Adaptive Curmudgeon

In 1981 the nerdiest Canadian rock band to ever exist released Red Barchetta. I loved it. I still do.

It’s the story of a young man who lives in a dystopian future. His uncle possess a glorious little sports car but “motor laws” have outlawed(?) such things. As any true rock protagonist should, he ignores this and goes tearing through the countryside in the beautiful mechanical delight. Shortly a “gleaming alloy aircar” appears, then a second, both intent of destroying him and his little car. The antique sportscar enthusiast outdrives the behemoth machines and flits back to safety at his uncle’s farm.

Being Gen X I’d been hammered about environment since I was born. I assumed “motor laws” were an environmental thing. Later I read the sci fi story that was the song’s inspiration. The “motor laws” were a safety thing. The “gleaming alloy aircars” were so protected against collision as to be virtual tanks, so assholes with them took to hunting gearheads in their vulnerable machinery.

In song, a Canadian bass player with a 1948 Ferrari 166MM, faced a very dangerous foe; the faceless joyless future…

“The blur of the landscape
Every nerve aware…

Suddenly ahead of me
Across the mountainside
A gleaming alloy air car
Shoots towards me, two lanes wide
I spin around with shrieking tires
To run the deadly race
Go screaming through the valley
As another joins the chase”

The short story was from 1973, the song from 1981, yet it feels as likely today as any other time. We know why. Whether the justification is “safety” or “environment”, the result is always the same; a certain type of person finds simple pleasures to be insufferable. The plague of Karens that went into Covid rut in 2000 has been with us a long time.

I rented a scooter in Maui in 2025. It had a near silent engine the size of a football and got somewhere north of 100 MPG. So of course it shut itself off whenever idling at a stop sign. Idiots cannot (will not!) recognize the practical and meaningful difference between a 100 mpg scooter on a lonely one lane island coast road and a 15 MPG SUV soccermom’s special lumbering Karen and three children’s car seats through clusterfuck traffic to Starbucks.

There’s a difference. It’s a big one. But Karen is interested in compliance. Stated justifications are a means to an end.

Anyone who loves driving a real car has always been under attack by those who can’t or won’t operate a truly invigorating machine. Those attacks began with the Model T and will never end. I am literally the last generation of people who can use a clutch in a daily driver. It wasn’t a big deal but one can’t do it while brain dead and texting.

Why am I telling this story? Because I just rode a driverless… “car”. Ok it wasn’t a car, it was an ugly electric lunchbox on wheels. But it was legally piloting its ass through city streets and there was no human behind the steering wheel… which didn’t exist.

It was an experiment.

I haven’t written the rest of this post. Before I post my results, here’s your homework.

A nice drive.

Rush:

Recently, I bought a dozen eggs. This is no big deal. I’m very happy it’s no big deal.

American grocery stores have always been a miracle; not just occasionally, for my entire life. Even before recent times of madness, I would take a moment to appreciate it when I walked into a grocery store. Maybe I’m a bit of a loon; pausing at the produce section for 30 seconds of silent reflection… even awe… but I don’t block the aisles, I’m silent about it, and gratitude is a good thing.

I’d never seen empty shelves in America until 2020. Gaps in stock felt ominous. Undeniable cracks in a very big edifice.

It’s good to think and re-think about any event you’ve experienced. Most people revert to denial. They misremember it; either deliberately or because they were instructed to do so. “I don’t remember writing that stuff on Facebook.” “A neighbor got ratted out for walking on the sidewalk, but the Karen calling the cops has always been a jerk.” “Sure it was statistically absurd but we got the results I wanted.” “Minneapolis was a one off, as was Portland.”

Denial is infantilizing. A fully realized adult saw what he saw and chooses to remember. We (and many other nations) went to hell so fast it’s clear the people craved it. It wasn’t one event, it was a cascade of them. “Two weeks to flatten the curve.” Cops arresting a lone surfer. Citywide riots aren’t new, but official consent sure is. The nation’s most statistically unlikely election might just be statistically unlikely, but it’s new that asking rude questions could get you censored, debanked, fired, or jailed.

When things collapse there are consequences. Within a year I was on a list of who was going to get fired. My job performance was stellar, and irrelevant. A mandatory medical injection was the only thing that mattered.

Imagine that. One month you’re in a workplace where HIPPA makes it illegal for an employer to even ask about your cancer treatment. The next month your job depends on submission to an injection. What happened to HIPPA? It wasn’t repealed. It just became moot. A lot of laws became officially/unofficially not laws anymore. People just accepted that it’s morally wrong to fire a man with AIDS but morally right to fire a redneck who hasn’t got the shot.

The people complied until they didn’t. Like the peak moment of a flood cresting and slowly ebbing back to normal, it ended. Or at least it’s mostly over. For now.

Some actions, once done, can never be undone. It’ll never be exactly the way it was.

When I go to the doctor I’m asked if I recently left the State. To what end? You don’t live in a nation where travel between States is an issue; until you do. Five years ago a medical decision was printed on a piece of paper that you carried around as a form of ID, now my doctor wants to know if I’ve flown to Texas. These are not unrelated.

Who knows where it ends? Maybe it didn’t really end? All I know is that some part of that interregnum of chaos is when eggs briefly vanished from the store.

The egg supply shouldn’t have anything to do with a human virus, or an election, or anything political. But we made everything politics. Sometimes that means killing a lot of hens. Killing hens affects the egg supply exactly like you’d expect. Now we’ve got a new generation of hens. Eggs will remain reasonably priced until the next time we freak out and mess up the supply.

I don’t remember what I paid. When a cheapskate like me buys something without bitching about it, the price is reasonable. Eggs aren’t as cheap as before. No shit! Nothing is. On average, nothing ever will be again. Inflation is a one way ride. A cycle of inflation is just another bullet point in the apocalypse we recently lived through.

Regardless, eggs are a lot cheaper than they once were. Have you taken time to appreciate it?

I’m more removed than most people. My homestead is a parachute. I can and have “raised” my own eggs. I had chickens for maybe a decade or so. Farm fresh eggs for the kitchen and a zillion dozen sold on the side. I could do it again. I don’t have to. Yet.

My homestead and capitalism are tools that solve many things. If eggs go to $10 a dozen I’ll have several dozen chickens running around my yard faster than you can say “invisible hand”.

I’m glad that’s unnecessary. I enjoy fully stocked stores. Savor it. We’ve regained something lost. Take a moment for gratitude.

I’ve thought about how eggs became a slogan and then were memory holed. I’m too lazy to Google it. Was it a year ago? What was the emotional attack word? “Oligarch?” “Authoritarian?” No that’s not it. Oh yeah “affordability”. They flogged the word a while.

Somewhere, right now there’s a person who shrieked about eggs because they were told to. The idea was implanted by whatever media they consume. Eggs weren’t important the month before, they aren’t now, but for a while they were all encompassing. That person isn’t appreciating plentiful eggs because it was never a thing that truly concerned them.

They’ve received new orders. They’re bellowing about Iran, or the newest disease, or “inequality”, or that dude on one side that schtoinked Fang Fang the spy but got tangled in a sexual harassment scandal, or the chick on the other side who’s scandal was a husband that liked to wear enormous balloon fake tits (what is it with perverts?). If all else fails the complaints get personal. Elon Musk looks weird and the Orange Beast is scheming to steal their cat.

The worst chumps bellow about what might happen. They imagine something somewhere potentially might turn bad. Then they scream about it.

The future is uncertain. Part of being adult is knowing that. Part of wisdom is knowing most fears never manifest. Part of resilience is knowing you’ll handle whatever happens. We are all going to die. The dumbass losing their shit about hypotheticals is a person who’s burning the present because they fear the future.

I think a lot of people like being ordered about. They’re happy bellowing about whatever reason they’re told is a source of terror. Anger feeds the hollow where a contented soul should reside. All they really want is attention. That’s why they like to carry signs and march in the streets. “Look at me! I’m so very angry. Pay attention to me.”

If you’re unwilling (or forget) to enjoy the resolution when a crisis (manufactured or not) is over, it wasn’t really a crisis. It was a tantrum.

If you were bitching about eggs, now’s the time to be happy. Buy some. Make an omelet. Get fancy and make a soufflé.

If they’re still too expensive, quit protesting and get a chicken. Hefting feed bags in a chicken coop is good exercise. Homestead raised eggs taste better. The soul benefits when you work to solve a situation. Whining that the government isn’t fixing your life is wasting your life.

But what do I know of such weakness? Maybe the sweet seductive cry of sorrow is delicious? I can’t be that way. I’m too enamored with the goodness in the world. I breathe life through motorcycle rides and pondering at quiet campsites. I find satisfaction in stacks of firewood and newly homebuilt things and new skills. I listen to the cranes cry out and think of dinosaurs. I smell cowshit and read the tides in the cycle of life.

I’ll never hold office. I’ll never take or give orders. A man who smiles at the smell of cowshit will never be on TV. I’m thus shielded from the addictions of political victimhood.

I think I’ll make an omelet today.

[Warning: Math follows. And some geometry. And lots of finicky details. I’m nerding out. If that’s going to freak you out, skip today’s ruminations. I won’t judge.]

Nerd video below:

If you get bored, don’t blame me. I think this shit is fascinating!

You’ve been warned…

I’m trying to 3d print a thing. It has become a huge (but interesting) challenge. I want it to scale, it includes parts that are shaped in ways that vex a 3d printer, and I’m trying to make it specifically not look like plastic.

All of that is not as weird as you think. The shape thing happens all the time. Unless you’re Microsoft, the machine is less important than the job it must do so you hammer the machine and finesse the orientation. As for not looking like plastic, people do all sorts of colors and materials and textures. Plus, all 3d printer guys are at war with the ultimate evil… layer lines. So I’m messing with that too.

All this is beyond my pay grade… or it should be. So far I’ve happily focused on  making things mechanically strong (which is a rabbit hole itself). Once I’ve got that handled I’ll dabble in making things “pretty”. Or not. I sometimes pick a nice color or make things match, but often I just use whatever color I’ve got hanging around in the material I’m printing. I’m a guy. Colors are… meh.

I’m trying to “level up” so reluctantly but eagerly (if that’s a thing), I’ve branched out into printing wood. I know what you’re thinking. “Wood does not turn liquid. It won’t flow through a nozzle. Weirdo!” But nerds are smart and they’ve been doing this for years. There really are filaments that are “wood impregnated”. (Note: my experiments with wood impregnated should teach me shit I need for carbon fiber impregnated later this summer.)

My spool of “wood” from Bambulab is around 15% wood sawdust (actually very fine powder). This is combined with normal plastic (PLA). It is said that the resulting object can be sanded, stained, and otherwise treated as wood. Results on the internet look impressive. Then again any photo of a person you find on the internet is also filtered to be inexplicably hot so maybe I’m just seeing good lighting or something?

It looks just like PLA. It supposedly prints like PLA. Except it doesn’t. Why? Because it ain’t PLA. I didn’t know the details at first and had some “bed adhesion” failures. The print curled up off the print plate and started shifting all over. My precisely drafted components became globs of filament spaghetti. (You can get the same feeling of “this ain’t the same thing” by running E85 in a car that’s not designed for it.) Except nothing was damaged on my 3d printer. I just had to clean up, tweak settings, and try again. (Try that with your E85 experiment.)

That’s just part of the puzzle. I want to make an array of interacting cylinder shaped objects… to scale. Meaning there’s all sorts of math I’m not sharing yet that forces me to do stuff the slicer software doesn’t like.

I suspect a cylinder printed horizontally is a pretty decent challenge of your 3d skills. Anything you print must have bed adhesion (remember a couple paragraphs before this?). The best path to bed adhesion is lots of surface area on the bed. (There are other details like having a bed so clean you could use it for surgery. Also, the bed is heated so that’s a thing. Plus you can have different bed plates with different properties. The rabbit hole goes deep.)

The contact area of the tangent of a circle perpendicular to a plane is zero… in theory. Also repeat that sentence… it’s English I swear. It’s a true thing. Don’t blame me that the universe is complicated.

The contact area of the tangent of a circle perpendicular to a plane is zero… It’s not my fault!

So I’m trying to print something that’s theoretically impossible? Nah. Nothing is impossible! The software knows what to do. It smacks me upside the head and says that I’m printing layers which have a minimum dimension that’s NOT zero. I think .2 mm layers? So the contact patch is .2 mm… which is what it feels like when I bank my motorcycle hard on slick pavement in rain. Then there are things called “brims” which aren’t the object but surround it… presumably to bully it into staying put. When the print is done you peel the brim off.

Confused yet?

Any cylinder will have an overhang. Like an overhanging cliff. I think the software calls it a “cantilever”. (“Cantilever” is also a small brand of bourbon made in an obscure town on the Minnesota/Ontario line. I don’t know what the experts say but I rate Cantilever bourbon as good shit. I’m just sayin’.)

Printers can handle some overhang but not too much. So I can mess with the scale of the cylinder to reduce the cantilever? Maybe. Or I could just tell the slicer to quit yelling at me and print the damn thing already. Or I could add supports… except supports are a PITA I’d like to avoid.

I’m even confusing myself! Here are some pictures to help.

Here’s a standard 0.4 mm print head and a PLA cylinder. See how it looks weird on the top? I can live with that. I can tweak the top. I’m interested in the sides. This is about the diameter of a pencil. (The print head is dirty… dunno’ why. It’s got well over a thousand hours on it. I don’t think it matters?)

The image below is me experimenting with different diameters. Notice the “brim” at the base. I’m getting OK bed adhesion. The color is irrelevant, this is all PLA. I decided that larger diameter looks better at the top, but I don’t care about the top. I will be tweaking the shape in other ways at the upper layer. So, big diameter isn’t that important… at least that’s what I tell the ladies.

I wanted the sides of the object to look more like a thing that might occur in nature. The lowest object in the image below has a setting called “fuzzy skin”. The setting introduces a bit of random jitter to the print head as it loops around the outside perimeter of the object. I think it is an improvement… but maybe I’ve been staring at plastic too long? Also, the top two rods are straight PLA but the third rod is Wood PLA. So many interacting variables!

Time for empirical evidence. I compared “fuzzy skin” to default PLA with a wooden stir stick in the middle. (Do you notice that the top half of the stir stick has coffee on it? That’s some real world testing y’all!) I really do think the goofily named “fuzzy skin” matters.

I have more pictures (especially of the wood) but I think I gave my iPhone a stroke. The photos live in the iPhone but aren’t uploading to iCloud photos… which is the least interesting thing that could happen. I will fix that too, but not today. Besides… this is the internet, it’s all about text. Who cares about photos? Right?

Also, enshittification wins this round. I did all that 3d modeling and slicer settings and 3d printer tweaks… only to be defeated by a fucking iPhone? I’ve been geezered!

Anyway I have so far figured out the following (especially about “wood” PLA):

1. Dry it.
2. For fuzzy skin on a horizontal cylinder, that’s about the size of a pencil, and made of wood PLA… slow shit down.
   1. Outer wall 60 mm/s.
3. For bed adhesion with wood PLA I also slowed shit down:
   1. Initial Layer 300 mm/s.
   2. Just give up and accept a brim. It’s not that bad.
   3. Keep your bed so clean Adrian Monk would eat off it.
4. Switch to a 0.06 nozzle. That’s a huge improvement!
   1. Everything I listed in 2 and 3 was determined on a 0.04 nozzle.
   2. This may mean everything I figured out is either moot or changed and needs to be re-figured out. I did this to myself. I wanted a complex hobby.

So that’s that… until I figure out more stuff.

AC

P.S. No matter what, always wipe the bed with alcohol and a microfiber rag after every print. That’s never a bad idea. Monk would approve.

Its been a roller coaster ride.

A month ago it warmed. Earlier than expected! Huzzah!

I started my dirt bike, gingerly squished through the icy mud, and rode to town for the ceremonial “first tank of gas for the season”. A few days later it got very cold. Then it snowed. It was nice while it lasted.

Things started thawing again but I had other tasks. I ignored the bikes and went on a 3,000 mile road trip. I expected to get home well after spring breakup. When I got back the planet was still dithering. It hadn’t made up its mind. Even so, all the snow was gone and the driveway was dry. Light at the end of the tunnel? I rejoiced. But then it snowed again. Hard!

It wasn’t just a flurry. It snowed until my tractor could scarcely handle the weight. It was a short wet sloppy whole ‘nother winter! I was exhausted.

It melted again… in fits and starts. Because of all that drama, the ground has had its fill. It’s as much liquid as solid. Yesterday my tractor’s front tire sunk a full 10” into a wet spot. I was hauling wood. It would be easy to get truly stuck and shred my already “questionable” lawn. Luckily, I was watching carefully. At the first sign of “quicksand” I backed out. Disaster averted.

Today the world dawned anew. It is April after all. It was nearly t-shirt weather! The driveway is battered but more or less passible. Like a kid on Christmas morning, I charged out to the garage, fired up my cruiser (Honda Shadow 1100), and made my way from our muddy homestead to blissfully clear pavement. It was going to be another “first tank of gas” day!

I planned to drop some mail at the post office; which I did. Then, as sometimes happens, the motorcycle refused to go home.

I though I’d ride a while and then find a coffee shop to do some blogging; another test of my pipsqueak Linux toy. Alas, every coffee shop was closed. It’s still winter season and it was late afternoon. God fearin’ folk were up at 6 am drinking coffee, not ambling around at 3 pm like a degenerate.

Not that I cared about the coffee. I wandered back country roads with no particular aim. The pavement is treacherous with winter’s accumulated grit so I rolled slow; which suited me just fine.

The landscape is still frozen. Lakes are ice (though the ice shacks have been pulled). But it’s achingly close to ice out. Nobody is dumb enough to be out there with a truck on the weak ice. (There’s usually some ass nugget who’ll drive a leased SUV onto a quarter inch of slush and sink it. But not today. The ice is so weak even the idiots received the memo.)

The grass is dead. It’ll burst forth very suddenly when conditions are right. They’re not right yet… but will be soon.

At my house nature is stirring. The wild turkeys are strutting about in twitterpation. There’s a huge Tom out there and he’s looking to score. He looks like a Thanksgiving piñata. The only cranes so far are a couple holed up in my swamp; and those two are incredibly pissed. They bet on the earlier warm pattern and lost. They’ll survive but they’re grumpy about their lot. Ruffed grouse have started drumming. Skunks are stinking things up. We had a trio of chipmunks invade our house!

As I rode, I was hoping to see more cranes. I have not yet mastered their migration pattern. I stopped at a wildlife refuge but saw none. I did see a bunch of snow geese. There are hints that the migration is started and some swans have shown up. But nothing migratory is here in full force. It’ll happen. Soon. Big birds will head north in a great armada. They’ll eat every invertebrate they can hoover up, reproduce, then flee south. Dinosaurs still rule the world, in avian form.

I ride through all this; contented at a level some may never know. Possibly because I’m paying attention to God’s creation instead of a cell phone screen. I witness the last bits of the season of death; not in regret over the cold but in joy at the rebirth. Winter is neither bad nor evil, it merely is.

Optimistic and bundled against the chill I grin at it all. I’m on my motorcycle. Even this simple fact is a thing I thought I might never attain. The odds weren’t good for it. It took me a long time to get one. I wasn’t fortunate to have such things in my youth. But I didn’t fuck up my life too much. In fact I did OK. I acquired one as soon as I had the funds and my wife was happy to see it. It felt late in life at the time but it’s long ago now. I freaked over financing “a luxury” but I needed it and could handle it.

Everyone (except my wife) thought I was nuts. What do they know? If you want to do something and are physically and financially able… do it. Don’t chain yourself to the level of other people’s fears. You are not them; exercise freewill.

Motorcycles are as fabulous as I dreamed they would be. Better even! I wish I could go back in time to a child watching Fonzie and reassure him. “Take heart young Curmudgeon. Your first bike will have twice the displacement of the Fonz’s Triumph. And Henry Winkler is just an actor with a nice jacket. He’s a pipsqueak that can’t even ride. You will ride!”

The bike and I wander post-apocalyptic terrain. Is that not what winter is? If you didn’t know about “winter” in advance you’d think the world was ending. In a way it does. Every year almost everything dies or goes dormant. Up north, it’s the way of the world. Our planet has an axial tilt. It is what it is.

Does every apocalypse seed the rejuvenation that follows? It feels like it might. I smell spring in the air and see it in the plants and animals. A frog hops across the lane and I carefully miss him. I’d never see such details were I hermetically sealed in an SUV.

Farm fields are thawing and smell of cowshit. The buildup accumulated during months of icy stasis is thawing all at once. It’s spread on the fields, returning to the soil from whence the cow’s feed came. Biology hasn’t had time to break down the material, but it will. In a few weeks, those same farms will smell sweetly of grass and flowers. Canadian geese will be prowling amid the corn stubble. My buddy the frog had better watch out. Thawing cowshit is the smell of commerce, of wealth, of another year when winter didn’t kill me. It means I’m where the food is made instead of where its consumed.

Eventually I turn back toward home. I stopped at a grocery store with a coffee shop in the corner. It’ll do. That’s where I’m typing this.

Enjoy your spring.

AC

I’m going to be “on the road” for most of the rest of the month. Last time I was so busy I only could make an occasional minimal check on my blog. This time it will be far more “chill”. (I hope.)

Wish me luck.

A.C.

Update: I just got a summons for jury duty. Yuck! Ya’ win some, ya’ lose some.

Propaganda works on you even if you know it’s propaganda. Our brains are wired a certain way. People and systems exploit this.

As intelligent adults, we must live thoughtfully; the better to retain our rationality. Do your decisions reflect our own agency? Have you recently done a “self audit” to check?

I pondered to what degree my mind has been captured by brand loyalty and inertia. I sat my brain down and gave it a good talking to. I’d been sliding down a few slippery slopes.

I’ve already made changes; mostly involving my personal technology. I will make more.

First comes computers; the ultimate “inertia vampires”.

I spent years stifled in a corporate’s IT straitjacket and haven’t fully shrugged off the bad habits it forced on me. At work, unknowable committees I never met decreed I must use only the software and hardware they allowed. Completely by chance, these options tended to shift money to whom they (whomever they were) wanted to shift money. Often but not always, into Microsoft’s pocket. This had nothing to do with me (or anyone) doing a better job.

One example among many; Word was the word. There’s a dozen equally excellent word processors. For most purposes, any word processor is fine. Many are “free”. But, within the cage naught could be typed but what Microsoft got a cut.

There’s a persistent idea that everyone needs to work on Word because only Word understands Word files. That hasn’t been much of a limitation for decades. (There might be situations where your entire staff is “on the cloud” but that wasn’t me.) I think systems use Microsoft Office mostly because they’ve always used Office. The head honcho is statistically likely to be of a certain age and highly risk averse. People who formed their impressions back in the time of CDs (or earlier!) and don’t like change really like Word.

All that matters is if it works. The tool is just a tool. You’re reading something I typed. Can you tell what word processor used? Is it Microsoft Office, LibreOffice, Scrivener, WordPress’ GUI, my archaic bit shovel*, or a scanned piece of paper and OCR? You don’t know and you don’t care; which is the way it should be.

[Note: At this point I went off on a digression about mistreatment at the hands of corporate IT. My story is nothing special, we’ve all have suffered alike. I’m sure the magic word du jour “AI” isn’t going to improve things in the near future either. I meant every word I wrote but I was being negative. Rather than rehash old wounds, I deleted it.]

That’s all in the rear mirror. I’m a free man. I’m happily playing with Fusion 360 on my own computer for my own reasons. My computer [more deletions here] is vastly more powerful and laughably, obscenely, stupidly, remarkably cheaper than the gutless computers formerly foisted on me (all with Microsoft licenses and other similar “deals”).

I’m perfectly happy with my setup. So, of course, it had to be enshittified.

Microsoft launched (inflicted) Windows 11, to universal scorn. The update has nothing to do with the user’s needs and everything to do with a system that views users as a cow to be milked and an an information node for creepy spying.

I’ve been through this before. Microsoft crows that “AI” has been crammed into the new OS. Well yippie! I don’t need or celebrate corporate buzzwords. There’s always a new form of Clippy. (I’m not saying LLMs aren’t useful. Only that rectally inserting them everywhere isn’t in the user’s best interest.)

For hardware reasons, upgrading my desktop to Win11 is a bitch. Plus, Fusion 360 is hassling me about sticking with Win10. It’s on-line but somehow wants me to have Win11 too? The downward spiral has begun.

I prepared to get bent over and pay for another generic Windows machine I didn’t really want. Then I thought, why eat shit?

The main reason I own a Windows machine is because former employers were welded to Microsoft. That’s over and Microsoft is being a winy little cretin. Why put up with that?

I was becoming a farmed revenue source. It happens to us all. It’s a shock when you realize they’ve done it again. Especially if you feel loyalty without excellent performance, that’s a red flag. The big tell is putting a brand in your identity. “I’m a Mac guy”, “Ubuntu forever”, “Windows is the default so embrace the suck”. None of us should derive “identity” out of the tool we choose for whatever computer stuff we do. It might be inherently logical to jump from OS to OS as one improves and the other enshittifies.

So, I didn’t buy a new laptop… yet. As an experiment I pulled a tiny old Macbook Air out of the trash. It’s now running MX Linux; I think it’s good for travel. As another experiment I tinkered with Mrs. Curmudgeon’s newer but still old Macbook Pro.

Macs cost roughly 3x the price of non-Apple hardware but the OS was OK. I briefly entertained the idea of becoming a Mac person. (Is there an initiation rite?) But the newly released Neo is a joke. Close but no sale.

Also, and completely irrationally, Fusion 360 is mostly on-line but perfectly happy with an old MacOS, cranky about an old Win install, and will break out in hives over Linux? Weird.

More experiments will follow. There’s no rush. Eventually, I’ll buy or build another number crunching heavy hitter. I have a 3d modeling hobby (and wrote a 500+ page book). I need more than a toy. Will it run Win11? Mac? Linux? I’ve no idea.

That’s how I know I’m being rational. I will find the solution by looking at performance and price. I’m also wondering about Fusion 360. If it’s making an ass of itself maybe I’ll just switch to a 3d Modeling tool that’s Linux friendly.

It would feel good to cut myself free of BOTH Mac and Win.

Whoops, I geeked out and went off topic again. I meant to expand on my theory that Windows is Jeep is John Deere. I might even blather about Harley-Davidson and Mac and  Honda and how my Honda PC800 is absolutely not a Goldwing.

But I used up all my time. I’ll try again some other time.

A.C.

*When I say “bitshovel” I mean word processors so crude they aren’t even true computers. I purchased an Alphasmart Dana in 2011 and an Alphasmart Neo2 in 2016. I paid $35 for the Neo2. It still works just like it did when I bought it. They’re now going for $186 on Amazon. I think I paid $25 for the Dana and it works too. I don’t see any left on Amazon.

If you want a bit shovel but absolutely must signal your social status, you can drop $700 on Amazon for a hipsterific Freewrite. It’s a pretty cool looking gadget! It’s easily cool enough to be worth $20 more than my Neo2. Is it $665 cooler? Not a chance.

Recent snows have been super dense. Tree branches normally high enough to be well out of the way sagged down to “tractor windshield” level.

I was as careful as possible but one branch got tangled into the gap between the cab and mirror. I didn’t realize it until I heard an ominous “snap”. Lucky for me, the branch broke instead of my mirror! It pretty much obscured my whole field of view. I had to drive a few yards practically blind just to find a place to park so I could get out and untangle the branch (and the huge pile of snow it was holding).

They say it’s April. I have my doubts.

The snow was so wet that parts of it were tinged blue. It was exactly the color I’ve seen on videos of glaciers. Very pretty. My snapshot couldn’t capture the deep glorious blue, but it’s there.

You know who’s loving it? My dog. She has zero fucks to give about my hassles plowing the stuff. It’s a dog jungle gym, playtime fun, happy zone to her. The day included a good deal of zooming about.

And posing on top of piles.

And more zooming.

And investigating whatever critters are tunneling about in the stuff.

Dogs know how to be happy! I should learn to be more like my dog. Though there would be drawbacks. Mrs. Curmudgeons would rather I don’t start shedding on the carpet.

Every year technology gets more awesome.

Every year technology sucks more.

Both things are true.

I didn’t want to spend the scratch to buy a laptop. I’m typing this on a tiny discarded junk Macbook Air. I wiped it and swapped to a light variant of Linux. It works. It works well enough that you’re reading this.

Linux is awesome… except for when people make it suck. It does every basic thing I want. However, I always use a VPN and my VPN doesn’t seem to have a Linux install. I got used to a basic level of security. Now my bare ass is hanging out in the internet (figuratively). Also I can’t run Fusion 360 without some significant tweaking. I decided not to try the tweaks because this old junker computer would probably melt if I did 3d modeling on it.

Enshittification: The world could have developed into a place where a harmless law abiding nerd like myself wouldn’t need a VPN. It didn’t. It’s just a slow arms race between things technology can do and the evil purposes to which corporations and governments twist the “neutral” technology.

I borrowed Mrs. Curmudgeon’s much better but still old Macbook. It runs Fusion 360 just fine. Also, Bambustudio and a few other things. It also runs a software called Vellum. I didn’t want to need Vellum but I do. I tried very hard but simply couldn’t drag my book through the annoying typesetting process without software to help.

So, the good news is Vellum works. The bad news is it only works on my wife’s laptop. (And it wasn’t free!!!!) The scary news is that I’m using Mrs. Curmudgeon’s Mac harder than it’s ever been used.

It’s like I borrowed an old but shiny and usable truck; then I went  “full Curmudgeon” and used it to haul ten cords of firewood and a ton of horseshit on nasty dirt roads. What can I say? I use my tools! The poor Macbook cries out to be returned to the nice lady that previously used it for simple shit like surfing.

Also, I look like a complete loon carrying around a paisley print laptop bag with a computer that has a flowery artsy cover. (I will run a computer for a decade without anything more than an occasional sticker: ideally a skull.)

Enshittification: Of course Apple no longer supports the Macbook. No OS updates are forthcoming. That’s bullshit. I’m pretty sure I could install VPN but I think I won’t. I’ve already imposed plenty just borrowing it. I’d like to hand it back soon.

Neither enshittification nor awesome: My book “Attack of the Lesbian Activist Squirrels” was written entirely in software called Scrivener. The software is a stone cold bitch to learn but it “digests” into Vellum. Scrivener works equally well in MacOS or Windows. I’ve run it in Linux but it was buggy.

So there you have it. Linux kicks ass but it only takes one piece of disagreeable software to derail it’s clear superiority. Windows 10 (on my desktop) was not half bad but I have hardware issues if I want to upgrade to Windows 11 (which everyone hates anyway). I could live with an updated (i.e. current and powerful enough) Macbook but paying more or less triple the cost for hardware will cause a stroke.

So for now, I’m in a three computer / three OS detente. Each one is OK. Each one sucks. I am loyal to no brand and no corporation; interested only in getting shit done the cheapest way possible.

Also, it’s all very well balanced. One is portable and completely under my control but weak. One is less weak but flowery and I don’t want to mess with it too much. (I still don’t have VPN on that one either.) The third is a computational processing beast (!) but it’s bolted to my home office wall and Microsoft is trying to strangle it.

I notice there have been “eras” or “phases” my abilities with technology. I remember assembling PCs with a screwdriver. (I had a used tape drive that I loved!) Little did I know that was the last bit of a “wild west” era.

Then I spent decades in a bureaucracy where IT ruled from afar; hassling us from what I can only assume was their stepped pyramid. The anointed ones of the high priesthood treated users as an annoying afterthought and they also somehow spent massively on computers that they computationally kneecapped into junk. Whenever I got my dirty unworthy worker’s mitts on them, the machine was already nearly useless.

Now it’s another phase. I can do whatever I want but the ‘net is so twisted that going without VPN is like walking the streets without underwear. Also I’m cheap so I’m blogging on junk and the simple expedient of popping open the hood and swapping parts as I can afford it hasn’t been eliminated but it has been curtailed.

Imagine all that. Back when all this started, for me it was the late 1980’s, I couldn’t possibly have predicted how it would go (I couldn’t even have imagined it).

I suppose that’s what makes life interesting. Now I’ll hit send on this post, then switch to fiddling with my 3d printer; which is absolutely science fiction except it works. (Speaking of enshittification, for every cool new thing I fix or build with the printer there’s some politician who can’t drive with a clutch but can bitch on Facebook trying to ban a useful tool that gives them the heebie jeebies. I guess it’s the ebb and flow of life.)

I’m pondering a “new project”. I have many irons in the fire, but an Adaptive Curmudgeon never stops considering new things. I’m reluctant to give too many details because I might drop the project in mid-tinker.

However the project goes (or doesn’t), I’ve already done some neat nerd stuff:

Step 1. Paper:

I began by acquiring the blueprint to an object. I’ll explain later, or maybe not. I haven’t decided yet.

I got the prints from a museum. It’s an object from 1939 and made by the Government. I think the plans are “public domain”. I found various digital images floating around the internet too. I tossed a few bucks at a museum because it’s a good cause and because I was looking for authenticity.

So now I’ve got the dimensions of a thing. In Fusion 360 modeling that would be called a “part”. Except the plans include multiple things meshed together. Fusion 360 calls that an “assembly”. I’m still a n00b so drafting “parts” into an “assembly” is hard for me. But hey… ya’ gotta’ learn somehow right?

Step 2. Virtual:

Vastly oversimplifying, you just draw shit in Fusion 360. You can also specify whatever dimension you need.

I could do this with the “parts” of my “assembly”. However, it’s easy to spend a lot of time specifying everything and then want to go back and re-scale a piece… which cascades through the system. Sometimes this is fine, sometimes it’s a mess.

Step 3. Parameterize:

In Fusion 360 you can specify “parameters”. Those are variables that represent a dimension. I can specify Fred = 5mm and Barney = 10mm. If I draw a Fred x Barney rectangle it’ll be 5 x 10.

If I later change Fred to 6 mm the rectangle will adjust to 6 x 10.

Step 4. Generalize(?):

I’m not sure the precise word for this step of my own thinking/processes but “parameters” can be “expressions”. I can set Wilma = 5mm. Then I can set Fred = Wilma and Barney = 2 * Wilma.

Then a Fred x Barney rectangle will still be 5 x 10. But I can change Wilma to 6mm and it’ll instantly be 6 x 12.

Remember all that high school math you thought you’d never use? This is it.

Step 5. Whip out the spreadsheet.

The plan is in units of feet & inches. I want it modeled to scale in mm. That’s not so hard with parameters and expressions but it’s a bunch of parts.

So I decided to dump all this “computation” into a speadsheet. I’m using LibreOffice Calc. It’s free. There are roughly a zillion free spreadsheets and virtually all of them are fine.

Only a bureaucracy run by clueless obsolete dipshits would pay fees for anything as crude as a spreadsheet. This applies to all Microsoft Office products. I’m looking at you NASA.

Step 6. Dump the spreadsheet into Fusion 360.

It’s pretty easy to export part of any spreadsheet into comma delimited file. It didn’t take long to figure out how to import it into Fusion 360.

If you think *.csv files are obsolete:

you, are, wrong
True, True, True

also

name, expression, value
Wilma, , 6
Fred, Wilma, 6
Barney, Wilma * 2, 12

Step 7. From virtual to real.

Imaginary is not real. Our society is almost completely driven mad by the confusion between virtual and real. Never forget what is just a construct! Ignore weirdos debating “politics” on X, teenyboppers mincing about on TikTok, AI slop everywhere, mentally ill freaks falling in love with LLMs, whores on Onlyfans, grandmas emoting on Facebook about shit they couldn’t find on a map, Trump blovating on Truth Social, the dwindling true believer woke masses on Bluesky, the redpilled on Gab, the talking heads propagandizing in the “media”, and the YouTuber’s desperately seeking your “like”.

If it ain’t real… it’s not real.

I apply that to myself. As a bearded recluse who writes blogs, I check once in a while to make sure I’ve stacked real firewood for the real winter. Sometimes I fall on the ice while hauling it.

I want a real thing. Lucky for me, I own a space age robot machine that makes 3d models into real objects.

I dumped a test object from Fusion 360 to Bambu Studio, tweaked a few settings in the slicer, and sent it to my Bambulab A1 3d printer.

It worked!

Preliminary Results: Looks good!

It’s just “proof of concept. But every step did indeed happen. I made it all the way from a museum acquired blueprint to a perfectly scaled object on my desk. Wow!

I’ve got a long way to go, but I’m pleased with how far I’ve gotten.

Remember, unless you can touch it with your hands, it’s just a mental construct.

I’m still fried. All the miles wore me out. I thought I’d kick back and dedicate myself to recovery (notwithstanding my “bad dairy” stupidity). Unfortunately, new and exciting shit happened to liven my existence.

Spring breakup / mud season had mostly wrapped up in my absence. After a few day’s rest I thought I might get my motorcycle out again. Everything was puppies and rainbows. Then it snowed. And it wasn’t a happy light fluffy dusting either!

Given that the driveway is softer than a politician’s resolve, I wasn’t sure I wanted to drag a snow bucket across it. But I had the tractor out to haul firewood anyway. I plowed a little bit. I took great care not to gouge the shit out of my already quite trashed driveway.*

It’s a good thing I did! I thought the storm was over but woke up the next day to a lot more; an absolute shitload of snow. Wet sloppy nasty dense shit. Deeper than my best boots! The areas I’d cleared were deeply covered. The areas I hadn’t were just plain buried.

My tractor is solid but sometimes the math just isn’t in your favor. It was like plowing wet cement with your tires on a base of peanut butter. (I worked hard trying to think of an analogy and still can’t quite describe it. I guess you had to be there.)

With a six foot bucket, pushing two feet of snow, I could go about ten or fifteen feet before the wheels broke loose. (Often even less.) That’s something like 120 – 180 cubic feet of material… max. In normal conditions that’s nothing. I can usually push a lot more snow and shove it much further. In this temperature and with this water content every bite at the apple became a bucket full of nope.

Slow and steady wins the race. The tractor and I were at it for hours. Incrementally, shaving off a foot or two of navigable space at a time. I was extra careful because these conditions are a stress on any equipment.

I’d planned for this. I chose a tractor & snow bucket instead of a truck & plow specifically for the worst conditions. Tractors are built to handle loads, especially dynamic loads. (Like the stress of a plow digging into earth as the tractor moves forward.) Modern trucks are awesome but I think anything that can do highway speeds is sub-optimal for shoving great masses just in front of the steering geometry. I wonder how any truck can survive plowing on a day like this? (Obviously it works; most local “hired” plowing is done with pickups. The drivers make bank but also kill expensive trucks. I’m not sure about their “profit to nuked tie rod ends” ratio. Anyone fortunate enough to own a skid steer uses that instead of their truck. Farmers have it made. They have big tractors which can move big tonnage. My mid-weight tractor & bucket isn’t a common solution, but it seems to work well.) I’ll bet a few pickups with freshly blown transmissions wound up scattered around the area today.

It’s an unusual situation. Normally, it’s not freaking April! Even when it does snow in April it’s usually not two feet. It’s just a bad hand. We’re prepared for January snow, not April. In January the snow isn’t so dense and the base is rock solid and frozen. You may freeze your ass off but there’s traction and reasonable density. This was… special.

Oh well, I’m alive and so is my tractor. I cleared enough snow that I won’t completely lose the race should it snow more. Plus the cleared areas should be a little less “floody” when this shit melts (it is April after all).

I think of all those news shows that blast scenes of everyone panic buying bread and milk and eggs when it snows in Virginia. It seems so silly from my situation. I’m relieved to have “access” but flouncing off to the store to buy fixings for French toast is at best unwise and at worst completely impossible. I plowed access to the county road (and my mailbox, which understandably hasn’t received mail in several days). When the driveway is mush I’ll often just walk that distance on foot. But the truck could manage it. This means, if I really needed to, I could drive for town. But the county road is more theoretically passible than demonstrably so. I’m a good driver with a beastly machine. In 4×4 low range my truck can handle it. A normal SUV (which lacks low range) is probably OK if one were a careful driver. Anything smaller would risk winding up either high centered or ditched.

Did I mention it’s April? In a week, all this will probably be gone. Another reason to just hang tight and let events play out. But… no motorcycle for a while.

A.C.

*I have an untamed dirt driveway that’s getting worse. Normally people buy truckloads of dirt periodically for such a driveway. They’ll often hire someone to grade it too. I’m cheap so I don’t do either. I’ve been trying to maintain it with a rear blade on my tractor. That works until it doesn’t. In 2025 things went too far and I just couldn’t smooth it out. I messed with the blade and made it worse! It’s rutted and patchy… really sucks. I think the solution is a thing called a “land plane”. It’s a leveling implement that costs a little over $1000. That’s a lot but probably less than a couple cycles of dirt delivery and professional grade jobs? Theoretically my tractor could pull it. I sure would like to have a more civilized driveway. I’ve been putting off the expense for decades but it is what it is. I might have to buy one this summer. Or, I can just continue with my current approach; denial.