Category: Uncategorized

As much as I love learning, I’ve had to accept that the vast majority of books have very little to offer, and this often won’t be clear until you’ve actually read some of them. Obviously, this is where libraries can save you a lot of money, but libraries increasingly focus on fiction books and very […]

I’ve found a few new YouTube channels to watch recently, mostly related to religion and mythology, and a few of these channels feature backdrops of shelves filled with books related to the subject matter. It feels slightly pretentious, but seems to be a common design choice. After all, if a channel is trying to be […]

I’ve spent the past week getting my arms shot full of Terminator juice, even one such to protect from a mysterious illness known as “typhoid”, because apparently where I’m planning to go next month, everything wants to kill you. Several years ago, I went moonlight snowshoeing in single digit temps with two of my friends. […]

Thus far, my late 20s and early 30s have been marred by quite a bit of instability. Getting established in a profession took awhile, building friendships and community took awhile, and developing a sense of self and purpose has taken awhile, too, all in the midst of mass scatterings of friends, comings and goings of […]

The ownership of history is contentious: while private collections of artifacts are sometimes scorned, and the taking of them from public lands is outlawed, much of history is kept behind glass cases, accessible only to a handful of credentialed elite, or otherwise left rotting in sterile cardboard boxes in storage facilities. Even more difficult is […]

January. Everything is a countdown to January. It still scares me to think of quitting my job, and it will certainly be expensive, but for all I know, this could be the only chance I have to take a year off while I’m still young. Yesterday I took my first hike of the season, with […]

I’m building my own book scanner now. It’s basically a PVC rig that will hold two cameras on each side and allow for a book to be placed in the middle. Both covers will be at a 45 degree angle so each page can be photographed in high resolution without damaging the spine. I’m doing […]

In the early 2000s, Lego did something that possibly had never been done before: they changed their colors. Specifically, they changed the light and dark grays to what are now often called “light bluish gray” and “dark bluish gray”. There were several reasons for this: there were some changes in philosophy within the company, and […]

For all of the money I’ve saved, I still live in fear of some financial issues. This is important to investigate. It took me two tries to successfully change my transmission pan gasket. The first time, I accidentally let some excess fluid spill out the back side of the pan while installing it, which was […]

When I bought my first car over ten years ago – a mid-90s Honda – the AC wasn’t so great. This really didn’t bother me as I was just excited to have a car, but as other stuff hit the fan and I started learning to work on the car, I eventually realized I could […]