@ifixcoinops@retro.social
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

ifixcoinops

@ifixcoinops@retro.social

Hello! I fix #pinball machines and #arcade games, and tell you all about it! I fix lots of other things too, and occasionally tell you about that. I also run one of the web's longest-surviving #textAdventure games, called Improbable Island, and I often write here on Fedi about decade-scale online community management stuff. Husband, dad, professional Thing Fixer and amateur woodworker in my early 40's, an #immigrant from the UK to the USA. Gun enthusiasts pls do not follow/interact.

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ifixcoinops, to random
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

Every winter: 🦝 ah, time to make the annual "Here's how to DIY an anti-SAD lightbox" post
Every summer: 🦝 oho, time to make the annual "Here's how to suck cold air in" post

ifixcoinops, (edited )
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

"Sucking cold air into your house rather than paying for air conditioning," the post that confuses and enrages Americans every year!

Prerequisites: no nearby wildfires, temperatures lower at night, one fan.

Bonus nice-to-have: indoor/outdoor thermometer/hygrometer. Incense (or vapor or a friend who vapes) to visualize airflow.

Method: at night, open two windows; one in the lowest part of the house (unless you have a basement colder than the outside, in which case find the coldest window that's not colder than the outside), one in the highest. Single-storey places, open a window in the coolest room and another in the hottest. Houses with cats, check window screens, replace screen fabric where necessary.

Orient fan in hottest room, one to two metres away from the open window, with airflow facing OUTWARDS. Put the fan on full blast. As the hot air is forcibly exhausted through the open hot-side window, cool night air is drawn in from the open cold-side window.

It might make more intuitive sense to place the fan facing inward in the cold side window, but try it both ways and you'll see how much easier it is to blow hot air out than blow cool air in. The hot air already wants to leave, it wants to expand into the cold night, adding the exhaust fan encourages it.

The optimal placement of the exhaust fan will be different from room to room; it'll always be facing the window and blowing outwards, but you can make a big difference to efficiency by moving it closer to the window or further away. Experiment, using incense or vapor to make airflow visible.

In the morning, close both windows and turn off the fan.

Advanced: check overnight air temp forecast on your weather app, set timer to pull cold air in until just before sunrise or whenever air is coldest.

Edit: this never occurred to me because I don't have an upstairs bathroom; if you have a bathroom upstairs with an extractor fan, experiment to see if that works well enough in place of the fan I've been talking about this whole time

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

@tehstu I get very indignant responses from Americans every year, they've got a thing for air conditioning

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

@tehstu take a walk around the neighbourhood at 1am on a cool night sometime and I bet you'll hear dozens of the damn things buzzing away, making a bloody racket and sucking down the electrons

ifixcoinops, (edited )
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

FAQ

🐰 I have a window fan / box fan, will that work?
🦝 If you can set it so it blows out, sure. It'll work better if you can move it back a bit, but any fan blowing hot out at night when the air is cold outside will outperform air conditioning for a tenth the money, money which by the way goes to some of the dodgiest people on the planet

🐹 It's really humid where I live, should I run my AC?
🦝 For all its popularity in the USA, air conditioning is horrifyingly bad at cooling down humans. However, it's GREAT at dehumidifying the air. Do the fan trick, then run the AC for ten minutes or so first thing in the morning (after closing the windows, and yes I do mean while the house is still cool) to wring the wet outta the air.

🐴 Will a ceiling fan interact negatively with this exhaust-fan trick?
🦝 Ceiling fans are America's greatest invention. As for yours, I've got no idea, but if you usually sleep under a ceiling fan try having your bedroom be the one pulling in cold, you might prefer it.

🦆 Which window should be the cold suck side?
🦝 If you wanna cool down the whole house, choose one that's furthest from the hot blow side. You'll have to experiment.

🐺 Is there a contraption to automate this?
🦝 There's a thing called a "Whole-House Fan," and it's This But Bigger. Have a look on the usual video sites to see them in action and see installation instructions.

🐧 what's the deal with box fans and shrouds?
🦝 Fans made for cooling down humans have different design considerations than fans made for other uses like exhausting fumes or whatever. Sometimes in industrial settings you'll see fans that are obviously made to fit in a square frame, but have a bit of sheet metal with a round cutout about the size of the fan blades. That's the shroud. It's there on the industrial fans (whose job is "Move a lot of air in THIS direction") because without it, the edges of the fan frame will actually suck air in rather than blowing it out. Shrouds are absent on household fans (whose job is "Move a lot of air, don't care where") because we use them to cool ourselves down; it doesn't matter if the air moving over us is travelling in a particular direction, it just matters that we've got air moving over us. But you're gonna use a household fan as though it were an industrial fan here, so if your fan's square then you might consider making a shroud to improve (sometimes nearly double!) its directional airflow. Use a sheet of paper or a tissue to find out where on the box is sucking where it should be blowing, and simply tape over those areas with masking tape (or cut a circle in some cardboard if you feel fancy). The Corsi-Rosenthal box people posted a lot of info in the last few years about fan shrouds, so searching for that might be useful, but don't overthink it and stress about it because you can do the lion's share of the improvements just by adding more tape around the edges until the bit of paper always gets blown rather than sucked on the exhaust side. 90% of improvement will get sloppily slapped on in the first five minutes, and another 5% will take you an hour, and another 2% might take all night, it's that kind of situation, don't sweat it too much.

🦄 Will opening just one window work?
🦝 No, not really.

🐌 Will opening two windows far from each other work, without using a fan?
🦝 eh, kinda. Any multi-level house is basically a chimney and hot air will rise. But adding an exhaust fan will make it go WAY quicker.

🐙 How about one exhaust window and many intake windows?
🦝 Maybe, depends on your house. This is where the incense comes in.

🐫 Why incense and not an anemometer?
🦝 Because you don't have one.
🐫 Oh yes I do.
🦝 Fine, use that, but it won't smell as nice.

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

@westerling Unless the fan (or a shroud) takes up the whole open part of window, putting the fan right on the windowsill results in some air getting sucked in from outside around the edges of the blades and then blown right back out, so moving it back a bit ensures that it's Hot Room Air that gets sent That Way.

But tbh even if you slap the fan right in the frame it's still way more efficient than AC on a cool night :)

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

@elithebearded phwoar that's a big lad

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

@ieure see prerequisites, because I remembered this time

llamasoft_ox, to random
@llamasoft_ox@toot.wales avatar

And finally this is working properly again.

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

@llamasoft_ox Oof big nostalgia hit here, I moved to the USA and never see English style cabs anymore. Lovely wine-glass sticks on a chip shop JAMMA cab! These are the joysticks that the internet tried to forget, they were everywhere in the 90's and nobody believes me about them 😁

Also that coin door pedestal so you can fit your knees in while sitting on a bar stool, chef's kiss

djsundog, to random
@djsundog@toot-lab.reclaim.technology avatar

the inverse of "make sure you have working backups of what's important" is "give yourself permission to delete digital detritus that no longer has any value to your life"

you do not need every email you've received for the last decade.

you do not need three copies of every photo you've ever taken with your phone.

you do not need the downloads folder for each of your previous twelve laptops.

you can delete some stuff.

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

@djsundog /home/dan/old/desktopcleanup/fromolddesktop/fromoldlaptop/sortThis/2009PhonePicturesBackup

emf, to random
@emf@emfcamp.org avatar

The EMF Arcade calls for aid! Do you know someone with a laser cutter (that can do 6mm plywood) who might want to help build an amazing arcade for indie and small game devs? We urgently need help getting our arcade cabinets cut, more details at https://blog.emfcamp.org/2024/05/17/help-the-EMF-arcade/

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

@emf feel free to tell me wind my neck in but how come you want to use a laser cutter for this?

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

@joenash @emf aha gotcha :) LMK if you want any building tips, I've been in the arcade business for like 25 years :P

ifixcoinops, to random
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

Got me a 27" Panasonic telly, it's a CT-27E13G. It's got some linearity problems.

In an arcade monitor, I'd twist the pot marked VLIN until it looked alright, but instead the manufacturers invented a new system where you try to find the codes for the remote control that you don't have so that you can get the damn thing into a service menu and seriously am I missing something or have we just totally dropped the ball on the whole infrared remote control codes thing

Like, it's 2024, I've got a phone in a drawer with an IR blaster in it, we've had websites full of remote codes for going on three decades now, how come none of them know how to squirt out the "Recall" button for a CT-27E13G

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

I found out from the service manual that the remote control is a EUR7613Z60 and damn

like

why did I have to find that from a PDF service manual

Are the words CT-27E13G and EUR7613Z60 not linked together in plain text anywhere on the internet? Come on search engines this is rudimentary stuff

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

@tehstu At least you get nine useless results very quickly

ifixcoinops, to random
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

Some folk are settling on "slop" as a word for AI pollution like we settled on "spam" for advertising pollution and dang, I was really hoping we'd just call it pollution

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

Like, all the cutesy names for web pollution, spam, link mold, the chumbox, AI slop, webshit, these describe either natural processes or byproducts that can be useful in the right contexts, these words say eh, can't be helped.

Pollution. It's pollution and everybody agrees pollution is bad and should be stopped. Call it what it is.

soatok, to random
@soatok@furry.engineer avatar

One of the Matrix developers saw fit to comment on my gist https://gist.github.com/soatok/8aef6f67fec9c702f510ee24d19ef92b?permalink_comment_id=5058644#gistcomment-5058644

In response, I actually looked at their code, identified two security vulnerabilities, and disclosed them to their security@ email.

This reaffirms the opinion I held previously.

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

@soatok have you done one for XMPP yet

ifixcoinops, (edited ) to random
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

Damn I gotta play my garden music more

(once she's gone, obvs)

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

@apzpins I think it's a sort of medium bird

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

@peterainbow it took roughly "Oh, I should move that nest before she finishes - oops I didn't move it" long

renewable_energy, to nature
@renewable_energy@mastodon.social avatar

Portugal is crushing it: renewables met 91% of Portugal’s electricity needs in the first 4 months this year & have pushed their⚡️prices to a 4 yr low!

Renewables are carrying an increasing % of their electrcity demand in the first 4 months in 2024:

  • 95% April
  • 91% March
  • 88% Feb
  • 81% in Jan

Portugal’s rapid transition is evidence it can be done: renewables are up from 27% in 2005 & 54% in 2017 with their last coal power plant shut down in 2021.
#nature #environment #renewables #earth

ifixcoinops,
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@renewable_energy you forgot the link

humulus, to random
@humulus@mastodon.social avatar

Hmmmmm....

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

@humulus mmm, fleshy

ifixcoinops, to random
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

Yesterday was a hard day. Got cheered up a bit today by getting a free bike off one of those Buy Nothing groups on Facebook.

When last I visited my family I rode a pushbike for the first time in over twenty years and I'd forgotten how much fun they were, how light, how without the context of being on top of an engine you look behind yourself and go "Wow, I went FAR!" and I said "Haha yeah I'm gonna get a bike when I get back to America." My brother said, as many people in my life have always said, "Dan, never buy a pushbike, people throw or give them away them all the time" and everyone's right of course, they do.

This thing's got two problems, slow leaks in the tyres and not changing gears properly. I've never fiddled with a derailleur before but eh, it's not rocket science, it just goes in and out on a cable; got the derailleur all cleaned off and adjusted up and still no dice so I took apart the shifter mech that lives on the yoke. Symptom was it wouldn't shift down more than a couple of clicks, this is the style where you've got two levers, one has a positive snap and one feels like a ratchet, the ratchetty one weren't ratchetting so I figured its ratchet must be stuck open and aye, its ratchet were stuck open.

Now if only I'd known this thing came apart on a left-hand thread, I might not have stripped that one bolt and be waiting on parts, but in the meantime I worked it a bit and gave it a drop of oil and now the ratchet bit works if you press up as well as in lol, just kinda hold it together with a squeeze whenever you change gears, it's fine

Tyres can wait til the weekend, I'll just pump it up now and then

Also this thing is so high. It's SO. HIGH. I'm 185cm and when I went to see to the bloke giving it away I craned my neck right back to say hello, dude could've been 2m tall. The seat's already down as far as it'll go and I'm 41 so I don't think I'm likely to grow into it. Getting real Penny Farthing feeling tryna ride the thing. Good fun though, and littleun actually managed to Properly Ride her bike today for a few metres, pedalling and everything, so tomorrow's gonna be a dad-and-daughter-and-bike day

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

Somehow I forgot that in my country bikes with step-through frames were called "Sit up and beg" style bikes when I were a lad, which just makes this whole situation even kinkier

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

🦊 It's a whole new world of opportunities in the bike business now Johnson
🐛 sir
🦊 These days anyone can ride face-down-ass-up like a good boy, or sit-up-and-beg like a good girl
🐩 What about the bad girls
🦊 For goodness' sake Sarah we don't sell to bad girls

ifixcoinops,
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

🐩 Sir at our last general meeting you specified that our target markets were
🐩👓 "Good girls, good boys and good-to-medium non-binary individuals"
🦊 Ah yes, what slogan have you come up with for the medium enbies
🐛 Sir we still haven't designed a bike for the medium enbies
🦊 you WHAT

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