Reader Note: This will be my last planned ShopTalk Sunday, as more content will be shifting over to the Peoplenomics.com side of the house. Next month, one regular UrbanSurvival publishing day will disappear into the fog of history. Over time, more of my serious work will migrate to the Peoplenomics side of the house.  Today we begin a transition, but this is not an eviction notice.

Time, money, and profile management are all involved in this decision. On the time side, I want to spend more time on real projects around the ranch.

I have finite hours, Urban consumes too many of them, and I intend to redirect those hours toward Elaine, the ranch, deeper Peoplenomics reports, books, and physical projects.

Shop Purpose: Friction Reduction

Remember the old motivational saying?  “WIIFM” – which means “What’s In It For Me.” Most people don’t “audit their lives” well.  Which is to say they eat what’s “easy” and they think “inside the box” and in the end, head to a couch, veg out, and die.  That’s a majority of humans.

The rest are people like you and me: Walking around with enough separation of powers between the ears to have a full-time Auditor on staff.  “Why did you do that?”  Or, “God, that was stupid, don’t ever do THAT again…”

If you are totally satisfied with your life, a discussion of friction reduction (and learning more about yourself) is probably pointless.  You will forever live at the pinnacle of your success, regardless of what MIGHT be improved on closer inspection. Great teachers, military organizations, craftsmen, and successful businesses have all practiced some form of useful dissatisfaction: examine what went wrong, admit it, and improve the system. I need more time to keep my dissatisfaction in check.

I awaken every day knowing there are multiple lists of things in my life I plan to change. There is a physical list (diet, exercise, weight, mitochondrial optimizing, and more). Next to it is the columns and writing projects which must get done. The husbanding list involves making Elaine’s life great, helping her with memory while she helps me with eyesight (I think of it as Compensating Partners, LLC.)

Then we have the Dream Lists.  The home food raising, the ham radio museum project, opening a bulldozer school, and a lifetime study of Personal Routine.

It’s this last one I want to pay some attention to. One of the simplest (most direct) routes to a better life is to live by a “Routine.”  Up at a certain time every day; plus or minus “brain on fire” moments. And your Daily Path.  Mine, from leaving the (grounded) pillow, goes to the bathroom, then the kitchen for coffee, and the morning anti-aging stack.

Reinforced with hot coffee, a red light therapy device is used for a few moments on my eyes, and the best two out of three blood pressure measurements are noted. From there, I pass through the music studio/hydroponic hatchery, where the plants are checked. Then it’s down a few stairs into the Grow Room I’ve told you about.  Overnight lows and previous day’s high temps are noted and – in season – the evap chillers and exhaust fans given the once-over.

Along the way, Shop Practice has cleared the way. “Alexa, turn on Grow.” Lights up the lean-to greenhouse.  “Alexa, turn on power wall.” Which lights up the renewable energy center.  Which – because the shop is enclosed in corrugated Lexan, means the walking path from greenhouse to Shop/Office is clearly illuminated.  Walking past the utility pole box and the generator shed, I hoist a coffee cup to one of the PTZ surveillance cams.  Son G2 is our back-up security;  motion events trigger cell-phone alerts.

I could bore you with the gory details of my daily routine – the weights I stop at, the time on the vibration board, or the spritz of essential oil spray around the office – but the point comes down to this:  I have made it a conscious practice to look for friction in my life and deal with it as effectively as possible.

I offload problems to people who can fix them (food delivery services, two lawyers, building material deliveries, Medicare Advantage plan, and so forth) while keeping a few around (like the Selectric Mystery) because they are easy to write about and reveal themselves as being “everyman problems.”

So, if there is a long-term view of your Shop, start with your “friction list” and line out what really pisses you off.  Then craft solutions out of your head and get them on paper.  From that you can then acquire tools and materials to build it (whatever “it” is) and enjoy the lower-stress life that follows.

Other people will line up all day long to judge you, no doubt.  25 years ago, when we moved off my sailboat and eventually moved to the deep woods, no shortage of people said, “Who could believe ANYTHING from a guy who lives in a double-wide in the woods, for God’s sake?”

Yet here we are: decades into a debt-free life, six figures liquid, a shop containing nearly every tool worth owning, contingency plans for most foreseeable disasters, and—most important—excellent health, as far as health can be managed.

I commend this approach to you. When you have a deep appreciation for (Universe, God, the Ontology, or whatever you call it), it’s perfectly OK to ignore the labels of people who are still groveling at the feet of the Debt Monster acting as financial marionettes.  You want nothing to do with debt. Period.

Friction reduction does not always mean buying another machine. Increasingly, it means learning how to use AI as another shop tool—without letting it talk you into building a twelve-inch door on a six-inch building.  Which needs explaining. PPE on? Let’s do this.

AI Use in the Home Shop

We were going to feature the Hermes Lite 2 ham radio build and setup as our last column – for now. But a chance question from a reader offered a broader topic that will stand up over time.

Let’s begin with the backstory.  A reader emailed me this week asking my comments on a new chicken house he had designed.  I won’t use his name but it was “egg-like” although nowhere near as ornate as this:

Chickens are not to scale and (I awoke with a sweat at 1 AM the next morning) his version didn’t have an entryway rain porch. But here’s the point:  It was a fun idea (still is, too). But that triggered the Industrial Artist in me to design a short course in Shop Use of AI.

Shop AI: Basic, Simple

Obviously, one way to approach this idea would be to say “Grok, give me a sketch of an egg-shaped chicken house.”  That’s all it took plus the command “as a pen and ink drawing” to keep things generic.

From here, it was only a few commands to reach a watercolor rendition with bigger chickens.

And finally, I tell AI to “Double the size of the chickens – they are still too small – and make it all photo-real with some grass to approximate scale.”  A few seconds later and Grok hands me this:

The Real-Life Shop Problem

All looks like a fun build.  But now we need to tell AI to, “using this drawing, turn it into a buildable plan.”

After a few minutes of thinking (“Researching egg-shaped chicken coop construction…”) which dragged out more than five minutes (an eternity in AI) it delivered the plan.

Egg_Shaped_Chicken_House_Buildable_Plans

Before you run out and start buying materials for the build, let’s hold up a minute and review what AI delivered.  Consider this part of the drawing in particular:

Grok seems to have a ways to go on converting shop ideas into something that’s actually buildable.  When you open the PDF you will find lots of “small errors” – like the top of the drawing says the whole thing is 5″ wide.  At the bottom (with no tilting) it’s 6″ wide.

I then spent a while trying to figure out the physics of how a 12″ wide door fits on a 4 (or 6) inch wide building.

And now we are to the point.

Understanding Engineering Constraints

AI doesn’t.  At least not well and yet.

Sure, sure we could pick at the goof-up on measurements and units. It might require lighting up to understand what you are looking at: an AI view of an internal domain.  One where parallel lines are not equidistant.

Then you can spend a good hour (or two) trying with your mind’s eye, to figure out where AI would have had to be standing in order to achieve the perspective above.

Even more fun was the “build it in air” page of internal details.

And this is where engineering begins to matter.  Pappy taught me 90 percent of good engineering with a single phrase.  “Build something like it doesn’t need fasteners.”  

Applied to home construction, this requires that the ceiling sheetrock goes on before the sidewalls are rocked.  Because then – by the no fasteners rule – the edges of the ceiling are held in place by the sidewall rock butted up against it.

Was it in Mind Amplifiers (?) I explained that “we are the parents of AI” and so we need to take time to give explicit tasking instructions.

“I need a constraint table list for all engineering of wood and metal doors commonly used in residential construction.”

This is the kind of task that AI does super well.

ShopTalk Sunday – Door Constraints

Whoa baby!

Here’s the larger point: anything you can wrap a constraint table around becomes a discrete domain. Define the constraints and you define the domain.

That’s where workable solutions begin—whether you’re designing a chicken coop, training an AI, studying cognition, or fooling around with long-wave economics and minimum service life. But back to the chickens.

Real-World Chickens

As luck would have it, our reader asked the wrong fellow about Chicken housing design. Because I have done it before and quite successfully, though on a somewhat larger scale.

The lesson here is whenever you are working with AI – and you get even a baby-step past just spit-balling and blue-skying, then you need to write down your constraint tables.

As a serial chicken owner, before I made my first chicken housing more than two decades back, I programmed myself to handle the design constraints.  This is the magical part of taking a “cute idea” and turning it into an actual deliverable.  Your commands might go something like this:

[Use constraint table “Basic Engineering”]
[Use constraint table “Home Shop materials”]
[Use constraint table “Cost per animal of construction”]
[Use constraint table “Minimum service life and recycling”]

Additionally incorporate the following as [“Chicken coop constraints”].

• Design should allow one surface to be outside of the fenced chicken run or chicken moat boundary
• Bottom of any chicken structure should be 1/4 inch galvanized hardware cloth to allow poop to drop to ground
• Coop (hardware cloth floor) should be 24 inches or higher from grade
• Ramp to chicken door should not exceed a 20 degree rise angle
• There should be a full length rear (outside of pen) Lexan or glass viewing port to allow inspection of animals
• Provide for common 12-Volt linear actuator and remote to secure chickens inside at night.
• Provide PTZ camera mount with night vision for predator checking
• Construct using 3/4-inch CDX plywood, standard dimensional lumber, and a metal-overlaid roof
• Specify ground-contact-rated material for all 4×4 and 2×4 lumber below coop-floor level.
• … (Add more dream features like a water hydrant nearby for easiest washdowns…)

And that’s the takeaway from this (maybe last for a while) edition of ShopTalk.

The future is bright and we Makers have never had it better.

But with complexity comes…complexity.

On that? “Alexa, turn off vacuum. Alexa, turn off bench.” Don’t wander off too far, though. Son G2 wants to take up the ShopTalk mantle—and retool this part of Urban around his interests, which will mean more video. I’ll keep you posted. Just waiting for him to punch in for hisa shift.

Write when you get it built,

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