I have just discovered that the prior owner has put an entirely inappropriate cartridge on my “good” turntable. Not only did they use the cheapest one they could find – it is a Shure, but old and bottom of the barrel when it was new – they used a P-mount on a standard tonearm, which adds weight and made connecting it difficult.
So. Shopping for cartridges. This leads easily down the audiophile rabbit hole, and I don’t want to go too far. (more…)
There are often cardboard stand-ups used for characters on a map when playing a role-playing game. They’e cheaper than minis. Paizo has sets of them they market as “pawns”.
The plastic bases commonly used hold 1/16″ chipboard, perfectly. It’s also numbered 0.06″ or just 0.06. It can sometimes be called Binder’s Board and is used for making book covers. Check the scrapbooking places.
I got a big box of it on eBay – possibly a lifetime supply – for $16, including shipping.
It fits the stands perfectly. I’ll print the art, glue them to the cardboard, and cut them out on the laser cutter at TechShop.
I’ve been playing records lately, and have been considering one of the big expensive Record Cleaning Machines. I’ll probably buy one, in fact. In the meantime, and to handle surface dust, I ordered a carbon fiber brush to use dry. I’m really impressed at how effective it is! It’s easy, quick, inexpensive, and makes a big difference. Highly recommended!
Many people have suggested I use autodie. I have never been interested in the functionality it provides, and don’t use it. I think there’s primarily two reasons why that is. I might know a way to address one of them, but it’s tricky. (more…)
A friend sent me a link to an article from Lifehacker, where they picked their Five Best Headphones. My friend knew that I like headphones. I try not to be too into audiophile headphones. I only own one pair of headphones worth over $1,000, so I’ve not gone completely overboard. Trust me. Or don’t and go over to Head-Fi and read what all the nice people there have to say about headphones.
I replied to my friend, discussing that article on Lifehacker, and he suggested I publish it as there was a ton of additional information in it. So, here it is, a reply to Lifehacker’s article: (more…)
In Perl, when you get an error, there are magic globals that the interpreter sets to the value of that error. If you’re going to do any other work before reporting the error, save those variables! Work almost got this right… (more…)
Bowlfish assumes that after it boots, the single hard disc in a system will be wd0a. Not true on a Soekris net6501 when using a USB volume. It’s sd0a. You need to update /etc/fstab to mount / from sd0a instead of wd0a. You can do that with a site.tgz file, or just mount and edit the disc before you boot. Or mount -o rw,noatime /dev/sd0a /mnt on the booted system, make the change to /etc/fstab, and then mount -o rw /dev/sd0a. (more…)
I use a tool called Bowlfish to build OpenBSD images which run with the drives mounted read-only. This lets me use cheap Compact Flash or USB drives in a Soekris single board computer instead of a real disc or a more expensive SSD.
Bowlfish has been a lifesaver and has worked perfectly for years. The current version, however, didn’t. I was shocked. Then I fixed it! (more…)
Found a section that annoyed me in perlsyn today, in the documentation for the foreach loop: (more…)
I wrote about a visit to a Shinto shrine last week, and hadn’t touched the topic here before, and thought I’d change that. Since I’m wordy, there’ll probably be several parts. This one is to discuss what Shinto is, at least, what my understanding of Shinto is. I feel like it’s a new topic for me, and one that I don’t know much about, but I’ve been reading about it steadily for months now, so I’m probably better informed than I give myself credit. (more…)