I’m crunched at work lately but I made time to knit for a while again. Hopefully I can finish this scarf by the end of February. I also bought some new yarn and needles to make the next project go a bit faster.
Here’s some more progress on the secret cabinet project. The door is framed and both are painted. Also, the plexiglass is cut to size for the door, but I’m not going to drill and nail it on until the painting is done. Here’s a current picture.
Work crushed me today and I had a lot of other stuff to do so I just did some knitting again tonight. I feel like I’m making good progress on the scarf but there’s just a ton of rows to go through. No picture today, it looks pretty much the same as last time.
I’ve been working on this scarf for a while with the PSOne knitting group. I didn’t have time today to get back in to working on the secret cabinet project so I knit on this for a while.
Today I worked on a larger project. I don’t want to reveal the whole thing until it’s done but it’s basically a cabinet. So far I cut the sides of the cabinet, routed out a groove to hold the back, and screwed it all together. Here’s a picture:
February is thing-a-day month, and I’m participating. Well, I’m not blogging with them, but I’m making something every day and blogging here about it.
In honor, or perhaps in defiance, of the snowpocalypse setting in tonight, I made snowshoes. It’s just a rectangular wooden frame with a small platform to stand on and wrapped in fabric to add surface area. It didn’t work great, but it worked well enough. You can see the effectiveness in the photoset linked below:
Snowshoe victory!
I host Barcamp Chicago’s website. It’s a custom Django site on Ubuntu. I recently upgraded the server to the latest LTS and later discovered my Postgresql database was gone. Postgresql had gone from 8.3 to 8.4 in the upgrade, but since it didn’t warn me about needing to migrate the data I assumed it took care of that. That was a mistake. I had three databases on Postgresql 8.3 and none of them were present anymore. I read on a forum that I could reinstall 8.3, but that person was working from Karmic not Lucid like I had. I ultimately had to:
After that the CLI showed my databases were present so I relaunched the barcamp site, but it still wasn’t connecting. A little more googling revealed that Postgresql likes to increment the port number it listens on when there are two versions installed on the same machine. That was indeed the problem, so I changed the port number back, restarted it and Apache, and finally I’m back to where I started.
I should have known better than to trust Ubuntu to migrate the data, but even if I did that myself I’d never expect a minor version upgrade to listen on a different port when that upgrade disables the old version anyway.
A few months ago I decided that I wasn’t going to tolerate excuses any more and it was time to get started with my own business. Since that time nothing has gone as I planned, but my quest to owning a business couldn’t be developing any better. I have my hands in three different businesses right now.
The first is RuggedScents. I mentioned this a little bit in my last post. Sacha De’Angeli and I started this business half as a goof to enter in the BARcompany competition at BARcamp Chicago 2010. Surprisingly we won the competition, so we used the prize money to develop a production process and start selling our line of masculine colognes. We have the process figured out for our first product; Smoque, a campfire scented cologne. Our products will be available for purchase soon.
The next one to come along was Maker Tees, though it has its roots in some things I did much earlier in the year. Pumping Station: One wanted to sell logo t-shirts, but nobody was interested in making that happen. As they were crippled by indecision, a group of members including myself stumbled upon a separate awesome t-shirt idea, the “Sir, I Practise Hacking” shirt. I had no choice but to have those shirts made, and since I was doing it already I made the Pumping Station: One shirts too. I carried around a big box of shirts, selling them in person until I broke even, then I temporarily dropped out of the t-shirt business. The process was so simple and appealing though that I decided to take it larger scale and sell a wide variety of maker themed shirts, and seek to sell shirts on behalf of hackerspaces.
Finally, I’m a big part of another venture that’s just getting some momentum. A few months ago I had the idea that a social network for hackerspace members could be very popular and useful. I mentioned this to a fellow PS:One member Jordan Bunker, and that mention along with some discussions he had with the Space Federation led to us working out a set of features, a few possible business models, and deciding to actually build it. We will be building this software and developing the community around it in the coming months, and with sponsorship from the Space Federation we may actually get paid to make it.
This is definitely a very exciting, and far too busy, time in my life.
BARcamp Chicago 2010 wrapped up a couple weeks ago, and it was a great success. Last year was the first time that Jason Rexilius, the founder of BARcamp Chicago, took a smaller role in planning the event and as a result it was a bit rocky. This year we got a better start on planning, got enough sponsorship to cover all our costs, and were well organized enough that nobody had to run around putting out fires all weekend. There were definitely some areas where we could improve for next year, particularly in marketing and managing content, and we’re already working on ways to do better.
One of the things I was most looking forward to at BARcamp this year was BARcompany. We’ve tried to foster entrepreneurship in the past but there hasn’t been much success. This year we had five teams start to build something, and three made it through to present their idea. The winner was RuggedScents, a campfire scented cologne put made Sacha De’Angeli and myself. Check out his write up of how the idea came about. This is why I’m not building a Hero’s Fountain anymore: I was only focusing on that to make a kit that I could sell, but since RuggedScents fell in my lap there’s no need to work on the fountain. I’ll still get back to the fountain and other kit ideas I have eventually, but for now RuggedScents looks promising!
By the end of August, I intend to build a working Hero’s Fountain. I made my first attempt the other day. It didn’t work, but I identified a number of ways I can improve it for my next attempt.
Below is the test apparatus. It uses a plastic bowl and two milk jugs for the water vessels. The nozzles are pieces of copper tubing and are attached with plumber’s epoxy. The hoses are simple nylon (I think? The material for that isn’t really important.) tubing and are attached to the nozzles with twist ties.
Hero's Fountain Apparatus 1
Hero's Fountain Apparatus 1 Internal
The first mistake was using the plumber’s epoxy. I used it because it’s simple and fast and I’d seen it used successfully in a similar application before. Unfortunately, after I was half done attaching the nozzles I saw the instructions said it’s not recommended for use with polyethylene, which is what milk jugs are made of. As you can see, the epoxy didn’t bond with the milk jugs, which broke the air seal. This is most visible on the leftmost nozzle in the picture above.
Beyond that first failure the rest is more speculative. My apparatus has both lower chambers at the same height, which means the water has a long way to rise from the blue topped milk jug to go through the fountain spout at the top. The air moving between the pink chamber and the blue chamber will rise much easier, so I believe raising the blue chamber to shorten this distance will improve performance.
Also, it takes a substantial amount of water to fill the tubes between the chambers, at least compared to the amount of water in the red bowl. Priming the tubes with water would probably improve performance, but hopefully that will prove unnecessary.
Finally, as the water drained from the red bowl I didn’t consider that it would form a vortex. That pushes some air down the tube as well as water. I don’t think that’s a problem, in fact it might make the machine run a little longer, but it’s something I will pay attention to in my next attempt.