Contents:
First-aid kit contents, 1x large red bag
Left pocket, survival:
Compass, Small Magnetic
String
Magnesium rod (under compartment) - Use with knife if lighters run out
Misc fasteners and bags (in bag)
Water purification kit. Good for about 3 person-years.
Work gloves
Right pocket, convenience:
Baby Powder - Prevents chafing. Also consider moleskin.
Earplugs
Floss
Face mask - For smoke or disease.
Glasses, spare, for Zachary
Lighter
Nail clippers
Petroleum Jelly - Chapped lips, protect wounds, help light tinder.
Razor
Sleeping mask
Toothbrush
Toothpaste
Center compartment:
(right) Band-aids/plasters, various sizes - Use to cover small cuts
(right) Gauze and medicine directions
(bottom pocket) Grill lighter
(back) covid-19 test
Thermometer, mouth
Tweezers
Alocane-brand Lidocaine burn relief gel
Triple Antibiotic Ointment (may not work) - contains bacitracin,
neomycin, polymyxin. Prefer washing using sanitation bag.
Hydrocorozone cream - treats itch and rash
Cotton swabs (in bag) - Clean wound
Gauze (in moleskin) - Wrap to stop bleeding, or use to clean a wound
Gauze (loose)
Moleskin - Patch blisters or prevent them from forming
Liquid Skin - Superglue. Disinfect small cuts, then brush on to close.
Q-tips - Clean wound
Sanitation bag (see below)
Medicine box (see back)
Vitamins box (see back)
Sanitation bag (in center compartment):
Water - Clean wounds. Slightly soapy. Refill and add campsuds and
povodone iodine to replenish.
Campsuds - Concentrated soap.
Povidone iodine - Use with water to create a sterile cleaning fluid.
Doesn't work to sanitize water (need 15min+80 drops/gal)
-------------------------
Medicine box (in center compartment):
Acetaminophen, 500mg, x20 - Longer white pill labeled 5500.
Non-NSAID pain medication. Does not reduce fever, only reduces pain
Use for people on certain medications or for headache.
Caffine, 200mg, x10 - Medium ycircular yellow pill labeled 44 226.
Take half with taurine to stay awake. Caffine impairs judgement
Calcium carbonate, 0.5g, x5 - Pastel colored large circular pills.
Antacid. Use for heartburn.
Ibuprofen, 200mg, x30 - Small circular red pill labeled I-2.
NSAID anti-inflammatory. Use to reduce fever or inflammation.
Low fevers fight diseases, don't remove them.
Loratadine, 10mg, x30 - Small oval white pill labeled L612.
Used to minor allergic reactions.
Melatonin, 3mg, x10 - Small unlabeled white pill.
Natural sleep aid. Take 1 to sleep somewhere noisy. Groggy after.
Peptobismol, x16 - Larger pink circular pill in plastic labeled RH 046.
Use for diarrhea or stomach upset. Recommended dose is 2.
Pseudoephedrine HCl, 120mg extended release, x2. One per day.
Pseudoephedrine Hcl, 30mg - One every 2-4 hours as needed.
Use for stuffy nose. Stimulant.
Taurine, 500mg, x5 - Medium white gel capsules. See caffine.
Razor blade, x1
Activated charcoal - Black powder.
In case of poisoning, immediately induce vomiting.
Then eat activated charcoal.
Bentonite clay - Grey powder. Do not use.
Vitamins box (in center compartment):
Mulivitamin, x20 - Large green pill labeled 1.
Take one every other day only if vitamin deficient.
Contains enough: Vit A, Vit C, Vit D, Vit E, Vit K, B1, B2,
Magnesium, Zinc, Selenium, Copper, Manganese, Chromium
Bayer One a Day Men's Pro Edge
Vit D, 5000 IU, x25 - Small yellow gel beads.
Take one every 2-3 days if sick or missing sunlight.
Zinc, 50mg, x20 - Medium white unlabeled circular pill.
Take half a pill per day to resist getting COVID-19 or for diarrhea
Folate, 400mcg, x20 - Small-medium white gel capsule.
Take one every other day if missing vegetables in diet.
Vitamin C, powder
Take small amounts if missing fruit from diet to prevent scurvy.
For diarrhea, oral rehydration solution. If not available, use water.
0.5tsp salt 6tsp sugar
0.25tsp potassium salt 1L/quart water
Potassium chloride, powder - ORS
Iodized table salt, powder - ORS or dehydration.
Atorvastatin, 40mg, x50 - Medium white oblong pill labeled ATV40.
Prescription: Take one pill daily to reduce cholesterol.
Here’s what happened in 2022 for me!
Move
I moved from California to Ohio. I wanted to be with my friends. Also, my old place caught on fire (twice). The new place is cheap, but underground. The first order of business was installing lots of lights, and replacing my moldy old mattress.
My dad kindly lent me a car until mine showed up in September. There was lots of DMV paperwork. Not the best, but Ohio is much cheaper and easier than California in this regard. I also got health insurance, which cost almost as much as my rent.
Happily I already knew many people where I was moving, and I also started attending several meetups from meetup.com. I got to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with friends and family this year. I also sent out Christmas cards for the first time.
Games
I started two D&D games in 2022. One ended before session 1, the other exploded after two months. I had a nice time playing as a player in “Index Card RPG”, though. I ran a session of lexicon, which went pretty well. We quit before getting to the letter Z, but that’s a design flaw in Lexicon–it’s way too long.
I participated in the 2022 April Fools Puzzle Contest, on #ircpuzzles. I came in 7th.
This and that
A little travel. I went to Missouri to visit friends. I got to go to my friends’ wedding in Boston.
I read “The Art of Computer Programming” volumes 1 and 2. Donald Knuth sent me a check for finding a 0x1.2 bugs.
I got a snakebite lip piercing.
I made a first-aid kit, which I’m realizing I didn’t write up. My thinking was that it’s bad to give medical advice when you don’t know anything about medicine.
I made a new blast furnace with my sister, which we never used (old one).
In November, I did Hack-a-Day, a project I conceived to do a new computer project every day of the month that I could show off to others. As part of it, I learned web sockets, webRTC, unity3D, game programming. In all, there were around 30 projects–click the link to see them all.
I made huge improvements to qr-backup. Its basically “done” for the CLI version.
I wrote youtube-autodl, a program to automatically download a feed of youtube videos and sort them into folders.
I wrote a video linter for my personal video collection.
I wrote a screenshotter, which takes one screenshot a minute of my laptop (encrypted) and archives them indefinitely.
I was exercising daily. I kind lapsed after my ankle surgery, oops.
I stopped doing my daily morning log at some point, and didn’t fix it within 2022.
I tried an experiment with “no-computer” sundays. This was super productive one time, and less so the next. It led to the e-ink laptop, because writing a short story by hand was really painful.
I started limiting myself to one youtube video per day. That went great and I’ve kept it up.
I sorted my scans into folders. I decided not to do the whole process (transcribe the handwritten documents, etc) for the thousands of scans, because it wouldn’t be worth the time. I’ll wait and see what I can do with AI in a few years, maybe.
Writing
You can read most of what I wrote here! On a blog! Of particular interest might be my new index page.
I also wrote a short story, Earth II. It’s not online because it’s bad.
I had to remove library.za3k.com because of DMCAs.
The April Fools Puzzle Contest is over. Congrats to the winners.
Every year, the libera IRC network has a puzzle contest starting on 04-01. (It’s not an april fools joke). It’s fun but quite difficult.
This year I wrote about a third of the puzzles. Give them a try, either alone or as a team! It will be open indefinitely, but social activity will die off in a week or two.
As of writing, no one has won (finished all the puzzles) just yet.
I’ve been working on a spell guide for D&D games. During the process, I researched the differences between the Dungeons and Dragons 5e Player’s Handbook (PHB) and the 5e System Reference Document (SRD).
For those that don’t know, in 3e Wizards of the Coast released the core rules of the game for free. They’ve continued to do so for 3.5, 4, and 5e. The 5e rules were released under Creative Commons recently (thanks!), in response to some community backlash over proposed licensing changes (eek!).
There are 361 spells in the PHB, but only 318 in the SRD. Which are missing?
Here are the 43 spells in the PHB but not the SRD:
arcane gate
armor of agathys
arms of hadar
aura of life
aura of purity
aura of vitality
banishing smite
beast sense
blade ward
blinding smite
chromatic orb
circle of power
cloud of daggers
compelled duel
conjure barrage
conjure volley
cordon of arrows
crown of madness
crusader’s mantle
destructive wave
dissonant whispers
elemental weapon
ensnaring strike
feign death
friends
grasping vine
hail of thorns
hex
hunger of hadar
lightning arrow
phantasmal force
power word heal
prayer of healing
ray of sickness
searing smite
staggering smite
swift quiver
telepathy
thorn whip
thunderous smite
tsunami
witch bolt
wrathful smite
Why are they missing? Well, the official WoTC answer is:
In general, the criteria for what went into the SRD is if it (1) was in the 3E SRD, (2) has an equivalent in 5th edition D&D, and (3) is vital to how a class, magic item, or monster works. For example, the 3E SRD has the delay poison spell, but in 5th edition that’s handled by the protection from poison spell, so protection from poison is in the SRD.
Wizards of the Coast, SRD5.1 FAQ
Looking at the actual list, every single spell missing was (1) not in the 3E SRD, (2) was added in 5E. I was curious what fraction of new 5E spells got added to the SRD vs. not, but it looks like no one has a list of new 5E spells, so I couldn’t easily check.
The following are renamed but present in the SRD, presumably for trademark reasons:
drawmij’s instant summons, evard’s black tentacles, leomund’s secret chest, melf’s acid arrow, mordenkainen’s faithful hound, mordenkainen’s magnificent mansion, mordenkainen’s private sanctum, otiluke’s freezing sphere, otiluke’s resilient sphere, otto’s irresistible dance, rary’s telepathic bond, tasha’s hideous laughter, and tenser’s floating disk are all shortened. They become instant summons, black tentacles, secret chest, acid arrow, faithful hound, magnificent mansion, private sanctum, freezing sphere, resilient sphere, irresistable dance, telepathic bond, and floating disk.
bigby’s hand becomes arcane hand
mordenkainen’s sword becomes arcane sword
nystul’s magic aura becomes arcanist’s magic aura
Pakistan has blocked access to Wikipedia. Old Wikipedia is now available in urdu, and has the same content.
We are working on more clearly communicating the Old Wikipedia is not Wikipedia in Urdu like we do in English–translation help would be welcome!
پاکستان نے ویکیپیڈیا کی رسائی روک دی ہے۔ پرانا ویکیپیڈیا اب بزبان اردو میں دستیاب ہے، اور اس میں پہلے جیسی مواد ہے۔
ہم انگریزی میں جیسے، ہم پرانے ویکیپیڈیا کو ویکیپیڈیا کے بطور بزبان اردو مذکور نہیں کہنے کی سعی کر رہے ہیں- ترجمہ کی مدد خوشبو دائی جائے گی!
Prefer the old layout of Wikipedia? A couple friends and I made oldwikipedia.org
Hope you enjoy.
Waves, Z Vance 2023Bouquet, Z Vance 2023Worm Statue, Z Vance 2023Model
I did a survey of the cost of buying hard drives (of all sorts), microsd/sd, USB sticks, CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, and tape media (for tape drives).
I excluded used/refurbished options. Multi-packs (5 USB sticks) were excluded, except for optical media like CD-ROMs. Seagate drives were excluded because Seagate has a poor reputation.
Per TB, the options are (from cheapest to most expensive):
Tape media (LTO-8) at $4.52/TB, but I recommend against it. A tape drive is about $1,600 (twice that new). That’s a breakeven at 150-300TB. Also, the world is down to one tape drive manufacturer, so you may end up screwed in the future.
3.5″ internal spinning hard drives, at $15.00/TB. Currently the best option is 8TB drives.
Optical media, at $16.71/TB. 25GB blu-ray disks are cheapest.
3.5″ external hard drives, at $17.75/TB. Currently the best option is 18TB drives.
2.5″ portable spinning hard drives, at $22.00/TB. Currently the best option is 5TB drives.
SSD drives, at $42-$46/TB. Best option is 1TB.
USB sticks, at $59/TB. Best option is 128GB sticks.
MicroSD cards, at $62/TB. Best option is 512GB cards.
Changes since the last survey (4 months ago):
Amazon’s search improved. Less refurbished drives and sponsored listings.
Spinning drives: 22TB 3.5″ drives became available
Spinning drives: Prices for the previous cheapest option (4TB) rose, making 8TB the new cheap option.
SSDs: Prices dropped by about 30%.
MicroSD/SD: Prices dropped slightly.
Optical: The cheapest option (25GB blu-ray) dropped 30%.
Optical: I stopped gathering data on the cost of BR-RE
Tape: LTO-7 tape drives are now available used, halving the break-even point on tape.
Year 0 – I filled 10 32-GB Kingston flash drives with random data.
Year 1 – Tested drive 1, zero bit rot. Re-wrote drive 1 with the same data.
Year 2 – Tested drive 2, zero bit rot. Re-tested drive 1, zero bit rot. Re-wrote drives 1-2 with the same data.
Year 3 – Tested drive 3, zero bit rot. Re-tested drives 1-2, zero bit rot. Re-wrote drives 1-3 with the same data.
This year they were stored in a box on my shelf.
Will report back in 1 more year when I test the fourth 🙂
