Some more pens, and then I went back to bowls for a bit. The attraction of pens is that I can churn out a pen in about 30 minutes, whereas a bowl can take twice that. Therefore when I have a small chance to play in the garage I'll do a pen, whereas when I have more time I might do a bowl. [icbm: home]
So, I've been making pens for the last few months. Here are some examples. The first two are my first "commission", in that my brother in law asked for some pens for a friend's farewell gift. [icbm: home]
One of the action items from the nova midcycle was that I was asked to make nova's expectations of core reviews more clear. This blog post is an attempt at that. Nova expects a minimum level of sustained code reviews from cores. In the past this has been generally held to be in the order of two code reviews a day, which is a pretty low bar compared to the review workload of many cores. I feel that existing cores understand this requirement well, and I am mostly stating it here for completeness. Additionally, there is increasing levels of concern that cores need to be on the same page about the criteria we hold code to, as well as the overall direction of nova. While the weekly meetings help here, it was agreed that summit attendance is really important to cores. Its the way we decide where we're going for the next cycle, as well as a chance to make sure that people are all pulling in the same direction and trust each other. There is also a strong preference for midcycle meetup attendance, although I understand that can sometimes be hard to arrange. My stance is that I'd like…
Richard Jones introduced me to devpi as a pip cache, and its pretty cool. He's written up a guide on his blog at http://mechanicalcat.net/richard/log/Python/devpi_quick_start. The basic idea is that it caches on demand, so you can have one of these for your home network and avoid downloading things over and over. Even better, it your machines share a linux ABI (think same Ubuntu release or whatever), then you can upload wheels and avoid all those repeated compiles.
Some interesting things I found recently that I think others might be interested in: A video of a cool 6 bit adder made from wood and marbles -- I think this will be really useful for explaining binary maths to my kids when they show an interest. (More detail). A wooden combination lock. There is also a page describing the build of the lock. A repeatable morticing jig for a table saw, with full build instructions. He also built a cool box joint jig with plans available. A pistol for playing jenga with an unfair advantage, that's my kind of cheating. You'll notice all of these videos are from Matthias Wandel. He has a YouTube channel and seems like my sort of geek. I am sure there will be more links from him as I work through his 7 years (!) of videos.
I've had a spa3000 for a long time and then it blew up. That meant I had to replace it with a spa3102, but without being able to refer to the configuration I had on the spa3000. It wasn't too bad, although the software on these devices is truly terrible (even with a modern firmware). Some pointers: Use the WAN port on the spa3102, even if you're only plugging in one ethernet port. Get firmware from Cisco. You can upload this to the spa3102 by putting it on a web server and then hitting http://SPA3102_IP/admin/upgrade?http://yourwebserver/firmware.bin. Then follow the instructions here. When you have problems with the dial plan, realize that Chris Yeoh has already solved this and go here. Finally, fix hangup detection by stealing the config line from here. Job done. Of course, there's no way to backup the config on one of these devices, so I am sure I will be back here again.
LCA2015 will be in Auckland, New Zealand next year, and the Call for Proposals has just opened! The conference is one of the best venues in Australia and New Zealand to get word out about your Open Source project, as well as learning about the cool things that other people are doing. This is the third time the conference has been in New Zealand, and its looking to be an excellent event. This one call for proposals covers papers, tutorials, and mini conferences. For more information about the CFP, checkout http://lca2015.linux.org.au/cfp. Mini conference proposals should go to http://lca2015.linux.org.au/miniconf-cfp.
Just another batch of things I've worked on recently. [icbm: home]
So... I finally got my chisels on Wednesday and so I've done a little turning at home in the last few days. There are two other items not shown here: a tool handle (cause its boring) and a bowl where I had depth fail and it came apart. Its also clear to me that dust extraction in the garage is a thing in my future, because a shop vac just doesn't cut if for cleanup. [icbm: home]
Here's a bowl I made last weekend. My sister hurt herself at her Roller Derby match, so she ended up with the bowl of condolences. At first I thought this wood was ash, but its acutally catalpa. [icbm: home]