Finished installing a 3.5" lift on my truck - it goes in for an alignment Tuesday, and then it’ll be ready to drive!

This has freed me to start working on my car again - I had pulled the transmission to replace the clutch, upgrade the synchros, and install a limited-slip front differential. That’s going back in, and I also installed upgraded coilovers. Probably have at least a few more weekends of work there to get the car back on the road, but I’m super excited to have two working vehicles on the horizon. The car has been down since around Christmas.

Been on a break for a bit, but before that we got a Tektronix 535A oscilloscope from the 1950s-60s up and running (with the exception of a gain issue with the vertical amplifier, haven’t quite figured out the cause yet), and did some work on reverse-engineering and emulating the analog filters of the MOS 8580 SID on an FPGA (still heavily WIP, haven’t gotten around to a rewrite yet so it’s still really jank, college is a bitch).

Red over 12 books this year. The goal was 12 by the END of the year.

I’ve rad maybe 5 in the previous decade. Feels good man.

I stopped using smartphone in the bedroom and started reading much more as the result.

I finally got a widget I modeled in OpenSCAD to print correctly in my resin printer. The shape is such that supports were really challenging.

It’s interesting to me because I have graduated from the ‘tchotchkes’ phase of printing into the realm of making functional parts that further my other projects.

Trying to get Cthulu’s tentacle-beard to print correctly was a good exercise, but designing and printing a useful part feels like a real step up.

Started grafting and propagating fruit trees of all types. Now have fresh fruit from Memorial day until Thanksgiving, and gave dozens of trees away. It is is way easier, and way cheaper to do than you would think. Started out with flagging tape, a utility knife, (although a cheap pocket knife would work) and some waterproof wood glue. Recently added some Parafilm for bud grafting. This is the Youtube video that got me started.

A friend of mine has what has been referred to as DID and mentioned a lot of people saying they have the condition in order to be trendy. I documented an instance where I unintentionally went full Solomon on one such individual. I asked what something was, that thing happening to have an element of randomization to it. This stranger diagnosed with DID (different person from my friend) answered. Some time later it was asked again, with what appeared to be the same thing. The stranger recognized it too much rather than assuming something was different, and this caused some eyebrows to be raised, and follow-ups happened and a trend slowly died.

Removed by mod

It’s been two and a half months, but I’m almost done creating a board game from scratch. It’s like Risk, but Cat themed, and featuring a massive deck of cards.

Next up, gotta start work on the prototype before I can invite some people over to play and hopefully learn if this game actually works as a concept, needs some rule tweaks, or is utterly confusing and broken.

I misread this as “the least interesting thing” and was going to say I successfully woke up today, but actually interesting? Hmm. Cooked some amaranth leaves yesterday, from my garden. The whole plant is edible, leaves are sort of spinach or chard flavor. It’s an ancient cultivated plant, the bees love the purple flowers it has right now and the seeds can be eaten as grain, people bake with it.

I managed to “preheat” my oven for 2 1/2 hours… That’s kind of interesting.

“Ah yes the ribs should be done by now!” quickly turned into “why do I have decayed dog shit where my brain should be?”

So I guess a close second interesting thing I accomplished is surviving not having a functioning brain lol

I started painting again. I’m finishing up a portrait of Macho Man Randy Savage and another portrait (of my mom) is in progress.

You can view them here.

I got 2 bags of sparkly, brightly-colored art batts (wool, silk, and angelina) at a fiber festival at the beginning of June, and I just finished spinning all of them today (it doesn’t take months to do, but I cut my finger in mid-June and had to take a break from fiber arts for a while). Now the singles need to rest, then I can ply them, then they’ll be yarn! And then I can knit something very happy with them and maybe have it done in time for winter.

We spent the whole day cleaning my elderly mom’s plant-filled patio. Pressure-washed, repotted, and pruned everything. Even got the little cherub fountain working.

I’m actually using Emacs and messing with both the C++ and JSON from the FOSS game Cataclysm DDA while compiling and hacking around. I’m also working on integrating AI with llama.cpp into Emacs. I’ve never been able to break into the whole IDE space effectively. I can easily mess with VSC and other easy stalkerware options, but when I actually watch my internet logs, I refuse to accept that kind of traffic and connections as normal.