While of course there is a paper to rewrite, and a couple of last homework assignments to tu:n in, I instead hope to draw attention to more interesting things going on this week.

I’ve been listening to TwiT, with Leo Laporte & Friends — a fine podcast indeed, covering the week’s tech issues. They talked a little bit this week about Maker Faire an event which I’d love to visit given the opportunity. Maybe they’ll do it again next year?

So in the spirit of making things, last night I went to the ACM office and worked on an interesting project. Details to follow later this week.

This weekend Allerton is hosting their the annual plant sale. It should be really exciting– I plan on bringing my digital SLR to get some good pictures while I’m there. Anyone else up for a trip this weekend?

12:00:09, Morse M2 Metric Tap

This week I really enjoyed the first smells of spring as my cold subsided and I got outside. The weather has been beautiful, following some great storms. Today was so nice in fact, I went Geocaching after work. I rode my bike down to the big park on Windsor and had a really enjoyable time. For those interested in Geocaching, I highly recommend using the Google Earth KML file to visualize local cache locations and find convenient targets.

The Laser Galvo project is still going on. As you can see above, I got a special very fine tap in which I will use to thread the holes in the milled aluminum, once that work is done.

One special note about the photographs above; I took them with a Kodak Professional DCS 330 Digital camera, then proceeded to crop them to 2×3. It’s lots of fun to be able to use depth-of-field in a meaningful way again. And the colors are Fantastic. I forgot how great pictures through this old camera could be.

Now on to a beautiful evening of Coding.

There seems to be some progress on every front these days. I am making significant progress working on a yet-unreleased-project using Ruby On Rails. Its really quite fun to program with Ruby on Rails– I wish I would have learned about such web frameworks a long time ago.

I’m also thinking a bunch about LaserLine 2.0. MacWarriors is on board with working on a real 2.0 version and we are going to do some planning Saturday at the meeting. I hope to have the hardware finished this summer so we can work all next semester to create a beautiful piece of software to drive the thing. I expect features and plans will be detailed on the WikiTrac Project Site.

Laser Galvo Update

Speaking of the projector, the final CAD versions of the base and side are ready. I am now prepared to go in to production with the pieces. It might take some time to get them produced, but it is very much going to be worth it. The M2 metric screws for it arrived; here are some pictures of the finished coilform and screws:

I tried to contact Robin Adams at Linux-Laser about the bILDA2 interface but got no response. Hopefully Linux-laser.org will update soon with plans for this amazing piece of hardware. I am really excited about building one and writing an IOKitUSB driver for it. (This is only half-sarcastic–it would be very interesting to write my first hardware driver–but also scary. Hopefully IOKit will make this not so painful???)

KAP Update

A week ago, on the startlingly windy Friday, I flew my kite. While at first I had problems I thought I was ready for some good KAPing when the wind diminished and steadied at the Arboretum. When I tried earlier in the day to fly the kite on the Engineering Quad the extreme wind was strong enough to break a swivel and release my kite. It was the closest I’ve been to flying away. There was also some sort of down-draft-vortex business making flying in the quad near impossible. So back to the Arboretum–I had the kite up and steady, so I attached my camera. When I got home I found my pictures were 100% failure. I realized that there is no way I’m going to get quality pictures with this camera setup. It just can’t handle the movement of the kite string. I also need a better suspension– but really I’m starting to look for a broken Digital Elph that I can hack in to a camera for KAPing only. I’m still too scared to send up a really nice camera– and I want one that I won’t feel too bad hacking up for an external electronic shutter release.

I also need a broken DLP projector– but that’s another story. Please let me know if you have one you’re considering disposing of. In fact, there is a large amount of specialty equipment I am looking to purchase. All sorts of strange things, mostly used, broken, or otherwise unavailable. Maybe I should put up a “Wanted” web page with product info on it.

Random

This week I found this company, Pomona Electronics, that makes the greatest little metal project boxes. I bought one from ECE Stores, and now only search for a great project to build in to it. I’m sure I’ll come up with something. They have this great blue enamel finish, and just exude quality. Made in the USA. I think they’ve been around for…ever.

I was thinking about applying for the ADC Student WWDC Scholarship– but that means I’ll have to join ADC as a student member first. I should really act on that quickly if I’d like to go.

Non-Electronic, Non-Technical Update

I was introduced to this great website Threadless this week. They have a bunch of great t-shirts (though I don’t really need to buy any of those right now…) My favourite is the Visible Light one.

Geek-out Addendum

So instead of actually posting this 2 hours ago, I spent a huge amount of time trying to install mmCache or eAccelerator. on Mac OS X 10.4.5. Unfortuantely I was not able to get it to work. It looked like phpize was configuring the package for the wrong API version, but it seems somehow worse than that… Anyway, does anybody have either of these modules in binary form for OS X 10.4.5? If not– any other suggestions for a phpAccelerator?

I took many pictures over spring break, I have posted some pictures here. A few in the 2×3 format, cropped, which I especially like because its like film.

People:

Animals:

I have been working on the next post for like 3 days, so that I may come back with a bang; sorry for the hiatus.

Really, it might even need to be spread over two posts because its going to be that information-packed and insightful.

Soon, I promise.