Last summer, Nvidia briefly had their RTX 4090 graphics card in stock for its standard price of $1,499. People online scoffed at it because the 5000 series would be out soon but I decided to go for it. Turned out to be a good grab on my part: the replacement RTX 5090 is 2x more expensive (and definitely not 2x more powerful) and the RTX 5080 is now the $1,499 card and is far less powerful. The 4090 lets me play whatever games I want without consideration for specs and is great for local AI usage so I’ve gotten a lot of fun out of it.
On the other end of the price and utility spectrum, we are at a flea market recently and a guy had a box of old knife switches for $10 a pop. I picked out the biggest chunkiest one, mounted on a piece of shale, and bought it. I have no use for it or plans for it but it gives me great satisfaction to own it and mess around with it in a fidgety sort of way. It’s sizable, weighty in the hand, you can manipulate it and it has an obvious useful function even if I have no use for that function. It’s great!
My House. in 2018, the housing market was tightening up so much that every time I was interested in a place, it got sniped by a flipper. So at last, the smallest, most podunk house in a great neighborhood went on the market and I just said to my realtor, “WTF, make the offer.” I got super lucky that there was a sharp, short downturn in the market as we negotiated and I got the house for a good price, even if it was sold “as is.”
I would like to mount one of these on the wall of our lab and just connect some random cable to it and pretend to not know where it came from.
(Years ago facilities installed emergency shutdown buttons in most of our bays but they weren’t connected to anything for a while. Unfortunately people got in the habit of screwing around and hitting them thinking it was funny–until the day facilities snuck in like a pack of ninjas and hooked them all up. Wasn’t quite as funny that day.)
I’d love to take a great big knife switch like that and wire it with fat old frayed cloth covered wires going off to somewhere, but use low-voltage DC as the operating juice (for safety) then have that control a modern relay hidden out of sight that would do something awesome and fun. And even if the “whatever” that it is hooked up to isn’t that heavyweight, I’d add in a recorded sound of a giant motor spinning up and have it play that over a hidden speaker, or at least play a menacing 60Hz hum.
I have a small piece of card stock, about an inch, framed. It went to the moon on Apollo 17, stayed there for three days in the lunar module and returned to Earth. It was part of the cover of some sort of manual.
Simultaneously the stupidest and most awesome thing I’ve ever bought ($300 for a little scrap of brown paper), and I just love having it. If the house ever burns down, I’m grabbing it as I escape. It came with authentication and provenance, having been in the possession of the mission commander, Gene Cernan.
By far the most affordable piece of space memorabilia of its type. When it comes to Apollo stuff, it depends on the size and more importantly, where it went. To lunar orbit is good. Lunar surface is better. The most rare stuff is “lunar surface carried” and is murderously expensive. One day I may spring a few thousand for a full checklist page or something similar that went to the surface.
Like needscoffee, I whim-bought a 79 Fiat Spider. Guy was moving out of state and practically gave it away. I got it wedged into a one side of a two car garage next to my 80 Spider. Two other tiny cars on the other side.
Me, too. I was 49 years old, an apartment dweller who had never ever considered buying a house. Until one day I did. I got the book “First Time Home Buying for Dummies” and followed it chapter by chapter. I didn’t tell anyone I was doing this. It took me three months. I bought a wonderful 50s ranch from the original owner who had lovingly kept it up. And then surprised the hell out of all my family and friends. That was so much fun. It was the last thing they ever expected me to do. And it was one of the best decisions I ever made.
I was lucky enough to see two ends of a joke like that when I was a student at university. Somebody replaced the microphone insert (from a microphone), and had a spare, dead, microphone insert as a result. He draped it in the ceiling of the Student Council office, remarking that ‘someday, someone will find this and probably think they have been bugged’.
The trains are made by Bachmann and are OO gauge (1/76.)
Interestingly the signal box (made by Hornby) is an exact replica of the one in my town.
Apparently Hornby had a reliable guy who would go and measure up various track-side buildings (plus take pictures) - and he lived in my town. So that’s the signal box he used…
In February 2021, hubby suggested we should glass in our patio to make it into a conservatory. Our neighbors had done theirs about 5 years before. At the time we said that we had no interest.
From March to October we spend > 50% of our waking time at home in the conservatory. It faces south, so it warms up quite nicely, so we sometimes even have lunch in it during the winter months. During this time of the year we have breakfast, lunch and dinner in the conservatory area. Without the glass panels it would be a bit too chilly for breakfast.
I love model trains! When I was a kid I had a fairly large HO scale layout with two trains, one pulled by a steam locomotive and another by a modern diesel-electric. My dad made a big plywood table for it, and it eventually got a bridge overpass with trestles and lots of switches, and a train station and scenery.
When my son was little I bought him a Playmobil train set for one wonderful Christmas. It’s a great concept because while technically a “toy”, the Playmobil train is G scale and compatible with professional grade LGB track and accessories. I ended up spending far too much money on fancy LGB cars and lots of extra track. The scale is too big to be put on any sort of regular table, so, much to the consternation of my wife, we had train tracks running through much of the upstairs of the house! I also got an upgraded transformer for it with illuminated meters and a crank-type speed control. Just as an aside, for those who may not know, LGB equipment is outdoor rated, and because of its size, many train nuts have tracks and LGB trains running through their back yards and gardens.
I’m assuming you are in Europe…doesn’t the south-facing glass turn the place into a sauna during the summer?
My home state of New Jersey is hardly considered one of the “hotter” parts of the country (we get a proper winter with snow), but I am afraid that a glassed-in conservatory behind my house would be a very unpleasant place in summer months.
Don’t get me wrong–my wife would absolutely love to do this and has suggested it before. She would have hundreds of plants if she could.
I’m in central Switzerland, whose weather is very close to Seattle’s. I used to live in NW NJ, and I can assure you that summers here are much more comfortable than a NJ summer. Lower humidity make a huge difference.
On Thursday I’ll pick it up from the gun store. The mandatory waiting period will have ended. I’ll then take it to the range and put 100 rounds through it. Can’t wait. It will be fun.
Sorry if this is a hijack, but what is the printing process they are talking about on the refit model? It sounds like “tambo” but I’m not getting any hits when I google that, so I’m either mishearing it or misspelling it. It sounds like an interesting process I’d like to learn more about.
Tampo printing, more formally known as tampography. Less formally, pad printing. A squishy silicone rubber pad picks up ink from a plate, moves over, then plops the inked tampo pad onto the sorts of things that can’t be run through a printing press. Metal and plastic pieces, especially irregularly shaped or curved things.
Just as an aside, for those who may not know, LGB equipment is outdoor rated, and because of its size, many train nuts have tracks and LGB trains running through their back yards and gardens.
); got a pait of hands, too, all for $10