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Due to a certain car repair I needed to make, I had to buy a hydraulic press. Here it is, standard setup with a bottle jack.

The jack has the lever that you need to use to raise and lower the press. The lever has to be moved from the pump to the release valve, back and forth as you raise and lower the press.

The previous owner had put a zip tie around one leg, so that it could hold the lever and he would have a place to put it. But I did not find that a convenient location.

I found I was just placing the lever on the top of the press. It was very convenient, but not very stable as the lever could just roll off.

So I took some measurements of the top of the press, fired up the old CAD program, and put together an STL file so I could 3D print something that would fit on the top of the press and prevent the lever from falling off.

And it works.

Here is the file in case you need it. STL file for a cap to cover the top of a typical garage hydraulic press

Here are some more mini-reviews of books, thanks to having too many books in the summer to read so they piled up and I eventually got to them. I’m going in order of when I read them.

First up: The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Victoria Forester

And now, the thrilling conclusion to last week’s story, or rather, to the trilogy The Girl Who Could Fly.

At least that’s what I was hoping for. I mostly got a conclusion, but she left a couple of loose ends to have an opening for a fourth book. If you read the second book of the trilogy and liked it, then you should read this one.

Next up: The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett

This is the second book in the Discworld series. Maybe “series” is the wrong word for Discworld, more like collection of books. But this one definitely directly follows The Color of Magic. I still like his writing. If you liked the first book, go ahead with this one. If you didn’t read the first book, don’t start with this one.

Next up: Theo of Golden by Allen Levi

Like everyone else this year, I read Theo of Golden. Also like everyone else, I read it because a couple people I knew were reading it and all raved about it.

I liked it, it was worth reading.

Do not skip ahead, do not read the last part of the book early.

The book starts off seeming like a “slice of life” story. It ends up being a few slices of life and works in a plot. And some life lessons. The chapters are on the short side, so it’s a good book for reading in spurts, since you can set it down whenever you need to and pick it back up later without having to get back into it.

Next up: Sorcerer of the North by John Flanagan

This is book 5 of the Ranger’s Apprentice series. It follows book 4, but does not continue its plot.

This book was good, in the same vein as the rest of the series. The main characters are there, they get into trouble, they get out of trouble. If you’ve read books 1-4 then you’ll know what to expect. The only thing to note is that this is only the first half of the story – this book ends in a “to be continued” situation. So make sure you have easy access to book 6 after this.

Last up: A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge

I didn’t know much about this book, other than it was in our library and somewhere it made a list of good sci-fi books.

This took a long time to read. Unlike Theo of Golden, this book has long chapters and complex threads and I could not just read it whenever – I had to set aside blocks of time to read this.

But it was worth it.

There’s a bit of world-building involved, but more interesting was the species-building in the story. It takes a bit to understand the creatures in the story, because Vinge does not explain things right away. And that’s what makes the book good – you have to think about what you’ve read and put in effort to understand what’s going on. It also brings about a bit of joy of discovery, rather than having everything laid out for you. He doesn’t try to hide things, but because of the uniqueness of the worlds and species in the story, I didn’t quite catch onto some things until a chapter or two later, and then earlier things made more sense.

There is a plot, it’s not just worlds and species. There’s a main plot and then some side plots, the story is told from a few points of view. The conclusion was not exactly what I expected, but it was a conclusion. I later learned there is a sequel, but I’m not sure if I want to try that yet, just in case it doesn’t live up to this book.

That’s it for this review. More book reviews coming up later this year.

For some reason, I saw the words “centaur” and “centurion” in the same day and I wondered what would happen if you put the two together. So I found two renderings (since actual photos are not available) of a centaur and a centurion and I mashed them together and made this image for the internet to have.

Everyone knows the quote about an angel getting his wings, but I decided to update it for today’s world.

Teacher says “Every time you use AI, a data center gets its funding.”

Thanks to Zuzu Bailey for that quote.

I was wondering what would be next for Trump to rename, and it has always been weird that the federal government is located in the District of Columbia, so it made sense to me that Washington DC should become Washington DA for District of America.

Yes, I made this one up.

I go to usually one Michigan football game a year, with whichever children want to go. Now that the older two are at their own colleges, it was just me and Gamma this year. We happened to choose the Western Michigan game.

It was not a good game. It had a fantastic finish, but before then it was not good, unless you were a WMU fan.

The consensus among the UM fans in the section of the stadium where we were was that UM was not getting its money’s worth out of the NIL they are paying the QB.

My favorite quote, from some annoyed fan during a play in which the QB was scrambling around and looking like he was running out of time: “Throw the ball!” and then he did throw the ball but, since he was flinging it out of desperation and not on purpose, it fell incomplete, and then that same fan quickly followed up with “No, TO someone!”

That, along with various other grumblings, inspired me to slightly modify a photo of said quarterback, with a more appropriate name on his jersey.

A number of my logins require Two-Factor Authentication, where they email or text me a code to enter in addition to my password.

The accounts that text me are more convenient. I could just glance over at my phone, and the alert would pop up with the sender and the first part of the message, and the message was short enough that the snippet that appeared in the alert had the code, so I could quickly memorize the code without leaving the login page and continue on my merry way.

It also worked well if I happened to be on my laptop – I could glance over at my phone, see the code on the lock-screen alert, and no bother opening anything to continue working on my laptop.

But there was one company that sent longer texts, so I couldn’t read the code from the text alert. I had to open the text to read it. And that was inconvenient and thus annoying.

Then I got to thinking about it, and I realized that one company is the only one that’s actually secure. The other 2FA texts are not. Because if someone steals my phone, they can’t open it and read my texts, but they can read any text alerts that pop up on the lock screen.

I suppose I could change my Messages settings to not show a preview of the text in the alerts, but the main one that matters to me is the one that does it correctly, so I’m not going to bother.