psipsy

I have a substantial collection of doujinshi, enough to fill most of an Ikea bookcase. That amount will almost certainly increase so it's important to keep track of it in some way. There used to be a website where people could do exactly that with their collections. It was easy to use and comprehensive, making it very useful. Then the owner of that site fucked off and disappeared, and thus so did the site itself. There's another site that aims to fill that void but it has a long way to go. It's not as comprehensive as the previous site, and not as easy to use.

"I should take pictures of my doujinshi so I have a reference to what I already have so I don't buy the same thing twice!" And set up those pictures in such a way that I can organize and access them when not at home. Well, let's worry about that part later and work on the image collection first. The phone would work. Or I could use the DSLR I already have which gives me full control over the shutter speed, aperture, ISO, flash, and so on. Do I really want to freehand either of those for what is literally thousands of these books?

Well, I have a scanner. Why not that? In order to avoid the moire effect and avoid it looking over-exposed, it takes almost a minute per scan. That would be fine if I only had a small percentage of what I have now. Even a few hundred would be tolerable. Two or three thousand books will take a long time. Still valid if needed. But do I need to do it that way?

The camera only needs a couple seconds at most per picture. Since DSLR shutter mechanisms are rated for hundreds of thousands of movements and in rapid succession, this sort of task should be easy for the camera. It's like it was designed and built just to take pictures. The weakness there is it needs to be about 14 or 15 inches away from the subject to get a standard B5 in frame, with the 24mm pancake lens. (To use my 50mm lens, it would have to be almost 30 inches away.) I also thought about using a regular zoom lens but felt a prime lens would be better. Lens selection is a whole other can of worms. This also needs to be repeatable. I have a tripod. It is a very nice tripod. Tripods are really better at holding the camera horizontally. For this, the camera needs to be pointing straight down.

But who am I to pass up a reason or excuse to build things? Hence, I built something out of extruded aluminum T-slot rail, so I can mount my DSLR to it and use a remote shutter control. This also gives me the ability to mount lights, add light-diffusing panels to cut down on glare, and just generally make it sturdy. By keeping the camera still and adding lots of light, I can get away with slightly stopping down the aperture for a better depth of field and bottom out the ISO to 100. Basically, a light-box gantry.

There's a slight wrinkle when it comes to some of the larger books: The gantry doesn't put the camera high enough; it needs another 3 inches. If I was a thinking man, I would have designed the overall dimensions to account for that, and just designed a base plate with an adjustable height or worked in a focusing rail. You know what, it's fine as it is. I have maybe 30 of those larger books, so I don't see much point in including capacity for them when that quantity is within reason with the scanner. I can add that later if needed.

So far, it's pretty sturdy, while also being lightweight. Whether or not it works out, when I'm done I can use it for another project. Apparently there are similar setups for scanning developed film, and I also have a 100mm macro lens.

All this for what amounts to keeping track of dirty comic books.

This past anime season was kinda light for me but there were some good shows.

Yowayowa Sensei: Student discovers his scary teacher is not scary at all and is actually helpless in every way possible. Lots of quality fanservice in this.

Kanan-Sama is easy: Demoness enters high school to prey on the souls of her classmates, ends up dating one of them due to various misunderstandings. Not as much fanservice as Yowayowa but it's up there.

Needy Girl Overdose: I would describe this as the deranged offspring of Serial Experiments Lain and Perfect Blue, about an internet idol being an absolute hot mess basketcase off-screen.

Do You Like Big Girls: Dude is roped into "managing" a volleyball team full of girls who are taller than he is, ends up banging all of them. Wait a minute, this is straight up hentai.

Observation log of a self-proclaimed villainess: Villainess is self-aware of her role in an otome game (isekai) and is actively trying to help the heroine reach the Good End but ends up giving her the Bad End somehow, while inexplicably also giving herself the Good End. I'm seeing some important lessons in here, about not sacrificing your own happiness for someone else, and not meddling with someone else's life despite your best intentions. Maybe I'm reading too much into something meant to be a comedy.

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There are more anime fans in my department now than there were in the entire building when I started. They don't really know of the struggles anime fans in the US faced prior to the 2000s and the internet as we know it. The long lead times, the scarcity, the reliance on fickle VCRs and tapes, needing to Know People who had the stuff. And so on. I don't hold that missing experience against them or use it as a purity test. It's not that they weren't into anime during that time, it's more like they hadn't been born yet or were so young they wouldn't have remembered.

This year: Japan, for sure. I looked at flights for my intended timeframe and OUCH. I could handle it, but still. Ouch. Gotta renew the passport first, and then I'll revisit the idea in a few months.

Next year, I'm thinking some more road trips. Haven't been on a big one since 2022. I thought about doing Historic Route 66. Thing is, the amount of time to do all 2400+ miles in one trip and do it slowly enough to get a feel for it is a minimum of 2 weeks, plus another week just to drive back home (or do the wind-up, if I go west to east). That's a lot, even for me. I could do it, I have enough PTO for it. It's still a lot. As it turns out, it's not really needed to do all of it like that. One option is to fly out to a major city along that route, rent a car at the airport, toodle along Rt 66 for a few days, then drop the rental off at another airport and fly back home. Since there would be a car rental and flights involved, that would ultimately be more expensive than driving what I already have. The real benefit is in spreading it out over the course of a few years, a week at a time.

I can say I did some of it on my 2008 road trip. A little bit.

Speaking of road trips, remember those coupon books for hotels and motels? They were printed on newsprint-grade paper, and available at rest areas and truck stops. The featured lodgings were organized by state, then by major highways, then by exit numbers. I used them extensively up to about 2011. The drawback with the coupon books was I had no way of knowing if there were any vacancies until I showed up or called them, and there was also the slim but non-zero chance that the place would be completely closed. After 2011, I started using Priceline, as that shows who still has rooms and I could reserve it right then and there. I think the coupon books are still being made but I'd have to visit a rest area to find out.

Somewhere in my archives, I think I still have some AAA TourBooks. Those were fun and useful.

The coupon books did teach me something useful about getting rooms on road trips, and it remains true in the Priceline era. Up to about 9PM, there are plenty of options. Between 9 and 10PM, rooms start to get taken fast, and I gotta be quick if I see something I like. After 10PM, the only places left are either really expensive or really sketchy or both. This is something obvious to people with normal sleep schedules. Even then, there will always be someone who thinks they can squeeze the driving out to 11PM or so.

Memorial Day weekend was the wettest and chilliest I've ever seen. I had to turn the heat back on.

The local dairy/convenience store chain has come out with cookies and cream flavored milk. It looks like milk that's had a bunch of cookies soaking in it and tastes like it too. It's really just cocoa and sugar added in but it does the job. They also have mint chocolate chip milk. It's alright, if a bit strong on the mint flavor. The strawberry milk is more subdued.

Two years ago, I mentioned I have a small tool chest with drawers that slide out. I also mentioned that random stuff will collect around the front, making it difficult to open the lowest drawer. The solution was simple: 3 pieces of 2x4 lumber screwed together to make a big "U", and put that under the tool chest. It only took me 2 years to implement this solution. Now it's just high enough that I can open the drawers and it created a cubby hole underneath. I thought about building a little drawer for it then decided it would be better to just leave it open. Maybe I could just make a little door instead. Yeah.

Miharu is now paid off! Got the title in the mail about a week after that last payment. At the time, I got a really good deal on the interest rate (0.9%) so I wasn't in any hurry to pay off the loan early. Now hopefully she behaves as well as Ai and Nozomi and I'll be able to go 10 years without a car payment again.

April showers bring May flowers, as well as the cacaphony of gas-powered lawn equipment. Lawn tractors, push mowers, and line trimmers all playing their parts in a buzzing orchestra. Were it socially acceptable to do so, I would let my lawn grow and become wild. But alas, local ordinances against that are a thing, so I must join this symphony of 2-cycle and 4-cycle engines with my own 'instruments'. The repairs I did the last couple years (carburetor, head gasket, ignitor coil, spark plug, air filter assembly) have held, so it was ready to use as-is. Which is just as well; if I waited even just another week, it would be twice as difficult then.

Except for a few stubborn piles remaining in parking lots, the snow is pretty much gone. The first of it to disappear was in the yard, which means that by mid-April, that grass is gonna come up roaring.

As I've mentioned before, some of my coworkers were born the same year I started working at my current job. I do not judge them harshly, for they are adults in their own right. And some of them are showing interest in the Olde Ways, an interest in technologies from before their time.

While looking at the instructions for my 10QD film camera(s), I found the function that enables it to do multiple exposures (up to 9) on one frame of film. Okay, that sounds like it could be fun. I finally put some film into the $2 one and so far it works. So it looks like I have two working ones now? I'll know for sure when it gets developed. I could probably make a thing out of picking up a box full of old film cameras every time I go to Japan. If they work, they can be gifts. If not, they can be decorations. Or parts for something else.

Income taxes are done. I'm not getting back as much as I used to so I wasn't in as much of a hurry to file as I used to. Apparently the "no tax on overtime" helps a little. I didn't really go crazy on the overtime this year so that doesn't have as much of an effect as it does on some of my other coworkers who went crazy with it.

My Bakemonogatari BD collection grows, with the recent release of "Off & Monster Season". The first such addition in 6 years, because it's the first part of the show to have been animated in that long. Granted, the past 6 years have been weird for everyone, so I'm not surprised.

One of the film cameras I picked up in my recent trip to Japan is a Canon A-1, which was a very popular camera when it was released in... (checks notes)... 1978. Since so many were made and sold, good working models aren't hard to find and can be had for a couple hundred dollars. The one I found was around $20 and needed a bit of encouragement to get the shutter to work again. It's still not quite good enough to use, as there's a squeak when the shutter mirror is actuated and there's not much left of the light seals. I could do the light seals myself. I watched some videos on how to fix the squeak, which is a known issue on these and similar models. The process involves performing brain surgery on the camera to remove the mirror box from the body. I could try to do that myself. Or, I could ship it to someone who does that all the time and would cost me about $100 and it would be back to me in about a week, ready for film, while I use my workbench for other projects.

The free disc film camera I found for free last summer was free for a reason: It didn't work. I looked up the model and it came with a non-removeable battery. I took it apart to find what kind of battery it was, and found it was a pair of fairly common 123A batteries soldered in place. I have a point & shoot 35mm from the late 90s that also uses a 123A and still works. I bought new batteries from the store literally this past weekend. Since disc film has been long out of production, there's no sense in doing the surgery to put in new batteries and getting it to work again. It's only good for being a novelty decoration now. The other disc film camera I have, I got as a present when I was a kid. It also still works. Everything is mechanically operated. Pressing the shutter button provides enough force to actuate the shutter mechanism, reset it, and advance the disc a frame.

A couple years ago I spent around $300 to get enough DDR4 to max out one of my computers. Four sticks each of 32GB, for a total of 128GB. Way more than I'd need but at the time I figured why not. I guess maybe it's for the best I got that when I did. Getting the same thing now would cost $1200. Honestly, I hope every company that went all-in on that AI-datacenter bullshit ends up losing their entire ass.

I was prepared for the snow with no less than 5 shovels. Double-handled scoopers for moving the snow out of the way without destroying my back, and heavy steel digging shovels that are great for breaking up packed snow and ice that would otherwise destroy the plastic shovels. Which has happened. And when the snow is really packed down after walking and driving on it, the steel shovel gets under it and scraaaaapes it all off with one push, leaving bare asphalt. Satisfying. But really, the cold is the worst part. I've been lowering my thermostat so the furnace isn't running all the time. (Plus the heating bill is in my name.)

Recently, I decided to check out my collection of VCRs, to see which ones still worked. Spoiler alert: None of them worked without working on them, and most of them are still out.

Going by in order of acquisition:

Front-loader 4-head from 1984 with analog tuner: This is one I got back in 1994, from a VCR shop that literally gave it to me. Originally I wanted something to use as parts to fix another VCR but this just needed some adjustments on it to get the sound right. I guess the owner didn't want it fixed so they let it go. For the longest time it worked great. It was a heavy tank of a machine, and had a great picture when it worked. Now? It doesn't want to play tapes. I got new belts but I need to install them and put in fresh grease.
Status: Gonna have to revisit this one later now that I got a service manual for it.

Fancy 4-head stereo VCR from 1995: This one I got new and paid good money for, after getting an actual paying job. It was a workhorse in its day, has a lot of features with some neat editing tricks, and had a good picture. Of course it needed new belts, and on this model, getting to those belts requires splitting the mechanical chassis from the main circuit board. I got new belts on, and it'll load tapes, rewind, fast-forward. But there's no video when it plays and I'm afraid that I might have broken something. I also found a service manual for this so maybe that will help. If I can't save this I might actually mourn it. If I want another one exactly like it, I can get one, but they're about $90 used.
Status: Needs more troubleshooting.

Fancy 4-head stereo VCR from 1997: I also got this new. It's a little less fancy than the 1995 model with a few less fancy features, but had just as good playback. Internally, it's similar to the one I got in 1995. Of course, the belts were worn out on this too. New belts went in but it didn't want to load the tape properly, so I take it back apart. Oh, there's a little spring that's not fully connected, just dangling. Where does it go? To a plastic piece with a broken tab, and it's the kind of plastic (most likely polypropylene) that ignores almost every adhesive in existence. Ah shit. I was able to run a tiny screw into the part and hook the spring onto that. Now it works! Well, mostly. The rewind and fast forward are kinda slow. But it does load and play and eject. Will my fix last? Who knows.
Status: Works good enough for now, I'll take it.

Top-loader VCR from 1984: Got this at a yard sale in 2006. It caught my eye because the main steel cover has a fake woodgrain finish. Being a top-loader, that left enough room on the front for the buttons to be large enough that someone could use it while wearing boxing gloves. The price tag was $5 but since the owner was closing up the yard sale, he dropped the asking price to a dollar. This one, of course, needs belts. I'm hesitant to do that on this because my usual source for belts is asking $115 for them, and I can get whole working machines with more features for less. On top of that, I can't figure out how to disassemble the thing to even get to the belts. I feel like if I do get that far, Pinhead from Hellraiser is gonna appear. And it's the only 2-head VCR here.
Status: If this doesn't get fixed, I'll be fine. In fact, if someone wants it, I'll let it go for the low price of "get this out of my house". Maybe it's good for hipster decoration. I don't know.

S-VHS VCR from 1988 or 89: An S-VHS machine with all kinds of features and functions and buttons and dials. This was getting thrown out at work and was about to get put in with the rest of the electronic waste, which the company has to pay for to get rid of. Manager said get it out of here, so I did. Some of the belts had decomposed into tar and needed scraped off their pulleys. I got new belts on and it can play tapes but it doesn't want to rewind or fast-forward. Doesn't even try, just stops.
Status: Service manual acquired, so I'll use that to try to figure this out.

4-head stereo SQPB VCR from 1999: By this point in time, almost all VCRs were 4-heads with stereo, and they had become extremely compact and simplified compared to models from 10 years prior. In disassembly, I learned that a few screws are all that's holding it onto the plastic shell, which itself isn't necessary for operation. I got this a couple years ago from Goodwill for a whopping $5. It was remarkably clean inside, a good sign. It can play tapes, it has a good picture, but stalls out when rewinding. It has one belt, stretched, glazed, distorted from years of sitting. A new belt is on the way.
Status: I'm optimistic enough that it just needs a belt so I got a spare (used) remote to go with it.

There are Youtube channels of people who work on VCRs and they all run into the same problems. Brittle plastics that break as soon as there's any kind of stress on them, stretched belts, sub-par components that failed early, replacement parts made of unobtainium, simple abuse, and general design flaws that reduce device lifespans. If a model-specific part is broken? And there are no spare units to pull from? That's it, it's done, game over. The fact remains that nobody who built VCRs designed them to last this long.

And most of the features of these are obsolete. Recording something from over the air or cable? Forget it. The original analog NTSC signals that can be deciphered by these are no longer being broadcast, so the ability to pick up however many channels and the fancy event timers mean nothing now. The fancy editing features on high-end machines can be replicated on a computer, which has a strong advantage in being non-linear. The only real use these things have left is tape playback, so the differences between 2 head/4 head and mono/stereo still means something.

How am I checking the video output on these if I'm not near a TV? I got one of those cheap video capture dongles that plugs into a USB port. It's okay, I guess. It's really not great. If I want to capture video for the sake of archiving, I'd use the newer computer with the Blackmagic capture card. But for the sake of seeing if there is video coming from a VCR, the USB dongle is okay enough. I'm actively looking at other methods.

And so, I put them all back together with the express purpose of clearing off my workbench, so that I may work on other projects.

Some more papercraft kits arrived. They're highly gratifying to make and they turn out well. Then again I've found that putting almost anything together is gratifying. Plastic models, Lego, papercraft, and so on. It does something to the brain sauces.

I tried making prototype custom computer cables with some automotive wire, since it's what I had on hand. Nope. The insulation is too thick and stiff and it won't let the crimp connectors go on right. I shouldn't be surprised, since the insulation is designed for its advertised purpose. Then I tried some wire with silicone insulation, which is thinner and more pliable. It's almost like a wet noodle and is easier to work with.

I have 6 VCRs here and maybe one of them might possibly work again someday. I've tried three of them so far and they all have something wrong with them. Two of them I got for free, one was purchased at a yard sale for a dollar, another was picked up from a thrift store for $5, and the remaining two cost a lot more since I purchased them new back in the 90s. I still have the original boxes for them. I'm going to try to fix them anyway. I found a source for belts (if a bit expensive), and service manuals are available. Those are a big help. Will I be successful on all of them? I have my doubts.

Working the day after Thanksgiving was a first for me. It was voluntary. I could have said nothing, not shown up, and I would have faced zero consequences. But I said I would, so I did. Lawdy that overtime pay though.

Getting AI-generated search results feels like trying to ask Brainy Smurf something while he's tripping balls and hasn't slept in almost a week. It tries to sound informative but it says nothing and doesn't make any sense.

I got myself a bunch of sockets for computer power supply cables and a crimper for them, so when I happen across a computer build with power cables that are too long or too short, I'll be able to fix that. That said, I also ordered some loose SATA connectors for the same reasons. Wire? SATA drives don't need much current so even if I put half a dozen hard drives on one harness, 18 gauge will be plenty thick enough. Didja know that even though SATA connectors have 3.3V, modern drives don't use it? And 2.5" drives don't use the 12V either for that matter.

The hardest part of opening up most portable Apple devices is removing the display. Well, the battery inside my iPod Touch did much of the work for me by puffing out and pushing the display off enough that I could fingernail it the rest of the way.

I kinda have to accept that even though Windows 7 was the best version of Windows, many 3rd-party programs compatible with it aren't getting updates anymore, and most of the versions that do get updates aren't compatible with W7 anymore. With browsers in particular, whole sites are starting to break as a result. If I want to connect to my phone via Bluetooth, it won't work with W7 anymore. And if I have to do a fresh install of W7, the activation can't even be done online anymore, as Microsoft turned off the activation servers for anything older than W10. On top of that, the process of running updates is completely mangled. But if I need to, I can. I'm clever and sneaky.

Hardware is getting to be in the same situation. Oh, I want to replace the wi-fi adapter? If I want to use Windows 7, it's topped out with 802.11ac. Which is fine by itself but new adapters are AX and faster and will only work with 10 or 11. Motherboard/CPU newer than 2017? W7 ain't it. Video cards? Nvidia and AMD cut off W7 a few generations ago.

How many computers do I have that are still running W7? At least 6, with 4 of them being realistic candidates for W10, even though that too has reached end-of-support. But I figure W10 has some good useful years before it starts to really fall apart the same way W7 is, and by then these older systems will likely need replaced due to catastrophic hardware failure.

Most of these candidates have room for multiple hard drives. It's a matter of getting more SSDs to put W10 on for a dual-boot setup. That way I can take my time with moving files over, making sure core programs work, and so on. For one computer, I already had another 2.5" 1TB, ready to get W7 cloned onto it but I never got around to that, so I used it for W10. Makes that easier. One down, three to go.

There's a difference between NGFF and NVMe that makes them not exactly cross-compatible. Physically, they have a different key but M.2 slots can often take both. Some motherboards and enclosures can do both, some can't. My computer from 9 years ago apparently can do both, but Windows 7 doesn't like booting from NVMe. Windows 10 however, knows what to do with it. Two down, two to go.

For another computer, I picked up a 2TB SSD that was marked down by $35. Seems it was returned for some reason. For $100, I'll give it a chance! According to various utilities, there are no write cycles on it. So someone bought it, decided it wasn't what they wanted, so they returned it. Alrighty. It came with a USB-SATA adapter too. After needing to shuffle cables around because not all 10 of the SATA ports are bootable, the installation went through. Three down, one to go.

The 2010 vintage laptop will be tricky. Not impossible. I'll have to crowbar both versions of Windows onto one drive somehow. It's also the oldest of the 4 candidates, and the maker of it stopped posting drivers on their site. I've put W10 on an older and lower-spec computer so I'm fairly confident it'll work. Quad-core, 16GB RAM. Should be enough. But it'll have to wait because I've run out of valid keys for now.

There's no sense in going with anything smaller than 500GB hard drive these days. Mostly because it's not much more expensive than a 250GB. At 1TB? Yeah you could still get a platter drive at that capacity but an SSD isn't much more and the difference in speed more than makes up for it. Platter drives only start to really pull ahead in value at around 4TB, and by then, those are mostly being used for mass file storage and not the OS. And putting W10/11 on a platter drive is a new level of masochism I'm not into or ready for.

The base install of the OS goes relatively quickly. What really takes time is all the updates, the drivers, the programs of choice, and the customizations. There was one computer where W10 didn't recognize the wifi card right away. After installing the driver for that, it found drivers for everything else. This is a far cry from computers of olde, when the basic act of installing a hard drive meant entering the parameters in the motherboard's BIOS.

A coworker and I were talking about video cards, and the high power consumption of some of them. The RTX 5090 has a peak TDP of 575 watts, which means it can pull almost 50 amps at full power. All that juice is flowing through a bundle of 18-gauge wires. As long as the connection is made properly, each wire can handle its share. Meanwhile people into R/C cars running on LiPo batteries will look at 50 amps and say "that's cute". An EC3 or XT60 connector would be able to handle that much juice easily and safely. But those aren't going to be used for computer graphics cards anytime soon because it's not a recognized standard for computer connections.

Somewhere in Akihabara, there is a store selling old Intel CPUs in a gashapon machine. Imagine popping in a couple 100 yen coins, turning the knob, and out pops a plastic ball with a first or second-gen i5 CPU. That's something I would do for the sheer novelty; I don't think I'd try making a full computer based on it. Then again I wouldn't put it past myself.

After over 2 dozen orders from Surugaya, they finally made a slight mistake. One of the CDs I bought had the right sticker and barcode but was a completely different item. Y'know what, I ain't even mad. They apologized for it and will refund what I paid for the affected item, and I don't have to send the wrong one back. Though it may be because the value of the wrong item is less than what it would cost to return.

Normally I do all my model building at my workbench in the basement. Recently, I started making up a small portable kit of basic supplies that I can take places or just into different rooms as the mood strikes. If something gets too technical or requires some of the more specialized supplies, I can put it off for later when I'm actually at the workbench.

Some time ago, I got a portable paint booth with a fan-powered filtered exhaust. The cord can retract and it can fold up for transport or storage. I now have it set up on another workbench in my basement. I could use canned spray paints or an airbrush. To use the airbrush, I'd have to get a small compressor. Or I could just use some longer hoses to reach the compressor I already have in the garage. Alright. So I stopped at Harbor Freight to get a bunch of fittings and air line accessories including an extra regulator for direct control and the total for all those bits came out to almost as much as what a separate dedicated airbrush compressor would have cost anyway. Wait that's not how it's supposed to work.

Maybe it's just as well I delay my Japan trip to next year. There might be a strike at work. Maybe. It'll depend on whether the union and the company can agree on a contract at the last minute. And when. It would be somewhat irresponsible of me to purchase the plane ticket and make all the arrangements if the strike does occur. If it all works out, I'll be getting some nice raises, and the pay bump alone would be almost enough to pay for the trip next year.