I hope you like the final state of this project. It was quite a bit of work, but now I have a fantastical home decoration or centerpiece. I may eventually list it for sale on Etsy.com, although for now we’re treating it as a quirky new house guest.

It is not notably functional; although I have had friends offer their suggestions. Sadly most good ideas ( “Make it a lamp!” ) would require a completely new build: utility would have to be part of it’s design from the beginning of the project. It does however make a nice candle holder / nightlight:

Nightlight mode: activated.

I came up with a quick project to do this weekend, but there were some challenges I hadn’t expected.

Pictures from the build below.

The first pickle I encountered was that it can be ver tricky to drill through porcelain:
1) Too much pressure and you break this brittle material,
2) Go too fast without lubrication and you can overheat you drill bit,
3) Using lubrication virtually prevents drill bit from digging at all,
4) You must use a drill bit specifically designed for glass & tile with a carbide tip. If you can’t get your hands on that at least use a masonry bit.

It seems most homes* have one “hot room”, that by accident of design (contradictory, I know), keep higher temperatures and are more difficult to cool than other areas of the building.

Our current hot room faces West, and seems to be at the end of the of the duct-work of our apartment’s air conditioning; a great combination for combating the blistery-cold summers of Las Vegas.

So we’re blocking out the sun in the hopes that it’ll make the some of the heat go away, which in turn should lower our a/c bill.

* Drawing only, of course, on my experience of places in Las Vegas that I have lived.

Quite plain, yes?

Pencil, stud finder & level not pictured. Toy trains just for fun.

Brass leaf-ended curtain rod.

P.S. Related.

• picture
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• wikipedia

Only one of these items was an impulse buy, and neither is quite as destructive as Mouse:

He has a drinking problem.

I hope to be melting army men & generally making a mess of things in the near-term. Although, I’ve already told Journeyman Protector he can babysit the heat gun for me. It’s not as I have stacks of ABS lying around anyway.

I’ll be molding clay onto the styrofoam head in the coming days to sculpt a clone trooper helmet. I’ll use that to make a mold. Maybe the guys in the 501st could use some extra helmets.

It’s obviously not a one-night project. I haven’t even gotten all the materials together. I heard that Artstuf is the place for what I’m looking for, it’s just too bad the site search isn’t very refined.

The easiest way to get me to take an interest in something is to ask me for advice. Tony did that the other day: he asked how he could get one of his designs on some t-shirts and avoid the iron-on transfer process.  I read an Instructable by Threadbanger and thought, “I could do this!”. I was right. Read on.

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I’m not. But it’s in the back of my mind now. I’m sure I’ll be spending more time on the RPF or Make forums soon. Well here’s why I bring it up - I’m driving around the other day & I’m thinking about ‘which Arduino should I get’, when I get around to thinking about all the sensors & accessories I could hook up to it. I don’t want a big hassle when I want to fiddle around with electronics so I was thinking about a way to spare even more parts from being spent (soldered) on a prototype than the breadboards alone might accomplish. That brings me to what I made today:

RJ11 analog signal test 1. Close-up on click, don't blame you if you don't!

Uh-gly! This is the only shot you’re getting, trust me: no one wants to see the soldering job on this beastrocity. Right now, it only does one thing (it lights up), and it doesn’t even do that like it means it.

Basically what I have here is a quick project to serve as a proof-of-concept for an analog electronic signal network. When needing low price, reliability or rapid-development you can almost always go with something off-the-shelf. In this case, telephone jacks connectors (RJ11) seemed like a quick & easy way to get this bird off the ground, and (if further developed) make for modular & expandable setup.

Here’s a general layout diagram:

1. 9-volt battery (I didn’t have any AA/AAA carriages) awaits user-input via
2. momentary switch, which meets up with one of the 4 wires at the back of the
3. phone jack, which is of course has a
4. regular telephone wire connecting it with another
5. phone jack the current is runs through a sufficient
6. resistor, protecting an
7. ordinary LED.
8. In a larger setup we could see a central network ground or perhaps one at each non-passive station; however as currently configured,
9. the electricity runs back through the jacks & line, closing the circuit at
10. the negative battery terminal.

There’s a lot of room for improvement. For starters, using RJ61 or Ethernet (8P8C) would nearly double system capacity with little other changes. But we have the makings here of a method of signaling confederates in a show or activating equiptment via relays.

Shift register-based parallel to serial circuits could be added to make each individual wire of each line carry multiple signals. It would be even better if they could be added inline, after the fashion of couplers or RF filters.

I found this picture of the bed frame we made, inspired by a similar construction by my dad (Big Fig). Want to make one? (more…)

Wombat's Nimbus, my Sorting Hat. Click for closeup.

I’ve got another animation, click below to view.

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A little something I made a few years back. I have a nice Sorting Hat to show you also, except (like ol’ Jack here) he’s unpainted as well.

Doesn't he look happy to see you?

You probably want either a close-up or one that sits still; I have both for you. Click below.

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My JavaScript muscles feel just a little tighter lately, thanks to my job. At least, compared to how they were a week ago when I was just getting started with the task of formalizing our budget. What started out as a way to ensure our company was “recession-proof” (not that our organization managed to reap any real benefits from the “good times”) has turned into a major all-consuming crusade to ensure our success.

The task of gathering the necessary data from various computer systems & paper records would, under normal circumstances, be fairly straightforward. Unfortunately, there is the dark ages: the period of time our company wasted attempting to appease to a hopeless, outdated, expensive and disabling petulant child of an Inventory/Financial software package. Extracting information from this opaque mystery is both time-consuming and painful.

The other problem I have been facing is a chart of accounts (both in the aforementioned train-wreck, and in its replacement which we have been using for a full fiscal year) which lacks some of the granularity a leader would need to make good decisions & steer the ship away from the rocks.

Now that I’ve compiled most of what is needed, I needed to make sure it would be used. The eyes of some in the staff tend to look a little glassy after being exposed to only a few “numbers” (indicator ratios, statistics, bank balances), so it’s important that:

By the way, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, is available on amazon for those who are working on their Christmas shopping

Awesome book, though I would settle for Visualizing Data by Ben Fry

After a couple of gigantic spreadsheets and one attempt at an OpenOffice Access database, and not feeling particularly good about the results, I decided to deploy it as a web app over the company intranet running on my workstation’s web server. It was looking pretty good, but I’m not fantastic with ajax-style interactivity so it was still half-baked. That’s when I came across ExtJS, which has sped up the production & increased the quality of the application in most areas, but the learning curve for the massive, object-oriented & JSON-related JavaScript library has been hellish.

Here’s a screen shot of what it’s shaping up to look like:

I’m really learning a lot from this entire project process in part because, if anyone else in our small business is able to handle any of these tasks (I’m thinking of the owner, manager & the bookkeeper as 3 people under whose jurisdiction this might fall) they sure aren’t stepping up to the plate, and I am receiving absolutely no guidance or help in creating a sustainable (company staff will be able to use this tool ad infinitum once it is finished) way for to keep our heads above the water in hard times. I’m having to learn new techniques & terminology, analyze and discover trends that can be used to lead.

It’s a very tiring process, so I hope it pays off and I retain some wisdom from the whole experience.