andmaybegayer

[andmaybegayer]

now more than ever there was a sewer man

[andmaybegayer]

Why is there paper on a peanut butter cup. I bit straight through that thing.

[andmaybegayer]

Mr j my cat has a crush on you and he is a boy

That's how things are these days

[andmaybegayer]

usamerican psycho

[andmaybegayer]

I don't post much personal stuff here, but I'm proud of the work I've done for howmanycigarettes, so I want to recommend that people check it out.

[andmaybegayer]

Melissotarsus workers never leave the nest to forage outside, for two important reasons. For one, they have a strongly reduced sting, which makes them highly vulnerable to attacks by other ants. In fact, minutes after Leeanne had opened their nest it was invaded by Crematogaster and Pheidole ants, which quickly wiped out all workers and larvae present in the exposed corridors. But even more importantly the ants could not forage outside their narrow corridors even if the world outside was safe and friendly, for the simple fact that they cannot walk. Yes, these six-legged insects are incapable of walking or even standing on flat surfaces outside the narrow confines of their nest. Inside the narrow wood corridors they move in a way reminiscent of a rock climber squeezing between two vertical walls by pressing the back and knees against the wall (a move known as stemming). Their first and third pair of legs points down, like in all other insects, but the second pair of legs is usually held up, with the feet pressing against the ceiling. I placed a few individuals on the flat surface of my portable photo studio, and they immediately fell on their back and flailed their legs helplessly.

Since these insects cannot leave their nest inside the tree, they are forced to obtain all their food there. They do so by raising scale insects, mostly of the family Diaspididae. Symbiotic relationships between ants and scale insects are not uncommon – many ant species tend and protect them in exchange for honeydew produced by these floem-feeding insects. Melissotarsus also collect honeydew from some species of scale insects and groom them constantly, removing wax from the insects’ bodies and preventing the formation of the protective shield that scale insects are typically covered with. But the bulk of their food comes not from the sugary water exuded by the scales (in fact, most of the species they raise don’t produce honeydew), but rather from slaughtering the scale insects for meat.

[andmaybegayer]

L

[andmaybegayer]

The other side: Buttercup Festival 3-312

Latest on Patreon Jan 18th: New illustration!

[andmaybegayer]

I designed it cartesianly because I was just vibing, but by making that cut you get a flat surface to lay it on that means all your tubes print in the same orientation in all the ways that matter. This a) means that you don't have any severe overhangs like you'd have if you printed some holes horizontally, these are all easy 45° overhangs, and b) you get equal material properties on all holes. 3D prints tend to fail between layers, the plastic just isn't as fully fused along the y-axis of a print.

3D printing is stupid because it means I can design a part like this and it's not entirely unreasonable.

Probably not going to go with this design but seeing that slice up have such good printability is fun.

[andmaybegayer]

Last Monday of the Week 2025-01-20

Getting the juices flowing, wait, no, not that way

Listening: Atarashii Gakko! is a thrash rock girl group who do these incredibly convoluted and elaborate music videos, I think I saw Pineapple Kryptonite ages ago and forgot to look into them. Their new thing is Tokyo Calling which is a great high-energy song. Terrifically catchy.

Reading: Finished The Spear Cuts Through Water. I love some gay boys who only know how to express their love through punching.

Towards the end the focus of the story starts to slip in a way that works really well with the framing device of the Inverted Theater in which the whole story takes place, as the story slowly moves from being about the protagonists to being about the world they leave behind.

At times I found that the book slowed way, way down, and at other times it moves you through pages at a breakneck speed. The slow sections aren't bad but they could be a little frustrating.

This is very good at selling you the image of the Whole World Around You, between the constant snippets of external thought interjecting onto your story, and the casual way the story moves up and down layers of narrative, you get a very expansive and layered look at the world. Closing out the book by going into the acknowledgements with no warning was incredibly jarring and is such a cool trick to pull off this well.

Watching: Watched John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum while crashed on the couch trying to convince my slightly sick partner to eat more.

That's John Wick alright. Increasingly he doesn't have to say anything because we all know the deal. It's hard to get this kind of contextless context on mainstream media so it's cool that they can do it here.

As always: my conception of the people of this world is that they're the Faeries, they are the Seelie and Unseelie court, their world is layered on top of ours but basically never interacts except in extremis. There's a tiny bit of bleed through from normal organized crime but that's about it, otherwise they're simply too bizzare, their motivations too foreign. They clearly don't care about like. Real Money that much, they have their own currency that buys you seemingly Anything You Want, from the right guy.

Also watched American Psycho again after a long time. I forgot how much fun this movie is, he's so awful. The man has zero rizz!

Playing: I got my hands on a Lenovo Legion Go at a steep discount, so kicking the tyres on that. Mostly so far I watched my partner play through a few levels of Portal for the first time, which is fun! Truly one of the great games to watch someone play for the first time, even if they constantly badger you for hints.

It's a fascinating little device, shockingly powerful all things considered, I was extremely surprised despite knowing that it's basically a 1650 strapped to a lightweight performance AMD laptop chip. You can just run (low and change) Forza Horizon 5 on this!

I'm not used to controllers in 3D so I will probably stick to platformers and 2D RPG's and visual novels on this for the most part but it'll if nothing else serve as a platform I can plug a mouse and keyboard into and use as a spare PC if I want to do local multiplayer stuff at home. I want to work on a rig to make it an HTPC/gaming console type deal too.

Currently running Windows so I can get a feel for the expectations but it will get Bazzite'd at some point.

Making: Sketches and modelling to figure out some furniture. I found out that my hardware place does online cut-to-order plywood which is a huge boon for my project brain. I can cut wood at the makerspace in town and I still might, but you have to check what they have on hanger or order in some plywood which can get expensive fast once you add in saw time.

Trying to design a folding coffee table that turns into a side table when I'm not using it. I hate coffee tables but there are times when you need one. Current plan is oscillating between all wood or finally breaking down and buying a bunch of carbon fibre tubes to make something stupidly complicated.

This is pushing against not so much my skill level as much as my faff limit. Like. There was the option of doing this in brazed aluminium. But ideally I can do as much of this as possible at the free library makerspace and I don't want to deal with safely doing brazing at a library makerspace.

I also because I have brain worms want this to take down relatively small, because at all times I am thinking about Just Walking Out. Carbon tubes mean I can make it mostly slot and bolt together. Brass was an option but it's so expensive, and while aluminium tubes are an obvious choice I think they are simply piss ugly. I would genuinely do painted PVC first tbh.

Tools and Equipment: Caddy is a really neat project

I've used nginx for HTTP/S and CGI for many years but much of the Weague infrastructure runs on Caddy for simplicity. It's an HTTPS server with a very easy to use configuration structure, fully automatic HTTPS, that works even on local networks, and with a really solid plugin system for CGI. It is less performant than nginx but most of the time nginx is simply not your bottleneck. If you want your project to Just Work, whether that's static site hosting or a more complex application, Caddy is easy to deploy and low maintenance. No more hoping you get cron emails when your cert update fails!

Next time I run into an issue with my personal site infra that requires fixing by editing nginx.conf I'm probably just going to migrate to Caddy.

[andmaybegayer]

3D printing is stupid because it means I can design a part like this and it's not entirely unreasonable.

Probably not going to go with this design but seeing that slice up have such good printability is fun.

[andmaybegayer]

and you better believe I'm stirring occasionally

[andmaybegayer]

I'm thinking of getting one of those robot vacuums, but don't know how to start picking the right one. Do you have opinions on the matter? Do you like yours, and if so, what model is it?

I have a Xiaomi S10 EU, which is a midrange model that I think is now discontinued in favour of the S20? Xiaomi does a pretty good job with their designs, my family have various Xiaomi models that all work fine. Roborock is another brand I've heard good things about, and they're an offshoot of Xiaomi and seem to be where a lot of design innovation is so presumably that's a good sign. I assume iRobot is still making Roombas but I've never used a Roomba.

(The craziest new stuff from Roborock includes a robot arm for picking up and moving small objects out of the way? Crazy, you can now teach stabby to thrust!)

A few notes

1) They work best if you can keep your floor clear and generally free of small objects, and obviously don't navigate stairs and steps well. My apartment has very little stuff on the floor, and all my cables and wires are tucked into corners and along skirtings. If your wife has filled your house with chintz you may have a hard time getting a robot around on the floor.

Robovacs love to eat bag straps and shoelaces and charging cords, so if you tend to have those laying around on the floor and don't have the wherewithal to clear them up, you'll probably spend a lot of time untangling things from the brush.

2) They can handle most area rugs, but not all, e.g. it handles my thin cotton living room rug with short tassels without an issue but I have to move my thick kitchen floor mat out of the way or it'll eat the longer, thicker tassels. You can mark areas as no-vacuum zones if this isn't your bag.

3) Definitely spring for one with at least LiDAR, which you can see by the little stick-up lighthouse module on the top that houses the LiDAR module. Without LiDAR the robot has to just bump around semi-randomly to navigate, which is slow and inaccurate. It can build a map but the map is very poor and it barely knows where it is.

With LiDAR it knows exactly where it is, because it knows where it isn't. The very newest and most expensive bots do away with rotary LiDAR and just use forward looking cameras and 3D depth sensors to do VSLAM but if you're going for that price range from a big manufacturer you'll probably be fine. Most companies list their sensors on their site, but they often use weird names so it can be hard to tell.

(see above, with and without a LiDAR tower. Some very new models can retract the LiDAR tower to go under low furniture.)

4) You can cover a lot of house without needing the self-emptying base stations even if you run it regularly, I'd say probably around 200m² in a fairly ordinary dust environment. In my 50m² apartment I run it at least every weekday and empty out the integrated dust container once a week and that's usually fine, and I don't have any particular air filtration running, but I do keep the windows mostly closed when I can.

5) Speaking of maintenance, I don't use the mop feature on mine but it does keep your floors cleaner while requiring more attention to be paid to water levels. I'm actually going to try using mine more now and see how that goes. This is one thing where I think the stations might make sense even for a pretty small apartment. My brother uses the mop feature on his all the time and he likes it.

6) General maintenance: not that much! It'll buzz you on your phone when it thinks a component has hit end of life but so far I don't think anyone is using DRM to force you to use first-party parts or making you throw away things that are working, you can just manually reset the timers, although so far when the warnings do come up I tend to agree that it's time to replace a part.

You have to empty out the dust and change the water, and if it eats something you might spend a few minutes detangling the rotating brushes. The brushes will get knotted with hair and need cleaning every couple weeks to months depending on how much hair and how long it is, but most models come with a little knife tool for cutting the hair. Never tried the models that advertise that they don't get tangled.

7) Bonus nerd shit you probably shouldn't do. If you really do not want your Robovac connecting to the cloud, there's some work on developing self-hosted management servers that you can point a rooted robot at, and of course you can root your vacuum cleaner, because it's just an embedded Linux box on wheels. The open source management server software is called Valetudo.

[andmaybegayer]

Y'know what, women..... you're alright.

This morning, I got up and went to shovel snow, and I immediately had such bad abdominal cramps that I threw up.

But before I threw up, I was sitting in the bathroom for a while whining like a dog from the pain and trying to NOT throw up. And I thought: This is what women must feel like, when they get cramps.

And in my pain induced hallucination, I saw the Big 4 of Womanhood before me: Joan of Arc. Rosa Parks. Cleopatra. And a Dog Girl.

This is how our conversation went:

Joan of Arc, Rosa Parks, and Cleopatra: "Now you know what we feel like."

Me: "This sucks."

Joan of Arc, Rosa Parks, and Cleopatra: "Yeah."

Me: "This blows super hard."

Dog Girl: "Yubi yubi!"

So y'know what women, maybe you're not so bad after all..

(Does a cool little upward nod at you like the kind guys usually do at each other)

Maybe we can overcome our differences.

And I will let you be my ally.

[andmaybegayer]

Talking to my aunt about USPol and realised that the list of times a completely non-malicious app has leaked a ton of US military secrets is extremely long. There's a strava military base thing, the Anki training decks with nuclear secrets, there's the Facebook groups for military bases. I mean. All of War Thunder.

That's to say nothing of intentional manipulation of domestic data, like that research group who used anonymised phone location data to identify SEC investigators and track their location so they could short companies that were under investigation.

[andmaybegayer]

He had to go in for repairs so I have to retrain him about the whole Shadow Realm situation. Otherwise who knows what might happen.

I have one of those robot vacuums but there's a mirror in the house low enough to the ground that the lidar scanner can see a nonexistent room in the reflection so on the navigation map it's generated I have a room that doesn't exist that I have to forbid the vacuum from entering.

[andmaybegayer]

wh40k voice: brother your calves

can't see anyone stumble on the tram or whatever anymore without thinking "engage your calves brother"