captain_aggravated

I'm slapping together a night stand for my cousin out of crap I have lying around the shop, and I'm using the project as an excuse to try out some stuff.

Carcass is "hardwood" mystery meat 7-ply from Lowe's. Joinery is all dovetails; lower shelf and mid frame are sliding dovetails, upper frame is half-blinds. I did that to see if I could. Answer: Barely. The sliding dovetails were fine but the half-blinds wanted to blow the plywood apart.

Face frame is rift sawn traumatized pine. That's what I managed to salvage from a damaged section of 8:4, and judging by the growth rings that tree had been through at least one divorce. The curve on the bottom I laid out with a bowed spline. First time I've actually done that. It's attached to the carcass Norm style, with Tite-bond and #10 biscuits.

Tomorrow I'll build the drawer.

I have a Porter Cable dovetail jig. It works reasonably well when it's properly aligned, but properly aligning it a hilariously clumsy process of guess and check. The alignment lines on the templates are on the top surface, so there's a quarter inch of parallax error, and the brass adjustment nuts aren't graduated in any meaningful way. The instructions say things like "If the joint is too loose, move the jig away from you." How far? Depends on where you hold your head. It results in a guess-and-check, guess and check mentality. There is no try, measure how far off it is, and adjust it based on that measurement.

I solved both of these problems with a knife.

I printed out a little wagon wheel looking thing to use as a guide so I could put some graduation marks around the brass thumb screws. They run on a 16TPI threaded rod, so 1 full turn drives it 1/16th inch, 1/2 turn 1/32", 1/4 turn 1/64", and 1/8 turn 1/128". I stopped there because that's about the limits of my ability or need to measure. It's not on an absolute scale, but now I can move both sides of the template with some precision, if not accuracy.

I also scribed an alignment line on the back of the template, and then down each side of each template tooth. The factory alignment lines are like 1/16" wide or better, so I just scribed the location of the center. That should eliminate parallax error.

I'll give it a test run tomorrow and see if I helped it any.

After several small projects, it was time for a cleaning and organizing. Spent like 3 hours and the place is still a disorganized wreck. I've just got too much shit in a little building.

I also dropped a clamp on my foot, -2hp.

But, the place is somewhat less dusty now.

god. dammit I have to table saw this butcher block apart.

Making some cutting boards, not sure why, maybe my table saw is cutting a bevel or something, but the parts didn't line up perfectly, so now I have to flatten a couple end grain cutting boards. Which is rather difficult to do. I hope I burned some good calories throwing my bench plane back and forth for awhile.

What it came up with is too good not to share:

Conventional wisdom regarding finishing cutting boards and other food prep surfaces is to coat them heavily with mineral oil and/or a food safe paste wax to "seal" and/or "condition" them. Seri Robinson asserts otherwise, her research has shown that any finish applied to wood decreases its natural anti-microbial properties.

I had dental surgery like, a month ago. Posted about it here. Instead of a front tooth I've got a metal (titanium I think?) cap sticking out of my gums. The tip of my tongue constantly touches it and I'm really over it.

The weirdest part is every time I brush my teeth it feels cold for like an hour. The button has a female drive to it (I think it's Torx?) and it holds onto toothpaste.

At least I'm off my no biting things diet. There's stuff that's still impractical to eat but I can have sandwiches now.

I've gotten several of the text-in-image variant lately from accounts on SJW over the last few days.

So here's the state of things right now:

I've got a Synology NAS with stuff like my movie collection stored on it. I think at some point I'll move my music collection up there, too. It's an ARM powered 2-bay thing, I'm not particularly interested in using any of Synology's software, and there's some stuff that won't run on that box because it's ARM instead of x86. I don't really have a "server" box running.

A few years ago I bought a "commercial TV" aka one that doesn't have Roku or whatever. For awhile, I ran OSMC (basically Debian Kodi) on a Raspberry Pi, which...I had enough problems with that it's unlivable. I'd rather just not have a television than continue to use OSMC.

In the meantime, I built a new gaming PC for my desk, the old machine (which happens to be in a Fractal Node 202 case so it already looks like a TiVo) has been moved into the living room. It's a Ryzen 3600/GeForce GTX-1080 machine with a bit over a terabyte of SSD and 16GB of RAM. It's still kicking bubblegum and chewing ass. Yes, it idles at a greater power draw than the Pi pulls at full steam, but it'll spend most of its time asleep, we'll be okay.

I'm currently still using Mint Cinnamon on it. Which is a hilariously unusable home theater OS. Plus I have my desktop (a Ryzen 7700/Radeon 7900GRE machine running Fedora KDE) and my phone (A Galaxy S10e) that I sometimes watch media on. Some questions:

• Why does VLC error out when trying to play mp4s stored on my NAS? Is it because SMB is Microsoft fucksewage that doesn't actually work? Because that's my working hypothesis.

• I have so little information on what Plex/Jellyfin even are, I gather Plex is at least semi-commercial while Jellyfin is the open source but worse option. These may or may not have a server component that has to run on a server-like box, which I don't and won't have.

• On the client side, I don't know if they take the place of a DE the way Kodi does, or if it's a separate app, or if you'd have to exit Plex or Jellyfin to use something like Steam, or if Steam Big Picture mode would work as a media center, but can it get to Youtube...

Is there anything out there that works better than throwing my TV away and forgetting about it?