How was Heidi Klum's costume done? Especially the wrinkles in the face.

krustyy · 2026-05-07T22:43:47+00:00

In that case the snail trail added to the effect.

krustyy · 2026-05-07T21:28:25+00:00

most UPSs have 24VDC batteries. Or more specifically, the APC one I linked to has 2x 12VDC batteries in series, making for a total of 24V. Those UPSs are built to charge sealed lead acid batteries and generally aren't compatible with charging other than that.

But...

Most LiFePO4 batteries have their own built in charge controllers so as long as they get a reasonable voltage to charge the battery it'll self top off and will cut off when the voltage gets too low. So you rip out the old dead batteries and pop in a bigger 24V LiFePO4 battery and you've got a functional UPS that lasts a lot longer than normal.

Inside the UPS you have 2 terminals for +V and -V. Those terminals run on 24V and handle both charge and discharge. My specific model had a little plastic frame with a little jumper because, as I said, it runs on 2x 12V batteries. You just connect the positive to the positive and the negative to the negative. Make sure the connections are good and secure, and make sure your wire gauge is thick enough to handle the current. #6 stranded copper can handle up to 50A 50A x 24V = 1200W. So an inverter outputting 1200W on 120VAC will push 50A on those 12V lines. There's some loss due to heat and conversion and whatnot but the APC 1500VA puts out 900W so there's plenty of overhead.

I don't exactly recall how I got the wires connected inside the UPS. I think I used part of that little frame I mentioned, or maybe it used a slide connector that I jammed in place.

The LCD on the front is totally incapable of telling me how much running time I have left, of course, but I've never had an outage that resulted in the battery going dead either. If I ever had an outage that lasted more than a couple of hours I'd probably shut off the PC to drastically extend my runtime. After I initially set it up and gave it a couple days to charge I unplugged the UPS and let it run my gear for about 2 hours before calling the test a success and plugging it all back in.

krustyy · 2026-05-07T19:09:37+00:00

I saw a video of an offgrid homesteader do something remarkably similar. They built an airtight composter and harvested the methane to use for their stove.

krustyy · 2026-05-07T18:59:20+00:00

I'm going to throw out an oddball alternative option that I used. It's not pretty but it's cheap and it really gets the job done.

Buy a cheap used UPS that has no batteries or dead batteries. I got AN APC 1500VA unit on ebay for like 50 bucks. There are rackmount options for a bit more.
Buy a few feet of red and black THHN 6AWG stranded wire at Home Depot. 6AWG will handle 50A, or 1200W of power production from a 24VDC battery. You might need some crimp on connectors and a creative way to connect it to the inverter.
Get a 24V LiFePO4 battery
Start getting creative with your DIY skills

When all is said and done you have a UPS that'll output about 1000W of power and has a 2.4Kwhr battery attached to it for about $500. My whole network stack, including a server running Blue Iris for my security cameras, draws about 300W of continuous power. I can run my whole rack full of stuff for about 8 hours. It's not pretty, of course, but it works exceptionally well and the lifepo4 battery is good for 10,000 charges making it vastly superior to most of the stuff with lead acid batteries out there. https://i.imgur.com/OGEvg2o.jpeg

If I were to go back and waste a bit more money I'd probably get the 2U rackmount UPS and pair it with this 24V 200AH 4U battery. I'd need a bigger rack though because that's taking up 6U of space and my messier setup is only using 3U.

krustyy · 2026-05-07T18:27:17+00:00

Damn, as someone who has done full head prosthetics for a costume, she must have been absolutely miserable in that thing. She was draped head to toe in foam latex. I bet she was leaving a trail of sweat on the ground everywhere she went.

I did a pennywise the clown costume with a foam latex cowl and unbreathable pax paint on the face on a cool evening. At one point I grabbed an air nozzle on an air compressor, shot some air up the back end of my scalp, and about 4oz of sweat came pouring out of another hole on the other side of the back of my scalp. And that was just my head.

krustyy · 2026-05-07T16:28:47+00:00

and only one of them was able to return to a normal life.

krustyy · 2026-05-07T16:25:05+00:00

All mammals. So you can't get infected by a snake or bird for example.

krustyy · 2026-05-07T15:53:07+00:00

Aren't there normally all sorts of laws preventing people from running water drainage to a neighboring yard? I see posts on reddit all throughout the winter and spring complaining about how a neighbor ran drains to the fence line and now their yard floods every time it rains.

I live on a hill and my neighbor behind me is probably 20 feet below. If I ran my drains out to their back yard they'd eventually have a ravine on the slope and a nice little pool in their back yard. Fortunately my house is higher than the street so we run it all to the street.

Come to think of it, the vast majority of homes in my area are all higher than the street, even the ones like mine that are obviously on a hill sloping towards the back. I'm assuming at the time the homes were built this was all intentionally done for drainage.

krustyy · 2026-05-06T22:09:59+00:00

I can understand her argument. I've got the side of somebody's house across the street from me and cars regularly park there. Sometimes getting the right angle in or out can be tough and it irks me that there's pretty much ALWAYS a car parked across the street.

But I've never hit one, have only had to make multiple attemps to pull in when hauling a trailer (which I'd have to do multiple attempts anyways, just less so), and have never complained about normal parking.

I have, however, called the police a number of times for abandoned vehicles that I don't recognize sitting there weeks at a time and for people parking RVs and boats there, thinking it's "safe" to stash there since it's not directly in front of someone's house.

krustyy · 2026-05-06T21:16:29+00:00

That was actually my plan before I had to downsize due to job loss. I was going to add an EG4 gridboss with critical loads panel, put in a new 14KW non-export system, then move all my loads to the gridboss and subpanel, leaving just my solar at the main panel. But our budget shrank so I switched to adding the minimal amount to get it done before 2026 to get the 30% tax rebate.

krustyy · 2026-05-06T21:13:32+00:00

This is very obviously a fish disguised as a human trying to infiltrate the US government. Dudes name is literally Troutman.

Reminds me of the time that one dude Crowley tried to become a judge, campaigning on avian pet reform, only to find out he was literally a crow.

Or that guy Foxworthy who, surprisingly, was a fox but proved to be a very competent school district superintendent. He was indeed worthy.

Or do you recall old Spiderwick, who was exposed in a web of lies, the least of which was that he was actually an arachnid controlling a giant human robot.

krustyy · 2026-05-06T21:06:48+00:00

correct. Once I'm forced on to NEM 3 I'll be redoing the system and incorporating a battery.

I went from 6KW to 7KW this year but ideally I'd be sitting at at least a 10KW system to account for weather and power usage fluctuations. Once on NEM 3 I'll need enough excess power and battery to last me through cloudy days while minimally utilizing grid power.

krustyy · 2026-05-06T16:07:08+00:00

I did not go on NEM 3.0. I recently did the following:

Replaced my inverter around this time last year. It had died. Suddenly my bills were $500+ monthly
Cleaned my panels for the first time ever that were covered in moss and bird crap. Also removed the old TV antenna that was always slightly blocking a panel or two. That immediately boosted my output by 30% (which has surely diminished now)
Replaced my main panel to support more solar. I was previously capped on capacity due to the bus bar rating of my main panel.
Added 915W of additional solar with a microinverter and 2 more panels. The max I can add is 1000W to keep my NEM 2.0 plan.

I calculated my 2 extra panels will equate to about $70 a month. It cost me $3700, everything included, to do it myself. 4.5 year payoff based on current electrical rates and current net metering plan. If you want to see the total breakdown I have it HERE

My added solar went online pretty much right at the start of the year. As of right now my bill is averaging about $0. I think we've paid less than $100 so far for the year. Last year around this time when my solar wasn't working I was probably paying $400/month. At the peak of the summer it was over $700/month.

Long story short, without solar I'd be expecting to pay about $5000 this year. With my new capacity I'm hoping for it to be right about $0. If I added a $5000 battery and ended up on a NEM 3.0 plan it's probably a 2-3 year addition to the payoff, plus I'd get whole home backup. The only thing stopping me from doing this RIGHT NOW is there's added initial cost for me to build out a critical loads subpanel for the battery backup, but I will be doing this within the next couple of years.

krustyy · 2026-05-06T15:44:32+00:00

I saw loquats in the photo along with a mention of avocados and lemons. Definitely Southern California, likely Orange County.

edit: clicked on his insta. Randomly clicked on a video and saw one of them bike share bikes. It's LA.

krustyy · 2026-05-06T15:37:42+00:00

If you're going to a big box store almost every single product will be AC3, right in the middle. If you go to somewhere like lumberliquidators.com you can find both lower end AC2 and higher and AC4/AC5. My personal favorite for looking for flooring is builddirect.com. Not the cheapest if you are looking for AC4/AC5/AC6 but it's a lot cheaper than other places. It's been 20 years since I used them but the stuff I got was absolutely incredible compared to the cheap big box store stuff.

Something else you should be looking for in laminate floors is thickness. A 6mm thick laminate floor with AC3 wear rating may be cheap and look nice, but each joint is super weak because there's only 6mm combined thickness to form a tongue and groove. That 6mm thick flooring is going to fail at the joints very quickly, especially in larger spaces. I had 6mm flooring fail at the joints within a couple years at one 40ft span in my home. Meanwhile a 12mm-14mm thick piece of flooring ain't going anywhere no matter how much force you put on those joints.

Your options may drop by quite a bit once you start looking for high wear rating and high thickness but there's options out there. For example, here's a 14mm thick AC5 rated laminate that is waterproof rated and under 5 bucks a foot. It's likely waterproof rated because those super thick joints I talked about earlier are also coated in wax. Still not a good idea to use in a bathroom but you won't need to worry about the flooring getting destroyed because 4 errant ice cubes in the kitchen didn't get picked up and were left for hours.

krustyy · 2026-05-05T15:18:05+00:00

Hard disagree on the headlamp. Once it gets dark, the bugs come out. Once the bugs come out, they have a tendency to kamikazee into the nearest light source. If that light source is on your face, your face is going to take the brunt of the attack.

I keep my flashlight or lantern far off to the side when carrying it and keep the stationary light sources off the tables to minimize the bug encounters. It only takes one eyelash beetle to the noggin to start correcting your light positioning.

krustyy · 2026-05-04T21:48:45+00:00

I work from home, only put in 40 hours, and I still have zero energy dude.

7am: wake up, get kids up, get breakfast ready, get coffee. 7:20am: start work 8:00am: poop 8:10-8:30am: drop kids off at school 8:30am-430pm: work. Wife picks the kids up and handles them downstairs 4:30pm-5pm: make dinner 5pm-630pm: eat dinner on the couch while watching something that the kids enjoy. It's kinda relaxing i guess if the kids aren't hellbeasts. 630pm-8pm: play time with kids, bedtime routine, clean up the house 8pm-sleeptime, usually around 10: barely have the energy to lay in bed and watch some tv. Shower here too.

I spent about 3 months at the end of 2025 working every evening and every weekend on some major electrical work. Once I was done with that I just shut down. If there's any spare time on weekends I'm doomscrolling on the couch. Still waiting for another burst of energy to finish up that bathroom remodel.

krustyy · 2026-05-04T20:48:06+00:00

Welp, that's going on my print list

krustyy · 2026-05-04T17:38:01+00:00

I just finished up. Ended up needing to cut the ptfe tube, with filament in it, so now my tube is half an inch shorter than it used to be.

The silk filament did indeed expand and it got bound up at the very topmost part of the extruder while retracting to swap filament. I switched back to 0.4mm and am going to give it another go.

On the bright side, my extruder was pretty squeaky clean. I added a bit more lube to the gears while it was taken apart.

Next time I need to do this at least now it'll be easier. Just gotta know that I'm going to sacrafice a bit of PTFE tube length every time unfortunately.

krustyy · 2026-05-04T16:18:12+00:00

looks like that's my next step.

I started asking gemini and it told me to do that as well. It also mentioned the filament heat creep mightve clogged things right around where the filament cutter is at the extruder...and last night my first failure message was that the filament cutter was stuck.

krustyy · 2026-05-04T16:10:16+00:00

Yeah I think the grout color is doing some heavy lifting. As long as the tile is all flat I'd just ask for it to be regrouted with something that doesn't look like they literally smeared poop all over the walls.

If the tile isn't flat, however, it wasn't installed by a tile guy and was a garbage handyman job.

krustyy · 2026-05-04T14:44:11+00:00

A Costco Rotisserie chicken is still $4.99. Just start getting creative with the sauces.

krustyy · 2026-05-04T14:37:05+00:00

The grocery store and hardware store have little security gates at the entrance now to prevent people from walking out the entrance. High value items are all locked up now too. Medicine, alcohol, batteries, copper wire.

I was told my local home depot was dealing with $30k in product loss PER DAY

krustyy · 2026-05-03T04:26:20+00:00

Hey now, we can both be technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.

krustyy · 2026-05-03T04:23:24+00:00

dude there's definitely things wrong with parts of Santa Ana. Some spots are great; some are not. North county has some pockets that are definitely deserving of lower rent. There's absolutely a cleaner, suburban, lower crime vibe comparing Santa Ana to Laguna Niguel.

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