For Christmas this year I built a new thing! Here’s the necklace wall mount I built:
The design uses six pieces of pine glued together into a tiered structure. Then I extracted the wall mounting hardware from some Ikea parts to add to pine boards. I finished the part with fast-drying polyurethane, and finally added 47 brass hooks.
The only problem is … not all of the necklaces can fit!!
One of my friends told me once, “the best way to deal with from having your bike stolen is to buy a more expensive bike!”
Although this strategy might encourage runaway bike theft, I just got a replacement bike for my departed Montague Paratrooper. Since I use a bicycle as part of my daily car-train-bike commute I needed a practical replacement as soon as possible.
Here’s my new Tern D8:
The bike is a 24″ folding bike with 8-speeds and mudflaps – and it’s just about perfect for my daily needs. Please excuse the matching “glacier” blue between the car and the bike – this is an unhappy accident. 
Folds up nice though!
Oh no, my bike is gone! All that was left was the cut lock this morning.
Oh the memories….
Why didn’t they take the crappy blue road bike instead (also?).
UPDATE:
Well at least I learned a lot about Renter’s Insurance as a result of this. Here are my tips:
Here are some sweet jack-o-lanterns from the Halloween party this year!
Guess which one is mine! The dinosaur? Good guess, I should have made that one. I tried to make the world instead…
After seeing a musician playing cajon at a farmer’s market last weekend, I decided that I needed one too! I had been looking to buy a hand drum and the cajon stood out to me for its distinct bass and snare voices.
I’m always looking for a good deal so assembling my own cajon from a kit was the way to go. I found the Sela Bausatz cajon with a bass sound I liked and a snare construction that was solid. After following the instructions from kit and drilling a few holes -> TADA!
Here’s my cajon:
The wood required a little finishing though. For the birch shell I used a fast-drying polyurethane and for the front panel (the tapas) I used a few coats of danish oil. Wood is complicated!
I just built a sweet climbing board for my pullup bar. Take a look:
The design uses a doorway-style pullup bar and uses u-bolts to attach a plywood board. Then add whatever climbing holds you like!! I got mine from Blank Slate Climbing.
C# WinForms offers a suite of fully-featured controls for building responsive, event-driven user interfaces. However, there is limited native support for data visualization and the existing tools show poor performance when plotting >100K data points.
My solution to this problem is DataGridViewPrime, a class extension of DataGridView that includes functions to Save, Copy and Explore the data source bound to the control. The features are accessed though a new context menu created for the control.
Here’s an example:
If you would like additional data visualization options in your DataGridView controls, check out the source code on GitHub.
Good luck out there!
Although Abella used to live in a shoebox, now the electronic musical instrument has been fully soldered and packaged in a project box. The prototype is complete!
Note indicator: provides a color-based indication of the current note selected.
Key selector: multi-switch input to set the key. The first 7 switches correspond to C major through B major, and the last switch changes the key to major pentatonic. With no switches activated the key is chromatic.
Note selector: covers 2 octaves of notes in the selected key
Volume control: Turn clockwise to increase the audio output
Mute: comprised of an IR light source and an IR phototransistor. Block the path to mute the sound.
Clutch: with the clutch depressed, move the note selector and the note indicator will show next note. Release the clutch to begin playing the note.
How does it work?
Abella uses an ATMega328 microcontroller to generate sound by direct digital synthesis (DDS). The waveform is not a sine wave, but a combination of the root frequency overlaid with the higher two octaves and perfect fifths. The root frequency is set by a linear potentiometer, and the key is set by a DIP switch. An internal accelerometer produces a +/- Z signal that is used for frequency modulation when Abella is rocked up and down. The 0-5 V output is filtered and attenuated for compatibility with audio amplifiers.
I am now the proud owner of a Seek Thermal Compact 206×156 resolution infrared camera! Let’s play a game: it’s called “guess the subject of this photo”!
This is an Dell S2409W 24″ monitor. Note the higher temperature at the top of the display due to the position of the fluorescent bulb.
This is a GE Turntable Microwave Oven. Note the high temperatures at the front panel and top-right enclosure of the microwave. Main source of thermal leakage appears to be driven by the incandescent light bulb rather than the transformer or magnetron.
These are LED light bulbs. The second one (Cree 800 lumens) failed within the first two months, but the Philips 800 lumens SlimStyle’s are going strong. Stay tuned for a comparison of operating temperatures….
Merry Christmas to me! It’s time for a motherboard upgrade. Here are the components I selected:
Photograph and infrared image of the final build. Idle maximum temperature of 37C seems good. Peak performance benchmarks to come….
Gregory Kimball 