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Remember, remember
(30 Nov 2018 at 23:50) |
Heyyy there. November is a particularly busy month at work for me, and between that and some travel, creative projects have been light. A few things to mention:
Server seems to be working okay again, phew. All I did was make some basic changes to protect against automated DOS/hacking attempts, so either it was something wrong with the host I'm using that coincidentally cleared up, or it was just too much load from rejecting those brute-force attacks!
Grad school friend and occasional collaborator Jim put up golf.horse, which is a leaderboard dedicated to the important problem of self-decompressing wordlists. This is a descendant somehow of my Portmantout project from years ago, including using one of the same wordlists. I spent a weekend on this problem, which is pretty fun. Jim is not surprisingly back on top for the long wordlist, but I have some more tricks up my sleeve. If you like programming challenges, I'd recommend it. (There will eventually be some SIGBOVIK tie-in.)
I've been playing around with the Shaper Origin, which is a cool compact CNC router for wood that uses computer vision. It's interesting to learn to design for this tool, since it makes some normally extremely difficult things trivial, and yet still has significant limitations. I guess I haven't posted anything that I made with this before, but this month I made a fairly simple standing shelf for jars in my kitchen:
KitchenCAD
The highlight here is the approach to finger joints that's much simpler than what I usually have to do:
Lentils
In fact these can be pretty much any shape as long as they don't have any inner radii that are too small, but there's something satisfying about these particular crenellations. You can tell that there are some errors here, but this has more to do with poor workholding (which mostly has to do with trying to avoid wasting any perfectly good scraps) than issues with the tool. Another thing that's crazy easy to do is engraving a drawing on a large area; here you can see some spirals. Enjoy 'em now because there's pretty much no way anybody is gonna see those spirals with lentils on them 24/7.
When I was back in CT for thanksgiving I went through some old boxes of notebooks and things from my K-12 days, and collected and scanned some pretty funny stuff. I was going to share a bit of that, but I'll just save it for next time since it's three minutes to the deadline here! |  |
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| Today I bought as close a mason jar to yours as I could find (Bell, rather than Kerr, but same size), because I wanted better lentil storage and figured you know what's what. Happy new year! |
You have less than half a day to post a blog entry in the next month.
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| Pasta sauce jars. Empty first, or course. |
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