Clear as ice.

 

Ok, time to ice-splain

This is a wall of text but extremely easy to accomplish. Refrigerator ice comes out very white, but if you look closely it is very clear around the edges and white in the center. Refrigerator ice freezes from the outside in.

The white bits are all the impurities in the water, those impurities freeze LAST. The trick is to control the direction that the ice freezes, this process is called, simply, directional freezing. There are a lot of ways to do this, but this ice tray from amazon is the easiest.

How does it work?

The tray insulates the tray on 5 of the 6 sides with styrofoam. The 6th side, the top, is the only exposed part of the water, therefor it will freeze first. All the impurities (the white bits) will be forced downwards into the water reservoir below. When complete and you separate the silicon mold at the top, those cubes will all be uniform in size and perfectly clear (they may have some frost right on the top surface, but if you let the cubes stand alone in a room for 5 minutes they will clear up).

Why clear ice?

1. it looks bad ass
2. it tastes better since all the impurities are removed, they will not get into your drink and foul up the taste
3. it will stay colder for a longer amount of time.

The level of effort is stupid-easy. The hardest thing you are going to do is pour water. Everything else is just time and patience.If you want a science experiment you can try it in a very small batch. Get a metal yeti/stanley/tervis tumbler. It will need to be one of the slightly conical ones (with perfectly straight 90degree angles you will never get the ice out)

1. Fill the tumbler 90% full of water and put it upright in your freezer without a lid.
2. Let it freeze for 18-20 hours.
3. Take the tumbler out and set it on the counter for at least an hour.
1. it needs to thaw just a tiny amount otherwise the tumbler will not let the ice out of the vessel.
4. After an hour the ice cylinder should slide out (do this over a sink, there will be very cold water involved) If it doesnt want to come out give it a little more time. The cylinder will be half clear and half VERY white.
5. You can chip away the white puts with an ice pick or cut it away with a serrated bread knife.

This won't make a lot at one time, but if you only have one cocktail a week, it is an easy way to accomplish the task.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cjk6rIPLiNQ/

Lego: First pass: Macro sorting

 So you have a few thousand Lego bricks and want to organize them. Where do you start?

The most common approach is dump them all out on a large surface, get a few storage containers, and sort by color. This works for storing the bricks but has some shortfalls. 

1. Not efficient if you actually want to build anything with what you have in inventory.
2. New bricks (new to the collections and/or new styles of bricks) will just get lost in the mesh
3. If  you want to build something and you go searching for a specific part, it will be much easier to locate, e.g. finding a grey 2x1 plate will be easier to find in a mess of other 2x1 plates than in a bin of all grey parts.
4. Boring and unimaginative

Brick Architect has a good guide on this. He breaks everything into six categories: Bricks, plates, tiles, slope, technic, and SNOT (Studs Not On Top).

But... it feels too confined.

I use a technique that I refer to was macro sorting. It is a combo of sorting by type or size.  

I use these categories (You can rearrange these as you see fit, but my biggest piece of advice is be consistent.):

1. combined plates and tiles (separate them later, for now keep them together), any shape as long as it is the 1/3 height
1. move anything larger than 4x4 (16 studs) to a separate bin, these take up a lot of space.
2. Bricks (anything 1 block high and all right angles is a brick, even if it has decor on it
1. unless it is a technic
3. Slopes, any brick that changes direction from top to bottom of the brick is a slope, this includes arches
1. unless it is a windshield or wheel well
4. SNOT, anything where the studs are in weird places and/or on more than one side, plus things like hinges, fences
1. lots of exceptions here
5. decorations, this is broad and includes plants, minifigs, any items designed to be held by a minifig, flags, signs, and many things I am unsure where else to put. For whatever reason I also put anything designed to clip together in here
6. technic, anything intended to be part of a moving assembly that has the ability to connect in non-stud ways
7. vehicle chassis and parts, boat parts, wheels, tires, wheel wells, motorcycles, cranes, winches, forklifts, etc
8. Large items: walls, windows, doors, bricks that are more than 1 brick high, windshields, canopies

I will update this as I think of things, but remember, this is just your first pass. We will break things down further as we go along.

The streets of heaven are paved with gold Lego bricks

I have had a love affair with Lego since I was around 3-4 years old. I am now pushing 50 and I have recently rekindled this flame.

A little personal history, to put things in perspective. 

My father is a rocket scientist, an honest to goodness aeronautical engineer. I always thought this was a pretty cool thing to have in my family, but I also learned that it meant that engineering was in my blood. In my day job I am an operations engineer for technology. In short, I make things work with computers, either with networking, software, or even just technical processes. My job is to get to a fully operation battle station as quickly as possible. This requires a skill for organization and administration. A place for everything and everything in its place.

I have recently begun applying this to Lego. 

I had not really touched my personal bricks in a couple of decades. I had a few Star Wars sets that I picked up here and there and put together and enjoyed, but nothing really large. Recently, my mental health took a bit of a turn and when confiding with a dear friend he told me that he had been buying Lego bricks in bulk (by the pound) online. His belief was that the simple act of sorting the Lego bricks set off a dopamine kick every time he sorted as few as five bricks. I decided to try it out and bought twenty pounds of random Lego online and learned he was dead on.

I wish I had taken a few pictures of the boxes when they arrived... it was absolutely heaven in a box. All these new bricks I had never seen, partially assembled sets, garish colored bricks, and then... a sudden panic attack. These were a lot of random bricks. How was I going to organize them? My personal stash were still stored away in a giant footlocker and were all organized by color. How was I going to integrate these tens of thousands of new bricks?

There are dozens, maybe hundreds of posts, blogs, and tutorials online about the "expert" or "master"  way of doing this. However, most were unrealistic to me. They had lofty expectations of time, space,  and resources. I have plenty of time, but I am a father, husband, etc so I need to be very cognizant of where I spend it.

In the next few posts I hope to share my pitfalls, snags, educations, trials and tribulations around a large influx of new bricks for the Lego layman. Stay tuned as I try and lay out a decent path to organize the chaos of organizing the little bricks from heaven.

Dune: Villeneuve in Review

 I will start with my bona fides, i.e. what makes me qualified to give this review?

Is it enough to say that I have read the book Dune? More than once? More than twice? In fact, I have reread Dune every March since high school.. so for more than 30 years. I have read Dune more than 30 times.

I will emphasize only rereading the first book. For this review I will only touch on a couple of minor details for the later books.

To start, I loved the movie, but it is not the book. I will break this down in to five categories. Things missing or poorly explained, changes, interesting bits, things they did right, and things I expect the second movie will cover.

SPOILERS

Things missing or very poorly explained:

• They never mention that Paul has been in Mentat training he entire life and is expected to become a Mentat Duke
• The dinner party. This scene in the book showed Paul's comprehension of the political world in which he was immersed.
• Mahdi! It was lightly mentioned in the flick, but not well explained. Paul was call Mahdi many times before he was referred to as Lisan al Gaib
• Thufir Hawat: Mentat Assasin. I tried working this one into a joke.
• Q: "Who would win a fight between Gurney and Duncan?"
• A: Thuffir
• Of course, the real answers is that the Harkonnens would be the victor.
• The movie does not properly depict Thufir's prowess. I wanted more Thufir. The actor did well but I didn't feel like he helped physically train Paul
• Weirding Way. Lightly mentioned once, zero explanation as to what it meant.
• Piter de Vries and his obsession with the Lady Jessica
• Internal dialog. This was a big part of the book, being inside the character heads. 
• Count Fenring. The previous screen adaptations also failed here and he was such a fascinating subplot in the book. Another spoiler: few could best Paul in single combat at his peak, Fenring could have done with ease.
• Las guns were not well explained. Las guns and shields were natural enemies; if a las gun hit a shield the feedback would destroy both ends instantly and unpredictably. This is why there was such an ephasis on bladed combat
• Jamis was ambidextrous, Chani should have warned Paul of this fact. You did briefly see this in the fight between Paul in Jamis; Jamis switched the blade to his right hand behind his back in his final lunge towards Paul
• Jessica slaps Paul after his fight with Jamis. She purposefully wanted to shame him so he never enjoyed killing. This may still happen in the next movie.
• The animosity between House Harkonnen and and House Atreides never mentioned. One minor mention of "cousin" which is actually pointless. In truth the Duke was a cousin of the Emperor, not the Harkonnens.  
• The rivalry between Thufir and Jessica. Rivalry may not be the right word here
• The spice melange. I don't know that the movie really explained why it was so valuable.
• The actual weapon that took down the Atreides was old school artillery.
• Where are the Atreides family atomics? The book does not state this plainly but it is implied that posession of atomics are what makes a Great House. 

Things Changed

• The spice carryall scene. Changing it to be shitty equipment instead of a hijacked carryall feels pointless.
• Dy Kynes gender swap. I have zero problem with this, she nailed the role.
• Duncan was sent to live with the Freman during the meeting where they were all spitting. I loved this scene in the movie, it made me laugh. it was a big change but an acceptable one.
• The sardukar should have been in Harkonen uniforms to hide the emperor's involvement.
• When paul lets Jessica know he is aware of her pregnancy. No major issues with this other than with the timing the Duke never knowing feels wrong.

Interesting Bits or scenes that I liked a lot

• The Sardukar were badass the way they were portrayed.
• A guild navigator was not shown
• The mentat eyeball roll was neat
• The sign language. It was actually in the book, but not used this much; the book used more coded verbal phrases. I am good with the sign language as the translation of the phrases would have been difficult on screen. 
• The Duke's line of  "So.. it's done?" was Oscar Isaccs at his best. Very Dameron Poe
• Duncan's demeanor when he walked into the first hallway with the Sardukar... where he looked at them and was like "oh, my second blade might get some use" and pulls the blade.
• A lot more personality put on the Duke. 
• Stilgar's super chill attitude was brilliant.
• Paul staring down the Reverend Mother

Things they did right

• Ornithopters. Hells yah.
• Stillsuits
• Personal Shields
• Bagpipes
• Paul's age and size
• Paul's love for his father
• The Baron and his suspensors.
• Music/score
• The Atreides warriors were the best in the universe, but there were not very many. They were better than the Sardukar and the Fremen. 

The second movie should cover...

• Jessica's bloodline
• The Weirding way
• Jessic'a ascension to Sayadinna 
• The Freman "religion"
• Where Thufir and Gurney end up after the attack
• The family atomics

I may add more to this later after I watch it for the ... fifth time?

Let me know if you have any questions.

New posdcast!

We now have a new podcast page called Scott Pilgrim Vs The Minute.
We have like.... posts and stuff.

Which is more than I can say for this dusty old page.

Interesting read and a new project.

I read this article the other day and it got me to thinking...

Oh.. the article... I could care less about the actual content about the article. Just the output :)

http://news.sky.com/story/man-tweets-harry-potter-book-line-by-line-to-piers-morgan-10765829

So I was thinking, could I automate that?
What I want to know is could I take a book, convert it to text, then use powershell to parse it into 140 character chunks, connect to twitter, and post a tweet?

I think I have a new project!

Avengers in chronological order

I will tweak this post when I get the rest of the details but below is the chronological orders of the movies and the Agents of Shield Episodes that fit in between.
The date following is the release dates of the movies.

1. Captain America: The First Avenger (July 22, 2011)
2. Iron Man (May 2, 2008)
3. Iron Man 2 (May 7, 2010)
4. The Incredible Hulk (June 13, 2008)
5. Thor (May 6, 2011)
6. The Avengers (May 4, 2012)
7. Iron Man 3 (May 3, 2013)
8. Thor: The Dark World (November 8, 2013)
Agents of Shield S1: Ex - Ey (need to get the specific episodes here)
9. Captain America: The Winter Soldier (April 4, 2014)
Agents of Shield S1: Ex - Ey (need to get the specific episodes here)
10. Guardians of the Galaxy (August 1, 2014)
Agents of Shield S2:E1-E19
11. Avengers: Age of Ultron (May 1, 2015)
Agents of Shield Season2 S2E20
12. Ant-Man (July 17, 2015)
Agents of Shield Season3 E1-19
13. Captain America: Civil War (May 6, 2016)
Agents of Shield Season3 S3E20-22
14. Doctor Strange (November 4, 2016)