A friend just sent me a meme that said "Happy Pride Month to Home Depot for not selling a single piece of straight wood"
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Nick Poole
@North@chaos.social
mastodon 4.6.9Serial Hobbyist, Systems Thinker, Frustrated with a world that seems to insist on suffering despite material abundance.
Queer Engineer, He/They, Electron-Gun-Slinger.
Toots about Electronics, Social Politics, and Mental Health.
1376 Followers
140 Following
50 Posts
Joined November 01, 2022
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Because my work was open source, I'm able to share what I was up to with Rising Tide Research Foundation this past year. Enjoy!
https://www.nickpoole.me/2026/09/05/year-in-review-with-rising-tide-research-foundation/
Cleaning up the vacuum workbench, getting ready to upgrade several components. Degreased the frame and painted over the "Hokies Orange" paint job from the university. No more oil! Out with the rotary vane and in with the scroll!
I don't know if I ever posted "finished" pics of the office. There's still some trim to finish and I'm still organizing things from the other workspace (thus the mess on the workbench) but it's functional!
Did a little more work in the shop. Finished the corners of the lab rooms with angle iron. Installed lights and a power drop for the island of stuff under the bridge. Still need to wire it. The outlet is an l5-20r locking receptacle so it won't pull out and I just bought a heavy duty power strip and replaced the plug with a matching l5-20p plug. The big bench still needs a few sheets of osb and the mdf bench top needs a few coats of polyurethane. Almost ready to start working on the labs.
Guy who makes his home bar look like an old pub except instead of a pub it's a university physical science building.
It has been 0 days since I've forgotten to clean the rice maker until it smelled like sake
Boy George using AI to write a Pro-Israel, Genocide-denying reggae song is the kind of news that sounds like playing 52 pickup with a deck of Cards Against Humanity.
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It's too hot in the woodshop so dad built a fan out of stuff he had laying around.
Grabbed two Jalapeño Cream Cheese taquitos at the gas station. Homie at the counter said grab the last two and he'll write em off. Deal.
Then he told me a story about leaving his iPhone somewhere in the store when there were "a couple black guys wandering around" and how he was lucky it wasn't stolen.
So now not only am I eating 4 taquitos at 3am but they're fuckin racist taquitos.
Boosted by @GroupNebula563@mastodon.social
Everyone was so busy on McConnell watch that they almost missed the Lindsey Graham b-b-bonus round.
Ayyyooo you're telling me that I can buy the Kikwear denim that I always wanted as a teen but couldn't afford and they're coming back into fashion?
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Alternatively, a FOSS standard for interferometric scans of phonograph records and an OSHW record scanner.
You could even press and release a modelling record that can be played into accompanying software to model a turntable and cartridge (I imagine it's frequency sweeps, amplitude sweeps, and pops for impulse response) and share the model as an open file type.
Finally changed screen protector on my phone today. This one really put in some hours.
Listening to some Marilyn Manson tonight for the first time in a long while.
I think Mechanical Animals was peak Manson, but my favorite album is probably still Antichrist Superstar. The Golden Age of Grotesque was probably his last good album.
I'm a legendarily thirsty boi. There was a restaurant that @gella@chaos.social and I used to eat at regularly and the waiter would leave an entire pitcher of diet coke at the table.
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@JamesAkers@expressional.social Mostly ditching the rotary vane just because I've own two Welch 1402s and they've both worked great but I couldn't stop either from slowly leaking oil. At the same time, I became aware of the rebadged Scroll Labs pumps being sold at BVV so I bought one. I'm just tired of dealing with used pumps filled with used oil with unknown contamination making puddles in my lab.
As for the trap, I had a dessicant foreline trap, which worked fine. A cold trap is a pain to maintain.
I took apart some shipping pallets/crates that had stacked up last night and my hands hurt so bad today from pulling nails/staples.
I think I'm gonna plane some of that wood down and use it to trim the doors and windows of the labs.
A putty knife retires from solder paste duty to spackle holes. A portable compressor takes a vacation from actuating UHV valves to drive nails into trim.
Spent most of the day cutting, sanding, and staining plywood slats for the slat walls in the office. I ran an orbital sander for like 2 hours straight, I'll never feel my hands again, lol. Also, I went through a quart of wood stain. But I have enough slats, so tomorrow I should be able to paint _and_ install slats. We'll see!
Go to sleep at 6am
Wake up 4 hours later
Hardee's is still serving breakfast
Doordash Hardee's
Eat breakfast
Go back to sleep
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So it makes sense just to climate control the enclosed lab rooms. They're all more or less closet sized, which means the energy requirements are pretty low. And they're inside of a larger insulated building, which does some buffering.
The catch is that the ventilation requirements for the 3 rooms in question are like an HVAC exam.
Lol. Lmao even.
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@MLE_online ... I was compelled to make this and only afterwards have I decided it wasn't worth it.
I am so. tired. of paint scraping.
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The chemistry lab will have a fume hood, which means that it will need makeup air. Which means that while the hood is running, climate control is near impossible. I can design the hood with an active makeup air system, so that very little room air is used and it doesn't pull all of the conditioned air out of the lab. That makeup air could come from inside the building, so it's somewhat "tempered," as well. This also reduces backdraft when the lab door is opened.
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The makeup air system could have a little room air, as a treat, so that the lab is at negative pressure.
The biology lab (basically a coat closet with a laminar flow hood inside) has the exact opposite requirements. It will house (be?) a vertical laminar flow hood. In this case, it probably makes sense to circulate the air inside the room as much as possible so as to lengthen the life of the HEPA filters.
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Same idea, two different artists:
https://www.instagram.com/p/C19vTJGOs-m/?igsh=c3V5NnZvMW13c3Y2
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@brennen@federation.p1k3.com When I heard "Nacho Fries are back!" I was activated like a sleeper agent.
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*Qatzpiel engulfing me in blood and lightning*
"One for flinching!"
I was CERTAIN that I owned a pin nailer, but I guess I don't. Guess it's time to load up the finish nailer and pray.
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@salty@zwiebel.social I can't tell, it sure doesn't look particularly special but it could be a Parker needle valve or something like that, which could be in the 150-200USD neighborhood. Still, screwing on a capillary on one side and a gas fitting on the other and selling it for this much is pretty cheeky.
Like... it's not even a bad idea, really. I would do this as a DIY solution for leak testing but damn.
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The RGA came today and it looks to be in decent shape. The quadrupole looks unused, the filament is intact, and the copper CF gasket is fresh. I would like to power on the control unit, see it boot up, and post some pics, but I've been down with a nasty headache all day. Updates tomorrow for sure.
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@vadhakara I'm going very mid-century, so the walls will be beige with wood slat wall in sections.
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@azonenberg@ioc.exchange I guess you could extract the audio from the surface scan "perfectly" and then degrade it in some way consistent with the parameters extracted from the needle model, Then you could generate the needle model just by playing the reference record and comparing it to the master.
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@azonenberg@ioc.exchange The format of the scan would probably be dictated by the scanning technology. Because you could "unwrap" grooves in software if you had to. Probably, it would be easiest to make a linear scan of the groove, maybe with a neighbor on either side for redundancy.
You could do some kind of constrained physics-based modelling, but it occurs to me that this makes characterizing new needle cartridges potentially difficult.
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@azonenberg@ioc.exchange Also, I know nothing about DSP and very little about audio in general, lol