Astelor

When I was changing the ink in my new TWSBI ECO Rosegold, the piston was stuck. Like stuck-stuck. The internet said I should remove the feed and push the piston out. Here are a few things I learned

The feed is fricking fragile, one of the fins was slightly bent (but not destroyed) when I was trying to remove the feed. I gave up on removing the feed. (btw holding down the sides of a steel nib will not damage it, I tried it with a piler on my other fp misadventure)

The piston mechanic is quite similar to a ballpoint clicking pen

You can partially insert the end of the stub and leverage it to pull the piston out

I applied silicon grease to the back of the piston and the walls. Hold the barrel with my hand hoping to warm it even slightly, and I dipped my pen in water. And kept trying until whatever vacuum gave in.

I wish I learned this with a cheaper model but alas.

It really is strange that the piston can get stuck in the barrel.

When I was changing the ink in my new TWSBI ECO Rosegold, the piston was stuck. Like stuck-stuck. The internet said I should remove the feed and push the piston out. Here are a few things I learned

The feed is fricking fragile, one of the fins was slightly bent (but not destroyed) when I was trying to remove the feed. I gave up on removing the feed. (btw holding down the sides of a steel nib will not damage it, I tried it with a piler on my other fp misadventure)

The piston mechanic is quite similar to a ballpoint clicking pen

You can partially insert the end of the stub and leverage it to pull the piston out

I applied silicon grease to the back of the piston and the walls. Hold the barrel with my hand hoping to warm it even slightly, and I dipped my pen in water. And kept trying until whatever vacuum gave in.

I wish I learned this with a cheaper model but alas.

....i wonder if I can turn some of these off w accessibility settings, actually. or if itll go to much for what I want. sigh

HP 2113E minicomputer and 87XM micro – Mike Loewen

"The HP 2113E minicomputer from 1976 was part of the second series of 21MX machines, and used semiconductor RAM instead of core memory. The system on display has a 2748B high speed paper tape reader (500cps) which is used to load software into RAM. Paper tape BASIC will be loaded, after which BASIC programs can be loaded from the interpreter. A 2645A terminal is used for communication. Also on display is an 87XM personal computer from 1983 with dual diskette drives. The 87MX has built in BASIC with graphics capability."

Then i spent like 4 hours meticulously inserting all of them into my collection on archidekt. I guess i did not really have to input Set and collection number for every land and card but i did it anyway, for some reason i enjoy cataloguing stuff like this. Perhaps helps that the cards have some nice art.

I also went to a local game store for the first time and picked up a few singles from a binder. I was super stressed about that, especially once i saw some people playing in the shop, but my partner helped me get past the stress and everything went smoothly.

Also, for the record - i know and fully agree that buying singles is the way to go when building a deck, however besides building a deck i also wanted to GAMBLE.

The Research Revamp

Well, it sure has been a while since my last post! As an aside, that post somehow got flagged as being mature, and I can't see the button to appeal it. Doesn't matter too much to me but I really wonder what on earth the algorithm saw that caused it to flag my post!

In any case, I've been keeping very busy, and I've gone through almost everything programming related on the lists I previously posted. My sleep schedule has been somewhat iffy so after each day I'd feel too tired to make a blog post, weeks turned into months, you know the drill! I have a bunch of topics written up so I think I'll be good going back to a weekly posting schedule.

With that out of the way, welcome to my new research user interface! A lot of the text is placeholder because I have completely revamped my research projects to fit in nicer with the other systems (like the AI matrix) and progression within the handcrafted dungeons/campaign.

Nevertheless, the UI is fully functional - we have a nice prominent list of current research instead of two dinky tacked on left/right arrows which were hardly visible, first and foremost. The list of materials in the bottom shows the newly-added scrap cost for research, doing away with bars that would tick up over time to show research progress, as research is now instant.

Finally, you have the somewhat simplified main window. Most playtesters found that the scientific-paper-style I wrote the research in was overwhelming and very text heavy, even when I highlighted the important bits. Now I'm going to keep it to a couple of lines of prose, a succinct description of what you unlock, and maybe repeating the materials/scrap cost within the window, as it is quite big and might otherwise look too empty.

In the video, you can see me accept a bunch of research, and see new ones appear in the list as you clear their dependencies. And of course it's completely navigatable with both mouse only, keyboard only, controller only, or some unholy combination of the three.