The first step is to surprise a cephalopod. A captive cephalopod is no good as they live in a constant state of wonderment at their captors, the bipeds, and so their ink defense produces something closer in spirit to sliced pork. No, my friends; you must go below the ocean's first two layers (the "chump layers") and dive deep into the tubelcaine. This is where cephalopods feel at home.

I am a bivalve! You are a bivalve! But although we may disagree on matters which do not concern the separation of the Two Valves, surely you agree that the rich consistency of an octupus' ink has nothing on the squeezings of noble Dodecaphles, patron saint of the overly grabby. In the tubelcaine, we will find peace. Together, we will be banned from all fountain pen forums.

 

In the interest of the fullest and most dinitrogenate disclosures, here is the kind of thing I spent time on / wore in public in 2003. I don't know how they are in my closet after a decade of moving around, but whatever. Palp dat shame.

My 780 Ti was getting a little long in the tooth and I wanted a closed-loop GPU, but was basically too impatient to wait for water-cooled 1070s and 1080s to come out. Fortunately, their release made 980 Tis cheaper, so I picked this thing up for $400. It's very slightly slower than the 1070, and a 1070 Hybrid will probably be around $450, so that's alright. I bet I'll regret not waiting for the 1080, but this thing should be fine at 1440P for a good while.

I actually tried to water-cool my 780 Ti with a Corsair H60i, but its hoses weren't long enough for installation like this. Which I probably should have thought of.

[gallery link="file" ids="504,505,506,507"]

I made-a the pizza-pie!

Apart from making good sauce, I found that the trick to it was laminating the bejesus out of the dough -- roll it out, cover in butter, roll it up. This is alluded to in the work "Roll it up, light it up" by noted chefs Cypress Hill. Likewise, you have to follow their topping advice carefully, and break off sausage in the right proportion.

One time a reputable lady grated mozzarella right into my mouth.

Anyway, pizza is pretty good, so I suggest that if you want some, you should eat a pizza. Pizza was unknown to the Maratha empire, but a lot of their records still refer to "the Noid" and "Caesar of the Small Temple" and "the raging, cheese-fueled obesity of the North Korean potentate". So listen to Peshwa Madhav Rao II and eat a goddam pizza. You don't even have to make one -- people will even bring them to you. Good people, people you can trust. Laminate your dough.

Hate goddam upholstery. The Element's driver's seat needed the cover replaced, and oh boy was the new one expensive and aggravating. Nice to have done, though.

[gallery link="file" ids="515,516"]

 

 

I commute by bike to work, and I was looking into a better way to carry my garbage back and forth. Better, even, than bungee-cording my bag to the back. My old bike had an old soda crate on it, which worked okay, but my more recent bike has a big-ass 8 lb. chain lock and is Dutch, so I was in search of a Dutchier way to carry things. The Fietsklik is one such thing, but I couldn't really find any review of it, at least in English, although it was a Kickstarter about 18 months ago (most of the English-language Fietsklik things are coverage of the Kickstarter). So, this is that. For reference, my commute to work is 3.3 miles each way on a very bumpy dedicated bike path. Between the bumps and the fact that I do it whether it's raining or 110 °F, I wanted something that was both well thought-out and tough.

The basic system is a base-thing that attaches over your bike rack. The base is smooth plastic, making the rack a nicer place for a passenger. On either side of the base are clips that a bag can attach to using a mechanism built into each bag (Fietsklik offer three styles of bag). Each bag can lock on or quick-release. There's also a crate that slides and locks on to the top. Pretty simple. Topeak makes a bag-and-crate system, but it is less suave. I didn't buy a Fietsklik for a long time because their US shipping was something like 100 Euros, and I was too lazy to ask my mom in Wales to forward one. It's currently 25 Euros to ship everything, though, making the total for a base, box, and bag 120 Euros with their current sale. I didn't measure my bike's rack because it's a Gazelle and if a Dutch bike accessory didn't fit a Gazelle I figured I might as well just jump into a volcano, but their website has size guidelines.

Here's the base pre-installation.

Installation is very easy. It attaches with U-bolts, then you put a plastic cover over the business. You should get an 8mm nut driver, but everything else is included. The nuts are nyloc, but I figured a little Loctite couldn't hurt. My crate needed a little assembly. The instructions were poorly-Xeroxed in the finest tradition, but they're not really necessary.

[gallery link="file" size="medium" ids="519,520,521,522,523"]

The big problem for me was the bag attachment mechanism. Here's a picture of the business:

The straps to either side release the bag from the base. The locking mechanism is inside the bag.

The issue is those truss-head rivets. They're pathetic. I put my big chain lock, a roll of pens, and a Nintendo 3DS in the bag, attached it to the bike, and two miles later the bag broke free from the attachment mechanism because the rivets fell apart. This was pretty annoying, as the bag itself is quite well-made. Fortunately, nothing was permanently damaged. My solution was to imbue the Fietsklik with some overkill. Here's the inside of the bag half-way through the process:



A dollar or so of hardware sorted everything out. I replaced all four rivets with bolts, washers, and nyloc nuts. Now my Fietsklik bag accepts no guff from interlopers.

That's basically it. It's a pretty well-designed system. It'd be nice if they sold the attachment mechanisms separately so you could hack together your own bags or whatever — I'd like to hang my chain lock right from the side, for example, rather than putting it in a bag. It'd also be nice to have the option for a slightly smaller, stronger (maybe non-folding) box that has a shopping basket-style handle.

The Fietsklik bits are all pretty good save for the issues above. I'd buy it again. 7 out of 10 Queen Beatrixes.



Update, a few months later: All the Fietsklik stuff is holding up pretty well. The only thing I've been noticing is that the plastic cover to the base bit scratches up really easily when exposed directly to my big chain lock. I have also been noticing that the bag is fucking huge, but I guess that's alright.

Update, a year later (Feb. 2017): I stopped using the Urban Explorer bag because the retractable latches stopped retracting. I pulled the latching mechanism apart and it seems like the retaining clips inside are a bit vulnerable, as one had broken. The sliding portion of the latch falls out of place, and no longer works.

To replace it, I got the Urban Office bag. It's a little smaller. My problem with the old bag was those pathetic truss-head rivets, but I thought that was maybe due to my huge chain lock. I now have an Abus Bordo folding lock that rides on the seat tube, so that cut a lot of weight from the bag. I thought it would be okay with the truss-head rivets -- to work, I now carry a 12.9" iPad Pro (1.5 lbs), a roll of fountain pens (almost nothing... 50 g?), and some headphones. Unfortunately, it lasted for about a week before the upper rivets pulled out and had to be replaced with more bolts, washers, and ny-loc nuts, as with the older bag.

I gave them a pass with the last bag since my old chain lock was massive, but the new bag has never even had a kilogram in it -- for the latch mechanism to be falling off of the bag after a week of regular use is pathetic. Proper hardware is cheap (I paid less than 1 USD to sort the bag out, and I wasn't even buying in bulk), and product failures due to improper hardware make for a bad look.

The "All Shall Kneel" party's popularity has really rebounded in this timeline.

Conglomeratif un Buenador

Firing tiny cannons is fun, so I did it a bunch of times in slow motion. Pretty good -- gets a BB clean through a lemon, even with a very conservative gunpowder load. The cannons are from Mini Cannon Tech; the assembled ones are pretty pricey but they sell unassembled kits, and combined with occasional sales they're not bad.

Fun project.

[gallery link="file" size="medium" ids="539,541,540,543,542,544"]