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We just got the cheapest single burner propane forge eBay/Amazon. Working great so far. Looks like this https://www.ebay.com/itm/176573538859

Note that a forge produces big noisy flame and burns a lot of gas. If all you want to do is heat a nail a plumbing torch will suffice. But if you want to make a knife you will need some sort of forge.

You're not wrong. Our family safety glasses compliance rate is about 50%, def something we could improve on. When supervising other people's kids I get that rate up into 90s.

I will ensure we have at least have glasses on the next time we take photos for the website lol.

The gp was saying around 200 nails an hour, not 2k an hour. Your labor cost is an order of magnitude too low.

I can't find the price of nails in roman times, but 300 years ago it was around a buck a nail.

https://www.nber.org/digest/202203/tracking-price-nails-1695

The labor for this many nails is intense. They had to first smelt the iron, cast the pigs, "puddle" the cast iron to remove carbon and make wrought iron, hammer the wrought into rod, and THEN they could start making the nails.

800,000 nails × 3 minutes = 2.4 million minutes = 40,000 hours = 20 Years of labor

I randomly found an anvil on sale for cheap and now our family has the blacksmithing bug. One of our favorite things to do is take a couple anvils and a small forge down to the park and let the kids smash red hot nails into "mini-swords". We have also started selling the swords on his lemonade cart, People actually buy them!

You would think this would be a dangerous activity but it turns out to be petty tame. About 1/20 kids burns a finger, and when they finish yelling they inevitably tough up and get back to work because they are having so much fun.

So anyway, scrounge up plumbing torch and some nails and let the kids make "mini-swords." You can use a sledge hammer or any big chunk of metal as your anvil.

If you want to see what the "swords" look like my kid has pictures on his site: https://lemonsword.com/

If agents of the state expend most of their of their energy fighting against each other, they will have little time left to spend on attacking the people.

Therefore in a two party rule, libertarians should do what they can to pit one arm of the government against the other. Sometimes this will mean voting D, and sometimes R, whichever better disrupts single party rule.

The hardest thing for me to get used to is that unlike cars, sailboats do not have brakes! Even the "throttle" is under your control only indirectly. Out in the ocean with nothing to hit this is not much of an issue, anyone can do it.

Close to other boats and rocks and other hazards it takes some practice. Pros can to sail into the harbor, luff up and grab the buoy without touching the engine.

Having no brakes really teaches you to plan ahead.

I put my name on this opt out list and it stopped about 2/3 of the junkmail. It costs $6 for 10 years. I think it was worth it.

https://www.dmachoice.org/register.php

Just tape a piece of paper to the door that says "IN MEETING". On my kids this is about 75% effective.

That said, other people's kids busting is my favorite part of zoom meetings.

So you are working on a way to generate toolpath gcode from python? I need that.

I have a python workflow for my laser cutter, I can make a drawing with drawsvg and then cut it with lightburn.

I have used build123d to make 3d models in python but not yet found a way to generate toolpaths for my milling machine.

Simulated annealing works great for placing map labels. Lets say you have to label POI with flags, you do not want the flags to overlap and you can only place the labels NSEW of the POI.

1. Plop the labels down in random* directions.

2. Calculate the total overlap.

3. Randomly* move 10% of the labels.

4. Calculate the total overlap again, If the overlap is improved, keep your changes, If things got worse, then backtrack.

5. Sometimes you randomly keep changes that make things worse, this is the annealing part. This is how you escape local minima.

* The randomness does not have to be 100%, you can try smartly avoiding nearest neighbors 2/3 of the time and then do a random move 1/3 of the time. If you always try and be smart you will tend get trapped in a local minima.

99% of the time our reactions to stimuli are automatic. This is why we practice mediation sitting still on a hard floor. It is not comfortable, with your legs crossed, your knees hurt, your butt hurts, it makes you feel you want to move, some one is sniffling, a baby is crying somewhere, it MAKES YOU FEEL annoyed,

It is possible to overcome the "MAKES YOU FEEL" part of this. External stimulus will always be there, but with some training, the only thing that "Makes you feel" will be you. You notice the pain in your knees, but it flows over you as water flows past the stone in the river.

This is easy to say but not easy to do. It takes quite a few hours of deliberate practice. Some people never get there. But, I think it is worth a try. Find a mediation class. Go every week.

A few historical examples involving the us government: MK-Ultra, COINTELPRO, Tuskegee Syphilis Study, NSA Mass Surveillance (Snowden Leak), Gulf of Tonkin Incident, Iran-Contra Affair.

If I list the most recent ones it will just start a flame war.

Densified wood in the form of deck boards is somewhat commercially available now. I recall walking on them at a maritime museum on the east coast somewhere.(Chesapeake Bay?) Very nice compared to traditional dock planks which tend to warp and cause constant tripping hazards. They also do not become slippery when wet like plastic deck boards.

https://us.kebony.com/modified-wood-technology/the-process/

You can also get densified wood used to make spacer blocks in electrical transformers. This stuff is strong enough to make bolts out of.

https://www.roechling.com/us/industrial/products/composites/...

Someone was selling a densified wood teak substitute for use on boat decks, but I can't find them on google today. The top teak substitute search results all seem to be made of plastic now.

Is the gold in LEDs just in the bond wires?

My mom had a Heat Pump water heater at her house and I was always having to go and fix it or clean the filter. It would start beeping loudly in the middle of the night when it wanted attention. The hot water was frequently not very hot.

Hopefully the new heat pump water heaters are better. The advantage of resistance heating is simplicity and cost, with no moving parts. Solar panels are so cheap now they make it hard to justify the expense of the heat pump, assuming you have room to mount the panels.

If you want to DIY a solar PV water heater I made a whole website about it with instructions and a simulator to estimate what your payback period could be.

https://www.pvh2o.com/

I installed PV solar hot water at my house, works great. Makes about $2 a day worth of power.

Hopefully they invent some kind of sticky gripper instead of just smashing all the windows like Doctor Octopus.

This article must be written in very simple French, because I could read most of it despite not knowing French.

One thing I discovered raising chicks is that as long as the chicks have a hot area and a cold area they can move about find a comfortable temperature. So you don't really have to worry about cooking the chicks by not having the heat lamp set up just right.

Cats love warmth so much though, I have seen (and smelled) cats singe their fur by laying too close to the fireplace. So maybe a cat is more at risk of cooking if the heater sticks on.

Anyways cool project. The concept of fault tolerant automated systems, or even ones that can self-heal is very appealing.

Related, does anyone know of an app that can read gauges from an image and log the number to influx? I have a solar power meter in my crawlspace, it is inconvenient to go down there. I want to point an old phone at it and log it so I can check it easily. The gauge is digital and looks like this:

https://www.pvh2o.com/solarShed/firstPower.jpg

The "national pollution park" is actually a pretty good idea. Currently we outsource that to China.

I witnessed the dystopian future where humans are slaves to machines at my favorite local Mexican restaurant. It was about an hour before close. The kids and I were the only customers there. Before we ordered our food we had to wait for the staff to explain to a very annoyed door dasher that the meal they were here for had already been picked up by someone else. As we ate dinner over the next half hour, a new door dasher would arrive every few minutes in an attempt to pick up that same already-picked-up order.

Eventually eight people had been sent by the machines to pick up the same order!

So no, robots are not required to enslave humans and cause them misery, an app will suffice.

I recently watched "Karate Kid" with my 8 year old son. I was trying to explain that the reason it looked so good because it was shot on film instead of digital. And we still call making movies "Filming" even though the film is long gone.

Explaining film to a kid that only knows digital cameras was not so easy. "You edit it by cutting long strips apart and taping it back together." "You have to go into a dark room and wash the film in chemical baths." Sounds like some sort of magic ritual.

Now I am wondering if I just think the look of film is better because that is what I watched when I was a kid. Maybe todays kids will think digital looks better.

If you have an old calculator and you find the buttons are sticking, you can sometimes fix it with a bath in isopropanol. I have revived 2 old HPs this way.

1. take out batteries

2. fill a shallow container with IPA (70% or 90% is ok)

3. immerse buttons, but try and keep the display out of the IPA as much as possible (if liquid gets in the display it takes forever to dry and can leave a ring)

4. work the buttons until you feel improvement, IPA will turn brown

5. let dry for a few days before you put batteries back in.

You are right, "guard labor" is what is traditionally called. I think I got "Goon" in my head from reading that "Bullshit Jobs" book.

Economists call this sort of labor "goon work". This include PR specialists, lawyers, police, private security, alarm system salesmen, etc.

Goon work produces nothing, so it is a net drag on the economy. The % of goon jobs increases as wealth inequality increases.

Some amount of goon work may be required due to bad actors stealing stuff, hard to tell what the optimal number is.

Rent seeking is a net drag on the economy as well and goons enable rent seeking.

Anki’s Cozmo Robot was the best engineered "Pet" robot I have yet seen. I had to take one apart to replace the battery and it is an engineering masterpiece. The behaviors are pretty good also. It is about the size you are talking about but more forklift shaped then humanoid. The robot itself was pretty dumb and most of the "brains" ran on your phone via the app.

Anki went broke after the came out with a smarter successor to Cosmo. I think a biped that small would be a real challenge to make at a price point the market will accept.

Digital Dream labs bought Anki's IP and tooling and now sell Cosmo's for $400.

If you are serious about this, get yourself a few used cozmos from eBay and try to hook an LLM to the python API.

That glove box came out real nice, what a good idea. I inhaled too much dust as a young man and eventually became sensitive to it. Now I have to wear a respirator all the time. It is smart to contain the dust in your appt since you spend so much time breathing the air there.