psipsy

Despite all the awful things going on in the world, it's nice to know that Kasuga Ayumu (Osaka from Azumanga Daioh) is now also a character in Yotsuba&. It's like finding out someone who seemed to fall off the face of the earth decades ago is alive and well.

Nozomi's clutch work has begun! It was tricky to jockey her into the garage without a working clutch, but I did it. The first step was to remove the wheels and all the top-side items that are in the way, such as the air filter box, battery, and disconnecting small things from the gearbox. The hard stuff is underneath, which involves disconnecting the knuckles, driveshafts, the subframe, 3 out of 4 of the motor mounts, and maybe the starter. Then the gearbox itself can be unbolted from the engine to access the clutch parts. (I have an engine hoist for heavy stuff.) Impact tools are an absolute necessity, especially when going up against the motor mount bolts, subframe bolts, and those 36mm axle nuts. Instead of pushing and pulling with all my strength, a quick pull on a trigger and it's off in seconds.

I've had to throw just about everything at this job, and I got as far as pulling the driveshafts before discovering one of them just would not want to come out, no matter what. It's kinda stuck to the middle shaft, but the bolts holding that on are blocked by the stuck part. Otherwise I would just take it off as one assembly. There is a tool to get me out of that, so that's on order now. It'll give me a chance to work on other bits while I wait.

Historically, the re-assembly usually goes faster, or at least easier. Fasteners and threaded parts get cleaned up or replaced, especially if the heads are starting to round off or the threads are too mangled. Instead of fussing with electrical connectors and wasting time trying to unplug them at weird angles, they'll just click back in. Old broken and worn out parts that fight the whole way out get replaced by new parts that are willing to go in. Well, usually.

Sometimes it takes longer because of opportunity for other things. I have the subframe and front spindles out, so I might as well do the lower ball joints. I'll be taking off the flywheel, so I might as well also do the rear main seal that's directly behind it. The starter has been getting a little weird, so that'll get replaced since I can reach it now. Assorted other parts that are a nightmare when they're half-buried in the car then are easy to reach with a bunch of other large parts out of the way.

I hear there is a new Japanese grocery store that opened up in the Tyson's Corner area. It doesn't look like something on the scale of a Mitsuwa Market or Uwajimaya but next time I'm in that area as I eventually will, I'll stop and check it out.

N-scale Shinkansen acquired! The base 8-car powered set, from Japan to my house, was $130. Not bad. Anyone selling it online for less isn't including shipping or transfer services, which ends up being more than Surugaya's "foreigner tax". Maybe I'll get the add-on set later when there's another sale. The only real and effective way to get them for less would require being in Japan though. I could ask some of my friends who go often? Nah, I have respect for how precious luggage space can be. Something about diminishing returns applies here.

There's another curious bit about Surugaya; when I first started ordering from them in 2019, my order number, presumably sequentially generated, was in the thousands, as that was right after they announced that they started international sales. From 2020 to 2022, there was a lull in activity, and when I started buying from them again, the apparent order count hadn't yet broken past 20k. Then suddenly business exploded and sometime this year, their order count went above a million and they just announced they just built another giant warehouse, in addition to having already taken over a whole ass department store building to use as their new flagship store. For anime and video game stuff.

With how willing they are to sell anime merchandise to foreigners, you'd think that they're up to their necks in the stuff and after having visited their stores in Akihabara, I say that would be a correct assumption. Anyone selling anime stuff in Akihabara wasn't picky about who was buying it or why, just as long as they had money for it, language barriers be damned. As soon as something gets taken off the shelf or out of the display case to eventually end up in someone's home in a distant land, another item emerges from the back to take its place. After all, why simply toss it when someone on the other side of the world is willing to pay money for it? It's a win-win for everyone involved.

In discussing trips to Japan, I told my coworker about Surugaya, so that he would have an online source for a lot of stuff and not need to buy it while in Japan, freeing up space for more specialized and esoteric things. I haven't asked him if he bought anything there yet, but judging by his reaction to the site, I wouldn't be surprised if he has.

In my research and experimentation on merging R/C battery packs with model trains, I discovered Kato uses a mini-Tamiya connector to go from the power pack to the rails. Which means I could get an adapter that can convert a mini-Tamiya to something like XT60, and power the trains directly. Except I absolutely should not do that. There would be no speed or direction control, and if there was any kind of derailment resulting in a short, it would mean certain disaster. LiPo batteries have no chill. A 5Ah battery with a 100C rating can make the rails glow, if it doesn't burn out any wires first.

Initially, I just had all my N-scale stuff set up on a regular Ikea table. Then I ran out of table surface. So I built another table out of wood, except for the legs, which I got from Ikea. This gave me a larger surface to work with. Except I'm already hitting the limits of that. Well, I can just put some plywood over what I built. If I decide later on that N isn't right for me, I can sell off the whole collection and then sell the DIY table or something.

I'd still like to get a Shinkansen train set. They're sold in sets of 8, with one set having the end cars and a power unit and a few others, and the other set having the rest of the cars to fill out the full consist. As it turns out, they don't always run a full 16 car train in Japan. Even in N scale, a full 16-car Shinkansen would need almost 9 feet of track. That's a bit much. So I could just get an 8-car set and be done with it.

At work, I've been compiling a list of skills that new techs in my department should learn and know. In order to get into the position in the first place, one must pass an electronics test. But I learned early on that electronics isn't the only thing important to the job. Knowledge about simple mechanical concepts, chemistry, air and water, machining, and so on. Hence, the list. I call it the "Special High-Intensity Training" list.

Back in 2023, I signed up for Threads, which was Facebook's take on the short-form social network, making it a direct competitor to Twitter. Except it didn't work out like that, at least not for the anime crowd. What I found was, Threads is unfriendly to the anime community on average and downright intolerant of the grittier underbelly of fandom. The Touhou memes, the hentai, denpa, video & gacha games, hentai, fansub discussions of obscure anime, doujin works, hentai, vtuber shenanigans, and so on, it just ain't there on Threads. Especially the hentai and anything that could be potentially mistaken for something that alludes to it. Someone can post animu tiddy on X or BlueSky all day every day and face no real consequence for it but will get suspended or banned on Threads almost instantly. In other words, my friends aren't there. It does have people who are into the bigger mainstream shows, and that's about it. It's not just Threads, it's all of Meta (FB, Insta, Threads, etc). I don't know if their off-shored content moderators just have something against Japan. Which is possible. Tl;dr Threads is boring.

TikTok is an even bigger waste of time than Threads. The app hogs up several gigabytes of precious phone space for no good reason, and the constant stream of video reels are designed for sustained dopamine overloads. When I got my phone, I was able to get one with 256GB of storage, so I'm nowhere near running out. But still! It's not like I can expand that storage, and if an app's data doesn't serve me, then it doesn't need to be on my phone.

Going to Daylight Savings Time doesn't mean losing an hour of sleep for me. It just means losing an hour of being awake. Priorities.

Recent brainworm idea: Seeing if I can power my model trains using an R/C battery pack. Of course, I'd have to use a circuit to boost the voltage, and then use that to power the throttle device itself. Then it becomes a question of how long the battery would last. Is it necessary to do this? Not at all. Is it economical to do this? Absolutely not. It's about finding out if I can and then seeing what else I can apply that to. I got the idea when I was using a 9V battery to test-bump some locomotives. That works but it drains a 9V battery kinda quick. In comparison, an R/C battery pack is designed to provide gobs of current for extended periods of time.

The limitation of the R/C battery pack is that its usual voltage of 7.2V or 7.4V isn't high enough for proper operation of the throttle. That's where a buck-boost device comes in. It's able to take power from within a range of something like 5V to 30V and turn it into a higher or lower voltage, typically in the same range. So it can turn that 7.2V into 12V or 13V.

And lo, I set off to build such a contraption, harvesting various parts, only to find there's already such a device that gets 95% of the way there, complete with a connector for an R/C battery. Of course it's cheaper than the total of the other parts I got. Alrighty then.

Getting that part unearthed another revelation, especially with electronic parts online. See, when shopping on ebay, I'll narrow it down to "US only" so I'm not getting things that would take forever to ship. Problem is, some of the sellers are using Jamaica NY as the item location. What's special about that? That's the Post Office for international arriving mail after it clears Customs. Meaning if the listing says it's there or the tracking shows it's shipping from there, it's certainly not already in the US and is coming from somewhere else, usually China. I'm not against the items coming from China, it's the sneakiness that irks me.

Of any problems I may have had while living in a trailer near a forest, I can say that a wendigo wasn't one of them. I think it was all the computers and assorted electronic devices I had running that kept them away. Maybe wifi signals make them feel itchy or something.

Those shelving rack things made of plastic or metal wire? Those are an organizing miracle. Put 'em anywhere, and put almost anything on them. I think I have a couple dozen of them in total now, in varying places, holding varying things. The stuff on them is still technically in a pile, except now all the items on the lower shelves are accessible and no longer load-bearing.

My dinner table (that I've been using for Lego) is terribly unstable due to a design flaw. I've had some success with using some PVC pipe and fittings as adhoc DIY jackposts. It's better now. Not perfect, just better. What I should have done in the first place was to get a bunch of loose table legs from Ikea since that's what they were designed for. If only I thought of that first.

Otakon early pre-registration done to the tune of $75 but it does include mailing. I remember when I went to Otakon 1995, it was $35 at the door.

I signed up for mixi2, which is kinda like Twitter. Although it's mainly Japanese-only. So I feel like I arrived at a party I was only passively invited to but I don't know anyone there well enough to make the most of it. It is at the point where invites are still needed. Between that and Bluesky, I feel like people are signing up for those just to reserve their usual handles for when the time comes that Twitter finally sinks or implodes or both. Basically making sure they have their spot on the lifeboat. I don't blame them.

Youtube's been suggesting videos of walking through places like Yodobashi Camera. Now I've been to Yodobashi, and when looking at it in person, it's huge. What makes it LOOK huge is how everything else in Akihabara is well, really small. I did a size comparison of Yodobashi's flagship store to something in the US. The overall land use of the building isn't very large by US standards, about 40,000 square feet (or about 3700 square meters). The average Walmart is 4x bigger. What makes Yodobashi actually bigger is that it goes up 7 floors, 8 if including the food court, 9 if including the golf driving range on the roof. (There's a mesh screen to prevent balls from flying over the edge.) The parking is also underground. Yodobashi also doesn't do groceries. So except for maybe size comparisons, I don't know if it's possible to compare Walmart to Yodobashi.

My winter break is almost over! I had planned to take off the last Monday anyway, the predicted snow is going to make sure I do. Did I get anything done? If sleeping and watching anime is being productive, then I guess I did.

We've heard of Waffle House. And then there's Huddle House. It's often attached to travel centers and truck stops near busy highways, making it part of a liminal space, and giving it a much more transient vibe than Waffle House. No one really looks for a Huddle House; it just appears. It's meant for strangers in a strange land, hungry for basic diner food and wishing to get back on the road and continue their journey to parts unknown, for reasons unspoken. Maybe they'll return that way, usually they don't. I don't know why I brought this up.

I got an email saying the MOSAIC.WAV set arrived at Tenso. $80 to buy the set and another $40 for them to ship it here because the CD packaging is non-standard. So it goes. It's a 4 CD set, so it comes out to about $30 per disc. I remember paying that much for anime CDs at conventions back in the 90s, so I'm not mad. And the process was nowhere near as difficult as it could have been.

Right, so speaking of pricey Japanese music, I was trying to figure out why Sana Natori music CDs are so damn hard to find and when they are available, they tend to be expensive. Turns out, they're only sold at her live birthday events (I don't know how that works with vtubers). So in order for me to get one at release, I'd have to be in Japan, on that one specific day to physically be at the event at Club Citta, which requires buying the tickets for the event and after-party set months in advance, which in turn requires a valid Japanese address and contact info in order to enter the lottery for a chance to get those tickets, and that's assuming the set comes with the CD, otherwise I'd also have to be in line early enough to get one before it sells out. God. Damn. Alright, maybe the used price markup isn't so bad after all. If anything, I have respect for the exclusivity of the event for that fandom. Those fans paid their dues and that moment is for them to enjoy.

My Christmas/New Year's break begins. I've started it by ejecting a mass of cardboard into the recycling bin. They're just boxes, not love letters.

Sometimes I think about taking a flight somewhere, and intentionally getting a window seat, just so I can look out and take pictures. At normal flying altitude, the horizon is over 200 miles away. I did that on my Phoenix trip this summer, and it was a night flight with clear skies too. I spent most of the flight looking out the window. Other times I feel like taking a flight somewhere, just to see something different, somewhere I normally wouldn't be able to drive to in a reasonable amount of time. My 2022 road trip taught me that it takes a long time to drive across the country. Almost a week if I'm going alone and don't want to beat myself up in the process. Or I can go through the hoopla of flying, which is only 5 or 6 hours in the air to get to the other side of the country. That still wipes out much of the day. But not a full week.

Then other times I'll look at a flight to somewhere kinda closer, only to find the airfare by itself is much more than what I'd spend in gas and lodging. For example, if I wanted to drive to somewhere like New Orleans, I figure it would cost about $250 to 300 in gas, plus however much it would cost for lodging enroute. Assuming I'm somewhat picky about where I sleep, I can still keep the total under $500 for the roundtrip. (There's also the cost of food but I've learned how to turn that into its own attraction.) Now the flight alone is going to be more than that, and after I land, I'd need to rent a car to get around cuz I sure as shit ain't gonna take Uber/Lyft everywhere. Time is also a factor. Between getting to the airport, checking in, going through security, boarding, any kind of delay, the flight itself, exiting the airport, and getting a ride to where I need to go, that adds up. I calculated that it's not worth flying if the driving time is 8 hours or less, and only starts showing a clear edge once driving time would exceed 12 hours.

I have been trying different toppings for sandwiches and many of them are somewhat lacking. They're either too oily or runny, or they taste off or bland, or they're hard to find, or they have questionable ingredients. So! I started experimenting with making my own, using sour cream as the base medium. What I've thrown into the mix: bacon bits, bleu cheese crumbles, horseradish, diced jalepeno peppers, assorted spicy spices and peppery peppers. I want something that I can bite into and it bites back at me. So far what I've come up with would also make for a fantastic dip. I've been making extremely small batches for testing, lest I end up eating several pounds of sour cream in a short duration. More experimentation is needed.

Last year I was given a company phone. At first I left it at work after my shift. Then I started taking it home with me anyway. There were a few times I was glad I did. One of the benefits is being able to check my company email at home, and decide if it's going to be much too silly at work and I would be better off calling out sick, then using that same phone to do just that. And then again using that same phone to enter PTO time for the day. Something something about double-edged swords.

A few drinks I enjoyed in Japan were Pocari Sweat and Strong Zero. I discovered I can find Strong Zero around here but not under that name. Here, it's called "-196" and the alcohol content is lower, 6% instead of 9% in Japan. It's also more expensive here. It's called "-196" because it's made by putting whole fruits in liquid nitrogen and crushing them and mixing it with vodka. Then of course, filtering out the chunky bits. Is the US version good? Sure. But of course, it doesn't hit like the original. Now Pocari Sweat, I can find that as a direct import. There's nothing quite like a near-freezing bottle of that stuff after walking around Tokyo.

Sixth covid shot acquired. This time I also opted for the flu shot. Normally I don't. This time, I decided to get it. Call it a vibe. I spent the weekend with my shoulder twice as sore, because it was poked by two needles instead of one. Maybe I'll stagger them in the future.

I thought about going somewhere while I was off from work for a week. Didn't happen. I can feel bad weather in my knees and there was enough of that. So, instead I stayed home and watched anime. I got caught up on Atri: Dear Moments, and I also dug into the archives and watched Kokoro Library, from 2001. It's about 3 sisters who run a small library in the middle of nowhere, except there's nothing small about the library. It would be more appropriate for a large city or college campus.

The new season is warming up. I watched the remake of Ranma to see how that holds up. Another show: Punirunes season 2. While that's strictly a kid's show, I ended up enjoying it more than I thought. Nanahira does the ending theme, which is a bonus.

More Raspberry Pi parts and bits arrived. I have an idea that involves a small display and big sound. I think it'll be cool, if I can make it work. I can get the audio part working but the small display doesn't want to talk to the Pi.

I'm also lining up parts ahead of time for when my 2nd ipod's hard drive dies, as they eventually do someday. I already have the mSATA adapter and a 1TB drive for it but the power consumption on those is too much for a device that has a battery the size of a USB thumb drive, so I'm going with the SD card adapter instead. The SD cards and adapter use about 1/4 of the power of the SSD, at a penalty of half the speed. For something that's going to be used to play music, that's fine.

AUSA came and went. I went for the day as I usually do. Each time I go, there are fewer and fewer people I know there. Once upon a time, it seemed like I knew everyone there. Someday I'll be nothing more than a total stranger, a shadow, a ghost, just another face in the crowd there. I knew for a long time that was going to happen someday, so I've already learned to accept it.

It's time for another week off! Soonish. No real plans for it and I want to keep it that way. The timeframe of it is elastic; I can move it later if needed. Not too much later, as I'll already be maxed out on how much vacation time I can push into next year. Also I'll be out for 2 weeks anyway due to how Christmas and New Year's land on Wednesdays.

Speaking of 2 weeks, that will probably be the duration of my next trip to Japan next year. Last time I went, somewhere around Day 9 or 10 I was mentally ready to go back home. Maybe because my suitcases were getting full plus a box of stuff that needed mailed home. Maybe I was itching to add those 150 CDs to my music library. Maybe just to make sure the house was still standing. But I have good neighbors. Besides, the hardest thing about going to Japan is the flight. No matter what, the main flight segment is always going to be 12-14 hours. Sleeping on a flight? Naw, I can't. The most I can do is light naps to take the edge off. I have ways of keeping myself entertained for that long, and one of the main ways is to enjoy some music.

You know how there are some phrases that start off as mundane or innocent but they get appropriated for something sexual? The opposite can happen too. The operative phrase here is "rawdogging", which originally meant (and still does mean) unprotected sex. Lately, people have been using that word to describe taking a flight but not watching any movies, playing games, listening to music, reading, sleeping, etc. Just sitting. The closest I got to that was when I went to Seattle and after take-off, I discovered my cheap earbuds didn't work. That was almost a five hour flight, yo. If I had discovered this while I was still in the terminal prior to boarding, I would have willingly bought new ones from one of the overpriced stores in the terminal. After landing and getting settled in, I ended up going to Best Buy for replacements. Which were also cheap. That was okay, they just had to work well enough for the return flight, and they did.

About a month later I went to MicroCenter and bought a set of active noise-canceling bluetooth headphones and took those on my flight to Phoenix. Never thought I'd have headphones that need charging but here we are. At least they still have the option of plugging into an analog port. They were very good at blocking out the airplane noise; I'll give them that. Not bad for $100. They will come with me on future flights.

In Akihabara, there is a 6-floor building dedicated to selling earphones and headphones of any and every kind and accessories for them. Six whole floors just for headphones. During my 2018 trip, I would have done well to go there instead of Yodobashi, where I picked up a set of headphones that ended up being too small for my ears. Did I accidentally get child-sized headphones? I think I just looked at the price, thought it was good enough, and took the box to the checkout counter. I still have them but I don't really use them, especially after getting a pair of Mackies (which do fit over my ears). If I had gone to E-earphones instead like I should have, I would have probably been able to try them on first.

The Mackies and Grados are good for at-home listening; not good for flights. The Grados are open-back so they're excellent for music but don't even pretend to block outside noise. That also means if I'm listening to music with them, so is anyone else nearby. I live by myself so that's a moot point in more ways than one.

Where was I going with all this? I forget. I'll figure that out later.

The LD player lives! Again. One of the things I dreaded was removing the power supply board, because that also means removing the back plate, which supports a bunch of moving parts. I couldn't just pull the board straight up and out because the tray didn't give enough room for that. Except that's how it's supposed to come out. I've been doing it wrong. Someone uploaded a video on servicing LD players, and showed how to manually eject the main tray to get it out of the way. This means I don't have to modify the board to relocate the fuse, but I still added a couple sockets for the SIDAC so that can be replaced without removing the board. Because those parts will eventually burn out again. While I was mucking about in there, I also replaced the loading belt that was clearly on the verge of wearing out. Someone has been reproducing other parts, so I'm probably going to get a few of those. Next time I have to open it up, I'll also give it more of a cleaning and some fresh grease on the sliding surfaces.

Now that I think about it: If the original part lasted 20 years but the replacements lasted maybe a year or two despite being plugged into a surge protector already, I should probably reassess the specifications of that component. I'll revisit that when my existing supply of those parts gets used up. (The ones I ordered 5 years ago are already listed as obsolete.)

I had largely given up on finding a laptop with a built-in optical drive. Then while I was poking around in Akihabara via Maps, as I do, I zoomed in on one of the countless computer stores there. There's a computer company called Mouse and they sell custom laptops. One of the options in those laptops is a DVD drive. I don't know if they'll still offer that a year from now, but if they do, that's another thing I'll be getting in my next trip to Japan. Or maybe they can ship to the US. Despite my great attachment to my current laptop that I've had for 14 years now, I know that it's getting long in the tooth.

My neighbors put on a small block party a couple weeks ago. All I had to do was put some clothes on, and walk across the street. And it was nice. Some of my neighbors I knew, some I didn't.