Dave Ambrose

What a treat! Those things are monsters.

The problems are intermittent. Looks like my first attempt partially remediated the problem. I've refined it a bit. Let me know if it gets slow again.

I just noticed that slowness. Gonna take a look.

It is, Mt. Laguna area.

The Milky Way was readily seen. The moon hadn't risen by the time we left so don't know what it would be like with the moon up. There was a lot of moisture in the air that evening, so transparency wasn't great, but still good.

My wife and I wet out to some dark skies with our telescope. Checked out a new (to us) spot, and we think it's going to work out great. We've been looking for a nice, relatively close in spot for years. Nice to have this quality of life improvement checked off.

What he said. ?

Beginning of last month, I impulse purchased a metal lathe. Yesterday I finished getting it situated, getting the necessary tooling, and did my first project on it. It will get used mostly for telescope projects, but making some wheels comes to mind as well. It's going to be a nice addition to my shop.

I'll give the boat a good home. ?

I piggybacked these on one of my son's orders. The ornithopter is going to be spectacular when done, and the Paul Atredes figure looks very good too.

Issue 225 has hit the mail, and may start delivering as early as this week. We hope you enjoy the content. As always, if you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to PM them to me.

I'm still seeing some intermittent slowing. It seems to be from something resembling a denial of service attack. The offending request is originating within our hosting company, and we've opened a ticket.

It will be mailing out from the printet in a day or two.

Yes, there's a new magazine. Scott, the publisher, is a former staffer for MCM.

Interesting. I think I can explain your case. I was downloading a backup set from the server at the time you posted this. I've seen high network traffic slow things down, and will be more careful about when I retrieve those backup sets.

We can learn a lot from other modeling genres. My son and daughter build Gundams and other closely allied subjects. They've turned me on to all kinds of cool tools. We have a large Gundam model contest here in SoCal, and it's one of the nicer contests to attend. First off, I'm THE old guy in the room. But people are friendly and having fun with their builds. I've built a few, but I'm not big into the genre. There are lots of opportunities for cross fertilization that we should be using more than we are.

Maybe it's a nod to MCM? ? Galactic headquarters for the magazine are in Honolulu.

For me, it depends on the subject. Building a hot rod or dragster without an engine just doesn't look right. ? I once built a '60 Impala without the engine. I was very pressed for time, and it was needed for a museum display, so the engine wasn't necessary. Just glued the hood and trunk lid in place, then painted it. I've built a few curbside kits in recent years, and I have to say, they came out well. I don't miss the engine because the bodies are the primary element in the final build. That holds true for a lot of my models with engines too. If it means getting new and better kits sooner, then by all means, leave the engine out. We can either find one to put in there, or build it without. The increasing dominance of 3D printed aftermarket parts means just about anything can be made for a given kit and added for a reasonable cost. I think there's enough evidence to suggest that the majority of purchasers don't care about the engines unless they're very prominent.

I got to talk to him at a car show and have ordered parts from him. My experience ordering parts was good. They came a little sooner than predicted, and were very good quality.

Oddly enough, this isn't our first run-in with an AI project. Many years ago, there were a group of servers chewing up a huge amount of our bandwidth, and we were getting charged for the overage. The server addresses belonged to some AI project located in Fremont, CA. They never responded so I ended up blocking them.

I'm 90% certain that the first problem was someone using this site to train a large language model AI. I don't know about this second one, but it came from within our hosting company. I've already talked to them, and the problem is being referred to their senior level techs.

We had someone hammering our server again. Blocked them and it cleared the problem.

Joe, you should have gotten your replacement issue. Please PM me if it didn't arrive.

We had one or more entities trying to read out the site content. It effectively turned into a denial of service attack. This problem hit other forums too. I was able to develop an adequately selective filter to keep them from accessing the site. They may work around it, but it's sufficiently flexible that I can filter them out again if needed.

Because there's a bunch of white space in the post itself.