Scrounging Firewood (and other stuff)

[svk]

Merry Christmas everybody! I slept in today and then a friend from high school came over for brunch and she showed me how to make homemade hollandaise sauce which will definitely be added to my repertoire going forward. I’m just out the door to go have dinner with some other friends. The gal hosting lost her husband this summer (a good friend of mine) and her stepdaughter (who will also be there) ended up losing both parents over the past year so when I was she invited me I wanted to make sure I was there for moral support.

 

[olyman]

Merry Christmas everybody! I slept in today and then a friend from high school came over for brunch and she showed me how to make homemade hollandaise sauce which will definitely be added to my repertoire going forward. I’m just out the door to go have dinner with some other friends. The gal hosting lost her husband this summer (a good friend of mine) and her stepdaughter (who will also be there) ended up losing both parents over the past year so when I was she invited me I wanted to make sure I was there for moral support.

just moral support....ok.....

 

[GrizG]

When I was in college the computer course taught us to keypunch oak tag cards to run a program on the mainframe, last time I ever did that stuff!

I was preparing Tax Returns in people's homes, on a portable computer (a Kaypro 10) back in 1983! The operating system was CPM!

The floppies were 5.25" and you had to remember to type in "safety" before you moved the computer, or you would ruin your hard drive!

Yeah... punch cards and APL terminals is what I started with. APL used a what was essentially a Selectric typewriter with a special APL print ball and acoustical coupler. I think the modem was like 180 baud and dropped off regularly. That was the days when it took 6 minutes to send a one page fax! My father started using modems when they were in handmade wooden boxes and worked on MIS systems with 10s of thousands of punch cards. Kids today have no idea what it is like to write code on paper, desk check it, and fill out forms by hand that then got key punched. That stuff almost drove me away all together. The PC and GUI made it tolerable and fun!

 

[SS396driver]

Got a nice gift . Picture of me and my bil when we got the Christmas tree 8x10

 

[freeasaburt]

It's 10 past midnight here now, because of the incessant rain my bonfire idea was far from feasible but we had a nice family get together, with loads of meat, wine, beer, ... but most of all a good vibe and lots of laughter. I dug up a quite old Nikko rc car and my sisters' kids simply loved it, more than the new things they got! I knew it was worth saving... Still works perfectly, btw



Merry xmas, everyone!

 

[Jeffkrib]

I use a computer with Windows 11.

If you know of a fix, fine, but I don't think using the * is a big deal problem. I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.

20° -- to obtain the degree symbol on a PC hold down the ALT key and press 248 on the number pad. Given that it is an extended ASCII character this CHR number probably works on a MAC too...

Beat me to it, the old ASCI codes, good making symbols appear on your screen when young people are watching you type.

 

[freeasaburt]

Yeah... punch cards and APL terminals is what I started with. APL used a what was essentially a Selectric typewriter with a special APL print ball and acoustical coupler. I think the modem was like 180 baud and dropped off regularly. That was the days when it took 6 minutes to send a one page fax! My father started using modems when they were in handmade wooden boxes and worked on MIS systems with 10s of thousands of punch cards. Kids today have no idea what it is like to write code on paper, desk check it, and fill out forms by hand that then got key punched. That stuff almost drove me away all together. The PC and GUI made it tolerable and fun!

I'm 42 now, and the funny thing is for me it went the opposite way. I grew up with DOS, and the windows versions up to xp. Then I switched to linux and embraced the power or the command line... Professionaly I use windows (10/11) again now because I have to but my systems home only run linux, and I know why.

 

[GrizG]

I'm 42 now, and the funny thing is for me it went the opposite way. I grew up with DOS, and the windows versions up to xp. Then I switched to linux and embraced the power or the command line... Professionaly I use windows (10/11) again now because I have to but my systems home only run linux, and I know why.

Between teaching at colleges and my jobs in "the real world" Windows and MS Office ruled... My primary tools for analysis and regulatory reporting, with data from enterprise systems, was MS Access and VBA. Now... Open Office, Thunderbird, and Chrome cover the basics. This as I am retired from the work world, have no interest in consulting, and like the notion of "free."

 

[freeasaburt]

I basically hate any kind of 'office' applications, although if they need to be used i prefer open/libre office. Thunderbird has been my preferred mail client for years, firefox my preferred browser with chromium (the open source 'simple' version of chrome) as a backup.
There's a plethora of reasons to use an open source operating system like linux, openbsd, freebsd, ... but the fact that nobody is actually interested in (or actively monitoring, maybe?) what you do with the device you installed the OS on is already quite a bonus imo!

 

[bran1har]

Just welded up a log cant out of of scrap steel: piece of pipe and some rebar, what a game changer. No more wrestling 1000lb logs

 

[sean donato]

Man 7 pages in 2 days lol.
Well I hope everyone had a merry Christmas. We ended up just staying home. I'm cleared and had a negative test this week, but the same day my wife tested positive for covid. So we didn't go over to mom and dad's and didn't have her family over today. This will be her 3rd time having covid and if she didn't have to test for work, she wouldn't have known it. Said she had a mild headache but didn't think anything about it. Oh well. Everything will be postponed till after the new year. Having said that we had a pretty decent time just with us. Kids were pretty bummed from not seeing everyone, but we made the most of it.
Weather warmed up quite a bit today as well. Which were thankful for. We were out of power nearly all day Friday. Of course it went out right about the time I got to work and the wife said it came back on abou an hour before I came home. Sure makes me thankful the hose is heated by a wood furnace. The blower doesn't work, but the heat still circulates through the vents. Far end of the house gets kinda chilly but it's livable. Really need to get a fully automatic generator set up. My wife won't hook the generator up. Which I don't blame her, it's kinda heavy and you need to shut off the breaker for the hot water heater. Other then that we didn't get much snow amd the wind wasn't nearly as bad as we thought it was going to be.

 

[freeasaburt]

Outages are almost unthinkable here. Things can always go wrong, a car or truck running into a pole with no backup line for example, but even if something like that happens it's usually fixed in a few hours. Low temperatures made a few pipes burst and put a few villages without running water for a couple of days, which is so exceptional it made the national news.
Still, I'm still looking into becoming less dependent on 'the system', including the power grid. It's now more clear than ever (with the war in the Ukraine) that said system is super fragile... I'd rather have more firewood and, when I can afford them, solar panels.

 

[sean donato]

Outages are almost unthinkable here. Things can always go wrong, a car or truck running into a pole with no backup line for example, but even if something like that happens it's usually fixed in a few hours. Low temperatures made a few pipes burst and put a few villages without running water for a couple of days, which is so exceptional it made the national news.
Still, I'm still looking into becoming less dependent on 'the system', including the power grid. It's now more clear than ever (with the war in the Ukraine) that said system is super fragile... I'd rather have more firewood and, when I can afford them, solar panels.

Solar is great, we have a 9.88kw system, but doesn't help when the power goes out unless you have battery back up. ($$$$$) wasn't worth it for the cost of the batteries were nearly twice what the rest of the system cost. I can buy a lot of diesel/gas for $40k . Our biggest issue with the power going out is were the dead end of the line. Think there's 10 houses back the lane. Line comes from the top of the mountain down to my place then out to the neighbors. Literally was told by the power company we're the last customers they are worried about since our line feeds so flew houses. Makes a good generator worth its weight in gold. Fortunately the long power outages we had 10 years ago seem to be less frequent recently.

 

[Sierra_rider]

Solar is great, we have a 9.88kw system, but doesn't help when the power goes out unless you have battery back up. ($$$$$) wasn't worth it for the cost of the batteries were nearly twice what the rest of the system cost. I can buy a lot of diesel/gas for $40k . Our biggest issue with the power going out is were the dead end of the line. Think there's 10 houses back the lane. Line comes from the top of the mountain down to my place then out to the neighbors. Literally was told by the power company we're the last customers they are worried about since our line feeds so flew houses. Makes a good generator worth its weight in gold. Fortunately the long power outages we had 10 years ago seem to be less frequent recently.

Luckily, I'm on a pretty important feed, so I'm never the last to get powered restored during a widespread outage. Even earlier this year when my service drop was completely destroyed by broken pine trees, my service drop was put back up before many other people had power.

 

[freeasaburt]

Solar is great, we have a 9.88kw system, but doesn't help when the power goes out unless you have battery back up. ($$$$$) wasn't worth it for the cost of the batteries were nearly twice what the rest of the system cost. I can buy a lot of diesel/gas for $40k . Our biggest issue with the power going out is were the dead end of the line. Think there's 10 houses back the lane. Line comes from the top of the mountain down to my place then out to the neighbors. Literally was told by the power company we're the last customers they are worried about since our line feeds so flew houses. Makes a good generator worth its weight in gold. Fortunately the long power outages we had 10 years ago seem to be less frequent recently.

Batteries are subsidized here now. Which is good, but also a tell tale. 'They' are just not able to provide ample power at peak use anymore. Which is something that knowledgeable people have been predicting for years, by the way... We all use shitloads of power I guess, but rather than admitting the truth (which was already bleak enough without the prospect of a massive amount of electric cars and a planned increase in electric heating) the powers that be just keep on playing the 'don't worry!' game. I guess we'll see...

 

[chipper1]

17f here now.
That was easy .

 

[chipper1]

Hopefully I'll have my plow mount finished today! I got this far yesterday. I STIHL need to trim mount to length, drill keeper pin holes and weld on tabs Then remount skid plate and drill u-bolt holes in it. Then mount the entire plow assembly. View attachment 1043759View attachment 1043760View attachment 1043761

Merry Christmas Everyone!

One thing I like to do to my quads I've plowed with, is zip strap the reverse safety so you don't have to pull the brake to get the quad into reverse. I just need to make sure I'm completely stopped before I bump it into reverse, which is hard when plowing. I also found it to be easier for me to zip strap the lever while the quad is standing up on end like yours.
Notice I'm not recommending anyone do this as it could be a safety issue, but rather just sharing my experience .
I

 

[sean donato]

Batteries are subsidized here now. Which is good, but also a tell tale. 'They' are just not able to provide ample power at peak use anymore. Which is something that knowledgeable people have been predicting for years, by the way... We all use shitloads of power I guess, but rather than admitting the truth (which was already bleak enough without the prospect of a massive amount of electric cars and a planned increase in electric heating) the powers that be just keep on playing the 'don't worry!' game. I guess we'll see...

Yeah I hear that. We got an email last week about conserving power during the holidays to prevent the possibility of rolling blackouts/brown outs. Funny we just shut down three mile island so we lost another Power plant when we desperately need more power production.

 

[mountainguyed67]

you need to shut off the breaker for the hot water heater.

If the water is already hot, you don’t need to heat it.

 

[sean donato]

If the water is already hot, you don’t need to heat it.

On the off chance it starts heating it would over load either of my current generators if anything else is running at the same time. Easier to just cut power to it and go on living like normal and not having to step up to a bigger generator. Keep the deep freeze, fridge and the lights on. One day I'll score a bigger generator and not have to worry about it.