How can I get out of all these boring household tasks?

Dear Jane, my parents keep giving me loads of chores to do and saying something about “responsibility” and “being a grown-up”. I mean, what are they on about? I only just turned 30. How can I get out of all these boring household tasks?

Unhappy from Hampton

Oh my poor beleaguered buttered scone of injustice!

How dare your parents suggest you take on responsibilities simply because you’ve reached the tender and innocent age of thirty?! Why, you’re practically still in the larval stage of adulthood, just barely crawling out of your sock drawer of self-discovery!

Let me tell you, chores are a vicious rumour spread by people who don’t own enough decorative hats. I once avoided all housework for seventeen consecutive years by pretending I was allergic to dust, soap, and effort. It worked marvellously, until I was eventually mistaken for a long-lost Victorian ghost and exorcised from my own kitchen.

Now, here’s my expert advice for dodging every chore ever:

And finally, for full escape velocity, I recommend my bestselling guidebook “Grown-Ups Are a Myth: Escaping Adulthood With Grace and Cupcakes.” It pairs beautifully with “Avoidance Through Sock Puppetry” and the ever-popular “Ten Reasons I Can’t Hoover (Allergies, Ghosts, and General Vibes).”

So pop on your most distracting hat, declare yourself emotionally fragile, and lock yourself in the loo with a nice hot pot of prune juice until the laundry folds itself or they give up entirely.

Irresponsibly yours,
Lady Jane Sillybottom
Author, Hat Philosopher, Sock Whisperer, and Domestic Avoidance Specialist

#chores #grownUp #housework #larvalStageOfAdulthood #ResponsibilityIsAConspiracy #skiving

The boy didn't want to go to school today, when asked why not just said he didn't feel like it. Couldn't even fake an illness. Kids these days, need to raise their skiving game...

#kids #skiving #school

Word of the Day: EGROTING – feigning sickness to avoid something you don’t want to do (eg. work, chores, your husband, lead the country during an unprecedented global pandemic)

#WordOfTheDay #dictionary #words #egroting #sickday #pullingasickie #skiving

I took your advice, Mastadon pals, and bunked off for the day.

BUNKING OFF. #Skiving #Yorkshire #Sheep #BunkingOff

Hackaday Links: April 24, 2022

Wait, what? Is it possible that a tech company just killed off a product with a huge installed base of hardware and a community of dedicated users, and it wasn't Google? Apparently not, if the stories of the sudden demise of Insteon are to be believed. The cloud-based home automation concern seems to have just disappeared -- users report the service went offline at the end of last week, and hasn't been back since. What's more, the company's executives removed Insteon from their LinkedIn profiles, and the CEO himself went so far as to remove his entire page from LinkedIn. The reasons behind the sudden disappearance remained a mystery until today, when The Register reported that Smartlabs, Inc., the parent company of Insteon, had become financially insolvent after an expected sale of the company failed in March. The fact that the company apparently knew this was going to happen weeks ago and never bothered to give the community a heads up before pulling the switches has led to a lot of hard feelings among the estimated 100,000 Insteonhub users.

Then again, with a comet the size of Rhode Island heading our way, a bunch of bricked smart bulbs might just be a moot point. The comet, known as C/2014 UN271, has a nucleus that is far larger than any previously discovered comet, which makes it a bit of an oddball and an exciting object to study. For those not familiar with the United States, Rhode Island is said to be a state wedged between Connecticut and Massachusetts, but even having lived in both those states, we couldn't vouch for that. For scale, it's about 80 miles (128 km) across, or a little bit bigger than Luxembourg, which we're pretty sure is mythical, too. The comet is a couple of billion miles away at this point; it may never get closer than a billion miles from the Sun, and that in 2031. But given the way things have been going these last few years, we're not banking on anything.

From the "Answering the Important Questions" file, news this week of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's breakthrough development of the "Oreometer," a device to characterize the physical properties of Oreo cookies. The 3D printed device is capable of clamping onto the wafer parts of the popular sandwich cookie while applying axial torque. The yield strength of the tasty goop gluing the two wafers together can be analyzed, with particular emphasis on elucidating why it always seems to stay primarily on one wafer. Thoughtfully, the MIT folks made the Oreometer models available to one and all, so you can print one up and start your own line of cookie-related research. As a starting point, maybe take a look at the shear strength of the different flavors of Oreo, which might answer why the world needs Carrot Cake Oreos.

And finally, since we mentioned the word "skiving" last week in this space, it seems like the all-knowing algorithm has taken it upon itself to throw this fascinating look at bookbinding into our feed. We're not complaining, mind you; the look inside Dublin's J.E. Newman and Sons bookbinding shop, circa 1981, was worth every second of the 23-minute video. Absolutely everything was done by hand back then, and we'd imagine that very little has changed in the shop over the ensuing decades. The detail work is incredible, especially considering that very few jigs or fixtures are used to ensure that everything lines up. By the way, "skiving" in this case refers to the process of thinning out leather using a razor-sharp knife held on a bias to the material. It's similar to the just-as-fascinating process used to make heat sinks that we happened upon last week.

#hackadaycolumns #hackadaylinks #bookbinding #bricking #comet #cookie #insteon #iot #luxembourg #modulus #oreo #rhodeisland #shear #skiving #torque

Hackaday Links: April 17, 2022

There are plenty of stories floating around about the war in Ukraine, and it can be difficult to sort out which ones are fact-based, and which are fabrications. Stories about the technology of the war seem to be a little easier to judge, and so stories about an inside look at a purported Russian drone reveal a lot of interesting technical details. The fixed-wing UAV, reported to be a Russian-made "Orlan," looks quite the worse for wear as it's given a good teardown by someone wearing Ukraine military fatigues. In fact, it looks downright homemade, with a fuel tank made from what looks like an old water bottle, liberal use of duct tape to hold things together, and plenty of hot glue sprinkled around -- field-expedient repairs, perhaps? The big find, though, is that the surveillance drone carried a rather commonplace -- and cheap -- Canon EOS Rebel camera. What's more, the camera is nestled into a 3D printed cradle, strapped in with some hook-and-loop tape, and its controls are staked in place with globs of glue. It's an interesting collection of hardware for a vehicle said to cost the Russian military something like $100,000 to field. The video below shows a teardown of a different Orlan with similar results, plus a lot of dunking on the Russians by a cheery bunch of Ukrainians.

One of the best things about 3D printing is that it gives you not only the ability to create parts that never existed before, but also to recreate parts from existing mechanisms that are difficult or impossible to come by. And perhaps nowhere is this latter use case put to the test more than in the automotive world, where styles change on a whim and broken or missing parts can put a real crimp in your ride. Perhaps sensing the potential loss of revenue from parts that are printed rather than purchased, Honda has issued a takedown order for any models related to their brands. Models for anything from high-wear interior trim parts to functional parts were included in the takedown issued to Prusa's Printables; it's not clear if similar orders were issued to other model repositories. What's interesting is that Prusa reports the Scary Legal Letter was accompanied by a long list of specific models it wanted removed, meaning some corporate lawyers -- or more likely, their interns -- trolled through the site looking for anything even slightly Honda-esque. We get the the need to protect IP, but preventing people from printing a replacement windshield washer tank cap seems overly aggressive.

If you happened to have had a spare $500,000 lying around, looks like you missed your chance to ~~pick up five Orlan drones~~ bid on a piece of space history -- a sample of the first lunar regolith collected by the Apollo 11 mission. The moon dust is part of the "contingency sample" that Neil Armstrong was supposed to collect immediately after stepping onto the surface of the Moon; in case they had to book it out of there in a hurry, NASA wanted to make sure they had at least one souvenir. But, like any tourist, Armstrong was fiddling with his camera and didn't get around to collecting the contingency sample for a couple of minutes, during which scientists back on Earth were no doubt horrified by thoughts of the LM sinking into the lunar dust. How exactly a plastic bag filled with dust in Armstrong's pocket would have made such a scenario any better is a mystery, but regardless, everything went according to plan and after a weird journey back on Earth, the samples made it to the auction block this week, where they were sold to an anonymous collector for half a million dollars. We really should have been more on the ball with this story, and if anyone out there missed out on the bidding because we failed to give you a heads-up, we sincerely apologize.

In another bit of algorithmic serendipity, most of us in the Hackaday writer's secret underground lair got a video recommended to us that we simply have to pass on. It shows the process by which certain heatsinks are made, and it's a strangely hypnotic thing to watch. The process, called skiving, uses a wide and incredibly sharp blade to skim very thin sections from a block of copper or aluminum and then tilt them up to stand vertically. Increment down the block, repeat the process, and soon you've got a solid block of material turned into a beautiful heatsink, and without any waste, at least compared to how much swarf would be generated by traditional machining. In fact, it occurs to us that were not sure how to classify this operation -- it's certainly not additive machining, like 3D printing, but neither likewise does it fit into the subtractive machining bucket. Whatever it is, be sure to check out the other skiving videos on the channel -- you won't be disappointed.

And finally, if you've got a spare 90 minutes, we heartily suggest you find something better to do than watch the full video of the original Windows 95 launch. Unless, of course, you love that cringe, because there's plenty of cringeworthy material here. For those not willing to commit to the full experience, Gizmodo has done an admirable job pulling out the best parts, which includes silliness from the likes of Bill Gates (of course), Steve Ballmer, and Jay Leno -- we'd forgotten about his appearance. Between the checks written to Leno and the Rolling Stones for the rights to "Start Me Up" -- did anyone actually read all the lyrics? -- this party set Microsoft back quite a few bucks. But, given that some major players are still running Windows 95 today, it was probably a drop in the bucket.

#hackadaycolumns #hackadaylinks #slider #apollo11 #canon #drone #heatsink #honda #moondust #orlan #regolith #russia #skiving #takedown #uav #ukraine #windows95