💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~visiblink › phlog › 20190702 captured on 2021-12-03 at 14:04:38.
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For the last few days, I've been removing old drywall. The powers that be (the local regional district) scare the bejeezus out of you about it. I geared up. Respirator, Safety glasses, Tyvek suit (with hood and built in booties, like kids pajamas). I sprayed the walls and floor with a pump-type sprayer as I worked. I double-bagged the drywall in 6 mil poly bags and duct taped the bags closed. As I worked, I thought about how I sanded drywall with my dad when I was a kid. That was the very same drywall mud that they scare you about now. If it was as dangerous as they make it out to be, I'd be dead. Anyways.... So I take it all to the local landfill, with my asbestos declaration form, expecting that they'll have some secret, arcane protocol for handling it. Not even close. The attendant says to throw it in the bin with the household refuse. Are you sure, I say? "Yes, you double bagged it." Really, I say? "Yes." Okay. So I went through all of this work to minimize dust as I pulled the drywall down (which I'd do again... it worked so well and there's no dust in the rest of the house) and hermetically seal the stuff away in super-heavy, ridiculously-expensive bags and then it goes in the big bin with everything else. This means that some poor bastard driving a loader is pushing that stuff everyday, breaking the bags open (they're strong bags, but they're not strong enough to survive the loader bucket), and getting exposed to the dust on a regular basis. I really need to write a letter to the regional district. It was all so pointless. Well, I guess *I* didn't breathe much of it. Not much else is going on. I had a brief obsession with the idea of buying a ThinkPad T440p (it and the L440 are the last completely user-upgradeable ThinkPads), but stopped myself. I have been using a ThinkPad R500 for years and there's nothing wrong with it. I just get these tech cravings every once it a while. It's better to let them pass than to act on them. Oh, the other thing is that I managed to move my gopher server to a Raspberry Pi Zero W, which will reduce the energy use from 7-10 watts to 1-2 watts. It was a little difficult because the LXer mirror makes use of Raymii's totext.py, and I was having trouble installing some python modules on the Zero. Eventually, I stumbled across a low-memory command line switch and that did the trick. It takes the Zero about 20 minutes to run the totext.py script. It used to be a lot faster, but time is *not* of the essence in this case.