captain_aggravated

This may not be the right community to post this in; it's at least obliquely involved with woodworking.

I intend to hang a shingle as a furniture maker. Yes I know I know "Beware turning a hobby into a job because it'll suck the joy out" before the pandemic I was working in a custom build shop, about the only thing I didn't build for customers was furniture, and I kinda miss the pipeline.

In fact, I'd kind of like to find several other craftsmen of various flavors and open an "artisan shop", where, say, a table I built is used to display vases the potter made, and so on like that.

I got, or rather built, that custom building job at a makerspace in the city, and I could get this venture off the ground with a quick message to the General Slack channel. Not only was the place full of craftsmen and artisans but it was plugged into the entrepreneurial world, people would pour out of the woodwork to either join up or point me to resources. Where I'm at now there's just none of that.

I think I'm at the point where I just have to build something and put it up for sale. Just...before we bother with business plans and branding and logos and social media and all that crap, I need to open a personal Etsy account or walk into a local consignment shop and sell a thing I made out of wood just to prove I can actually do it.

This may wait until spring at this point; between a family member in hospice and the winter...

Can it be someone else's turn to talk now?

So for the past little while I've had a Pi 4 hooked up to my TV as a Kodi box running OSMC, which has been okay I guess. Having recently built a new PC, my old Ryzen 3600/GTX-1080 box is freed up, so I'm thinking of replacing that Pi with something that can also run Steam.

I'm completely at a loss for what system to run for a living room couch/TV experience. Kodi...could be better, OSMC doesn't have a desktop and won't launch just a normal web browser, it uses Kodi as its only UI and it's just not fully good enough.

I'm also not sure if Steam Big Picture Mode is capable of being a media center. Like, can it play movies from there? My experience with Steam's Big Picture Mode is it runs like microwaved shit anyway, feels as responsive as the average dogwood.

I want to be able to get to my collection of movies on my NAS, play Steam games, and do some web browser tasks like watch Youtube and that kind of thing. I just don't do the streaming services, I don't need Huflix or NetMax or whatever.

As in, you see a movie trailer, and based only on that trailer you make up the whole movie in your mind, and it ends up being different than the actual movie. Was your version better or worse?

I'll go first: Men In Black 1 had a somewhat misleading trailer, where they're about to shoot down the flying saucer at the end, and they say to each other "Do you have any idea what you're doing?" "Not a clue." And they shoot. So in my mind it was two guys from the FBI who had to suddenly deal with the existence of aliens and learn to fight them on the fly, learning and making it up as they went along all the while learning to work with each other.

Coming soon to my workbench is a small cabinet for my cousin. What's everyone building this holiday season?

Not long ago the band was kickstarting their latest album, Voyage (bottom-right) and offering a bundle of their older albums as a bonus add-on, so I took the opportunity to pick them up. My overall favorite is Cures What Ails Ya (top-right) though they all have songs I quite like.

Even though I ripped them to FLAC and mostly listen to them on my phone that way, I'm quite happy to have these. I paid some musicians and got a bunch of music!

Softener dispenser isn't draining. Open the lid after a cycle to find it still full of fluid. I'll admit I have no clue whatsoever how it works; I also don't know how they manufactured it because it doesn't come apart. It's the kind that sits on top of the agitator (top-loading washer), I think it works by centrifugal force, that it's supposed to fling it out of the center chamber to an outer chamber during the spin cycle?

I tried cleaning it not long ago, it doesn't come apart, so I don't know if I just washed some Clinton-era crud into a small port I have no hope of cleaning. Oh well, remarkably for a washing machine of this age these parts are still available, so I think I'll just spend ten bucks on it.

I decided to connect with my inner 13 year old and bought Army of Darkness on Blu-Ray. Like the rest of my video collection, my goal was to rip it to my NAS so it's available on my Kodi box; I don't own a blu-ray player, only Blu-ray optical drives for computers. But, I decided I wanted to just pop the movie in and play it on my PC, should look pretty good on my gaming monitor.

No machine in my inventory would play it from the disc. VLC and the one or two other media players in Fedora's pathetic excuse for a repository would play it. VLC would throw an error and tell you to look in the log for details...wherever the log is. Side note: I'm not going to see log for details if you don't give me a link or path to that log. We hold up VLC as the best media player but it can barely play mp3 and mp4 files from the local machine, it doesn't work across a network, it doesn't read optical discs, it doesn't give useful errors and I'm not looking up how to read its logs for more details.

So, several rounds of troubleshooting across a few computers later, I finally get a setup where MakeMKV will rip it from the goddamn disc. And what does the 1080p version of the movie get you? Film grain. Noisy hideous distracting film grain. Exporting it as a 720p video made it look better because crushing the resolution evened out the film grain.

Is this what liking movies is like these days? I don't think I want to like movies anymore.

Used one of those Affresh pods today. It's the second one I've used. Not entirely convinced it's achieving much but it was a nice day to have several gallons of hot water sloshing around in the house.

Last month I noticed just how crud filled the softener dispenser was, and there's no way to take it apart so I just had to sort of reach into the holes and do what I could, fill it with water and such and just shake it around trying to dislodge everything. Figured I should probably start cleaning the tub as well.

aka Miss Monochrome

Walnut and maple., it's an inch and a quarter thick, 12 1/2 inches wide and about 17 inches long. While it is an end grain cutting board I actually built it with kneading dough in mind, I don't intend to cut on this one, not for awhile anyway. Built it this weekend and baked some bread with it today. Which is why my mixer is covered in flour. I'm really happy with this one.

Walnut and maple., it's an inch and a quarter thick, 12 1/2 inches wide and about 17 inches long. While it is an end grain cutting board I actually built it with kneading dough in mind, I don't intend to cut on this one, not for awhile anyway. Built it this weekend and baked some bread with it today. Which is why my mixer is covered in flour. I'm really happy with this one.

I picture them as an all girl hard rock band with a sound similar to Veruca Salt.

It's the name of a grammatical quirk where unrelated parts of a sentence can be mistaken as a noun phrase. Comes from a headline "Violinist Linked To JAL Crash Blossoms."