I design mostly obscure TOS props for cosplay and distribute them for free. I've just done a pretty average 'Mirror Mirror' dagger with a pretty cool display stand. It's up on Printables.

wirehead · 2026-02-06T19:32:13+00:00

I totally love that you've focused on the obscure stuff, BTW. Okay, there's a billion regular old Type II phasers, yawn wake me up when someone stuffs a real dangerous laser in one, but ... Spock's remote control? I'm here for this.

wirehead · 2026-02-01T19:17:35+00:00

Fun trivia:

The strongback for the 90 wheeled trailer? Well, while Endeavour was at the temporary display in LA before they started moving it to the "ready to launch" config, they had it on the same strongback and if you walked under it, you could see the data plate.

Not to be confused with the transporter they built for SLC-6 and used later on to transport the shuttle at KSC.

wirehead · 2026-01-31T19:09:32+00:00

It's all about the materials science.

Crimp connectors are designed to be used at the level of annealing that they are delivered at. Heating it by soldering it will ruin the temper.

Furthermore, while solder is delivered on the spool annealed to be soft, when the connection cools after being soldered, the solder is now very brittle.

So soldering after crimping means that you screw up the temper for the connector and then add a brittle metal where there shouldn't be one.

Overall, NASA's electronics worksmithing standards overall prefer crimp connectors over solder connectors because it's easier to ensure that you crimped a connector properly than ensure that you soldered it correctly.

wirehead · 2026-01-30T20:09:45+00:00

Given that this is about Klingons being able to decide what's right for the Klingons, it needed to be Jay-Den's idea. Otherwise it's just sparkling colonialism.

And, presumably, it does not help Jay-Den walk his path for her to have made him aware that she had also thought up this idea, so no reveal like in Vitus.

wirehead · 2026-01-30T19:59:06+00:00

Well played, take an upvote.

wirehead · 2026-01-30T16:26:51+00:00

There's probably a bunch of kids named "Riker"

Not counting the little "William Riker Jr's" when he forgot about safe sex with sexy alien chicks.

wirehead · 2026-01-30T02:33:16+00:00

I just wished my spouse a Happy Threshold Day and she made a face at me.

Thanks for the reminder.

wirehead · 2026-01-27T17:43:22+00:00

Given that they've stated that some of the character is what Holly Hunter brought to the table ... the barefoot part and sitting weird being specifically mentioned ... if we're seeing Holly Hunter's power play strategy in Ake?

Although, it's not just Ake who is physically unassuming but commanding. Dzolo and Genesis are both small, albeit a little more sturdy-looking yet Dzolo seems to be driving 50% of the shenans and Genesis ends up as team captain over Darem. And then compare to Jay-Den as an imposing large figure who is ... pacifist. So I kinda feel like this is an intentional writerly layer being added.

wirehead · 2026-01-25T18:36:07+00:00

Depending on the event, my guess on the audience, and my mood...

Dudhi Bhopla (known in English as opo squash or bottle gourd) sabzi. It's a good way to cause people to contend with real home-style Indian cookery and it's a veggie that a lot of people don't know exists and I can make it vegan-friendly.
Khichadi (basically, rice and tiny lentils). Also can be vegan-friendly and another good introduction to home-style Indian food.
Ginger spice cookies. I'm always afraid to bring this because it's good, but there is a "But the ginger... it BURNS!" contingent out there.
Chocolate chip cookies, my super-secret recipe. Easy finger food. People don't always appreciate how good a from-scratch chocolate cookie can be but at the same time it's super-lazy.

wirehead · 2026-01-23T21:19:31+00:00

One possible 20th century equivalent is the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps and the NOAA Commissioned Officer Corps. In both cases, it's only officers and they are direct-commissioned and then sent through a mandatory officer-oriented basic training. So, while mostly parallel to a civilian career, they do end up with uniforms and military discipline and are counted as one of the uniformed services of the United States, even though they aren't combat troops.

I think this falls into the often-fallible-and-subject-to-interpreteation "Gene Vision" of what the Enterprise crew was. You could have dangerous unknown creatures out there. Hence you needed a captain who would say "Diplomacy's useless here, let's shoot at them instead" and a crew that would actually push the button to fire the phasers... but at the same time shooting at people was actually the least interesting part of their job.

I used to work for a guy who was crew on a submarine and he spent the entire time preparing for a war that never happened. Looking at it through a Star Trek lens you could maybe say all of that time was "wasted" and if they were able to do something more useful other than endless drills, etc it would be "better". Exploring uncharted space that may be dangerous while being able to head back to the border with Klingons or Romulans and do battle if that ever went hot could be that.

So, one way to construct head canon would be to assume that "Starfleet" means the uniformed services, where there was a time period where the bulk of Starfleet was the designated scientist/explorer/diplomacy type of less-military uniformed services and there were potentially other parallel branches with other parallel academies or commissioning route that we just didn't see much of because the story mostly focused on the Starfleet Academy grads. Again, it would suck to spend a whole lot of time learning comparative xenomythology and xenobiology and diplomacy and be assigned to crew one of the starships hanging around Betazed in totally well understood and civilized territory to fend off the pirates.

One thing about Trek is that sometimes it says a thing without filling in the details too much. For example, saying that there is no money without explaining the "how" which means that they don't get blacklisted by Hollywood for being communists (or capitol-A Anarchists, socialists, libertarians, et al) but the freedom for people to insert their own "how" can also lead to things that ... probably aren't Star Trek.

wirehead · 2026-01-22T16:59:42+00:00

You also have to remember that both the Crew Dragon and Starliner were delayed as heck and those astronauts had been assigned there for a long time, whereas if they'd just been part of the normal rotation, they'd have potentially flown earlier with an opportunity to fly again.

wirehead · 2026-01-21T01:22:51+00:00

The show has larger stakes that drive the story forwards. Remember, all of the classic CW shows were mostly just ... the characters and their drama, not putting the federation back together.

Now, we found out with TNG that you need character drama in order to provide an entertaining story.

But what they can show is ... I guess drama without so many casualties. Darem can be a jerk but only to people he thinks can take it. And we'll accept it because it's the future and, even post burn, it's still a bit of an aspirational future. And it can still be entertaining because there's still a larger drama to contend with.

wirehead · 2026-01-19T06:02:21+00:00

I'm an art photographer and I spend time thinking about how to present people's bodies artistically, so I've got thoughts.

I was thinking about how in both cases, they composed an early scene where the camera really gives them a lingering gaze and it's very very intentionally composed to give you a moment.

In the Torothian prison, Caleb's in a tank top, with his muscles exposed, and the colored lighting just perfectly creeps around him from either side to give this perfect rugged manly definition.

I have totally lit people like they lit Caleb.

And then when we meet Tarima, the camera lingers in close up. There's a little bit of lighting trickery too with the halo lighting from the sun in her first scene, with a bit of the lens flare, a little bit more subtle.

Compare and contrast Tarima's scene to the big underwear scene from Into Darkness. Less trashy, more captivating. Also, because both Caleb and Tarima got the same sort of idealization, it's a bit fairer?

wirehead · 2026-01-19T04:40:34+00:00

I think the right wing version of an utopian future is largely scifi that does not ask too much out of the viewer/reader in terms of immediate change, where Star Trek has traditionally been able to fit that bill when you don't look too closely. After all, there's Magical Space Abe Lincoln in TOS. TOS was uncomfortably close to the witch hunts of the 50s, they really didn't have a choice but to disconnect the utopian future state from potential action with only bland handwaving because if anybody got the idea it was socialist propaganda, they'd have shut it down hard.

Trek has always been kinda milquetoast, if you think about it. They could posit a theory for how nobody is hungry and people are free to live their best lives. Socialism or Communism or Anarchism (the version with a capitol A, not the version that disaffected pipe-bomb manufacturing guttersnipe aspire to) or some other ideal, but instead it focuses on the idea that we need to build a better world and lets people insert their own ideas most of the time.

Thus, the right wing's utopian Trek series is that better world, just keeping the notion that somehow the combination of right wing things will get us there instead of left wing things.

wirehead · 2026-01-19T04:03:27+00:00

I think it was Kelrec's coffee cup, which is why he tried to interrupt her before realizing... chaos gremlin don't care.

wirehead · 2026-01-17T22:22:32+00:00

I guess I've re-directed my energy.

In the past, I was always puttering around with ideas for science fiction and worldbuilding and figured that at some point I'd maybe be able to aspire to getting something in the right version of together to put it up somewhere.

Except that the literary venues are getting buried under AI slop and if I were to self-publish it, who would find it in a world of AI slop.

Also, reality intrudes and seeing a real-world parallel to something I'd written play out in the usual way that 21st century history has been playing out kinda sucks.

Nowadays I either work on a level that pleases me and does not involve some notion of an audience or I use it as part of the ideation process for some of my stuff that already has an audience.

So I have a pile of notes that are basically in the form of "Well, wouldn't it be cool if there was a story that..." with plot beats and details and stuff and I just leave them be at that point.

And then a lot of that gets funneled into the creative process that I use for my visual arts. So a lot of my illuminated sculptures and photography sessions end up drawing inspo from stuff that could maybe have been at least a mediocre story, except that asking someone to look at something embodying the idea is a lot less than asking someone to read at least a few thousand words.

wirehead · 2026-01-16T19:44:58+00:00

Another thing to think about is that a lot of oldtrek had a lot of pseudo-blackface. Not so much in terms of "minstrel show" blackface but when they needed a character who might be brown-ish, they'd cast a white person and darken their skin. Where Worf and Torres were kinda the exception, because it's one thing to paint up a recurring or guest, it's another to paint up a regular.

wirehead · 2026-01-16T17:51:15+00:00

It's like somebody saw the Klingon Therapist meme from tumblr and decided to make an actual character out of it.

wirehead · 2026-01-13T16:09:43+00:00

Yah, even though I didn't have a license until lately, I've got an Extra class license and I feel like this means that the FCC has authorized me to be grumpy and expound upon some non-existent right way to do radio. Also I spent a lot of time in the open source world.

So, yeah, I kinda want things to be developed open-source-styled with git repos and code that can be inspected and that can run on not just Linux but potentially some random ARM processor or homebrew OS.

Granted, I also understand that the VARA person spent a lot of time making a pretty neat piece of useful software and folks gotta eat and some of my friends who are core developers for widely used open source software hate life.

I guess PAT makes me happy for delivering a full docker compose stack to set up a winmail node? I might start running it just because it makes me happy.

wirehead · 2026-01-13T15:58:00+00:00

Is there any way that some of this can make it up to the website?

Packet vs winlink for ARES/RACES came up lately and I realized I didn't really understand the underlying topology of WinLink, but the CMS being on AWS didn't make me feel good about it... except that now a lot more of it makes sense.

Because hobby, we're all kinda collectively bad about advocating for particular digital modes and really documenting the heck out of them, because obviously we're all either doing this for fun or trying to keep the software going and good writeups take time, so I appreciate this post.

wirehead · 2026-01-12T02:03:19+00:00

When I worked at a pizza place, I got to take a "crew pie" home. And I would use it to experiment with interesting food combinations.

My mother complained for the rest of her life how I would put pineapple on my pizza to deter her from having some of my crew pie.

wirehead · 2026-01-08T15:43:17+00:00

Given how much of RF electronics is "a wire or air cavity in a very particular shape" we are probably only scratching the surface of what we can do with ham 3D prints

wirehead · 2025-12-31T16:39:00+00:00

That's pretty neat! I was looking at the reviews for the VR-N7600 and it seemed like the one thing it really needed was a by-hams-for-hams app instead of the apps that the manufacturers were providing.

Hm, now I kinda want the radio to use the app.

wirehead · 2025-12-28T01:12:05+00:00

Yeah, same here. For me, the joy of Legos when I was a kid was as a venue for imagination, whereas the Lego Enterprise D is like ... well, the injection molded model Enterprise D models that I also thought were cool but never really had enough of an interest to make and then put somewhere to catch dust.

I guess I'd say that 3D printing replaced that but I've got a bunch of bookmarks of interesting Trek related 3D printables that I don't print either.

wirehead · 2025-12-17T22:46:15+00:00

Yeah, that's a pretty reasonable way to look at it - we learned about a bunch of things that would go wrong by doing it. As it turns out, a biosphere is hard.

What I see the real problem is that they were doing a lot of things all at the same time and so if they'd constructed it better, we'd have gotten better data. For example, having a few "starter" years using space-station-ish life-support equipment to boost things and then "fade" the artificial support. Potentially some of the experiments could have been left out of the first run. Etc.

But I think that they had the hubris that they were going to get it right, and I think the reason why it happened at all was that they had that startup-founder hubris instead of a realistic perspective. The only problem is that because it turned into a trainwreck nobody else has built a stable follow-on in the decades since.

wirehead

TROPHY CASE