For years I ve been inching my way through various home automation projects. Some solar array visibility, some way to turn of inverter should batteries get low, some way to detect wildlife tearing through crops, et cetera. I had a good bulk of life improving features implemented, but nothing very coherent or well polished. Recently I revamped my whole infrastructure at home to standardize all the…
I done did it, I read another book! I stuck to classics again to better my chances of not hating the experience. But the choice was blinded by the ebook format, which does not give you a chance to weight the amount of paper you re about to tackle. I read Moby Dick, inspired by a comic I read (Achab by Patrick Mallet, meant as a prequel) which made me curious about the real book. And it s a big…
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I updated this blog which ran an antiquated version of WordPress from the neolithic era. I used the opportunity to review all the files, all the permissions, everything. It was all squeaky clean. The minute I run a new and secure version this happens: You hacked nothing, you ran someone else s code . My mistake was updating from a tried and true version which had stood the test of time, to the…
Gravel is super cheap when self delivered.
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This will be a whole other post, but I ve gone through great lengths this year to discourage wildlife from eating our stuff. Of course the clueless fawn to gorges itself in the middle of the day with zero appreciation for the effort.
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This is shaping up to be a great berry year. We re often amused that in our work toward greater self sufficiency, we never produced enough of a staple (potatoes, corn) for our family s consumption in a year. But we ll wolf down hundreds of dollars of berries in one day. We seem to have succeeded at overproduction only with luxury foods like blueberries, raspberries and maple syrup. It s nice…
It was getting pestered by a couple of other birds flying too fast for identification, which only seemed to mildly bother it.
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Build Documentation I built it last year and took a bunch of pictures to document the build. Then life happened and I didn t. Someone noticed I had an undocumented v2 and asked about it, so it was time to fix this.
In the Spring and Summer we often hear the sound of one or several corkscrews coming from pine logs. It s weird in a funny way, and any time we ve tried to investigate we didn t find the culprit. Whatever is doing this stops when you move the log. We finally got to the bottom of it, and found the bug responsible. Its mandibles must be quite strong to make such a ruckus. I m not sure what they re…
Robin found some copper flashing at the hardware store. Hell yeah I ll etch it. The glint is good, but it comes with a traveling vertical line that reflects the light source. I need to see if I can treat the surface to avoid that before etching. By happenstance I found that a rectilinear light source (office neon) perpendicular to the etching works better than a single light source pointed at it.…
It took us years to establish this patch of Lilies of the Valley.
I just did my yearly X,Y Coordinates stint with local 5th graders. It s the 5th time I do it and this year is notable in that I didn t write anything I wanted to fix for next year. Every time previous I came out thinking I needed to fix a bug, prevent a confusion, or improve something or other. This time it looks like the formula has been refined to its optimum. Kids will definitely push the…
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My office is a little small and barely able to contain all the machines I ve accumulated. The 3D printer I turned into an etcher for specular holograms was obnoxiously tall, and really doesn t need much vertical range. I chopped the aluminum extrusions so it would fit in an unused corner of the room. I ve been doing occasional tests here and there, nothing worth showing yet. Results are very hit…
I started going through the massive amount of oak that was dropped in my driveway last Winter. It s fun and fast. Everything is massive with this oak. I excised some of the cool knots, not sure if I ll ever do something with them but I figure they might be cool in some project. They need to dry a few years first so now s not the time to think of what that could be. Beyond the knots, we thought it…
7 days, 47438 pen strokes :\. Lara s work and a recurring dragon on this blog :). I sped up the machine to make it 7 days instead of 10, so it s slightly more inaccurate, but more importantly I failed to anticipate that ink would run out faster. I used to have about 1.5 days between pen swaps, here it s barely above 1 day. No harm done I got there in time, but I should have thought about it when I…
I spent the whole week end in the sugar house, maple trees have been relentless this past week. We have ~5 gallons of syrup canned so far with at least 3 more coming. The smells are incredible in the Spring, Winter makes you forget that the world has any smell at all. Wet soil hits the hardest after a long Winter, and it s quickly followed by pine smoke and sweet sap.
I was invited back to the science museum to do something cool with my machines. Any time I do a public event it s an opportunity to figure out what s engaging and do better the next time around. I was maybe a little too motivated and brought several machines, almost my whole apparatus, and deployed them in various modes. 1 PewtyBot, 1 Mirror PewtyBot, 1 PlottyBot & 1 SkecthyBot doing portraits,…