Media - Page 36 | virtualwolf.org

A photo of a white front-loading washing machine with a very dark tinted plastic door on it. The front of it curves in as it goes up towards the top and with the control panel being black as well, it looks quite futuristic.

A wide-angle photo of a small scruffy blonde dog sitting down in the mulch and sticks in a shady area alongside a path. On the other side of the path is a playground, and past the playground are a bunch of trees.

Seventeen years after I moved out of my parents' place and bought a washing machine/dryer combo, we finally had to replace it. Got a very slick-looking Electrolux instead, given we bought one of their dryers a number of years back and it's been fantastic.

I took Beanie down to the park while the delivery people were installing the new one and taking the old one away, and it was PROFOUNDLY glorious in the shade.

beanie our house dog darkroom washing machine

Posted on 15 April 2024, 15:10

A photo of a game of Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team. The board looks like the metal of the inside of an ancient steampunk starship, and the terrain is a bunch of walls all connected together in the same steampunk style to form number of interconnecting rooms. At the left are my six converted all-women Space Marines clad in rich red armour, and on the right are the FOURTEEN miniatures of the Chaos Cultist team. At the start of the game here they're primarily just scrawny humans in ratty clothing and with rag-tag equipment, but they turn into slightly larger mutants and then BIG things called Torments.

A close-up shot of my Assault Intercessor Sister Genevane who is mid-stride through a hatchway pointing her big pistol at an ominous-looking figure who is wearing a cloak and wielding a huge evil-looking sword.

I took my shiny new Intercession squad out for the first time tonight and was victorious, winning 16-11 over the filthy Chaos cultist heretics!

It was definitely an awful start though, absolutely atrocious dice rolling. At the start of turn two, my leader Sister Sarine fired her plasma pistol and of the four dice hitting on 3+, only ONE was a success (which was duly saved). Then she charged into combat, rolled five dice that would normally hit on 2+ but needed 3+ instead because of an aura effect the Chaos mutant I was fighting had, and EVERY SINGLE dice was a 2. 😑 She and my grenadier Sister Decimica ended up getting killed within the first couple of activations of turn two, and two of the giant mutated Chaos Torments had spawned and it was looking very bad. Fortunately after that I was able to rally a bit and my dice rolling turned around, and player of the match goes to my remaining Assault Intercessor Sister Genevane who accounted for two Blessed Blades, a cultist, AND one of the huge Chaos Mutants.

Being able to move a full six inches — actually seven because I took the Chapter Tactic that gives an extra inch of movement — instead of the slow plodding four of the Death Guard meant I was able to move around the map a fair bit more, and the bulk of my victory points ended up being from scoring objectives. I definitely enjoyed playing the Intercession team and they don't have too many things to remember. I think my plan is going to be to pretty much take the exact same equipment and tac-ops each time until I get a proper handle on them.

darkroom gaming kill team games workshop space marines into the dark chaos cultists

Posted on 14 April 2024, 23:19

A photo of a soft fabric dog house that's completely tipped on its side with a small scruffy blonde dog just visible inside it, lying on top of a pink blanket.

Beanie got, uh, slightly carried away in his house.

beanie our house dog darkroom

Posted on 12 April 2024, 21:40

A photo of a plastic box with a "PiicoDev Starter Kit" sticker on the front showing several small blue circuit boards connected together with wires. It's got various sensors and cables in it that you can use to hook up to a MicroPython board and generally do little electronics projects with.

New toys!

...that need to get packed away now because they're a birthday present. #FirstWorldProblems

our house diy new toys nerd shit esp32

Posted on 8 April 2024, 13:43

A screenshot from my Grafana dashboard showing two "gauge" type panels, one for the dew point and one for the atmospheric pressure.

I did a bunch more hacking on my ESP32 sensor reader code today, deployed the new BME280 into "production" outside, and got my Grafana dashboards updated! And I was able to do it completely successfully without needing to actually plug the ESP32s into my computer to update anything, the remote-updating code worked a treat.

The new sensor is remarkably close to what the Bureau of Meteorology is reporting: the sensor says it's 17.5˚C, 95% humidity, dew point of 16.6˚C and atmospheric pressure of 1017hPa, versus the BoM that says the temperature is 17.8˚C, 94% humidity, dew point of 16.8˚C, and atmospheric pressure of 1019hPa.

diy screenshot nerd shit esp32 grafana

Posted on 5 April 2024, 21:50

A photo of a small microcontroller board hanging from the side of my laptop, with four thin cables going from some of the pins on it into a single small connector that's connected to a very small square circuit board that is the temperature sensor. There's red heatshrink around where the cables are joined, and there's a second one of these connector-to-separate-cable, well, cables sitting unplugged on the desk as well.

Tonight I did a bit of soldering for the first time in a while!

My shiny new BME280 temperature sensors have this very handy relatively standard four-pin connector on them for use with I2C, but ESP32 boards I'm using (the HUZZAH32 from Adafruit) don't have it and only have standard bare headers. So I took one of the cables with the new connector on both ends, chopped it in half, chopped four of the separate female "DuPont" connectors I already had in half as well, and soldered them together, and bam, easy connection!

our house diy darkroom esp32

Posted on 4 April 2024, 21:45

A photo of a small scruffy blonde dog lying mostly upside-down, except his head and shoulders are propped up on a green/blue blanket and the back of his head is resting against the pointy edge of a bookshelf. It looks decidedly NOT comfortable.

Beanie has made himself apparently (?) comfortable.

beanie our house dog darkroom

Posted on 4 April 2024, 11:19

A photo of a small blue circuit board that's hanging by its wires from a piece of wood that's attached to the side of our back room. Towards the end of the wood there's also a blue box with a little fan vent in it (a Plantower PMS5003 air quality sensor) and a small white plastic enclosure that houses the existing DHT22 temperature/humidity sensor. And at the VERY end is my extremely dodgy solution to avoiding getting the sensors wet: a plastic tupperware that I've screwed into the end of the wood so it shields the sensors.

And we're alive!

That was quite straightforward, I found a MicroPython library for the BME280 and updated my sensor code so it can use either the DHT22 or the BME280. And as a fun additional point, the BME280 library also calculates the dew point based on the current temperature and relative humidity!

I don't have it running "in production" yet, I've just got it hooked up to a spare ESP32 and it's sending its data to an MQTT broker running on our Mac mini so I can keep an eye on it for a while, but it's very interesting comparing the values between the two sensors... right now the DHT22 says it's 20.2˚C and 94% humidity outside, the BME280 says 19.9˚C but only 71% humidity. I also want to get a better enclosure for the whole setup as well, I'll think I'll ask a friend who has a 3D printer to print me out one of the multitude of Stevenson screens that seem to be out there.

our house diy darkroom esp32

Posted on 3 April 2024, 20:02

A photo of three small dark blue printed circuit boards, two are BME280 temperature/humidity/atmospheric pressure sensors and one is a splitter with little connectors on all four sides, plus a selection of cables.

Yessss, new (small) project time!

our house darkroom new toys esp32

Posted on 2 April 2024, 15:03

A closeup of my Death Guard Fighter, who is wearing hulking green armour with a HUGE toothed mouth in his chest armour going across his whole abdomen and chest and wielding two plague knives, facing off against one of the xenomorph "Warriors", which is down on four legs and looks like it's about to pounce. To the side is a smaller xenomorph more upright behind a set of ammo crates.

A close-up of a Space Marine aiming his boltgun (complete with a 3D-printed muzzle flash weapon effect) at one of the Tyranid Warriors, while a second one lurks just around the corner behind him.

We had our rematch of the Death Guard vs. Tyranids vs. Strike Force Justinian tonight, and because tomorrow is a public holiday we all stayed slightly later and managed to finish the whole game, AND I won 8-7-4! 🎉 (We did slightly fuck up one rule up about injuries and so my Heavy Gunner did better in close combat versus the Space Marine leader than he should have, and ended up killing the leader.) Instead of ten Genestealers, my friend playing the Tyranids took three Tyranid Warriors instead and used, uh... some different type of Aliens miniature for them that looked very cool.

The Death Guard felt extremely thematic, it was just a slow, steady, plodding advance across the battlefield, and they were hard enough to kill that they were difficult to dislodge from the objectives once they were on them. My plasma gunner was my MVP, he only shot three times but each one was a killing shot, taking out two Space Marines and a Genestealer. I also took the dual-plague-knives Fighter for the first time and he did okay, but he definitely served well as an extra close-combat threat beyond just my leader. The Disgustingly Resilient rolls were a lot swingier this game than usual, I either did fantastically well (my Plasma Gunner took nine damage from the Space Marine sniper and would have died but ended up rolling so well he only took four, and subsequently ended up vaporising the sniper in his own activation), or really badly (my Fighter took something like ten damage in his first melee combat and saved NONE of it), with nothing in between.

As with the first game, we had a couple of very cool cinematic moments, my Fighter facing off against one of the Warriors and a Genestealer, and one of the Space Marines shooting at another of the Warriors while one lurked behind him ready to pounce.

darkroom kill team games workshop death guard tyranids seven hills space marines into the dark

Posted on 31 March 2024, 23:45