I’ve been experimenting a lot recently with making furniture out of MGP10 structural pine that I machine myself. The first few examples have been work stands for things like my Tormek in the garage. One of the things I need to do when making these stands is to turn a series of machined pine strips…
Home made vanilla essence for Christmas
Catherine and I decided to make home made vanilla essence as part of our Christmas gifts for 2014. This turned out to be pretty easy, and result is really good. As part of that I turned bottle stoppers for the little decorative bottles we gave the essence out in. I also needed to explore what…
Turning for December 2014
I gave out a bunch of bowls at the work Christmas party, and to my embarrassment many people asked what wood and finish had been used. I of course didn’t remember because I made some of them over six months ago. I’m therefore going to try and do a better job of systematically documenting the…
Building a Thien Baffle
For a while now I’ve been meaning to play with making a Thien Baffle for my garage workshop. The motivation is that whilst I have a quite nice 3HP dust extractor (for those in the market for such a thing — don’t spend $1,400 with some retailers — I am super happy with my $500…
Ghost
Trigger warning, I suppose. This like a Tom Clancy book, but with weirder sex, much of it non-consensual. Also, not as well thought through or as well researched or as believable. I couldn’t bring myself to finish it. Title: Ghost Author: John Ringo Genre: Fiction Publisher:…
How are we going with Nova Kilo specs after our review day?
Time for another summary I think, because announcing the review day seems to have caused a rush of new specs to be filed (which wasn’t really my intention, but hey). We did approve a fair few specs on the review day, so I think overall it was a success. Here’s an updated summary of the…
Soft deleting instances and the reclaim_instance_interval in Nova
I got asked the other day how the reclaim_instance_interval in Nova works, so I thought I’d write it up here in case its useful to other people. First off, there is a periodic task run the nova-compute process (or the computer manager as a developer would know it), which runs every reclaim_instance_interval seconds. It looks…
Specs for Kilo, an update
We’re now a few weeks away from the kilo-1 milestone, so I thought it was time to update my summary of the Nova specifications that have been proposed so far. So here we go… API Add more detailed network information to the metadata server: review 85673. Add separated policy rule for each v2.1 api: review…
The Human Division
I originally read this as a series of short stories released on the kindle, but the paperback collation of those has been out for a while and deserved a read. These stories are classic Scalzi, and read well. If you like the Old Man’s War universe you will like this book. The chapters of the…
Fast Food Nation
I don’t read a lot of non-fiction, but I decided to finally read this book having had it sit on the shelf for a few years. I’m glad I read it, but as someone who regularly eats in the US I am not sure if I should be glad or freaked out. The book is…