experimenting with bulk assembly of the remaining Life cell prototype boards. It's gone okay, but there are definitely a lot of subtleties to pick up still.
Bay Area folks: I'll be in town next week Monday through Thursday with a lot of free time. Let me know if you want to meet up for coffee of something. Or if there is something I should be sure to check out while in the area!
Replying to
@neauoire@merveilles.town Huh, I hadn't realized that 1/10 of a foot is almost exactly an attoparsec!
Huh, I could have sworn the prescription lens blanks were 60mm. Sorry, everyone I misled!
Replying to
I, Daniel Blake (2016)
It sometimes gets a bit too close to "deserving poor" rhetoric, but otherwise this is a very good portrayal of people falling to precarity as the bureaucracies supposed to be a safety net watch, unmoved. Nothing too harrowing, but a couple scenes are really going to stick with me, just because of their heartbreakingly simple honesty.
Replying to
Replying to
Amour (2012)
A brutally realistic portrayal of someone in terminal decline, to the point that watching it felt cruelly dehumanizing. I've watched 4 loved ones go through that already. I probably have another 4 to go. I didn't need a 9th. And that's not even getting into the violence at the end.
Replying to
The Tree of Life (2011)
It was only upon getting here in the list that I realized I had been mixing The Tree of Life up with The Fountain for the last 15 years. Which does kind of make sense, as that one is also trying to reconcile human loss with the vastness of our cosmic background. I just thought this was the less interesting of the two.
Replying to
Winter Sleep (2014)
This took me 4 sessions to get through, as I kept falling asleep. Some of that is just my poor sleeping habits, but definitely not all. I wish more of it had been focused on the landscape of Cappadocia, where it is set, instead of the tediously condescending main character.
Replying to
@tty Hrm, there definitely is something to be said for it only failing to apply if one has fucked around but not found out!
Replying to
Dheepan (2015)
Refugees from the Sri Lankan civil war, strangers posing as a family, start to build a life in France until they are threatened again by the gang warfare around them. For a movie with the unlikely shared inspiration of Montesquieu and Straw Dogs, I really liked it!
Replying to
@la@chaos.social No, they're sold as drawer slides, mostly used for equipment racks in service vehicles apparently. They claim to handle 500 pounds, but I'm assuming that means evenly distributed across the entire shelf.
Replying to
@tek @wortezimmer @signaleleven @Kir @infobeautiful Citation [0] contradicts itself several times and barely makes any sense at all. "A whole cow contains about 40 grams of protein and 6 grams of fat, making it a cheap source of protein." Pure slop.
Replying to
Blue is the Warmest Color (2013)
Ugh, what a weird mess. The visual style is subtle but distinct, playing with extreme closeups (particularly around messy eating) in a way that was moderately interesting. Some very good acting, and a script that was only occasionally cringeworthy. But the 180 minute runtime definitely wasn't justified, and far too much of that was taken up with gratuitous and deeply-male-gazey sex scenes. Mostly lesbian, with, of course, a male director. Just straight up porn, complete with the inability to go more than 20 seconds without the participants changing to a new (but equally impractical) position.
Replying to
@clark @ai6yr @wtrmt I like to (lovingly!) joke that while Project Hail Mary has its big obvious unobtanium in astrophage and xenonite, in The Martian it's actually the spacesuits. Nimble enough to allow all that macgyvering, easy to put on by a single person multiple times a day, and durable enough to survive years of heavy work? Way less realistic than mass-conversion microbes!
Replying to
@memnus@swingset.social Sorry I never found you, I only managed to swing by Friday night and everything was dark. It was a super rough year, and I was only there Tuesday afternoon through Saturday morning. And I ended up feeling much the same way. It was home to me once, but after 10 years away, I'm just not that person any more.
Replying to
@earthshine@masto.hackers.town @pawprint@furry.engineer My source didn't have an exact figure, but estimates it to be in the 1000-1500 pound range.
Replying to
@beka_valentine@kolektiva.social I did notice something similar in a couple Steinbeck novels, with the olds talking about the youngs as being inherently different in their relationship to cars, having grown up with them, while the olds will always find them a bit scary and alien. He doesn't use the term "automotive native", but he might as well have. But it's not like that turned out great either!
Replying to
@Primavera@void.lgbt It is, from a company that does trike conversion kits. Small volume, but pretty nicely made. It's actually based around two freewheels, but one has to be mounted backwards hence the large body.