Another “let’s redecorate the front porch” project from 2012. This table was built from the plans at http://ana-white.com/2012/05/plans/benchright-round-end-tables, and is apparently a knock off of a Pottery Barn Benchwright Side Table.
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Project to turn a thrift-store bed frame into a bench for our front porch. This was really my wife’s project, I just did the fiddly bits.
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I like my stand up freezer in general, but I have always felt like its shelves were inefficient. Because the contents of the freezer (especially meat) often don’t stack well, it feels like only about half of the shelf’s storage area is usable. Adding baskets is the obvious choice, but every time I look for baskets I find them to be over-priced and inefficient (the sides are usually sloped, and they are never the exact right size). This fall, while surfing for a basket solution again, I had an epiphany.
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A few years ago my wife bought a colander at a garage sale. Its handle has never been in great shape, but it has been falling off a lot lately and it needed attention. My wife asked me to fix it, and after finding out expectations were low (specifically, she would have been satisfied with a hole in a dowel rod), I thought I would try for something nicer. During a period of “maker’s block” for a much larger project, I banged out a fairly nice replacement with scraps from my recent panjolele project.
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A few times a year my wife asks me to build a canvas for her. This is usually a certain size of paneling cut down, or possibly some joined dimensional lumber. Then she paints whatever is on her mind on it. I usually don’t post these because they don’t have a lot to do with the end result, but recently she asked me for a fairly involved “canvas” to make a “barn quilt” on. She sent me a link to this page as a reference for what she had in mind. These aren’t really barn quilts in the traditional sense, but certainly the designs and materials are inspired by them.
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A couple of months ago Make Magazine‘s site posted a link to one of their projects – The Panjolele Cake Pan Ukulele. I had been considering buying a ukulele for a while and these steps didn’t seem too intimidating. After looking around I dug up a paper copy of the issue that had this project in it and got to work. This post is a build log to help me remember the project in general, and specific lessons I took away from the project.
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A year or so ago I spent a few hours writing an IPv4 subnet calculator in javascript. I didn’t have any real goal, just a desire to play with javascript. I promptly forgot about it. Then a month or so ago I found it again and dusted it back off. I had a lot of fun rewriting it and then… forgot about it again.
After remembering it yet again last night, I decided enough was enough, filed the roughest edges off of it, and posted it:
Some day I hope to do something with hardware worth writing about in its own right. For now though I am stuck documenting the absurdity of my learning experiences.
I’ve put together an initial attempt at IPv6 support in swaks. If this sort of thing interests you, please take a look at what I have so far and let me know what you think.
LINK REMOVED – this was a development release and the changes have been incorporated in official releases. Please see the project home page at http://jetmore.org/john/code/swaks/ for the latest release.
There is no documentation included yet, but the only real change to the documentation is the addition of the -4 and -6 options to force IPv4 or IPv6. There are a few unrelated tweaks since the last release, but nothing that needs documentation at this point.
Often when working on an electronics project I experience a problem that takes me way too long to debug. I don’t mind iterative debugging, it’s where I’m partially hanging my hat these days professionally, but it’s painful how often my lack of experience leads me up a dead end. The last time I got so angry I felt the need to write a post about it was an hour lost to software debugging when I had just crossed a couple of wires.