• 225 Posts
  • 173 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 10th, 2023

help-circle



  • Hi. I’m a refractory designer. I have over 30 years of experience in creating linings for industrial furnaces with bricks and monolithics, including what we would call ‘Precast shapes’ of which this would be included.

    Those are definitely air pockets stemming from the pour that were not vibrated out. It could be your aggregate size is making it difficult. I don’t know the product you are using, but often there are ‘fine’ versions that feature a smaller grain size just for better consistency when pouring. I would never recommend gunning something like this.

    As far as vibration goes, they sell industrial vibrators with long rubber mixing tips. I might have video from a few of my precast shapes showing a large precast shape getting vibrated. Everything about it just screams dildo and you feel silly, but it is what it is, and it does work.

    You’ll know if you add too much water. It will be brittle and fail if you can even get the mold released. More water is never a solution. Better PH is superior to more water.

    Vibration can be achieved by building an outer box for your foam insert. Wood can work for something this size probably, but metal would be best. You can then use any vibratory method that works. Pour direction matters too, but it opens ugly doors like lifting and drying.


  • I own ‘Fear & Hunger’, the game pictured atop the article. I play it. I enjoy it. I have nothing to give but accolades for this game. The author was brilliant in the game design and story. Their target audience is a mature adult. The video game plays as a turn based top down survival horror rpg. It’s a very minimalistic game in it’s world, though it has a lot of unique gameplay programming that elevates it’s style above others. The story though… Wow.

    You are simply going to the bottom of the dungeon to kill someone and then leave. That’s it. However, It does have very adult oriented… things… peppered into the game. The setting is pretty dreadful, and as you proceed it only gets worse. Eventually, when you think it’s hit rock bottom, it finds a brand new shovel. It hits pretty hard too.

    If you are an adult that can handle adult and survival horror themes, it’s well worth a play and you should buy it immediately. It’s a lot of fun, though get you feet set. The game will shock you out of your comfy place, and it will do so multiple times. Not my favorite horror game, but probably in my top 5. Brilliant and violent, both to the extreme.







  • jay2@beehaw.orgOPtoNature and Gardening@beehaw.orgGrowing Stinging Nettle
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    19 days ago

    Stinging nettle originated in Europe while wood nettle originated in North America. The stinging variety is a much older breed with a much increased potency. Having said that, I do keep finding tons of wood nettle on my excursions. Stinging nettle remains elusive.

    The plan would be to plant in early spring, harvest tops in a few weeks with the remainder going to fertilizer. Rinse and repeat until it gets too hot. Eventually I would have to let one go to seed to replenish stock.

    As I said below, I don’t care for spinach so I’m betting I find them both to taste like cuck. But it would be nice if the allergies relent.



  • It allegedly has incredible nutritional value with the dioica type argued to be a superfood. Vitamins A, B, C and K. Calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium and a lot of other very beneficial nutrients.

    I’m told for optimum flavor and benefit, you have to harvest it early in spring when the leaves are still actively growing and well before flowers develop. Additionally, harvesting only the top (4) leaf segments for consumption gives you the ‘prime rib’ of the plant while leaving the lower portion to survive to flower and reseed itself. Harvesting it young, it will not be stringy from woody growth, and will still contain all of the stored energy for upcoming fruit production. Once cooked, the formic acid in the trichomes (toxin and stinger) is destroyed and it can be consumed. It can replace spinach in just about any recipe. It supposedly has a nutty flavor. I’m not after it for flavor. I dislike spinach.

    It also has histamine receptor blocking properties, allegedly providing relief to hay fever. I don’t know of anyone personally to ask if it’s true, but there are many people promoting them now. Frankly, every year older I get, the worse my allergies get. If it does help, it’s worth it to me. If it does nothing, I’m no worse off than I was.

    There are even other alleged health benefits as well. Blood pressure, thyroid, liver, prostate effects. None of it I could confirm or deny. I’m just after allergy relief.


  • Yeah, I hear the root systems have some personality, hence I’m thinking containers. I was told good drainage and high nitrogen soil are key. They’ll take full sun to partial shade, though too much shade makes them grow too tall and they usually fall over.

    The cucumbers really, REALLY, seemed to like the nettle fertilizer. It was quite impressive. They’d been doing well considering the over abundance of rain we’ve had, but that stuff really kicked it into gear. I was so impressed with the results that I think I’m going to try the medicinal tea.

    If anyone got them in the Pittsburgh area, I’ll come out to cut them down for you. I’m heading out again today to forage for seeds. If any kind soul has some extra seeds to part with I’d be grateful. A lot of places are sold out until fall.







  • jay2@beehaw.orgtoLinux@lemmy.mlAdvice on a CAD solution
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 month ago

    As a professional 35 year draftsman, I would recommend you buy an 11x17 gridded notepad, a pencil, an eraser, and then make numerous sketches. Do an plan view of each floor to create the general arrangement and the room-to-room relationships. Sections will be required at each elevation to show heights. Then sketch each room on its own sheet. Here you can supply more detail, using matchlines, etc. In this manner, you don’t have to bear the burden of drafting and accuracy until you are behind the screen. You can just sketch the idea, and provide the numerics. Sketches need not be pretty or to scale or made by someone with any drafting talent at all. Use placeholders. A square with ‘TLT’ in it is just fine for a toilet. Later, the sketches can be redrawn in cad via a scaled floorplan and your placeholders detailed as required. This is generally how I would proceed when I had to draw up large steel furnaces in which the OEM drawings were lost.

    With that in mind, Id suggest paying cash to someone else that has cad software and knows it. This is not a large or even complex project. They can take your sketches and recreate them into a 2d drawing set assuming you did your sketches right. While it will be a great accuracy check, I recommend this just so you don’t have to run CAD on Linux, an endeavor that is sure to cost you that cash in time and frustration alone. It’s just not suited for the heavy throughputs of CAD.

    Consider this. If your choice of tools does not matter, you could replace your screwdriver with a butter knife for this renovation. As well you could use a rock in place of a hammer or some eco-friendly hemp string in lieu of your tape measure. If the choice of operating system, the base for all software to run on, is a negligible detail you may as well remove your foundation while you are at it. It’s just going to crack and leak in 200 years or so.

    If you don’t know any starving draftsman or doing it yourself is an additional goal, then at least go buy a cheapie beater windows laptop and get a mainstream cad software, even if it’s free. You’ll be needing something mainstream to get good search results as you learn to run it.

    And please, if this comes off as rude, I assure you that it’s borne from my first hand experience. CAD drafting is not difficult, but it is tricky. There will be many moments where things can get off the tracks without you realizing it. It’s disheartening to say the least when you realize that many minutes, hours or days ago you punched a bad number, misread something, phone rang and you got distracted, etc. And then when that happens, you have to know how to fix it since some of the drawing is right and some is now wrong, and a wrong drawing isn’t necessarily worth the paper it’s printed on. A good cad guy will avoid most of these traps for you entirely.


  • Of course they were. There’s no way that that many people refused to vote for her after her boy Biden took peoples homes and securities, and killed the economy, became an international embarrassment and the worst president ever. It had nothing to do with her partying like there’s no urgency while everything burned, even being piss drunk to the point where she couldn’t convey a clear idea of a future at her own assemblies. It totally couldn’t be that the average person, a good person more than willing to entertain the notion of a woman for president, looked at her and saw anything but someone they would call a woman or a president.

    I for one think we all deserved better from both parties. The real problem to get addressed should be when a two party system breaks down by both parties running an extremist in which neither represent the majority of the people all that well. ‘Better than the others’ is not always a good thing in and of itself as we are all right now (and yet again) witnessing the results of more poor leadership on a spectacularly global level. Well, except for Finland I suppose. Maybe we should hire them to come in and run things for us while we sort shit out. Maybe Lordi can help.


  • I happen to be working in a major grocery store right now that draws from UNFI for 75% of our product. Our shelves are far from bare, but our deliveries have been affected. Certainly, stock quantities are only going down. I did not receive any stock Monday. I was told they took our order from a prior Wednesday and resubmitted it for delivery this Wednesday, but it did not arrive. An order is in place for tomorrow, but again, we didn’t shoot it so they must be using sales estimates or another prior order. I hope it shows up, but its not likely I’ll be getting it (a truck is scheduled but with no eta).

    We have other suppliers and are drawing additional items from them where we can, but they cannot quell the full demand in either quantity or diversity.

    I’m surprised they had no backup system in place. That was incredibly unwise and irresponsible considering it is food chain related. Funny how banks are too big to fail, but not food suppliers.