mauvehaus

I'm bummed by this, because I live in a weird corner case and wanted to see where we fall on this map. Our legal address is in West Fairlee, VT 05083, but our mail is routed through the post office in Fairlee, 05045, and must be addressed to that town and ZIP code or it doesn't arrive. Just to make life more interesting, Another part of town delivers out of Thetford and does use 05083. All this in a town of about 600 people.

As a result of that, and address verification services, our de facto address is our mailing address. Except for the handful of times a year, usually pertaining to state taxes directly or indirectly, when we have to ask which address is actually needed/intended. Even in those cases, it's the source of confusion since the two differ by the addition of "West" to the town name and two digits in the ZIP code.

This is true, but it probably isn't a box of books that's beeping.

I also feel like ordering the moves by lightest box first is reasonable as a real-world optimization.

I am so excited to read this; thank you! I've reread The Winter Fortress every year or two since the first time.

Since Norsk Hydro was mentioned in the article, I have to mention in turn one of my favorite books ever: The Winter Fortress by Neil Bascomb. It's the true story of the Norwegian commando sabotage of the heavy water plant. Short version: after a failed attempt by the English, some locals who'd fled to England and received training parachuted in, blew it up, and then skied to neutral Sweden. Legends, the lot of them: they froze their balls off and didn't have enough to eat, but they pulled it off.

Every time I re-read it, it makes me want to take up nordic skiing. It is absolutely up there on my list of greatest true stories ever told with Touching the Void, The Emerald Mile, and a select few others.

https://www.abebooks.com/Winter-Fortress-Epic-Mission-Sabota...

I don't want a faster iPhone; I just want to be able to ducking swear when I text.

Absent doing something wildly abusive, vinyl records will play fine for a long time. And the degradation is comparatively graceful.

Source: go to any used record shop and find a copy of Chicago >5[0]. It'll almost certainly play, even if the music wasn't particularly good to start with.

[0] There are many copies of later Chicago albums in used record stores.

Being out on the trail for the Fourth of July one year, I celebrated by taking a handful of flour, rolling it up in a map, and blowing it across a campfire. You can make an impressive fireball with very little flour!

My grandmother had a washing machine with a manually fed electric wringer until she moved into assisted living. It would've likely been no newer than the immediate postwar era, as that's when she moved into the house she lived in. I doubt she would've owned it earlier (steel being needed for the war).

It was a bit of a production to do laundry with it. I can buy the argument that it was tough to sell machines that weren't fully automated. It looked fun as a kid, but I can't imagine it's fun for more than a load or two!

Edited to add: they lived north of the Mason-Dixon in an area with very few Black residents.

Corrected. Thanks. So the OP is playing with a variant where the original player landing on it doesn't get the first bite at the apple at the printed price?

A couple Thanksgivings ago, I played with a couple of alpha finance types that I'm related to at a distance of several marriages. It's certainly a more interesting game the way they play it, no doubt helped by everyone being amply lubricated and some enthusiastic brotherly backstabbing. Whether it's more fun or not probably depends on exactly how much you care about the outcome. It still took the better part of a couple hours though.

Uh, isn't that the official rules? If a player lands on an unowned property, it goes to auction[0] EDIT: if the player doesn't buy it for the price printed on the board.

[0] https://officialgamerules.org/game-rules/monopoly/

The buses running along the I-91 corridor in VT/NH USA centered around White River Junction VT and Hanover/Lebanon NH have been free to ride since around Covid. And those are two transit agencies. Broadly: one serves north of Hanover, the other south.

Birch bark canoes are the traditional construction in e.g. the Boundary Waters region. Wood-canvas canoes are built superficially similarly but don't use the tension of the canvas structurally the same way a bark canoe does.

Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America by Adney and Chappelle is basically the main source for information on bark canoes and how they're built.

The Art of the Canoe with Joe Seliga is out of print, AFAIK, but is a good overview of how wood canvas canoes are built.

The Survival of the Bark Canoe by John McPhee is more narrative and worth a read too.

Laminated wood strip canoes are a more modern invention. Bear Mountain Boats has a good book on how they're built, and Nick Offerman did a video on building one.

And yeah, modern Kevlar boats are ridiculously light. The canonical Boundary Waters touring canoe is the Wenonah Minnesota II, and the lightest version is 43 pounds in Kevlar. I believe graphite is the same weight but stiffer. Fiberglass construction is basically comparable, but heavier, as are some of the Royalex-equivalent materials.

Another fun fact about jackdaws is that they love my big sphinx of quartz.

Now excuse me while I pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangram

Thanks! The three-way joint where the stretchers come together is wild too. It's a three-way finger joint (for structure) with a three-way miter on top (to get the profiles to come together nicely). Drawing it is one thing, and cutting it is a whole 'nother thing :-D

The beveled profile on the top was the clients' touch. We went through four or five iterations on it. They have great taste and are a ton of fun to work with.

I'm in the middle of ginning two prototypes of a chair meant to go with it. It's as yet unclear if I've made my life any easier than the table or not.

This was a career change for me; I somewhat infamously no longer build software[0]. I went back to school in my thirties to learn furniture making. I had never picked up a hand plane or chisel prior to taking classes. I started with some evening and weekend classes, followed by a couple of weeklong classes before applying to go to school full time.

As with learning any skill, I'd suggest finding a project to work towards to motivate you.

I was fortunate to have two full-time programs to apply to in the Boston area (now one, sadly). The biggest difficulty for finding training is likely going to be finding a place that offers it.

New England has the North Bennet Street School, the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship, Vermont Woodworking School, and maybe a few others. As I'm currently in Vermont, I know the New England scene the best.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24541964

Uh, I spent a lot of time playing with Legos as a kid, but if you can find a time machine, there are probably a lot of way more profitable ways to put it to use than giving your past self some Lego sets.

If I'm taking apart things on my car, I'll do one side at a time even if it would be more efficient to do both at once so I have an un-monkeyed-with side for reference if I get confused putting it back together.

I tend to stay away from taking apart and reassembling electronics; I can't fix anything inside anyway unless there's an iFixit guide that I'm blindly following.

Most furniture projects break down into at most three (or thereabouts?) hierarchical steps for any single assembly. Which is to say, my spatial/assembly skills probably aren't actually that developed via building furniture.

Which is to say, great news if you want to build some furniture! Pick a simple project and wade in!

Thank you!

Thank you!

In most applications, it doesn't matter if the piece ends up 1/16" (1.5mm for the rest of the world[0]) undersized and I wouldn't worry about it. If for some reason the finished piece had to be 24.5" wide, I'd account for the off-nominal thickness of the plywood and charge more for the hassle of it :-)

Generally though, if you're putting something into an alcove and want a fitted look, you'd build the box undersized by some amount (1/4" to 1/2" depending on how square and plumb the walls of the alcove are), set the box in place, and then scribe a face frame to the walls.

Drawer boxes tend to be where you have to work to the tightest tolances. Side mount drawer slides don't have a lot of allowance for the drawer to be undersized and basically none for it to be oversized. Under mount slides are a little more forgiving, but I definitely still account for my actual material thickness on them. In either case, you're definitely building the drawer boxes to the as-built size of the opening they're going into and not the platonic ideal opening from the plans/drawings.

[0] Yes, I know. Slightly more than that, but this is woodworking tolerances.

Having just gone on a tear about why everyone should make their own shop drawings, I have to say that this is really well done. Nice work on this, and good job on incorporating some really good, practical woodworking knowlege.

I try like hell to stay out of the business of plywood boxes, but they're inevitable sometimes. I'll try this out when I have a project it's a good fit for.

I build furniture professionally. I mostly do commission work, and largely for people who are remote to me, which means I exchange drawings with clients digitally, usually in the form of a rough render (no wood grain texture applied or anything like that) out of SketchUp or FreeCAD[0].

When I actually go to build anything, I generally do pencil and paper shop drawings, usually 3 views, hidden lines showing joinery, etc. I'll make exceptions for simple projects, but for anything even moderately complicated I do shop drawings. "Moderately complicated" starts at a side table with a drawer, and that's something I've put together more than a few of.

The important output of the drawing process isn't a picture of the finished piece. It's knowing, deeply, how all of the pieces are going to fit together and how they relate to each other in space. It's having an order of operations and assembly in mind. It's knowing where the pain points and hiccups are likely to be. It's a good cut list with notes about e.g. what the shoulder distances are for anything with a tenon on both ends.

I don't doubt that you could accelerate the 3D modeling process with AI or a sufficiently friendly CAD program, just as you could take plans from Fine Woodworking or Popular Woodworking and go directly to the shop and start building. I do doubt that things would go faster or more smoothly in the shop for having done so.

[0] Which depends largely on the complexity of the project. This gossip bench was simple enough to do in SketchUp:

https://www.longwalkwoodworking.com/gossip-bench

This dining table required some serious leveling up of my FreeCAD skills:

https://www.longwalkwoodworking.com/mid-century-modern-table

My experience is that if there's a lot of shaping with curves and tangency, FreeCAD is less cumbersome to draw it in and a hell of a lot easier to make changes in.

Am a furniture maker, professionally. Do mostly hand work or at least more traditional tools, but use CNC with some regularity for jigs, templates, and the like.

If you're CNC cutting parts that need to fit together, you need to measure both your plywood and your cutting tool with digital calipers to the thou. Freud's 1/4" upcut spirals (available at Home Depot) are pretty commonly .245" rather than .250". That's enough that things don't fit.

Yes, I've been burned by this.

Also, if you're just making through cuts on your CNC, reference the bed for the Z-axis rather than the material surface, and a few thou either way doesn't matter.

A food processor and stand mixer are robots in French[0]. I suppose this rather supports the claim that "robot" is a social construct as different societies have constructed it differently. N.b. I haven't taken a French class in almost 30 years. Please excuse any nuances in the French use of "robot" in this context that I may have missed.

ETA: I almost forgot! Our nearby hardware store has a robot that sharpens kitchen knives. It's much less impressive than that sounds, both in appearance and how well it actually sharpens a knife. Nevertheless, I did note to the person operating it that if the robot uprising comes, we may regret the choice to simply give the robots knives.

[0] https://www.boulanger.com/c/robot

I can tell the difference, but I couldn't tell you which is which.

This usually pops up around Passover, when Coke switches to an all sugar formulation for reasons I'm unqualified to explain. It's an "oh hey, this Coke tastes different", I'll check the label, and see that it's sweetened with sucrose instead of HFCS.

I'll handwavingly claim that this is close enough to a blind study/anecdote as I'm not Jewish and haven't a clue when Passover falls. As I buy cans, not bottles, it's not the yellow caps giving it away either.

It's been at least 20 years, and Microsoft's blogging platform still doesn't support previous/next post links. Makes it goddamn hard to read the prior series about hot patching if it's not at the top of the blog.

I'm rarely going for a full-smite wallop, so I'll choke up on the head too. Where I hold my lump hammer handle is pretty situational. Even chopping out dovetails, it's a much finer blow than the hammer can deliver. I think the only time I've really gone after something was when the crest rail seized on a stick chair I was gluing up. I drove it down with some pretty almighty blows, but I did crack the rail.

But yeah, this looks damnably uncomfortable to use up against a surface. If it works for the author of TFA, I'm happy for him, but I can feel my knuckles getting bashed just looking at it.

As with everything in woodworking and Perl, theres more than one way to do it :-) If it works for you, that's what matters.

I do use my lump hammer when chiseling. Not hitting wooden tools with a metal hammer/mallet is one of those things people get all worked up about, but it's not really a big deal. For my money, it delivers a firmer strike than a beech mallet.

I have destroyed a chisel handle that was well on its way out when I got it used at a flea market, but turning a chisel handle is within my modest turning abilities.

The argument for head angle sounds good, but in practice it doesn't matter. An awful darn lot of houses were framed with hammers that have the head perpendicular to the handle. If it were essential, they'd have started making hammers with angled heads sometime in the last 3,000 years.

Source: am a furniture maker, professionally. I've switched from using a joiner's mallet to a lump hammer, so I have experience with both. The lump hammer faces are perpendicular to the handle, not angled in the slightest. Better lump hammers have slightly domed faces, so if you're walloping a piece together and don't have time to grab a block to protect it (time moves faster once the glue is on), you're less likely to leave a bruise from the edge of the face if you don't hit it with the face of the hammer/mallet dead square to the wood. Joiner's mallets generally have flat faces because it's easier to build them that way.

In practice, you also aren't usually swinging in an arc when you hit a nail or chisel either. You start your swing in an arc, and transition to a flatter trajectory as you approach the end of the swing so you have less motion in the plane of the face of the head as you're hitting the nail/chisel. Or in other words, you want the head traveling along the axis you're trying to drive the nail/chisel so you don't skew it off axis.

I've only ever been on the software side of the world, so I don't doubt you. It's clearly hackish and might not play nicely with a multi-location switch loop either. I wouldn't be surprised if the NEC has some objections as well :-)