I want a very bright light to put on the floor next to my current large jigsaw puzzle that I can easily change the angle of so that I get good illumination but not glare where I'm working. I've recently been using flashlights for this, but I want a lamp that plugs into an outlet so I don't keep draining batteries and also because it's kind of annoying to hold a flashlight the whole time.

I'm thinking some kind of hobby lamp is what I want, but I'm working on the floor not on a table. It should be not super heavy because I'll probably sometimes have to pick it up and carry it to the other side of the puzzle.

I think anything bright enough to give me sufficient light while puzzling would be too bright to wall-mount because I might look up into it accidentally so I definitely want an angled lamp.

idk what other information might be useful here, but I don't need or want a magnifying glass, just a bright light.

thanks!!

Hey all, I'm an avid skier and enjoy outdoor sports for fitness more than working out in a gym or running.

I'm considering getting into mountain/trail biking this year, but have some questions, so I'm hoping someone on Tildes has experience and can help me out.

First question: How common are injuries when mountain biking? I don't intend to do anything highly technical, mostly looking to do more casual trail riding for fun and fitness. When looking around on the internet some websites (blogs, reddit, YT, etc) make it seem like a serious injury is unavoidable if you bike often enough, but others say injuries beyond cuts and scrapes are pretty rare. In my experience with skiing, as long as you ski within your limits you're pretty unlikely to get seriously hurt, is the same true for mtb?

Second question: I'd like to be able to ride my bike on pavement as well, for rides with my family, exercise during work break, etc - is a "Trail" bike suitable for this?

ex: Specialized Rockhopper https://www.specialized.com/us/en/rockhopper

I need a new place to buy electronic components and some mildly niche circuits/products that's not Amazon. I'm currently looking for an adjustable temp fan controller for an indoor green house. It's sitting in front of a Window on a shelf covered in plastic. I want to add a 12v dc fan to the top to turn on when gets somewhere around 90 degrees farenheit.
I used to use parts-express.com, but it looks like they mostly just do audio now. Does anyone have any good recommendations for purchasing things like this in the USA.

Just wondering if any other tildan electronics/radio hobbyists are playing around with Meshtastic. I got my first two nodes (right under the wire before the tariffs!) and set them up last weekend.

I got my first response today on the public channel from someone else a couple hops away and it honestly feels like 1993 again with that "can anyone read this?"-vibe the first time I posted on a BBS. The more I see how the internet becomes hostile to humans, the more I think something "human community-based" like this is the inevitable future.

Is anyone else on the Mesh yet? Are there a lot of nodes in your community? What do you think Meshtastic will amount to?

Soldering/electronics repair enthusiasts: I am in need of a soldering iron/station for electronics repair and wiring, preferred budget is under $150, perfection can raise the budget to $250.

First line of this post is all that's really needed if you just want to provide advice on what to buy (which is just fine, people don't need to know how a car works for me to explain that they probably just need a minivan).
Below is what I have gathered thus far if perhaps there's more that you'd like to know about what I've seen and perhaps misunderstood so far.

At present I have a no-name, non-adjustable, extremely basic soldering iron that is more fire hazard than anything and a Weller soldering gun that is obviously not meant for electronics and small wires. The iron has been good enough for the occasional need to solder a couple of wires together to get something broken back up and working, but is not something I'd use on anything critical.

Inspired by a recent thread, and how reticent some folks seemed to be about creating topics or even new groups dedicated to making things, I figured it would be nice to have a topic where we can share these things. Whether it's an electronic widget, a piece of knitting or crochet, retrofitting a bike with a motor, or whatever else, let's share what we've been up to.

Does anyone have any experience making miniatures? I'm looking to get started and there just seems to be an absolute overload of options for sculpting material: Sculpey, Milliput, Green Stuff, Scultamold... The list seemingly goes on and on. I've seen some great videos by Miscast or Bill Making Stuff, but they can be a little all over the place.

Does anyone have any suggestions or point to any video/written tutorials on getting started?

Thanks!

Yeah, I bought an ebike from Costco. It was a pretty good deal and it exceeded my expectation in just about every way, at least so far. The only thing that's bugging me right now is that the seat is supposedly super comfortable but my butt is sore after relatively short rides, but I've read that that will go away after a while.

I haven't owned a bike for decades and I was wondering if there was any less obvious things I should look out for. I already figured out that I put on the front wheel off-center because the disc was rubbing against the brake pad, but that was an easy fix. The manual for my bike is painfully lacking in details; half of covers how to use the controller, and the other half is assembly, and even that part wasn't terribly detailed. There were two parts that came in the box that it didn't even mention (a reflector for the handlebars and the derailleur protector - the latter of which I only figured out what it was after I did a reverse image search for it). It appears that it was written for people who already know a lot about bikes. The fork has shocks on it that appear to be adjustable but I don't know how or even why you would want to adjust them. Is there a website or a book that I can find with more detailed info on bikes generally?

Finally, accessories. I already bought two simple things just on impulse: a simple cheap cable lock and a bell (which seems like a strange omission for a bike, but what do I know?). I figure that I should have probably invested in a better lock, though, since it's a fairly expensive machine, so I thought I'd ask what people would recommend. Also are there any other accessories I might consider? I want to get a bottle holder, but I'm looking for a design to 3D print if anyone has any recommendations. It'd be nice to finally bust out my roll of ASA for it.

Hey! I know a couple Miata owners are hiding here, so I figured I'd ask a car question here. Bear with me, this is a non problem that I blow out of proportion.

I get twitchy when I don't have a fun manual car, so right now I have a high mileage 330i E46 ZHP sedan. For those out of the know they're fairly notorious BMWs that are pretty unreliable, but the E46 generation is fairly easy to work on yourself. This was the ideal performance model that I wanted for a while, but unfortunately this one gave me lots more things to work on over the last year and a half than my last one. (Who knew the one with 230k miles off the street would be more difficult to sort than my grandpa's pristine 50k example??) It is a great car, it brings fun to my commute, but I don't feel the love with it. After the last repair I did took a turn, I just wanted it out of my parking spot more than anything... So now that it's back in a solid state, I have it up for sale and I'm planning on replacing it.

Here's the problem: bare minimum, if I'm going to drive something to work I want it to have side airbags. My pregnant wife and I almost got sidelined by a moving truck blowing a red light in my old NB Miata, and while I consider that kind of thing could happen regardless of the car I'm driving, I have a 60-mile highway commute and figured I shouldn't play those odds in a car with 80's safety sensibilities anymore. I sold the Miata and got the BMW, for safety and because it had back seats in case I needed to take the kid in it.But then I ended up never needing the back seats at all, and it doesn't seem like I really ever will in whatever I get. So now I'm looking to replace the bimmer with something less practical. And while my second kid is on the way - so we won't have a ton of time to go together for a bit - my wife agreed she misses the drop-top. So I'm looking at convertibles again. I feel like I've got two routes about this. (We have a minivan and a family sedan, so ignore any unmentioned notions of practicality going into this.)

The NC Miata has side airbags, and as a benefit they're dead reliable. They're a bit faster, a bit more comfy, and all around a better car than my NB was. So I could save up for that... But I just don't feel a ton of heart for them? Despite all the revisionism going around the NC and how they're underappreciated, I just find them very, uh, bar of soap to look at. Some seat time might change my mind here. A Fiat 500 Abarth or a 986 Boxster would also work, and I find them more interesting, but they don't have the reliability points.

On the other hand, if I'm looking to get something for my hobby... Shouldn't I get something I really want? There are a few things I'm interested in my price range, but what's really piquing my interest is an NA Miata or an MR2 of some generation. I had a bad NA before and would like to try again; I adore the styling, and the market cooled off a bit since the Covid bubble. With the MR2, I've never had a mid-engine car and they seem pretty simple, reliable, and aren't as unpredictable as a lot of other MR options. I could upgrade either of those down the line, and many I'm looking at are well taken care of with rust or pre-cat issues out of the way. There's also a huge influx of interesting kei cars and imports coming in that I'm really curious to drive and work on in the price range; Beats, Cappuccinos, Pajero Minis, and GC8 Imprezas are on my radar.

Since I'm not going to be driving to work for a few months while my kid is coming, it won't matter if I won't take it. But when that time comes I'm not going to drive the thing 5/7 days of the week. A manual car really livens my commute up and makes it much more enjoyable, and I probably won't want to be working on an old something with two kids around.So I keep jumping between these two options. My brain tells me I should save for an NC2 Miata; my heart tells me to get something cooler. My gut says I'm clueless and I should just wait for he best thing that pops up. But I just don't know.

Was anyone asking themselves the same question at some point, and what did you end up doing? Did you get the fun side dream car and keep it as the weekender, or did you get the compromise car and enjoy it every day?

I'm in the market for an OEM part that usually comes with the "premium" trim of my vehicle. Rather than pay the $2000+ listed on the official parts website, eBay gave me several junkyard/recycler types that list the part for $200-$400. Each of these listing make promises about 60-day returns, warranty, etc.

However, I attempted a buy-it-now (with a CC, not through PayPal), and the sale was cancelled within an hour claiming that the part didn't pass their QA. I made the purchase at 9pm, and I wouldn't expect that quick of a turn. I did send a note thanking the account for not sending something that didn't meet their standards.

Then, it happened again almost exactly the same way, save for a 3pm purchase time and a 45-minute refund turnaround. This is raising a bunch of red flags for me. Am I just having bad luck, being paranoid, or is someone trying to maybe steal credit card info?

I'm thinking that calling local junkyards and just asking if they have the year/model of vehicle I'm looking for and potentially the part. Will take any advice, though.

I'm into astronomy as a hobby, and it's useful to have a log of the things in the sky you've seen. Many people take handwritten notes, but my handwriting is awful and having to write notes takes away from enjoying the views through the telescope.

So after being inspired by AI note taking applications I've read about online, I decided to give it a try while out observing.

First, I take my recordings and run them through Whisper's speech to text engine. Because my recordings have frequent astronomical terms, it seems to be more useful to run the larger models (or the new turbo model), because they seem to do better identifying the names of moons and constellations.

Next, I run Ollama and give it a prompt like:

Here is a speech to text transcript of an observation session. Create a detailed log of the session, using only facts found in the text. Do not add your own interpretation to the text.

I'm still experimenting with prompts and models, but oddly it seems like shorter prompts give better results. So far, the type of model doesn't seem to matter so much as the number of parameters. Gemma2 27B outperforms llama 3.1 7B, but llama 70B outperforms both of them (again, I think the larger models have more context about which astronomical terms are important). Here's what that gets me with basically no work on my part:

**Observation Session Log**

**Session Details**

* Date: October 3rd, 2024
* Location: Wolf Street
* Telescope: Teleview 85 (also referred to as 80)
* Observer: [Not specified]

**Targets Observed**

1. M29 (Open Cluster in Cygnus)
	* Time: 2057 - 2101
	* Eyepiece used: 18.2mm
	* Notes:
		+ Found using star hopping from Sater
		+ Appears as a faint open cluster with 6-7 distinct stars
		+ Stars are fairly even in brightness and color
2. M39 (Open Cluster)
	* Time: 2109 - 2116
	* Eyepiece used: Ultra-wide angle, 18.2mm, and 8.5mm (noted as a mistake, actually
using 7mm)
	* Notes:
		+ Found using star hopping from Deneb
		+ Appears as a larger open cluster with more differentiation in star magnitudes
		+ Stars appear bluer than surrounding stars
3. Alberio (Double Star)
	* Time: 2120, 2155
	* Eyepiece used: Ultra-wide angle and 7mm
	* Notes:
		+ Found easily without a guide
		+ Appears as a beautiful contrast between colors with constituent parts standing out from the surrounding stars
4. M15 (Globular Cluster in Pegasus)
	* Time: 2120 - 2130
	* Eyepiece used: Ultra-wide angle, 18.2mm, 7mm, and Barlow (2x) with 7mm
	* Notes:
		+ Found using a bright naked-eye star as a guide
		+ Appears as a slight smudge or fuzzy patch with averted vision
		+ Not resolving individual stars at any power
5. Saturn
	* Time: 2140 - 2150
	* Eyepiece used: Low power, highest power (with a star chart to confirm moon positions)
	* Notes:
		+ Three moons visible: Rhea, Enceladus, and Titan
		+ Striping on the surface of Saturn visible at highest power

**Session End**

* Time: 2157

I'm very happy with the quality of the notes. It's much, much better than my handwritten notes and much less work, so I'm likely to do this more consistently.

I am very confused. I want to buy my wife her first ever sewing machine (she seems quite dedicated on learning it, and she has done basic repairs on clothing before).

The problem is that I see that lots of people on Reddit that don't recommend too many newer models due to lack of reliability or using poor quality materials (plastic housing/gears, etc.), but at the same time many people are saying don't pay too much for an older machine (like even $50 USD seems to be too much for some people lol) which does not have these problems because you don't know how they maintained the machine, but any of the machines that seem to be decently cared for (with my very limited knowledge) are at least $100 CAD.

So does anyone have a recommendation for a decent sewing machine? For reference, I was eyeing a Kenmore 158.13200 I found locally for $150 CAD, which seems to include lots of accessories and the carrying case.

I’ve casually discussed with several of other printers on here, but would love to casually chat about the hobby

What you print with, materials, settings, slicer, etc.

Me personally, I use a heavily modified Ender 3V2 that runs klipper with a dual z axis and direct drive extruder hotend (orbiter 2.0 on a V6)

I print a variety of PLA, PETG, and just recently got into ABS and ASA

I’m currently working on wiring up a stealth burner setup for the X axis though (in preparation for my Voron build 👀)

And I just recently finished printing the Input Labs Alpakka controller! (which is super duper cool)

But yeah I’m down to answer any questions or talk about anything 3D Printer related

I just got home from Bothwell 6 in Abbotsholme (UK), a live action role play event (also known as a LARP) where you play as a student in a magical school (those events are legally and morally distinct from JK Rowling).
While I had several previous experiences in its sister-LARP College of Wizardry in Czocha (Poland), this was my first Bothwell and I had a blast.

Anybody else larping ? Or curious and would know more about my experience ? (I got to perform in front of a Fae lord for favors, and one of my housemate turned out to be the ring-leader of an illegal-performance enhancing candy scheme... that got used by the professors anyway). What the hell is a nordic LARP anyway ?

I'm probably buying inlines soon to be able to ride together with my son. From the last time I had inlines, about 20 years ago, I remember that taking them on and off was a real pain, both really slow, and you ended up without any shoes, so if you wanted to enter a store for example it was often better to walk there than using the inlines. Is there anything out there today that solves those problems?

I guess I could buy some lightweight shoes to bring along, but the swapping still takes a lot of time and is a bit cumbersome. Any other tips would also be nice.

These could be blogs, forums, any online space where you visit semi-frequently at least.

Here are some based off my interests:

A Year in the Country - Blog on folk horror music

Gwern.net - blog about AI, statistics and psychology

Articles on the work of Lacan

Petit Tube - Random brief YouTube videos with few views

What are some hobbies you do specifically when during this time of year (whether it's your summer or winter)? And what do you do in the opposite season?

When I'm home, summer is when I do some light woodworking projects. Currently I need to finish a shadowbox that will be illuminated with LED strip lights. I also have to finish a bat house that needs a little more work before I can do a final assembly and install it on a post.

I don't really have any specific hobbies for the winter, besides crushing my music backlog while reading, so I'm interested to see what other people do.

I was intending on posting this before the season actually started, but here we are. :)

Curious if any of the succulent-lovers on Tildes have any tips/tricks for soil composition. I've been using the basic succulent mix from my local hardware store for years, but I've had some issues with rot. Reddit seems to think that soil composition is at fault for just about all succulent ills, so I've adjusted my mix to be about 50% perlite/sand 50% organic (a.k.a the basic succulent mix).

Still seems like the new mix doesn't dry out quite as fast as the internet thinks it should, though. Does going even more inorganic make sense? My guess from a few years of reading about succulents is that they would probably be happy in even 80-90% inorganic soil to keep their roots dry, as long as they were watered when they needed it. No clue if that's right, though.

It feels like I'm going crazy because I've been trying to find this thing for years with no luck.

A very long time ago, I got a 3D puzzle of the globe made of disks that needed to be stacked on a spike. Like a decorative Hanoi Tower puzzle. Wasn't particularly difficult but it looked really cool after sticking the pieces together and painting. Unfortunately it was lost while the family moved back in 2005 and figured I could just get another one and a few other designs. No dice. Anywhere. Local games and hobby stores never stocked it. Later, Google was no help. My family don't even remember seeing it so there's a chance I might be hallucinating.

Every few months I get a brainwave of new search terms to query with no luck and I keep putting off just asking online. But now that I've almost finished my new office, I really want it on my shelf.

So anyone know anything about it or am I better off making it in CAD and CNC cutting my own thing?

Just a thought exercise to see how you'd go about getting someone started from scratch. The person could be your nephew, a spouse, a coworker, or someone on the internet who needs a new hobby. :) I'm curious how that money would get spent and how that money might spend time. How far would it go? How would you make that time and money count towards a new passion?

Would you buy someone a small motorcycle? Polaroid camera? Time at a bouldering facility? Would you make/give them a really cool sewing station with a bunch of cubbies? A shoebox full of your MtG cards (just the extras, right?) and a ticket to a convention? A custom printed set of LEGO building instructions and the bricks to go with them? Outsider art to inspire a new style of artist passion?

If this is a success, I might post again in a month or so with a lower dollar value to challenge folks.