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Entries from July 2015

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As foretold by the bards, wood (31 Jul 2015 at 15:12)

In post #1116 I presaged a new danger: That I would get into woodworking and want to make all the furniture in my house. This seems to be happening. Currently up are speaker stands for my office, which are replacing stacks of CDs in milk crates. Here is a complete one in situ:

Sweet Max Payne mouse pad!

I found out that woodworkers consider screws to be cheating, because they aren't strong enough and they're too easy. I'm a big fan of considering things cheating, so what's new here is that this is all glue and joinery construction, specifically there are lovely looking finger joints:

Finger joints, also known as box joints, red oak

The different colors just come from the fact that the end grain stains differently than the side, which I am very happy with. Just glue and a very tight fit are holding those together, and it's strong enough to stand on. The fingers I cut with a home-made jig, of course, made out of scrap MDF. It looks like this:

Home-made MDF finger joint jig

There's a test piece clamped in there right now, but normally you'd have some nice oak board squared up with the surface, and then route out the finger gaps with a 3/4" router bit. The spacing is achieved with gage blocks (you can see them in the back, labeled 1–10). You can also observe my new sub-hobby, which is 3D printing adapters so that I can plug my crap shop vac into power tools for dust extraction. You can just buy a jig that makes finger joints but that's cheating.

Also in this project I have some mortise-and-tenon joints for the structural shelf in the middle. That looks like this:

The other side is even sloppier

The tenons, which do their jiggery pokery into the wood holes, needed to be rounded, since the router can only really cut round slots. I made a jig for that too. It looks like this:

3D-printed tenon jig

Here the router has a plastic guide bushing that follows the plastic template in order to cut the appropriate u-shape. It actually works much better than I thought until you get impatient and take too deep of a cut and the router kicks a little. I made a metal one for the next round, which may work better.

I know this is not impressive to real wood-workers, but I am having fun! And in the year 2025, you will be invited to visit my home and it will be decorated with autobespoke, rectilinear creations.

Next week is the ICFP Programming Contest, which I've marked off on my calendar this year, and in three weeks Ludum Dare #33, which I plan to do as well. I am still putting many hours a week into my Nintendo AI work, but it is slow going.

(8 comments — almost 2 years ago) [ comment ]

Entries from June 2015

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An art show (30 Jun 2015 at 23:41)

Ah, June, you so short! My free time is all tied up with secret projects, so not much fun to report there. One is the continuation of the NES AI work, which I'm happy has finally passed Alphabetical Star Wars in views on YouTube so is rightly back on top as my most popular artwork. I really do enjoy working on NES stuff, even though there have been like a hundred hours of slog on this particular boring piece. When it's done, which should be soon, expect several diverse artworks along those lines. I'm excited for that part.

What else? I guess I never mentioned here that my weird art game Entire Screen of One Game was part of an honest-to-goodness modern art show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. (Here's the program for proof!) I happened to be traveling to Paris that week in April for the Marathon already, so I was able to attend the opening. Pompidou is really great; I think my favorite museum that we visited in Paris, and attending for an art show as one of the artists was pretty surreal. Here's my favorite photo:

Everyone agrees that this is art, and this stance affirms that one should not touch art.

Here we have some legitimate art critics and administrators (I think the one in the front is the former secretary general of France) observing my game just dropping rectangles hoping that someone will interact with it. No dice. This was common throughout the night, people contemplating it like I sometimes do when standing at a museum staring at weird art when people are being quiet and serious, but not doing the basic act that allows you to access the game's essence, which is to press the arrow keys. I found that amusing. There were some kids there who knew what to do, and to their credit, a few very well-dressed adults touched it. The curator was nice enough to talk to me for a long time, since he was the only one I knew there, and it was clear that he understood the "joke" (which is to say, the art). The exhibit ("The museum of bugs") itself was actually quite good, with some favorites I recognized (such as Peter Molydeux's excellent tweets) and some new stuff I hadn't seen. Two memorable ones included a live-action video of a technical jumpsuit-clad dude faithfully reenacting what I think was a Tom Clancy Rainbow 6 character moving in third-person through narrow corridors and drawing and holstering his gun, making awkward turns into walls, and making the uncanny valleyness of that kind of 3D game quite funny. I wouldn't have been able to keep a straight face; good job, guy. Another was a video of someone who drove off the road in some 3D racing game, and just kept going and going towards the horizon for ages, eventually driving through distant atmospheric effects and skyboxes, and then finally driving off the face of the earth and falling towards -inf forever. (Spoiler alert: The Earth is rectangular after all!)

(2 comments — almost 3 years ago) [ comment ]

Entries from May 2015

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CSD Logo, part II (24 May 2015 at 11:33)

More old news! Do you remember this eleven-year-old post? Of course not! Well, eleven years ago the Computer Science Department at CMU, where I was then a grad student, finally decided that they needed a logo. They held a contest and I submitted two designs. One was "Star Wars" which after a short passage of time I decided was ugly and regretted (the idea is not too bad, but the lumpy S is revolting). The other was "University Style," which is far superior:

CMU Computer Science Department logo

This one is austere and has and plenty of CS appeal: You've got the fact that it's rotationally symmetric; it teaches you a very efficient way to pack the letters C, S, and D, which could yield some kind of gang hand sign but you'd have to be careful that when you made it you do it backward from your perspective because despite the rotational symmetry you still want the viewer to be reading it as CSD and not CZD; it's got this interlocking plugs kind of thing, etc. However, when they finally did the voting, they only had the "Star Wars" one on the ballot. And then months passed and a winner was not announced (rightly so, in my opinion). END OF STORY. A LOGO WAS NEVER PICKED.

Just kidding: William and I replaced our paper office door sign that announced its contents with a slightly different one that was official-looking and used the favored CSD logo above. There may have been a few friends that did this too. It was there for about 5 years. Then when the department moved into the new CS building (I had just graduated) there were no signs for people's doors, and so someone (Rob? Michael Ashley-Rollman?) used that logo to make a template for the signs and basically everyone had the logo on their door; it became the official-ish one for another 5+ years. (BTW if you are looking for this logo, please grab the vector version.)

And now, a few months ago, I found out that the logo had been canonized during the process of redesigning the CSD web site, which has finally launched. So now it is basically the department's official logo! HAPPY END!

(4 comments — almost 10 years ago) [ comment ]

Entries from April 2015

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Portmantout: A portmanteau of every English word (30 Apr 2015 at 22:59)

Oh, wow, that was dumb. I actually have at least three good posts saved up, but for some reason I thought I already posted in April. So I backdated this one. It's really May right this second. But it concerns April work:

Portmantout video!

This is a video I made for my little hack about "Portmantout". Portmanteau is a stringin'-together of two words (like caviar + armpit = caviarmpit), and Portmantout is when you do that for all of the words in English! I did the work and wrote the paper for SIGBOVIK but the video is part of my slow attempt to make an entertaining Youtube channel. It's a lot of work to put together these videos but I'm happy with how it came out!

Categories: hacks sigbovik drawings video

(6 comments — almost 2 years ago) [ comment ]

Entries from March 2015

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SIGBOVIK eve (31 Mar 2015 at 22:45)

Hi Radar-people,

As usual for this time of year, I've been hard at work on SIGBOVIK projects. The conference is tomorrow and I'll be emceeing (something I seem to always get asked to do, though I'm also happy to pass this torch soon, since what I really enjoy is making and presenting weird "research"). Speaking of weird research, I have two papers this year; the first one I spent weekends on for a month or two. It's an AI/machine learning joke based on a bad pun which I implemented in a serious way. The second is a wordplay one, which I threw together on the last day when I thought that other one wasn't going to work. I've been putting together a fun tutorial video on the second one for my two-hit-wonder ghost town youtube channel, though since it contains no cultural icons I'm skeptical it will play well with that audience. I thought maybe I'd upload the video tonight, but now it's getting close to the end of the month, so here is a post to satisfy my weird compulsion, and I will post the video and SIGBOVIK works tomorrow.

Next week I'm going to Paris for the marathon and an art show. Costume ideas? Fun things not to miss?

(9 comments — almost 10 years ago) [ comment ]

... Mar 2015 continued

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