early_riser

First thing I do when I get a smart appliance is scan it with nmap. This has revealed some interesting Easter eggs, like my Davis instruments air quality sensors having a local REST API.

Doing the usual scan against my GE washer and dryer shows that port 53 is listening. What could that be for? Is there a way I can at least query their status locally or something?

When I got the washer and dryer I was excited about the smart home features because getting an alert when my laundry is done or starting the washer remotely so the clothes are done when I get home are genuinely useful features. However, last time I checked the app none of that was available, so I just have these Trojan horses in my home spying on me with no benefit in exchange. Their app wanted my freaking mailing address when I signed up for their mandatory account, so the features mentioned above are the least they could offer in exchange for my digital soul. But I digress.

My fridge is in a similar situation. It commits the additional cardinal sin of ONLY being controllable via the app, with no on-board temp or filter status indicators whatsoever.

I’m interested in tornadoes, as you can probably see from one of the stories I posted here. I think they have a lot of unused potential for speculative fiction and worldbuilding.

First let me speculate on why they don’t show up much in stories and myths. Compared to other natural phenomena like trees, mountains, stars, the sun and moon, and the sea, tornadoes aren’t particularly universal. They’re a distinctly American thing. They’re not unknown outside the US, but the US has both the largest number of tornadoes per year, and the most violent tornadoes by a wide margin. I think it’s no accident that the only book you can probably think of that features a tornado, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, was intended to be a uniquely American fairy tale.

So why do I think they should be used more? They’re freaking awesome, that’s why! OK let me be more specific. I’m not the first person to point this out, but tornadoes have a few unique properties that tickle some primal parts of the human psyche in ways that other natural disasters don’t.

First, they’re big, really big. The biggest on record thus far was over 2.5 miles wide, and they tower into the heavens like a skyscraper. But, and this is important, they’re not TOO big. They’re huge enough to inspire awe and fear, but small enough that our brain registers them as an object, an entity, rather than an event. A hurricane is arguably more destructive than a tornado, but it’s so huge that we can’t conceive of it as a thing on its own. It’s a phenomenon, a process, an event. You can’t point to a hurricane, but you can point to a tornado.

OK, so it’s a thing, a big thing, but it’s also a moving thing, a growing thing, dare I say, a LIVING thing. It’s born, grows, weakens and dies just like we do. And it doesn’t just move inexorably forward. It twists, it writhes upon itself, it turns this way and that, it slows down, speeds up, stands still. It moves as though animated by an unfathomable will of its own. And what a capricious will it is! It can raze one house to its foundation while leaving a nearby house untouched. It can reduce human edifices to rubble and human bodies to mangled piles of flesh and gore, but at the same time lift a cradle, sleeping baby and all, up into the air and gingerly deposit it in a nearby field, without waking the child.

And it most certainly doesn’t do any of this quietly. The sound of a tornado is most often compared to a freight train, but that simply doesn’t do it justice. It’s a grinding, roaring, shrieking, rushing, screaming cacophony.

So it’s a big, loud, living, capricious, calamitous thing. In short, it’s a monster. A monster whose coming is portended by prodigious omens—uncanny green clouds, icy stones falling from the hot summer sky, an eerie stillness. It’s a monster whose presence is heralded by the ghastly wail of the very sirens that were meant to prepare us for the absolute worst horror humanity could visit upon itself, a nuclear bomb, which is oddly appropriate, since a nuclear bombing is the way most people describe a tornado’s aftermath.

But what does this have to do with worldbuilding? A tornado could be a portal to another world, a god of destruction, a portent of doom, or merely an inciting incident. An everlasting tornado could be the pillar that holds up the sky, or the door to the realm of the damned. But it never seems to be any of those things. It’s just absent.

TL;DR: tornadoes are cool, more tornadoes, please.

Where a European knight has his horse, a yinrih Knight of the Sun has his mech. While a mech can be piloted solo, during combat a team consisting of a knight who pilots the mech and operates main weapons and a squire who monitors the mech's systems and occasionally mans secondary weapons is used.

This cockpit is typical of the mechs used by the Knights of the Sun. It's located in the machine's torso. The knight reclines in a seat similar to a bowl chair. There is a cleft in the chair between his legs to accommodate his tail, allowing it to actuate analog controls located at the base of the seat.

There is a joystick in each of the knight's four paws, each incorporating a chording keyer for input. Yinrih eschew billions of buttons for different combinations of keys pressed simultaneously.

Instead of screens, output is furnished by a HUD visor worn by the knight and hardwired to the mech.

This input/output scheme, using an AR or VR HUD and chording keyers, is common in most large vehicles in addition to mechs.

Missionaries plying the yawning gulf between stars have to overcome two problems. First, yinrih cannot lose consciousness without dying. Second, faster than light travel is as yet impossible. While yinrih live over 700 Earth years on average, that's still not long enough to survive most interstellar missions, even at the quasiluminal speeds attainable by Claravian womb ships.

The solution is to suspend the missionary's metabolism while keeping the brain active through Science™. But this presents a third problem. In metabolic suspension, the mind is quickly driven mad by the lack of sensation. This is solved through the Simulacrum, a Matrix-like artificial reality presented to the missionary to keep the mind sane. Subjective time perception is also accelerated to make the journey seem to pass in a few weeks rather than centuries or millennia.

But this solution, too, creates its own issues. Namely the Voice. The Voice is a phenomenon manifesting as an intrusive train of thought attempting to convince the suspended person that the Simulacrum is reality, the only reality. Missionaries who give in to the Voice are said to have dissociated. So we're left with two undesirable ends of a spectrum. If the Simulacrum lacks verisimilitude the mind is driven mad, but the more realistic the Sim is, the stronger the Voice becomes. Total dissociation is next to impossible to reverse, and even if the victim is made aware of the true nature of the world they perceive, they're often too neurologically dependent on the Sim to survive outside it. Suspended missionaries undertake a regime of prayer and meditation to keep their minds anchored in reality.

Suspended missionaries can still interact with the outside world. There is a spartan operating system environment that missionaries can access outside the Sim. Here time flows normally and the systems of the womb ship can be accessed, including an ansible to receive FTL communications from mission control as well as remotely operated robots to repair and replace worn-out components during the journey.

The capsule is completely flooded with neurogel, which surrounds the suspended missionary, cushioning them against high G-forces and creating a link between the brain and the ship's systems without any implants, indeed without having to shave one's fur. The missionary's lungs and digestive tract are also completely filled with neurogel, further cushioning them and providing a liquid breathing medium for when their metabolism starts up again but they haven't yet left the capsule.

The posture of the physical body is significant. It is a pose often assumed by mystics in contemplative prayer. It is not known if this posture was necessitated by the nature of the suspension capsule, and was later emulated by the faithful, or if the designers of the first suspension capsules were accommodating preexisting devotional practice.

Firefly the Apostate is permanently sealed in a modified suspension capsule called the Eternal Womb. He lapsed during a failed missionary journey, his companions were killed (some say at his own paws) and, lacking the faith to resist the Voice, he dissociated, becoming dependent on the capsule to survive, even after regaining mental awareness. The fact that the leader of the militantly atheistic Partisans is forever frozen in serene meditative prayer is an irony frequently noted by his detractors.

EDIT: the white background was bugging me.

I have an Ethernet cable running PoE+ to a wifi access point outside my shack that is very close to my radios. It exhibits the typical QRM pattern, with birdies at regular intervals making a warbling sound when the rig is on SSB.

I've eliminated this problem before using chokes, but this cable is thicker (meant for outdoor use) and much closer, it runs along the same cable runway as my antenna feedlines.

I'm pretty sure the cable isn't shielded. I just bought the cheapest thing I could find on Amazon. I wouldn't trust it if it did say it was shielded. Anyway, would getting a higher category of cable help the issue? Should I try choking the cable at a different point? I did it at the switch end, not the AP end.

Hearthside does not have stores as they exist in the US, where you have a cart and shelves acting as both storage and display for products. For groceries, there are two separate businesses that are usually colocated. A market selling fresh produce and meats, and a grocery store selling premade, processed, and frozen items. The market is usually outside under a pavilion if climate permits, much like a farmers' market. The grocery store is more of a warehouse optimized for storage rather than sale.

Fresh produce and meats can vary in size and quality, so it makes sense that a shopper would want to smell, feel, and see them before buying. So such things have browsable market stalls. One box of processed snacks of a certain brand is the same as the next, so there's no reason to waste real estate to display them for the public. That said, sample booths such as one sees in Sam's Club and CostCo are a common site between the open air market and the grocery store, so if you want to try that box of processed snacks before buying, you can.

A typical family shopping trip goes like this. You and your fellow sires and dams pile into the train to go from your house to the business district. You have 20 little mouths to feed, so there's a lot to buy. A few of the sires are wearing draft harnesses. You are carrying one or more collapsible carts that the sires will pull behind them like a team of oxen. All 20 of those furry little terrors are traveling with you. On Hearthside it's considered proper to take your pups along with you when doing family business.

Once you arrive, you fold out the carts and hitch them to the sires' draft harnesses. The sires will not be touching the food. There is a net hanging under a low roof. After washing their paws, the dams leap up and grab hold of this net with their rear paws and tail. They hang upside down with the clean forepaws used to sample the wares and the rear paws used to navigate around the market. The sires will follow along on the ground, ready to catch any produce tossed into the cart by the dams. You and your fellow parents work in parallel, scattering throughout the market to fetch fresh fruits, firefly honey, spiced wormcow meat, and some fermented steadtree fruit juice for the fast preceding an upcoming holy day.

Kits will cling to their parents' backs, either dam or sire, though it's considered healthy and stimulating for a kit to cling to the back of a leaping and brachiating parent, so you see many dams nimbly vaulting around, each with one or two little fluffballs holding fast to their back or belly.

While it is more common for the dams to gather the produce while the sires man the carts, this is by no means a hard and fast rule. Men tend to be larger and stronger, while women tend to be smaller, quicker and more nimble, so parents tend to settle into these roles, but you see plenty of ladies pulling carts and gentlemen flying around above.

Haggling is common. A dam hangs down by her tail, brandishing a gourd in one paw, a fistful of plastic tokens in the other, both forelegs gesticulating energetically. A kit is snuggled into her chest, lulled into torpor by the thrumming of his dam's vigorous negotiation. The vendor's strange accent and hefty build betray his Sweetwater heritage. Hearthside has a sizeable immigrant population seeking a better life unattainable on the surface of Sweetwater, and these "salty pelts" often find themselves working as merchants.

Her transaction complete, the dam bounds off to find the next item on the shopping list. But the kit, stirred to alertness by her sudden movement, begins yipping hungrily. The dam makes her way to a row of nursing couches. She drops straight from the netting onto the couch, lies on her back, and cups the kit's tiny head in her forepaw. He licks enthusiastically at the lactation patch between her paw pads. Stimulated by the kit's saliva, the patch begins sweating bluish-white milk. Once the kit has lapped up his fill, the dam rolls off the couch, washes her paws and tail again, and then leaps up to resume her shopping spree.

Meanwhile, you've finished your allotted errand and are waiting just outside the pavilion for the rest of your childermoot.

"sample. free." yips a fellow to your right, gesturing down at a tray full of sweet cakes covered in some synthetic blue frosting that's just a couple atoms away from being plastic. He has the same chunky frame and smaller ears, but a completely different lilt to his voice. It seems like there are as many throats as there are people on Sweetwater.

You accept his offer, skewering a morsel with your claw and popping the cake in your mouth. Your kit peers curiously from between your ears at the glob of blue icing remaining on your paw pad. "Oh, here you go," you say with mock reluctance as you reach up and let her lick your paw clean.

"Too small!" the vendor grunts, his ears flattened in disapproval. "Only milk for one so young!"

You scent the air. "Well when you lay your egg you can feed your kid whatever you want," you say as you walk off to meet the rest of your childermoot, now wending their way ahead of you to the grocery store to pick up the rest of the week's necessities.

Compared to the chaotic din of the open market, the grocery store is a much quieter and more orderly affair. Normally there's a tidy line of folks waiting to pick up their orders, some made online ahead of time, others printed on a list of product IDs and quantities and handed to a clerk to process.

Today, however, there's a knot of folks clamoring around a towering figure. "It's a human!" an older fellow barks back at you, having smelled your curiosity as you approached. "I've worked with 'em before, but I never thought one would visit our little shire."

The human turns to you. "¡Oooo!" she coos, bending over you and reaching with her smooth, pentedactyl, furless forepaw toward your kit. "¡Qué Precioso!"

Your pheromones are shouting in protest at this unwanted intrusion but the human is oblivious. You take a step back and bare your teeth. "Do NOT touch my daughter!" You growl.

"¡Ay! ¡No tóquesla, porfa!" The older fellow has equipped a synth and is attempting to defuse the situation. He explains the woman's faux pas to her in her own language, of which you understand not a whisper. The old man seems fluent though, at least going by his rapid speech and the woman's long responses. He smells much more relaxed now. "Lo siento," she says repeatedly.

"No te preocupes," he says before turning to you. "She's real sorry. Humans have an odd fascination with furry critters, like to run their paws through their coat. 'petting' is what they call it. Ya see, humans don't got any fur of their own, as you can see, well ignoring that stuff on their head. But they used to have fur, back when they lived in trees and had proper rear paws for climbin'. Anyhoo, back then they used to pick bugs outta each other's coats. Allogroomin' is what they call it."

The man rambles on as the line inches forward, giving an unnecessarily comprehensive survey of human evolution and biology. "And that's where human babies come from!" He barks enthusiastically. "Ooh, Looks like I'm up." He approaches the window and hands the clerk his order. The employee disappears for a moment before returning with a box of the same blue snack cakes you sampled earlier. The old man hefts the box onto his back. "You gotta try these," he says patting the box with his tail.

"uh..." you stammer, still trying to process the old man's biology lecture. "Light, why can't they just lay eggs?" you grunt under your breath as the old man trots away.

"Next!" You hear the clerk barking behind you. You turn back to the window and pull a slip of paper from the wallet around your foreleg. You reach out to put the paper in the clerk's open paw but yank it back at the last second. "Oh, sorry, one more thing." You flick your writing claw a few times and scribble a number onto the paper, then hand it back to the clerk.

He scans the list and disappears as before. He comes back, a few boxes resting on his back. He picks them up with his tail and places them on the counter. "Oh," he glances at the paper, "and here's that box of snack cakes." He grabs another package of the same blue sweets and adds it to the pile.

You join the rest of your childermoot, some laden with the weeks groceries and others covered in geckering kits overstimulated by all the new smells.

"Well, let's go home." You and yours turn around and start walking back to the train station, the sun still frozen near the zenith, just where it was when you arrived hours ago.

Some yinrih have a fur pattern resembling a fox minus the white countershading. A red coat without the black ears and "socks" is also possible. Other coat patterns include solid white with or without biscuit pointing, piebald/painted, which is a white coat with black or brown patches), solid brown, jet black, and various shades of tan or tawny. This assortment of "domesticated" coat colors is an adaptation to aid sires and dams in differentiating their pups at a distance. Yinrih use odor as the primary means of distinguishing individuals, but when standing upwind it can be hard to catch their scent. Pups emerge from the womb nest with as distinct a coat from their litter mates as possible.

Regardless of fur pattern, the exposed skin on the palms and soles is grayish-black like the skin of an adult Orangutan. Painted yinrih also have patches of black skin under their black or brown fur.

The shading is probably terrible, but I like to think I'm getting better given the tools I have available.

I am not an engineer. I'm not even good at math, and my spatial reasoning skills are nonexistent. With that in mind, here are the CAD programs I've tried.

Blender, Pros: Free, surprisingly comprehensive. Cons: Not parametric, can't precisely measure or constrain models, all the extra stuff you get like rendering has no use in 3D printing.

Onshape: Pros: Easy to use, convenient (I've successfully edited a model on my phone), free*. Cons: Runs ~~on someone else's computer~~ in the cloud, not private, enshittification is sure to come shortly if history is any indication.

Fusion360: Pros: seems to be what everyone else is using. Cons: enshittification is already happening, runs locally with limited saves in the cloud so you don't own your files but also don't get the run anywhere convenience of the cloud.

Plasticity: Pros: buttery smooth workflow, pay once run forever, runs and saves locally. Cons: Not peremetric so hard to go back and adjust things later.

FreeCAD: Pros: free, open source. Cons: workflow as rough as sandpaper, constantly crashes.

Plasticity and Onshape have proven to be the most productive choices for me. If only Plasticity were parametric it would be the perfect software for me personally.

I want to like FreeCAD, I really do, but it's so hard to use. I love Plasticity, but it's meant for making 3D assets for games etc. using hard surface modelling, not so much for manufacturing.

If I may digress for a moment, I work as a network admin. I'm familiar mostly with Cisco at work, but use Ubiquiti at home. Cisco equipment is monstrously expensive from a consumer or prosumer perspective, and the only way to get true hands-on experience is to buy used equipment from ebay which may still be pricey.

Ubiquiti's market strategy seems to be to make the kind of gear that a network admin would want in their home. It's inexpensive relative to the big fish like Cisco, but has a fairly comprehensive feature set. The idea is to entice Joe IT guy to buy Ubiquiti gear for his house, fall in love with it, then push for the company to switch to Ubiquiti the next time they upgrade.

What I want is the Ubiquiti of CAD programs. Easy to use, low barrier to entry but comprehensive enough to use professionally.

Suggestions/comments?