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What's your go-to for sanity during COVID-19 times? - Page 2 — Parallax Forums

What's your go-to for sanity during COVID-19 times?

2

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  • K2 wrote:
    Lacto-fermentation.
    Yogurt, sauerkraut, kimchi, or pickles?

    -Phil
  • My go-to is this video. Thats all im gonna say.
  • K2 wrote:
    Lacto-fermentation.
    Yogurt, sauerkraut, kimchi, or pickles?

    -Phil

    I prefer kimchi, it has moxie. Sauerkraut is just fermented cabbage, but kimchi has moxie, and tastes better.
  • Clock Loop wrote: »
    My go-to is this video. Thats all im gonna say.

    Is that a clip from "Dark Crystal"? I saw the film a good long time ago, it was great. And it was all done desktop. We use BASIC Stamps or Prop sets to manage servos, they used a gaggle of custom boards in Apple computers, (Apple actual not Mac) to run them.
  • K2 wrote:
    Lacto-fermentation.
    Yogurt, sauerkraut, kimchi, or pickles?

    -Phil

    exactly,

    or Zucchini, Cucumber and even Tomatoes. I am doing this for the first time but - hell yes - this beats everything store bought.

    Enjoy!

    Mike
  • K2K2 Posts: 691
    K2 wrote:
    Lacto-fermentation.
    Yogurt, sauerkraut, kimchi, or pickles?
    It started with peppers, expanded to cucumbers, and now encompass practically anything growing in the garden or on sale at the market. It can make most any vegetable more interesting - cauliflower comes to mind in this context.

    It's also about flavor combinations. One can at least consider adding dill, garlic, onion, mustard seeds, peppercorns, jalapeño slices, caraway seeds, fennel seeds, celery seeds, and/or coriander to almost any batch of vegetables.

  • +1
  • I lost my sanity long before CV19 : )

    I've been spending a lot of time in a travel trailer. Attached a shot of my "office". AT&T LTE has been good to me, but when Starlink is available (to me) I may get a larger RV and live in it indefinitely. The RV parks are loads of fun! I've never been to one before.

    I have a RPi Zero, Propeller and sensors. I've been playing around with building an RV Brain. I was amazed to see how many other people automate and monitor their RVs with microcontrollers and Pi boards. Homebrew capacitive tank sensors that actually work, for a couple bucks, great stuff!
    1065 x 737 - 239K
  • ctwardellctwardell Posts: 1,716
    edited 2020-08-22 19:17
    Getting my 6 year old interested in model aviation (or just playing with toys that I like...)

    BlueRM24.jpg
    800 x 807 - 90K
  • Wow. @ctwardell rub your six year-old's head for good things for getting interested in model plane flying. That looks like a good hand control based model to start with.
  • ctwardell wrote: »
    Getting my 6 year old interested in model aviation (or just playing with toys that I like...)

    BlueRM24.jpg

    Oh wow, I had that same engine back in '72. Have they just not changed?
    We dropped the prop and fitted my dad's design of a centrifugal clutch which blew up...shrapnel everywhere :lol:
  • Cluso99Cluso99 Posts: 18,066
    edited 2020-08-23 20:52
    I still have a couple of unused OS Max engines ;)
    Cracked the piston on my used engine when I pile drove the plane into the ground. Nose cone was flattened but the plane was pretty much unscathed. That’s what you end up with after many crashes - a plane able to withstand crashing!
  • Wow. @ctwardell rub your six year-old's head for good things for getting interested in model plane flying. That looks like a good hand control based model to start with.

    Yes Buck, flies on around 30' lines. I've been flying them for about 45 years. I love building the balsa ones, but find it hard to find time these days. The Coroplast with 3D printed parts is nice because no need to paint and gives me something useful to print.
    Mickster wrote: »
    Oh wow, I had that same engine back in '72. Have they just not changed?
    We dropped the prop and fitted my dad's design of a centrifugal clutch which blew up...shrapnel everywhere :lol:

    Mickster, those little Cox engines have been pretty much the same since the mid 50's. The specimen shown is from the late 80's or early 90's. Cox has been gone for a number of years, but a company in Canada purchased the rights and a bunch of old stock and still sells 'new' engines. Folks are starting to do electric control-line now, but I just love the sound and smell of these little buggers.
    Cluso99 wrote: »
    I still have a couple of unused OS Max engines ;)
    Cracked the piston on my used engine when I pile drove the plane into the ground. Nose cone was flattened but the plane was pretty much unscathed. That’s what you end up with after many crashes - a plane able to withstand crashing!

    I've certainly dug a few holes with mine! I destroyed a just broken in Enya .35 when I was a kid, lead-outs failed on my Ringmaster and it did a rather graceful barrel roll over a big old country barn and flew nose first into asphalt. You might get some good money out of those OS's, good engines are becoming somewhat rare these days.

  • Yup, COX 049

    https://coxengines.ca/cox-.049-engine-babe-bee.html

    Was on all of my U-control planes.
  • That 0.49 looks like a bit of overkill for the weight of this one. Then again, should be pretty fast. And pretty hard to crunch compared to the PT-19 trainer I cratered a few times.
  • Publison wrote: »
    Yup, COX 049

    https://coxengines.ca/cox-.049-engine-babe-bee.html

    Was on all of my U-control planes.

    Yes, that's the company, the hobby is very fortunate to have them. I've ordered from them a few times for rebuild kits, glow heads, props, etc. I have one of their Golden Bee II's that I purchased unused from another modeler, I have not yet use it.
    That 0.49 looks like a bit of overkill for the weight of this one. Then again, should be pretty fast. And pretty hard to crunch compared to the PT-19 trainer I cratered a few times.

    I does look a little menacing on there! I was concerned it might actually be underpowered, but it does get out of it's own way pretty well. It's a bit too much to handle for the intended use as a trainer. I have a Baby Bee that I restored last year that I may swap in for the Black Widow that is currently on it.

    I always wanted one of those PT-19's!

  • ercoerco Posts: 20,244

    COVID-related, I've been working on a pretty cool freelance job, doing the electronics for this company's Ozone clothing desanitizer prototype. I walked into the job midstream, the last electronics/coder guy bailed and I inherited some of his hardware. Mainly a "Gameduino" touchscreen display, so I had to ramp up on that, but everything is working nicely now. Basically you hang clothes inside the vinyl enclosure and run a cycle to create ozone, maintain a certain level for a period of time, then destroy the ozone. Certainly an interesting/challenging project getting 4 micros synced (mainboard, sensor, sensor board and Gameduino) but it's done.

    https://www.o3technologiesinc.com/

  • Also COVID-related. There's been a lot of interest in monitoring CO2 in classrooms. The idea is that if CO2 levels become high in a classroom full of students, it means the ventilation is poor, which implies an enhanced risk of infectivity if one of the occupants has COVID.

    An associate of mine (retired UW Oceanography prof) and I are mentoring a high school senior for his culminating project: classroom CO2 monitoring. My part of the mentoring involves shepherding him through the build-and-program process of constructing a CO2 sensor/monitor. My associate will tag-team the student when he is ready to apply the device in the classrooms.

    Meanwhile my associate has been applying his own monitoring to an outdoor classroom (quonset hut with a sod floor) at a local private school. During the day it's open to outside air; at night, closed up. He was getting really weird results: the CO2 levels rose at night and fell during the day when the classroom was full of students. Can anybody guess why?

    I'll leave it there for now and come back after some of you have taken a stab at the reason for this seemingly odd phenomenon.

    -Phil

  • Phil, I'd jump to respiration in the soil, could be from bacteria, or other soil organisms, mediating a decay process.

  • Bingo! Soil respiration. At night, with the quonset hut closed and no photosynthesis, respiration from the soil microbes builds up a high CO2 level. Here's a nice interview with my customer Will Brinton about soil respiration:

    Here's a much longer, more detailed talk by him:

    As a test, I dug up a plug of sod from my yard, put it in a sealed jar with a CO2 sensor, and recorded the CO2 level overnight. Here's a graph of my results:

    The little downward blip at 15.5 hours is when I cracked the lid a hair to relieve any pressure build-up, since the CO2 sensor is sensitive to pressure.

    -Phil

  • Retired in the SW UK, so fiddling with compass and air pressure i2c chips driven by Taqoz, the forth package for P2, with a view to altimeter and vertical speed indicator.

    At 67, revisiting aviation by learning to fly a paramotor trike. Apart from a little introductory footlaunch kiting of the wing, it's not physically demanding and the local school makes it safe and great fun - everyone is friendly. I go weekdays to give all the workers a chance at weekends. Flying at little more than bicycle speed in the wonderful rolling countryside.

    Campervanning has also been a very low risk means of holidaying.

    Being double jabbed - soon to have a booster - we continue to visit farmhouse coffee shops and national trust places. We steer clear of crowds, especially of younger folk, where a lot of the virus is currently circulating

  • my idle time was forced on me because the a$$hat management at the factory kept us at high stress levels almost all the time
    I had 2 heart attacks because of it ( cholesterol level is low so it was all stress.)
    anyhow had to retire early.
    covid 19 hasn't affected me much but then again i keep myself busy with the ham shack and doing a bit of small engine repair

  • @erco said:

    Need robot pooper scooper!

    just remember to program it to fling the poop into the neighbors yard

  • Phil,
    I finally got a chance to listen to those presentations by Will Brinton, thanks for the links. He really does get into CO2 balance, how much of it emits from the soil, also the proportion of it that a heavy cover of greenery can immediately reabsorb. I've always found eddy covariance techniques for gas exchange to/from the atmosphere hard to fathom, all the assumptions and the difficult math. Will Brinton really brings it back to "ground truth", one that has more long term implications than SARS-COV2 for the planet.

  • I play with my Boe-bots, build WWII plastic model aircraft and ships, crochet afghans and hats and take ZANAX.

  • Erco's work with O3technologies caught my eye. People have used UVC for sterilizing PPE and spaces, but they seemed to avoid ozone, due its toxicity. But contained and neutralized it should be okay and very effective.

    One drawback of UVC is lack of deep penetration into or to the opposite side of material, shadowing. People have come up with schemes to rotate, flip, or surround the target To satisfy my own curiosity, I bought a UV fixture, one that does not filter out the 185nm ionizing radiation that generates ozone. https://www.amazon.com/UV-C-Light-Lamp-Bulb-Ozone/dp/B081CMKVHR. It came with a timer that could be set from 5 minutes to 60 minutes. The photo shows it inside a gasketed NEMA enclosure lined with foil. I figured the combination of the UVC and the penetrating power of the ozone would be a better sanitizer than the UVC alone, a double whammy. The smell of ozone was strong when opening it up, and detectable by nose even after a while to let it dissipate. I had a UVC meter, but no way to measure O3 quantitatively. Much less any way to see if it really worked to deactivate viruses.

    O3technologies probably isn't using 185nm light to produce the ozone. Something like a corona discharge would be more efficient. Subsequently, according to their web site, they use UVC (plus a catalyst) to dissipate the ozone after a treatment. That would I guess be the longer non-ionizing UVC wavelength, ~254nm.

  • This is a very interesting post to follow

  • @"Carol Hazlett" said:
    I play with my Boe-bots, build WWII plastic model aircraft and ships, crochet afghans and hats and take ZANAX.

    Hello!
    Um which family of plastic model aircraft from that period? I've got things for the Corsair, wings for a bigger engine, and the Spitfire. (Very dangerous and fast as greased lightning.) And the B29 and the B17. (It seems one of those survived a Fox-4, that's right, midair collision, the other side's fighter? not so much.)

  • @"Buck Rogers" said:

    @"Carol Hazlett" said:
    I play with my Boe-bots, build WWII plastic model aircraft and ships, crochet afghans and hats and take ZANAX.

    Hello!
    Um which family of plastic model aircraft from that period? I've got things for the Corsair, wings for a bigger engine, and the Spitfire. (Very dangerous and fast as greased lightning.) And the B29 and the B17. (It seems one of those survived a Fox-4, that's right, midair collision, the other side's fighter? not so much.)

    I have all of those and in several scales, what scales are those in? My favorite scale to work with is 1/32 but I also have 1/48s. My B29 is the Enola Gay but I also want to make one of the Bockscar.


  • Getting away from the pandemic... fast!

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