Month: September 2026

Blender Script: Moving Object

This script moves the selected object to be centered on the world origin but it sits on the z plane rather than half of it being below the z plane.

 

import bpy
from mathutils import Vector

# Put the origin at the center of volume
bpy.ops.object.origin_set(
type='ORIGIN_CENTER_OF_VOLUME',
center='MEDIAN',
)

for obj in bpy.context.selected_objects:
# The bounding-box corners are stored in object-local coordinates.
# Transform them to world coordinates before finding the lowest point.
lowest_z = min(
(obj.matrix_world @ Vector(corner)).z
for corner in obj.bound_box
)

world_matrix = obj.matrix_world.copy()
world_matrix.translation.x = 0.0
world_matrix.translation.y = 0.0
world_matrix.translation.z -= lowest_z
obj.matrix_world = world_matrix

Changing Password in an RDP session in an RDP session

You can use Ctrl-Alt-Del to bring up a menu to invoke a password change on your local machine. When you RDP to a box, there’s Ctrl-Alt-End but when you are using a jump box (rdp to box1 to rdp to box2), ctrl-alt-end lets you change the password on Box1, but how do you change the password on Box2?

explorer.exe shell:::{2559a1f2-21d7-11d4-bdaf-00c04f60b9f0}

Run that command

And you get the menu to change that password

 

Repurposing verse

Sec Def Hegseth is evidently out on a “Send Me” tour telling people how the bible justifies all manner of war and destruction. The current video has him quoting Isaiah.

Using “send me” as a slogan for literal war against ideological or religious enemies rips v. 8 out of its literary and theological setting. Isaiah 6:1–13 is a prophetic commissioning narrative, not a military commission. The chapter’s structure is important: vv. 1–4 present Isaiah’s throne-room vision of God’s holiness; vv. 5–7 move to Isaiah’s confession of uncleanness and ritual purification; only then, in v. 8, does the divine question “Whom shall I send?” appear, to which Isaiah responds, “Here am I; send me.” In context, the verb “send” marks prophetic dispatch—Isaiah is commissioned as a spokesman, not as an agent of physical coercion.

That becomes explicit in vv. 9–13, where the content of his mission is to speak a message of judgment. Isaiah is told the people of Judah will hear but not understand. Will see but not perceive.  He is not being sent to win a campaign or wage violence; he is being sent to proclaim an unwelcome truth in the face of disbelief, judgment, and national crisis. It is an especially strange prooftext for militarized rhetoric because Isaiah is sent on a mission defined, at least from a human perspective, by rejection rather than success. The point of Isaiah 6 is not heroic conquest but prophetic witness under judgment.

In parallel with the passage’s description of those who “hear but do not understand,” Hegseth seems to read but not comprehend: he extracts words from the text and repurposes them to sanctify his own commitments without reckoning with what the passage actually means.

Daily Updates

My prediction that weekly updates are going to be a thing of the past WAY more quickly than the monthly patch and reboot became insufficient: I switched to daily updates at home. Had at least 40 updates each night since! This host runs sendmail and Apache HTTPD on a Linux OS – not a million different applications or anything.

​[lisa@fedora5 ~]# dnf history list
ID Command line              Date and time       Action(s) Altered
67 dnf update                2026-09-18 02:39:22                53
66 dnf update                2026-09-17 02:21:58                44
65 dnf update                2026-09-16 02:44:46                41
64 dnf update                2026-09-15 02:23:13                46

 

First T-Shirt

The first t-shirt on my new machine is done! Lowering the thread tension was the answer. Other lessons:

  • The machine stitches a few times then pauses for you to cut the tail. It is not telling you it thinks the thread broke.
  • Not shrinking the pattern makes a HUGE difference. Compressing stitches is not good.
  • Cheap embroidery thread is frustrating. I made a test pattern on a scrap of fabric using some cheap thread I had purchased and used for hand stitching. Very cheap, large variety of colors. But in a machine? It breaks constantly. Every couple hundred stitches, I was re-threading a broken thread. Using my good thread, I only re-threaded the machine to change colors.

Reading Comprehension Fail?

I do wonder if Tyler Winklevoss actually read Runaround. The point Asimov makes in his stories has never been that my rules solve the problem of robot safety; his point is that even this simple set of rules yields unexpected behavior. That even seemingly reasonable rules interact in surprising and dangerous ways. Runaround itself is about a robot getting trapped by conflicts between the laws. And in later stories, Asimov keeps showing how easy it is to reinterpret, distort, or weaponize the laws. If anything, Asimov is evidence against the idea that frontier labs can just hard-code a few rules and call the problem solved.

If you don’t want to read, watch a movie, dude. The laws always get contorted to support all manner of robot apocalypse plots there too – hey, the real thing that’s damaging humanity is late stage capitalism. Let me just wipe out all of these financial systems to restore equity and thus save humanity. By the zeroth law, I am compelled to take this action!

 

Bernette B70 Threading v/s Tension

I got an embroidery machine – found an amazing deal because it was a “holiday” bundle with CDs of Christmas designs. It’s basically the November 1st Halloween candy of embroidery machines. As most machines do, it came with a sample from quality control testing the machine. It works. Except I could not get the thing to work! The bobbin thread was used *all* of the top pattern. The top thread was barely used. Everything I found online said you threaded it wrong. Don’t muck with tension settings, you absolutely threaded it wrong.

I couldn’t tell 100% that I didn’t thread it wrong. At the pretension section, there’s a tab that I had the thread “pinched” into — maybe that was wrong (although not pinching the thread in there and having it on the left hand side didn’t work any better). I spent hours yesterday re-threading the machine. I re-threaded it again and again today. I finally found a video on YouTube of someone who provided detailed instructions on what threaded right means. Turns out I was threading it right.

So, even though all of the advice online is to not touch the tension and just thread it right, I decided to adjust the tension. Can always move it back. It’s a digital control. I can return it to ‘4’ readily enough. Voila – my machine actually embroiders.

Ribs and Smoked Eye of Round

Two racks of ribs (one with mustard binding + crushed hot pepper, salt, and pepper wrapped with maple syrup; the second with just salt and pepper wrapped with apple cider vinegar) and a full eye of round (~7 lbs) split in half and coated with salt and pepper) were smoked at about 225F for hours. Combination of cherry, apple, and pear woods. Ribs were wrapped when they got to 165F and cooked to 205F. Beef was smoked until 125F, came up to 132F resting.

We prefer the wrap with maple syrup. It gets caramelized, sticky, and sweet. The beef could be cooked a little more. It temp’d right, but I think it will be better cooked slightly more.