Adiwan's nerdy dungeon

This year I planted about 40 tomato plants of 15 different kinds. There were a couple of plants that fell victim to disease but it was for the greater good and prevented greater loss. Despite of that the last few weeks I struggled with consuming the tomatoes as they ripened but it was fine. Just now I'm really overwhelmed by my own hubris. I already gave tomatoes away to family and neighbors and yet there is no end in sight. At least it is a good problem to have.

I own a garden and want to grow tomatoes that are not very common to buy in the super market. These ones are Black Krim tomatoes that are still growing and far away from being ripe. They'll turn dark pruple with a deep red when they're ready to be plucked.

I'm curious how they will taste like. According to some people on the Internet they say these ones taste firm, sweet, and a little bit spicy.

Star Wars Cargo Box

... it is hard when it doesn't love you back. I guess the pain is of my own making: I have a Debian installation with experimental packages. Big red flag here. Also it is an old installation that I carry on for almost 12 years. Second red flag. Also I have a ton of developer packages AND i386 packages installed due to Steam, HUGE red flags.

Once in a while I update my system and when I do the changes are BIG.

It took me a good few hours to straighten out over 700 conflicts in a way that doesn't mess up my install too much. The most annoying thing was that my old Thinkpad X201 takes forever to calculate conflicts each time I changed the state of a package. In the end to safe my sanity I removed Steam and all the accompanying i386 packages. I had only a few games that worked on that laptop anyway and my desktop Windows PC is mainly for gaming and heavy duty stuff.

Recently I was helping out clearing a house and while taking out the old furniture out my eyes fixed on a little box in the corner. It was a wooden box from a sparkling wine producer called "Matheus Müller". The old owners of the property liked drinking alcohol. The box was empty and in a good shape, except from some minor discoloration from age because the wood had no varnish on it to give it any protection.

I have no idea what it contained in the past but I knew what it could contain in the future: my miniature paint! My paint was stored in a rather small box that was way too small for the paint I gathered over the years. As you can see in the picture above it's not a little amount. I just needed to expand my storage.

When I got it home the first thing was to get my hands dirty and use sand paper to get rid of the wood discoloration and a huge printed picture. Removing it was quick and the over all cleanup of the surface made it instantly more pleasant. As much as a depiction of a scene with a river with boats and a castle in the background in poop brown has its charm I wanted to give way to a more cleaner look. After that I gave the box a good layer of matte wood polyurethane varnish that I still was good. I prepared a stencil of the D&D logo and printed it out with my 3D printer and used it to airbush a good layer of black primer in the hopes it sticks well enough the the varnish. I wanted an extra protection in case I messed up the stencil part but luckily it was OK. I had some problems as the air pressure of the airbrush lifted parts of my stencil. For my first attempt I'm satisfied. Originally I wanted to put another red layer on top of that but I chickened out and the black was good enough for me.

For the inside I had the idea to use the Gridfinity system. It is an open source system that uses a grid to keep inserted bins and other types of inserts in place when the whole thing is tossed around (within reason of course). I downloaded this file for the grid and bins and this one for my paint in drop bottles. I could print bigger inserts but firstly I wanted to get rid of ABS filament that warps too much if it were any bigger and secondly I wanted to keep it small enough if I wanted to reconfigure the inside of the box in the future. The ABS filament was a huge pain to print out to begin with. It was the cheapest filament imaginable as it was part of a 3D pen. Not only gave me the filament head aches from the fumes but also many many many print failures due to extreme warping and the filament breaking apart.

The only thing that I can rant about is the AWFUL Citadel paint. It dries up way too fast. The STUPID tubs don't seal well enough and it's TEDIOUS to get paint out without contaminating the paint with other paint. It's another story for another time. As soon as I empty the Citadel paint I won't buy anymore of them. This is why I didn't made any special inserts for them.

I got a request from a family member to make a Bulbasaur from concrete for their garden. I explained that I never did it and 3D-printing any kind of mold will be expensive and may result in many failures AND it will take a long time but they have faith in me.

I think I will 3D-print a positive and use silicone for the mold. It'll make it easier to remove the mold from the hard concrete in comparison to a hard shell mold. BUT to conserve the extremely expensive silicone I need to create a tightly fitting box that can be reused for the concrete pour. I predict that there will be bubbles galore in both the silicone and the concrete. Nobody I know has a sufficiently large vacuum or pressure chamber for removing bubbles. I ain't gonna buy that.

Ruins of Alph Ho-Oh replica