🤪 thanks to the cutting oil still on the stone, I can't tell much difference between the 50k grit polished facets (the lower big ones) versus the 8k prepolished smaller facets above

Got up to 8k prepolish over the weekend. First time trying to do an oval stone and am happy I got the facets to line up without too much fuss. Next is to polish on 50k grit and then somehow cut the girdle... Not sure how to do that well yet

Doing glue surgery to fix the Swarovski bear that the kid got as a gift a few years ago and inevitably managed to break

booo I wanted to get a second belomo 10x loupe and thanks to the tariffs they don't even ship to the US anymore

A friend asked me some questions about gems and that got me off my butt to unpack all my cutting gear. This time learning to cut an oval stone which is tricky because I have to place the side facets by eye, not absolute reference like a round. This is the first prepolish facet I had (8k grit)

... Damn it, I thought I had a 1/2 digital torque adapter to go with the new breaker bar I got for doing wheels but no, apparently I have a 3/8s one for doing spark plugs.. time to get another one 🫠

gyah make the shitty "contract position at THE BIGGEST SOCIAL NETWORK" (I wonder who could that be???🙄) spam stop linkedin....

10/10, no notes

ok the one tool I need to find in my boxes is a pair of parallel pliers... after that Ithink I have everything located

yay, digging around my project boxes, I found my calibrated usb-c mic so I can use my phone as an SPL meter again! also found my clearly bootleg "mitutoyo" dial test indicator

Damnit there's a Wera screwdriver advent calendar?!? www.kctool.com/wera-136610-... I need to pretend I didn't see this so that I don't impulse buy a set

my barbaric american 15oz mug cup that I use all the time is apparently juuuuuuust barely able to put a stroopwafel on top without it falling into my tea. seriously, there's maybe 1-2mm of clearance on both sides

O.o whut, there's going to be a new lyrical nanoha anime series for 2026? @cyanoacry.bsky.social

Yikes, Japanese community for Mozilla disbands because an AI bot has been running all over the kb articles with slop MT translations, ignoring guidelines, and other things

Ok I really want to know where did i pack my calibrated usb-c mic that I was using as an spl meter ... Of all my weirdo specialized tools, that's the one that disappeared off into a box somewhere

one thing i find interesting about our cat is watching it jump onto things... it's decently good at judging how much force to use so it always looks like it sorta hovers up onto the landing spot despite it being a 11lb cat

wow, for once nyc might have a non-shit mayor?

I've ben delaying getting jack stands and stuff because I was too lazy to do certain kinds of car maintenance... and whelp, car developed a busted tire (on literally 3 day old tires!) and now I have a full set of jack stands and stuff on order =_=

This week on Counting Stuff, using a cheap USB dongle and antenna to catch ads-b signals from airplanes going by and then decide and analyze the data #dataBS www.counting-stuff.com/counting-the...

This week on Counting Stuff, using a cheap USB dongle and antenna to catch ads-b signals from airplanes going by and then decide and analyze the data #dataBS www.counting-stuff.com/counting-the...

ugh ok, spent the morning (yay "funemployment") trying to get my manga/light novels off of amazon-jp now that they've locked down a bunch of drm loopholes... luckily i had an old 7gen kindle on the bright side I managed to get kobo-jp's store to work so gonna buy from there now

Me: ??? why is my C: almost full? Ithere's nothing installed on there outside of windows and a few other small things ... Computer: remember how I crashed? and there's a memory dump? and how you have *128 GB OF RAM*??? Me: ooooh

Like... Assuming I reuse all my other parts .. Ryzen 7 9800x3d is like 450ish? X870e mobo is 250? And ddr5 ram... Is like 300-500 for just 64gb?!?!?!

Gyah... If I upgrade the CPU and mobo to a modern AM5 setup the fucking ram prices are ridiculous..

ugh, given the weird shitty BIOS/hyper-v/whatever incompatibility going on and constantly crashing this system intermittently... I think i'm gonna have to just give up and rebuild a fresh system... at least a fresh mobo/cpu/ram/nvme... I might reuse the RTX3070

Finally upgraded my copy of pianoteq7 to piamoteq9 and maybe it's just volume levels but it does sound surprisingly better

Oh yeah, a few nights ago I got it in my head to make bootleg tonkatsu. Using pork shoulder because I dislike pork loin. And a cornstarch base batter instead of egg. Then later I went and made a five spice powder, soy sauce, garlic powder batter

dear gods, I left my RTL-SDR on my computer listening to ADS-B for a few days and forgot about it.. then the computer crashed hard for BIOS issues and I forgot where the file was... turns out I collected 1GB!! of data in about 2-3 days

Lol out cat is glued to the electric blanket

Hrm my 20+yo timberland boots (that I only rarely wore when I was younger and now use only for dirty work duty) has decided to lose its sole

I have "installed" the heating pad today... inside my fleece, right on top of my stomach. I can't tell if this is more, or less, awesome than having the pad on my lap

oh noes! The cost of running my newsletter is going UP! (we're fine, we're going from spending ~$3 per newsletter send to $6)

I give up tryin gto find the heating pad we have packed away somewhere =\ and bought a new one to use from my chair

... just messing with the SDR tuner and I'm not even kidding this station happened to be playing Never Gonna Give You Up as I went by...

yay, I found my RTL-SDR dongle and random old tv antenna. guess I can spend a bit of spare time seeing if I can find any interesting radio sources nearby

one thing i wish mom warned me about 30odd years ago is how much blood you have to deal with when you're the primary laundry do-er in the house and have kids and stuff =\

Funny what I packed to keep from the old house... A giant 100 spindle of old writeable cd? Or DVD? Either way the ink is bad and useless but the reason I keep them is because they make very convenient shims in certain situations

I should also go onto the leatherctaft materials box in the basement and see if I have something to make a wallet out of... Mine is a bit worn

At this point I'm just wondering if it would be easier to just frickin buy some deerskin and attempt to sew together my own set of gloves =\ and that's knowing gloves are a huge challenge to make

Every year it gets cold and every year I start browsing for gloves to wear around at home but can never quite find the perfect thing... Like some kinda fingerless lined insulated leather thing would be perfect

Oh no... The 6yo asked "what does dial 911 mean?" And I had to stop myself from explaining how ancient phones used to have a round dial-like rotary interface and ....

Ok, had my important meetings for the day, time for some silly fun employment shenanigans for lunch. Ever wonder how those Japanese rice balls with the special wrapper to keep the seaweed dry until serving work? (1/

do I NEED a book about all the kinds of seaweed in the world? Or ants? Or fungi? NO BUT THAT IS NOT THE POINT THE CART CALLS FOR THEM

ugh this is why i can't walk into bookstores... I've uh, filled my cart with $300 of rando books only because they're on sale

Took about 1 week after getting a new phone to drop it and crack the tempered glass screen protector I put on it.

........ ok, I don't normally do coding tests stuff since I don't normally try for swe-like eng positions, but hilariously the most stressful part was getting the damned functions to read input and output correctly from stdin? there was one where I had to force read the whole buffer =P

This week on Counting Stuff, job hunting stress means I sneak off to read about... food energy and calories!? in the middle of the night. It's a pretty wild mess of "things that are really hard to measure" #dataBS www.counting-stuff.com/people-who-d...

Exciting news, wife got a laminator for a project and now I'm trying to come up with uses for it

i literally don't have the space for one, but i'm again idly looking at the small sherline lathe and mill machines and wondering how many newsleters I'd have to write to buy a set 🙃

in cleaning up a lot of boxes today... I learned I have a LOT of hdmi cables of various lengths... from different eras and versions...