For the first time in my life, I find myself writting in my head a list of goals I want to achieve next year. Some are mundane, some are harder to achieve. I thought about sharing that list here.
Please consider sharing yours as well. Consider it like sharing ideas, something to push others in to thinking about small things they can do as well just because they can.
Now, without further ado:
The List
- survive
A reminder from j4k3. Should always be a priority.
- renew my entire fleet of hand tools and, if money allows it, some power tools
I have lot of maintenance chores, renovations and improvements to do around the house and my current tool stock is essentially shot, so...
- start making furniture for my house
Have you seen the price furniture goes for these days? I have a carpentry shop nearby willing to look at my doodles and work out the details with me and make the rough cutting of the big pieces that require precision tools for it. I'll have to take care of the rest.
- put together a cook book with my partner
This just came to me/us the other day.
Throughout this year, we shared with a good number of people food from our table. We are not foodies nor trained chefs, we just enjoy having good, tasty, healthy food. Many people told us they could never make what we cook daily and a few even told us we should open a place of our own. Because we're not that insane yet, the book will do.
No publishing intention: it will be about putting together a collection of recipes anyone can follow and share it. All inclusive.
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paint the freaking walls
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finish that computer tech course
I've been playing with computers for twenty+ years. Now I want my know-how recognized. And on this I have money tied and a deadline!
- write my own first book (romance, with raunchy bits)
Or should I say just put it together? I write my fantasies basically since I was taught to put letters together to form words. My biggest flaw is that I'm my worst critic and I drop draft after draft. Well... it needs to end.
- work with my dogs
I have two, very over reactive dogs. Of the big kind, that are constantly fighting each other for no reason. I need to do something to counter this.
- get back on working on my plot of land
That place is a fire hazard and I want to start growing my own food again.
- read more books
As an added incentive to culture and reading habits: support an online ebook repository, download and keep offline copies of as many books you can manage. Culture is the worst enemy of bigotry and ignorance.
survive
try to force myself back into a daily physical therapy routine that seems nearly impossible for me now
do my best to partition off my circumstantial depression from the existential fear of homelessness with my physical disability against the courage to end it on my terms
try living on solar time by building an ESP-32 clock that tracks the local solar time instead of time zones and cultural habits
try plating copper through holes and do a ridiculous multilayer home made PCB with 6 or more layers
finish my toolbox drawer lighting with some integrated 3d printed wire connectors
read some Arthur C. Clark
figure out netboot and run a server I can spin up from my phone with a small LLM as a proof of concept
replicate Ben Eater's 6502 project with another processor, probably the Z80 or 6809
try to figure out a way to flash a generic Rockchip based Android tablet that has a corrupt Linux kernel and bootloader
I have to add a few of those to my own list.
Plating through holes is going to be a fun project. There are kits for doing that kind of thing, but you will pay a premium to get everything in one box. The last time I researched it, some conductive ink/paint/glue and an simple electroplating setup was going to be the best option. (The low resistance conductive ink at the time was super expensive, and I was super broke, so I had to ditch the project ) For diy, copper rivets seem like the next best option, TBH.
Take lots of pictures of your wins and failures in your multilayer board project. I have no clue how you are going to be able to press the layers together while keeping them aligned, so I am super curious how that will go.
Those projects are super fun, but are a time suck because they tend to have quite a few iterations before they are usable. Sigh. Work and kids basically terminated those kinds of projects for me.
I have some stuff already, I just need to be willing to hurt enough to hopefully finish such a physical project. I use brass rivets a lot too.
I'm curious about trying to use some cheap enamel silver paint with a little bit of carbon black added. Most people only use soot black in a paint, but all silver paints are aluminum with chrome type paints having the smallest particle size. I may try to get some silver automotive paint out of storage if that doesn't do the trick. The color coat of automotive paint is much thinner than other types and contains a higher density of aluminum particles that are designed to form a more unified consistency. In practice the passes are sprayed with a similar wetness so that the solvent evaporates and leaves the particles in a consistent orientation. Getting this wrong leaves stripes or streaks where light reflects off of the particle facets inconsistently. The UV protection, durability, and thickness of the finish is from the 2k clear coat only. I've never tested if an automotive color coat is conductive, but if it is not, I bet adding a bit of amorphous carbon will be.
The sandwich is just a fiberglass layup. It would probably be better to use a prepreg inner with an autoclave. I already have very thin double sided copper clad and thin blanks of FR4. I'll just be roughing up the FR4 for mechanical tooth and using a common fiberglass epoxy like a glue.
I already have a small modular 3d printed tool that uses heavy bolts and nuts around the periphery to bend sheet metal prototypes like a deep drawl die press. I'll likely just use that with a printed jig for alignment and the required pressures.
The bigger challenge is what I might want to make and the programming to justify the task.
Why would you live on solar time
The timing of noon is primarily what centers the day and the distribution of daylight hours. I'm in social isolation from physical disability. So standardized time becomes more of a psychological burden than a concept that hold value. Standard time comes with many cultural expectations that mostly come from within, but are born from life experience.
I hypothesize that by rejecting standard time in favor of solar time, I create a framework of logic that enables me to reject all the cultural expectations and associated baggage. I'm no longer "waking up early" or "going to bed late". My psychology of what is late or early is no longer dictated by the standardization of time. I am not a train station or a stock exchange. I am a human of Earth, and my natural circadian existence is that of a diurnal animal in obeisance to the stellar powerhouse driving life on this planet. My noon is the center of my day and to say otherwise is heretical to life itself.
That's not to say standard time has no uses or value. I am of the belief that I should own myself by taking complete ownership of my day and relegate the subjugation of standard time to nothing more than a tool I access when I choose instead of a jurisdiction I live within.
Sounds potentially freeing but what do you do about work or making plans with others?
I would coordinate with their preferred time. I don't eat meals or go anywhere except to the doctor every 3 months. I eat when I'm hungry, not when I'm told or fed like a farm animal. I mostly struggle with the psychology that staying up late is an act of rebellious freedom. As silly as it seems, I struggle to overcome that in practice. Yet I've worked every imaginable shift including 7/12's at night for months at a time in the past. I've raced bicycles when my start time for my category is just before sunrise. I can absolutely control my timing of my day, but I can't defeat the psychology that I'm subjugating myself in some way when I do so. I'm not naturally a morning person. So why should I let standard time dictate when morning time is or is not.
I went from 350lbs to 190lbs because I took control over my diet and the psychology of meals and arbitrary food consumption that I struggled with growing up. I'm willing to bet that time holds a similar subtly unhealthy twist on daily psychology. That is an internal perspective that has little relevance to interactions with anyone that may or may not have a similar self awareness.
That’s some insane weight loss! How’d you do it? Very interesting philosophy on this too
Rode a bicycle everywhere. I even spent a year doing 33 miles each way to work. Back then I could ride a hundred and still function for the rest of the day. I was riding at least 400 miles per week.
I started just trying to ride as cheap transit. Then it became a quest of exploring myself and my potential. The more I rode, the more I was punished for my poor diet. By the time I started working in a bike shop I was around 250lbs maybe 275lbs. I knew that taking a job that far away would be super challenging, but potentially forge me into something anew. I started racing then too. The commute was getting to me around the time a nicer shop was opening near me and I landed the job there. The owner tweaked my last few bad habits and got me down to 190lbs. I'm not disciplined like that now but I'm under 220lbs, which is after spending 90% of every day lying in a bed after the car that disabled me. I still eat almost nothing processed and cook all of my own food.
Very inspiring! That’s an insane amount of miles