Making, Crafting, Creating... aka Whatcha workin' on?

That’s not encouraging! Fortunately my kids are grown, even if one of them is living at home (temporarily we hope)

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Just trying to get the hang of my new vacuum forming box, my daughter and I started making chocolate duplicates of stuff in my garage.

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I cannot think of a better use for a vacuum forming box, whatever that is.

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Cool! I had the opportunity to use one in junior high (way back in 1980), and it was fun.

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Looks like solid chocolate. What use is a wrench with no nuts?

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We had one of these when I was small, but yours is better!

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Shit. Make them do it.

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They have OTHER uses??

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Back in the day, my family had this one:

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Yes, basically a hot plate with a set of die-cast molds and bottles of plastic goop to make little flexible plastic critters.

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I’m makin a game of Battleship out of cherry and teak scraps to play with my daughter. I got tired of drawing the grids on paper for each game.

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Oh, man. I can smell it now.

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I did the whole job with Linux, so I don’t know how much I can advise. But here’s the tips I can give…

Rip to FLAC. Don’t bother with any other format. Anything else you want or need later, you can make from FLACs.

If you move on to digitizing analog media (I had some irreplaceable tapes and vinyl) you really really want to use the native CD sample rate (two-channel 16-bit Linear PCM sampled at 44,100 Hz). I used a Griffin iMic analog to digital converter.

Watch your audio levels. Autoleveling is less than impressive in every player I’ve used. Classical CDs are likely to rip quieter than rock CDs and so forth. Tapes are even more variable.

I highly recommend the “Squeezebox” environment. I can synchronize music in four rooms in two buildings, or play different music at the same time, I have ~7000 songs in my music library (plus access to Spotify and Pandora and Internet radio) and I can control it all seamlessly from a free Android app, any web browser, three different remote controls, or from the server.

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Mrs. Shiv’s rug is coming along nicely.

Top side:

Bottom side, excess material will be cut or tucked in:

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Hey, thanks for the excellent suggestions! This is exactly what I was looking for.

Unfortunately it’s too late for me to go with FLAC, since I’m working from my already-partially-digitized library which is entirely MP3. I’ll certainly use FLAC moving forward. I haven’t yet started digitizing the analog stuff; that might be down the road a ways. Right now I’m focusing on CDs.

I’m very interested in the Squeezebox environment you mentioned. How exactly does that work for playback? The site says you need a Squeezebox device, but can that be a phone, that can then play over Bluetooth in a car or wherever?

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There’s tons of Squeezebox DIYs online, or you can just buy the Slim Devices & Logitech branded hardware on eBay. All open source and you can choose to constantly evolve the system or just build what you like and maintain it indefinitely.
There are software Squeezeplayers for Android, windows, Linux… possibly even for Apple Devices.

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Made myself an active whip antenna for my portable radio. It works decently but I’m going to try another circuit that’s more complex to see if it works better.

Source for the circuit design: http://www.techlib.com/electronics/antennas.html

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Finally got around to straining.

Looks like piss, sticky with sugar, and the right proof for hand sanitizer. Not bad cut about 50% with water.

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Turns out that when your “cocktail” is 50% water, tastes like lemonade, but still over 80 proof, the next day things go poorly.

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Exhibit A:

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