IMALlama

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 12 hours ago

Very cool! Thanks for sharing.

How do you achieve those bends? I suspect steaming in a jig so the wood holds its shape once dry?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 12 hours ago

It’s still in need of some voicing and shaping

How do you voice it without the guitar assembled? I imagine there must be some technique there, but I have no idea what it is.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

little kids

If the kids are truly little this would be an OK move from the US. However, schools in Puerto Rico teach in Spanish which would be a struggle for kids who are not fluent.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

If there’s a sudden boom in prison construction in the next few years I’ll reconsider of course

You work in what now 🤨

Sarcasm aside, I am genuinely curious why you would leave this here. Is your work related to something with prisons?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Find people who care about what they're working on and they'll go well beyond the extra mile. As an extra motivator, make it clear the company won't be around if they don't succeed. I'm sure these employees have shares, but tha only really matters if the company succeeds (extra motivation!). Unfortunately, there have been a ton of green/green-adjacent automotive "startups" that have struggled to gain a foothold. See also:

(I'm sure many others)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (6 children)

I hope you get a decent answer. When we last visited 10 years ago a similar idea passed our minds.

I did some poking around at the time out of curiosity. From what I recall, a decent amount of manufacturing moved there in the 70s to claim made in America, take advantage of cheaper labor, and take advantage of some tax incentives. The incentives were phased out and manufacturing started leaving. Wikipedia .

I am not sure what their economy is like these days, but as with all moves a chunk of it is going to come down to the work you can/want to do and the jobs available, but with remote work living somewhere like Puerto Rico does seem appealing.

I suspect you're going to have the usual island pain points (hurricanes, expensive imports, limited economy, a large swath of the economy tied to tourism) and benefits (consistent weather year round, natural beauty which PR has a ton of, beaches, interesting culture).

Again, I really hope someone with first hand experience chimes in - even if the moved in the other direction from the island to the mainland.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Keeping a woodworking hobby from devolving into tool collecting can be a trick.

This can be true of most hobbies, lol. Amusingly, three others of yours fall into that pattern.

Electronics? If only I had a bigger power supply, higher speed/more channel scope, hot air station, logic analyzer, etc. Guitars? I have friends and coworkers who play. No one only owns one guitar, pedal, amp combo. Gardening? I have quite the setup in my basement to get seeds going, but I live in zone 6 and need to compensate some for the short growing season. Cooking can also be it's own equipment rabbit hole.

Beyond that: Cameras? Choosing which brand of body to use, sensor size, lens collection, tripods/flash/accessories. If you play a tabletop game do you really play a tabletop game or are you looking for an excuse to make and paint minis? 3D printers can be just as much about messing with the printer as actually printing things.

I think it's important to recognize the pattern so you can consciously decide if you want to fall into it or avoid it. For some people, the collecting around the hobby is even better than doing the hobby.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Nice framing! I would have maybe walked a touch closer and/or cropped to avoid the highlight on the right, but I really like the infinite mirror effect.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

Ha, this is true as does amortizing things like the coffee maker that needs replacing every 5 years, white vinegar for monthly descaling, the Stanley thermos I bought 4 years ago to bring coffee to work, etc.

Let's say that it takes 15 minutes to brew the pot of coffee at 1,500 watts. That's 0.375 watt hours. At $0.20/kwh that's $0.075/pot. Yay for dumping it into a thermos once it's brewed.

All in, even if you added an extra $0.50/day brewing at home is still way cheaper.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

Stay away from espresso and super "high end" artisan beans and you can have a very solid coffee hobby for not a whole lot of $$. We do a mix of drip, French press, and cold brew. The cost per cup is basically the same for each and the equipment was not very expensive.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago (2 children)

You got me curious, so I did the math for us.

I am a drip coffee person, drink far too much coffee (40 oz) throughout the day, and work on a fairly large corporate campus so I have easy access to hot/fresh coffee that I can purchase. Even though there are multiple branded places to get coffee from on campus, they have similar pricing.

  • Small (12 oz): 4x @ $2.65/pop = $10.60/day
  • Medium (16 oz): 3x @ $2.95/pop = $8.85/day
  • Large (20 oz): 2x @ $3.25/pop = $6.50/day. This is obviously the cheapest choice, but will result in a cold bottom half of the cup due to drinking my coffee slowly vs pounding it

My wife and I split a pot of coffee. It takes us 3 oz of coffee beans to brew it. I can buy a 20 oz bag of the coffee beans we use for $15.29, which works out to $2.30/pot. We often stock up on the beans when they go on sale, but I don't know what we paid for them the last time around.

So.. since my wife also drinks coffee let's say that the price spread between purchased already brewed coffee vs brewed at home coffee is between $6.50-$10.60/day. Splitting the difference = $8.85. Doing that 365 days/year = $3,120 saved.

The fact that I have coworkers who drink a similar quantity of espresso based (more $$) drinks at work is insane.

Do this over a 25 year career, invest the money monthly ($260), plan for a conservative 5% rete of return and you'll have $162,577 - only half of which is principal.

Apply this pattern of thinking over a number of different spending categories and you'll be way better off financially. That said, the stats on the billionaire class are eye watering and no amount of frugality will catch any of us up to them.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago

Factories will win this hands down, especially when you're building large/complex items. It looks like the distinction might be "single building" vs "complex or buildings", but VW's Wolfsburg plant is 70 million square feet. The largest plant I've been to isn't on that list, but it's still over a half mile wide - all under a single roof.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/g2904/7-of-the-worlds-largest-manufacturing-plants/

 
 

Or maybe there are no pockets?

 

The world of bee look alike is big! This seems to be a pollinator, and has a decent amount of pollen on its hind legs. It does have an ant body type, but also appears to have wings.

Bee?

Hover fly?

Ant?

Hybrid?

Something else?

 
 

Years ago, nearly a decade ago in fact, my wife enrolled in a pottery class at our local community college. We planted a shrub while she was enrolled, dug up some clay in the process, and her professor let her make something with it and fire it. To everyone's surprise, it went smoothly.

Enter kids, increasing work responsibilities, etc. A decade passes. Along the way we discovered our yard is 2-3" of top soil followed by nearly 100% gray clay. There's no marbeling, basically no sediment, nothing. Just slightly sandy/gritty gray clay.

I recently buried a gutter downspout and added a French drain in our yard, so I trenched my way through a ton of clay. I set some aside, since our oldest kid is now messaging with clay at our community center.

Here's the quick rundown of how I processed it:

  1. Manually remove the topsoil layer
  2. Toss clay into a 5 gallon bucket
  3. Cover in water, let sit a day or so
  4. Mix with a grout/thinset/cement mixing paddle attached to a drill to break up the chunks
  5. Sive for coarse material, like roots. I used some burlap as a screen and poured between buckets
  6. After you've screened the clay, remove the excess water. You can just let the bucket(s) sit and wait for evaporation to do its thing, you can wait a day or two for some water to separate and pour it off, you can use some fabric you don't care about much as a cheesecloth, etc
  7. Once the clay is the appropriate consistency, make something!

I made was a ceramic fish following the instructions of our oldest, who had just made something similar at the community center. The one pictured was meant to be the ugly sacrificial test piece before the "nice" one got fired, but our youngest broke the nice one into pieces, so I guess the ugly one is the nice one now.

I left the fish under our porch for a few weeks to dry out. After that, I put them into our fire pit, lit a small fire to warm them up somewhat gradually, and then built the fire up over a half hour or so.

Burningaton:

Post burn:

 

Yeah, I know they're called basket or corbicula, but pockets is more fun.

 

Yesterday's photo may or may not have been a hover fly. This is certainly a bee.

 
 

Pros:

  • Massive quantities of flowers for about 3 months
  • Bees love the blooms
  • The plant doesn't need any care to thrive
  • We've transplanted a few of the seedlings. They're true to their parent in terms of color, but the parents seems like a double bloom and the children seem like single bloom
  • If you want a hedge, this seems like a good option

Cons:

  • Seeds! So many seeds. Each of its hundreds (thousands?) of flowers will produce 10+ seeds. They all don't germinate, but it's a numbers game. If you want to avoid pulling volunteers up you're best off pulling the seed pods off the plant before they open on their own

I pulled ~2 gallons of seed pods off a week prior to this picture. My wife dumped them in the compost, so no epic 5+ gallon photo 😭

 

OM-1 with Oly 25 f1.2 pro @ f/2.8

I remain on the fence about this camera, but it can take some pleasing photos if you get it to focus where you want it.

 

Tongue first, ready to go for it. Just like when Aragorn kisses Arwen at the end of the last OG LORT movie.

 
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