expensive hobbies...
- Thread starter LukeD
- Start date
Yup, I'm a mechanic, I drive a 99 Mazda.
As there is no thread for random acts of stupidity- I bought a laptop that will happily do any of my daily duties with ease, so I buy a faster HDD and lower latency RAM so it benchmarks just a bit less shit.
It will just get left in power saving mode most of the time anyway and I'll no doubt void the 3yr NBD warranty which was a major selling point. I need to sort my sleep so I stop buying dumb shit at night.
Back to cars, there is a mob in NZ that makes some pretty powerful V8s using two Busa blocks, they had one or two in the little 86/BRZ things.
Melatonin maybe? Also no laptop late at night, maybe tv only? Had the same problem.
Nah I have some 2mg stuff but it does nothing, have had most of the non hypnotics and annoyingly the only ones that worked are low dose anti psychs. They make you a bit dull and fat, so I sleep better but now I'm a Trump supporter and believe in a sky wizard.
I supposedly have sleep apnea too, first test saw oxy levels drop in to the 70s but I don't think I go under 85 after swapping out my pillow to something less comfortable, not waking up full of adrenaline at odd hours is nice though.
Expensive hobby- Shit sleep, Pillows, mouth guards, oximeters, drugs, sleep test, doctors, shrinks and I'm still the same, just poorer.
Another great thread derail, hahaha!
Look for different shrinks until you find a good one. Especially with US problems of prescribing too much but often not of the stuff that's really needed. Ironically quite opposite to propaganda ADHD is undermedicated in US as an example.
For sleep just look for good meds. One of them will work. I'm not on anti anxiety, anti depresants and concerta/adderall and for the first time in ages I'm a functioning human. Yeah sometimes I need to play around with dosage but I found a psychiatrist who tells me to adjust according to what happens and told me to read. Ie a smart trusting person not a "want some pills" doctor.
Maybe go to a psychiatrist who will find there is some comorbid condition that causes sleep apnea.
I'm with you Woo.
'cept for electric cars. I find those cool and exciting. (though not enough to know every little obscure detail about them. so really, I'm with you).
you tried practicing mindfulness? it helped me.
could also be that my kids started sleeping through the night, and my body is slowly getting used to sleep again, but I think mindfulness helped.
Electric cars are exciting? Who wants a sports car that is heavy and you can only push it for very short periods of time because it overheats like it was produced by Italians joined in a British labor union.
not exciting to drive. exciting because they don't run on fossil fuels.
I like my 2001 New Beetle because it has a manual transmission, is tiny and easy to toss around and has a spunky engine that I can work on when something shits the bed.
I mean yeah those part is what makes me believe in them but I don't find them to be a "hobby". More like a political belief. Though I still would rather see hydrogen cells since it's cleaner.
I suppose some people find political belief to be a hobby! But for me it's not really a question of politics (in fact, I wish it weren't a question of politics - it should be a non-partisan issue in my mind), I find it's a question of survival.
re hydrogen being cleaner, I suppose it depends on where you are and what your source of electricity is. where I am, it's primarily hydro. and while the sad truth of large-scale hydro is that it's severely environmentally damaging (loss of biodiversity and methane emissions from rotting vegetation), it's still relatively clean by the time it gets to me.
I tend to disagree. With hydrogen, you'd be still trucking it around to all sorts of end-stations, having to use pressure-containers at each stage, for transport, intermediary storage, the retail location, etc. Not even getting into the point about how inefficient it is to "liberate" the hydrogen, you'd have to have crazy infrastructure in the way of distribution stations and transportation and all the machines and processes that are required to support that infrastructure. With electric, you have the powerplant, which can run on, well, anything, and the distribution network, which already exists. It may not exist to the extent to support everyone on electric just yet, but it's getting there and it already works in it's current form. It's vastly more efficient to transmit energy along these lines that already exist compared to the energy it takes to build and run a hydrogen storage/retail network.
Yeah the initial cost to produce and transport hydrogen energy is bigger but once everything runs of it the cost is lower since the footprint of hydrogen fuel cells is lower than that of creating lithium ion batteries. Lithium mining is not a great thing so in the long term we should look past it. Hydrogen makes sense in the long run more. Maybe after electric.
Also some countries have shit renewable energy options so they can only go nuclear and while I support that it's highly political and problematic.
But it doesn't "run it's cost", you have to keep producing ships, trucks, tanks, intermediate storage facilities and reserves, staffing gas-stations and all of that other stuff, factories to make all of that shit, the fuel/energy that all of that shit consumes all the time, and so on. Infrastructure wears out and we ain't seen nothing yet in terms of cost/energy due to how much harder hydrogen is to store. Think of if there were no gas stations, no tanker trucks, no refineries (ok, well way way less), no storage facilities/reserves to deal with variable demand and supply, none of this other stuff. The energy saved from that would be pretty immense.
I'm not sure where the allure of hydrogen comes from, the great thing about electric is that it doesn't care where the energy comes from, hydrogen, fusion, fission, wind, solar, geothermal, gas-turbine, etc. Ultimate flexibility and not tied to one source of fuel. That's a win any way you cut it IMO.
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The thing is we are theorycrafting. We would probably need a decent calculation of carbon footprint and other externalities of lithium batteries production and disposal vs hydrogen storage and transport.
As for variable supply - the same happens for electric power. Also you still have problems with limited energy storage for planes and ships.
Also Norwegians found a way to get hydrogen from vapour so you can use heat instead of electricity to get it. There are some nice new innovations in the world of hydrogen.
Also this is a decent article about Hydrogens pluses and minuses:
Why EV Fans should Rethink Hydrogen Cars
As a fan of electric cars, I’ve spent much time talking down hydrogen cars. However lately I’ve come to the conclusion that there is a…
mmmmm ye olde canuckistanian kopec$19k canuckistan pesos:
home ownership 
FVCK
FVCK
Electric motor, shifter, seatpost. Does it have that Fox LiveValve electronic suspension?$19k canuckistan pesos:
Bike mechanics are gonna need to have a degree in IT and electrotechnology soon.
As someone stuck working in electronics day in, day out I dread the thought of putting it on my bike. I need that separation of work-fun, and I know there's no way I'd be able to resist trying to modify shit. I'm also absolutely certain that - given no manufacturers of $15,000 industrial linear or rotary actuators have gotten ingress protection sorted - that bike stuff won't handle weathering and bad weather for multiple seasons without getting very expensive.
I live in america son, I have two trucks. Well, one truck and then a tacoma.
We all have socks too. I have about the same level of interest in the fine details of those as I do cars.
I like the mibble part though. I do agree with that.
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Most fun I ever had with a car was messing around with 1960s volvos. My 142 was hilarious to drive. $3500 worth of race spec cylinder heads and weber DCOEs on a $500 car. It was unpleasant in traffic but on a winding country road it was a blast. Not fast but quick enough and easily steered with the throttle. Those side drafts sung the song of angels at 7000 rpm. I can't believe I never threw a rod. When I sold it the new owner junked the car and put the engine in his race car.
Damn thats a shame. 142s are really good looking cars if you take care of them.
That's funny, I had a Fiat X19 with similar mods. Definitely not the fastest car, handles great and the sensory input of a great sounding motor makes a car a joy to drive. Car didn't have power anything. So the feedback through the wheels and pedals let me know what was going on. I think I miss it the most and it was the slowest car I had in a straight line.
(back in the 80's) i used to think the x19's were pretty cool. sounded like they were pretty fragile tho (and slow). that i haven't seen one on the road for years speaks to said fragility (and seeming lack of collector appeal).
random - also had dual 40mm dcoe webbers (on a datsun); neat mechanical devices.
random - also had dual 40mm dcoe webbers (on a datsun); neat mechanical devices.
Aaand my Beetle ate another ignition coil on my way to the train station this morning. Why did I say I liked the car?
Mine was pretty robust mechanically. But they do rust easily.
I used these tools to make the orange thing turn in to a paperweight, good investments.
Fuck volatile memory, fuck it to hell!
Fuck volatile memory, fuck it to hell!
Total stations are confusing enough. What the fuck did you do to that thing?
Initially it didn't work, and as I am a mechanic I was deemed a suitable human to have a crack at fixing it, turns out I was not a suitable human.Total stations are confusing enough. What the fuck did you do to that thing?
They came to me with no accessories, the receiver had a dud removable battery, no problem, but it still wouldn't power up with a battery connected. Opened up the removable controller thingy, replaced the soldered on lithium batt, temp replaced the rechargeable 9V with an alkaline and it would power up but had no OS, threw Code 54.
The main unit had a Code 26 fault after powering it up which was a on board battery issue so I replaced them but I did both at the same time which I now know is a no-no!
Seems what I thought were clock batteries actually kept the memory powered up so the units didn't lose their shit, now their shit is well and truly lost and I have to find a Trimble agent that will know something about a 20+yo device and be able to reinstall the OS then set the clocks.
Shame to potentially ruin such an impressive bit of engineering, I'd hate to see how much it cost to get it to market, the design and fab is phenomenal.
Top pic is a serious case of the Uglies..
Well, this is the DH section, do we talk about anything else here?Was this from your e-bike?
