Barnaby Walters

From now on I will be making all reaction rolls with this die

Working on schematics for the Enterprise-HG

First Elden Ring randomiser attempt highlights so far:

Started out with dual rot daggers, quickly found Ornamental straight swords, Millicent’s Prosthetic and consecutive attack tear for a no-brainer dex build

Malenia, the Fell Omen. I’m good at the Malenia fight… in her arena, with a level 125 character. Stormveil is off-limits for most of the game, but it doesn’t prevent progress.

First hard wall was Valiant Gargoyles, The First Elden Lord. Their poison clouds can almost fill the entire arena. Eventually got them with Death’s Poker and a +10 Mimic Tear, well-supplied with rotten meat dumplings for healing.

Smooth sailing through the underground and mountaintops until Fire Giant turned out to be ice lightning dragonkin into Placidusax. Time for a break, I’ll figure out how to deal with them later. Maybe dig out the rot daggers again…

#TIL tvtropes.org has a bizarre registration policy which completely rejects accounts from “suspicious” IP addresses, even if you prove in an extended email conversation that you’re a regular human who just wanted to make one small edit.

Does anyone have any experience getting serial data out of the multimeter quarter of a PeakTech 4110? Tried flicking through all modes and functions both via a cheap RS232 to USB adapter, and monitoring pins with a logic analyser, but I don’t see anything happening.

$50 per month patrons vs $5 per month patrons, 1761 edition

From imslp.org/wiki/Lessons_for_the_Harpsichord_(Jones%2C_John)

Finally got koreader and plato set up on my Kobo, and calibre set up for managing and converting ebooks. The default {author}/{title} file structure for moving ebooks to the reader doesn’t work at all for me, but fortunately(?) calibre supports no less than three different template languages allowing for very flexible ebook organisation schemes. These can be configured by opening the “Configure this Device” menu and editing the “Save Template” field.

I ended up using this little script to organise books in a way which makes navigation easy for my collection:

program:
# If the book is in a series, make a folder for that series, and ensure books are in order
# by prepending their series index to their file name.
if (field('series')) then
  strcat(field('series'), '/', field('series_index'),  ' - ', field('title'))
# Otherwise, if a book has tags, make a folder for the first tag and put it there.
elif (list_count(field('tags'), ',') > 0) then
  strcat(sublist(field('tags'), 0, 1, ','), '/', field('title'))
# Otherwise, simply place the book at the top level for easy access and future sorting.
else
  field('title')
fi

A couple of books ended up in the wrong folders, presumably due to some error with tag ordering or metadata syncing, but it was quick to clear up manually in the filesystem.

For anyone who wants to play current patch Hollow Knight enemy randomiser but is confused about where to find it and doesn’t want to wade through/sign up for discord: here is the google docs list of HK mods linked from discord. Enemy Randomizer [1.5 port] is the one you’re looking for

If playing with item rando, I’d recommend NOT randomising boss geo or the coloseums, as both seem buggy and unreliable.

Heads-up for anyone in need of some OPA1642 op-amps, Mouser has a few in stock, get ‘em while they’re hot

The “every single tweet has a pop culture gif” era of science communication is a curse and my fervent desire for it to end is balanced only by horrified anticipation of what might replace it

Never realised scorpion flies have such long noses

Not the most notable, but possibly my favourite #CityNatureChallenge 2022 sighting: a dancing caterpillar!

Sadly, this isn’t an extremely rare musical species which will revolutionise animal rhythmic entrainment research! It’s a defensive behaviour triggered in this case by the fly which I was actually trying to photograph.

#CNC 2022 Day 4 Highlights — was pretty tired at this point so just went for a short walk through the Laaer Wald. Not much of note, but I did finally get to see a bristly millipede

Also found a buzzing spider and a weevil with an amusingly long nose

That’s a total of 260 observations over the four days, of which 106 have already been IDed to species. I’ll wait a few days before posting my usual unique and notable species analysis, and will update it a few times as more observations get IDs.

#CNC 2022 (belated) Day 3 Highlights! Rain during the day, so I went out at night.

Several Flat-backed millipedes and Blue Ground Beetles

A little Flower Longhorn Beetle and a Laena viennensis

A pseudoscorpion

A Bronze Ground Beetle and a Four-spotted Carrion Beetle

#CNC 2022 Day 2 Highlights! Only 90 observations today, despite much more time outside — yesterday cleared out the low-hanging fruit.

I think there’s a European pond turtle hiding in this picture somewhere

This Aesculapian Snake was much less camera-shy!

And I finally saw an Ant Woodlouse

#CNC 2022 Day 1 Highlights! Spent a few hours wandering around Wienerberg and ended up with 97 observations (so close to a clean 100!)

A Barred Umber

Many Greater Bee Flies

Some tiny jumping spiders

And an obligatory hamster

Astonishing UI design at the OBI self-checkout today. For non-german-speakers, the text reads “Please think about the heyOBI App!” and the “answer options” require no translation