Be Excellent To Each Other

I bought myself a treat.

I love really fresh pasta. I love making my own, but our kitchen set up is really not adequate for the task. Our worktop is tiny and there is no overhang to clamp a pasta machine to, which means the machine won’t stay put and there is nowhere to feed the sheet of pasta either to or from. I’ve hand shaped it on a tiny plastic pasta board, but obviously this takes an absolute age so I do it very rarely.

An online friend of mine bought a machine the same as this a year or so ago. She’s very much a millionaire a few times over with cash to spare, and so she buys all manner of random toys that she uses once and then they get consigned to the cupboard and then bin. But over a year on she’s still putting videos up of her using this one gadget at least weekly.

It’s £300 new, which is a lot. But I’ve been wanting one a while and waiting for the planets to align, and finally treated myself to a second hand one from eBay. It was still expensive (£140), but it’s amazing.

You just stick your flour in. It weighs the flour as you add it. Then it tells you the exact amount of liquid to add. You turn it on, add the liquid, then it almost silently mixes together the dough and then extrudes it with no further user input. After dive minutes your pasta is ready.

It’s brilliant.

Probably a pain in the arse to clean, but I’m going to make that Russell’s problem

That's very cool.

I did treat myself to a KitchenAid a few years back and I could buy a pasta thing for that. It's probably the next thing to learn as a cook, doing pasta.

Fresh pasta is extremely easy to make, and wonderful to eat. Get on it, Blucey!

New watch. Picked it because it's green and because it has a rotatable compass bezel.

Weirdly, I've got this thing wrong in my brain where I always mix up East and West unless I stop and rotate clockwise through North East South West. So having it right there on my wrist feels like it provides a bit of utility to a problem has basically never has any consequences.

But also, I'm ACTUALLY FIFTY later this month and my brother wanted to get me something and I'm generally impossible to buy for.

It came with the silver bracelet strap but that's awkward, heavy and DEATH to arm hair. The green one is from some sort of sketchy Chinese website and claims to be leather. We'll see. Switching them over is the fiddliest faff of all time.

Love this as a reason. Just because it’s a colour.

I like the green strap, too. Makes it remarkable.

I'm the same with guitars.

Guitarists are like 'what's your favourite type of guitar? Fender? Gibson? Ibanez?'

and I'm like 'blue ones.'

That’s super. I wish more people (especially men over 20) felt more like this.

Tea towel fron my favourite Faroese bisexual vegan hardcore punk band that even BigOne saw.

Dog isn't a good meat. Beef is much better. You should tell them

Colour pushes me over the edge with purchases, silver, orange, black & lime are VERY appealing to me.

Put the new gadget to the test. It’s the best.

A mystery football shirt for a tenner from China.

Oh.

Was that with the selfie camera??

No, I can use Google lens to blur stuff.

Should have reversed the setting

You’re looking fab, MaliA

I bought a cube.

I did solve one completely by chance back in the 80s, so this time I want to learn how to do it properly.

Should be relatively simple, if all the sides are white

Racist

And apparently to extrude two parts.

Coming soon to MaliFans

I bought one of these today - tree branches encroaching all over the place, and I'm going to have a hack*




* get very tired arms, and probably find it won't quite reach as high as I want. And possibly also have a couple of **£&!*! moments trying to fit the blades.

I love ours! One of my favourite garden tools.

Bought a little clothes defuzzer for about a tenner. It's fucking brilliant, spent a couple of happy hours restoring knitwear and even a plaid shirt. My woolly hats came up like new I tell you. Incredible gadget.

Which one was it? I love a good defuzzer. They’re so rewarding.

This one, Amazon I'm afraid though:



GAIATOP Fabric Shaver, Rechargeable Lint Remover Sweater Defuzzer, Intelligent Digital Display Lints Shaver Fuzzs Pills Bobbles Trimmer for Clothes and Furniture White(1 pcs)

Yay! Cube!

I decided I wanted to be able to solve one and got one about six years ago. I found a decent enough tutorial (go for the CFOP method) and managed to learn that in a day which surprised me. That's a reflection of how easy it is rather than me being clever. Well, relatively easy compared to what I expected.

Anyway, I keep my cube nearby when I'm watching TV and sometimes do a few solves if I'm watching something that I'd normally double screen through.

Rubik isn't a great brand though so if you ever want to upgrade, the Yuxin Little Magic is buttery smooth, and dirt cheap, but I now use a Maglev 3x3 which is about 14 quid.

I'll never be amazing at it. I can solve in about a minute (the record is a smidge over 3 seconds to give you some idea) but it's a nice, pointless skill to have.

For now I’ll just be happy with being able to solve a cube without referring to a guide. I’ve got no ambitions to go for speed, and just wanted a plain “original” cube for reasons I can’t quite explain.

That looks like a sleek little machine! Posher than my one. I’ve got a Philips one, I think, but a similar design on the shaver head. I’ve also got a Gleener, which is so very good on things like T-shirts and sweatshirts, as well as knitwear. https://www.gleener.com/

Rawdogging the Cube! Apparently it took Rubik himself a month to solve the cube when he first created it.

This is a video about a guy trying to solve it. It's not a tutorial. But I watched this at the time and it gave me the impetus to do the same. In the end I think it was his tutorial that I used to actually learn how to do it though.





In the method that most solvers use the steps are;

1. Make a cross on one side (but making sure the four other squares are correctly aligned).

2. Complete the layer the cross is on and the middle layer, so you've got one solved face and the middle layer behind that solved.

Up until this point it's all just intuitive. There aren't really algorithms for this stuff. So this is where bums like me make the most gains because you're just getting used to solving situations that arise. It's the fun bit.

Steps 3 and 4 involve solving the final layer. This is where people use algoriths. Top solvers know all the different algorithms but bums like me know seven for step 3 and like four for step 4. I've not got the brainpower to learn them all. If I leave the cube for a month, I start forgetting the ones I know!

I'm glad I picked it up as a little habit/hobby. It's a fun little nostalgic thing to be able to do and it's probably decent for your brain.

This one is pretty good. The first layer and most of the second is done without using algorithms, but getting the last couple in place and then the top layer is half a dozen to learn.

https://ruwix.com/the-rubiks-cube/how-t ... rs-method/

Similar sort of thing. The non-algorithm stuff is definitely the most enjoyable bit. I hope you solve it anyway!

[Extendable tree loppers]


I can see why, now I've given it a go! I tried it at full extension, too. The driveway is now slightly less overhung, though I need the saw attachment to get the thicker branches. Still, a success.

I bought a build your own guitar kit.

Started off like this at the start of the weekend


and finished off like this by this morning. Needs tobe tuned in properly and have the action raised, but i'm very pleased with it.

Man alive, you just can't stop taking pieces of wood and putting strings on them, can you?

So have you painted/lacquered that yourself or did it come with some kind of face plates to attach? It’s a nice (petrol? Dark teal) colour.

Painted it myself, popped down to halfords to get some metallic paint

I like your little ad-hoc cardboard spray box!

I couldn’t tell that it wasn’t pre-made in that colour, so that’s a nice job you’ve made of that.

Yeah that's neat!

Next up, fishing rods and buggy whips!

( That looks really cool, btw! )

That green strap looks heaps better than the metal one, it really sets the watch off nicely, I really dig that

Thanks, Tax. I was a bit unsure (replacing the stock bracelet with a chinese cheap strap) but so far the consensus is that it looks better so that's nice. Knowing very little about watches, I'm just trying to style my way through it.

I've said it before but I'm really not a spender. I'm driving an old car, my fashion style is a simplistic as possible (no logos, slogans, pics) and I'd rather all my money went towards early retirement. BUT I bought a watch display box with six slots and I'm going to fill them. In fact I just have.

I bought this watch on AliExpress.



Reason 1: ORANGE AND BLUE!

Reason 2: it's actually a mechanical watch (as opposed to battery powered), which is a thing for watch nerds apparently. But anyway, it's the only mechanical one that I'll have so it fills a niche in the collection.

Reason 3: it has a transparent dial so you can see the workings of it. I love the fact that you can see the date wheel.

Reason 4: post-bday cash.

Will definitely swap out the strap for something blue or orange or both.

Watchgecko.com is a good place for straps

That Proxima looks like a mash up of a couple of different Christopher Ward models with the sapphire face, but a very nice design

I love the Christopher Ward logo but they're way too pricey for my tastes!



ta! I'll check them out.

I ordered a pack of 8 of these from Amazon, but they sent a pack of 4.



I got on to Amazon to report that items were missing, and then the order showed that it still hadn't been delivered, so I assumed they were going to send me another pack of 4. Waited a few days, still no delivery, so I went on-line again and asked for a refund. They refunded me for the original package of 8, even though I'd already received 4.

Ergo, one pack of batteries for free.

I've started replacing eneloops (the ones with the Amazon basics wrappers on) in the radiator controllers with even fancier lithium rechargeables, which have got a lot cheaper generally and were approaching half-off on the prime big deal days.

The NiMH discharge voltage cycle causes Drayton wiser valves to stop operating when they're still half full, and moan from not long after a charge; having batteries that deliver until 1.5V until they deliver 0V keeps them much happier.

Can't use them in the chicken coop opener for the same reason!

I've pretty badly ruined any environmental benefits of using rechargables!

A book about Wipeout.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/ivhr8TjRUSwLVi988

The orange and blue watch I ordered arrived. As did the similarly coloured strap.



It originally came on a bracelet strap but I wasn't a fan of that.

Car modifications have escalated dramatically.

I now have a new turbocharger for my car to add to the pile of other things I've bought and not fitted yet.

So I guess technically it's car parts-buying rather than modifications that has escalated dramatically.