Building Project: Shop Expansion

As I mentioned in my previous post I have a furniture project coming up to build a custom convertible sofa bed for our library/guest room. Before that I needed to add some new tools to my shop and give them someplace to live. One important feature is a sliding compound power miter saw station where the front of the bench provides the infeed/outfeed support for the miter saw. The bench will also have a ruler and an adjustable stop for the infeed of the miter saw. Because I was going to build new benches and such I also decided to add more storage. The storage is drawers, shelves, and pegboard to give everything I have a place to live, plus some extra capacity. I’ve never built or installed drawers before so this was also a skills upgrade. See the design drawing below for an idea of what I was shooting for…

Side, top, and front views of new bench design…

The first challenge was ordering all the stock and hardware for the new bench. I had two problems with my order. One was self-inflicted, I ordered the wrong length 2x4s due to clicking on an adjacent item in the online ordering system. The second one was the store’s problem, they omitted half my plywood and that was after a one day delay. The good news is that now I can go in person to the store and so I went and picked up the missing plywood and a bunch of additional 2x4s.

Some of my order…

I set up a temporary miter saw station and my new table saw in the garage which is attached to the shop. This is probably where the table saw will always be used just for space reasons. I got a folding and roll away table saw so it can be out of the way when I’m not using it. Also, the car needs to go in the garage most of the time.

Temporary miter station and table saw station in the garage

The first part of the build was to build the frame of the bench. I actually built it as three independent units and then connected them. Note the lowered section in the middle to allow the deck of the miter saw to line up with the surface of the bench. The miter saw made all the repeated cuts so easy and quick. Also it makes perfect consistent square cuts where I would probably have some “variation” using a hand held circular saw.

One unit of three…

Three units framed and connected… ooh and my first drawer…

You can see my very first drawer in the image above. It was so cool to have a table saw and be able to rip all the sanded maple 1/2” plywood to the right dimension and then to length on the miter saw. I also made the dado in the drawer sides using the table saw, just putting each piece of stock through with the blade set to about 1/4” height and shifting it 1/16” for three passes. I was able to cut the drawer bottoms by just ripping the panels to the right width ( the inside width of the drawer plus 3/8” so it sits inside the dado). I used a very simple butt joint with glue and pre-drilled countersunk 1” screws. The drawer slides are nice 24” full extension slides so it’s easy to get to everything in the drawers. I intentionally set them back from the front of the unit so that there are still clamping surfaces and to protect them from getting sawdust and such into them. You can also see the bench tops which are two layers of 1/2 plywood.

All the drawers installed and the miter saw in it’s new home…

The next part was to add the pegboard on 2/3 of the bench to hang up tools and some shelves on the last 1/3 of the bench to have some open shelf storage. There is also a shelf under the miter saw as well and floor storage under that. I also installed and set up the other tools: drill press and sanding station.

All the tools installed on the bench top, pegboard and shelves as well…

After putting stuff in the drawers and hanging up a bunch of tools, I installed the miter saw adjustable stop and ruler. I built a jig for my router and carefully routed a channel to install it after doing some work to level/flatten the infeed side of the bench. The stop came out great and it largely removes the need to measure and mark when I’m cutting multiple pieces.

Miter saw stop and ruler…

So that’s the whole saga… It took about five days or so end to end and I think it is a good representation of my original design. I’m very happy with the functionality, the machines, and the storage. I’m reviewing my design for the bed project and I’ll probably get started on that in a week or so.

Miscellaneous projects...

I’m about to start a new construction project and it reminded me that I’ve done a few random projects and not posted about them at all… So, here’s a rundown of the small stuff…

Fixed the dimmer that didn’t work well for 20+ years…

In our dining room there was a weird dimmer switch that had a touch plate that was supposed to adjust by sliding your finger on it or something. It didn’t work right for two reasons. First, if you tapped it it was supposed to just turn on the light, it would often fail at this or leave the light flickering on and off. Second, I could find no reliable way to control the dimming with it, it either went full on suddenly or off to flickering… We lived with it since we moved into the house and I kept meaning to have and electrician replace it. Finally I got the courage together to replace the damn thing. It was actually very easy and the instructions for the new dimmer were very clear. The new dimmer is the proper rating for the LED lights in the fixture and had a normal on-off switch and slider for dimming. The hardest part was finding the circuit that this light was on, it wasn’t on anything labeled in our box as “dining room” and turned out to be on the circuit with the basement and some of the outlets in the kitchen ( wtf? ).

A normal functioning dimmer for the dining room…

Fix the split in the front foyer door

Our front foyer door developed a split in the wood near the door knob a few ( 10, 15, who knows… ) years ago. And I attempted to glue it in the past and failed and had since just had some masking tape over it to prevent it catching on things. Don’t judge me. Recently, I cut out the damaged wood, made a patch and glued and fastened the patch in place with brads and sanded it flush with the original door. I even painted it to mostly match.

Got the paper towel off the counter

For a couple of decades our paper towel in the kitchen has been on a vertical dispenser on the counter. I’ve always regretted that dispenser since it was always in the way or behind something. Also, it would move when you tried to pull paper towel off of it. I built a dispenser that could mount to the underside of the cabinet to solve this problem. It is better ( not perfect ) for one handed use, and it solves all the other problems. I used some old book shelf material I had in the scrap pile to build it and I painted it to match the cabinets.

Converted Dana’s bike to grip shift

Even after the complete overhaul and rebuild last year, the shifters on Dana’s bike weren’t working correctly and they were making it hard for her to ride. I got some off the shelf grip shifters and replacement brake levers and replaced the original Shimano stuff. They work great and I was also able to adjust the pull on the brakes to make them a lot more aggressive. The shifters work with any Shimano drivetrain as long as it is a 3x7 setup. I also finally understood derailleur adjustment and was able to dial in the shifting. I got these cool purple grips as well that match the bike frame.

Converted all of the lights in the basement to LED from fluorescent and added a bunch

I have wanted to add more lighting to the basement ( where my workshop is ) and had been dreading trying to lure an electrician out here to do a small job. One day I noticed that there was an old dead fixture up in the joist bay and it was still wired in to the main light switch in the basement. I removed it and got rid of it and converted that wiring to be a switched outlet. I then got these cool four foot LED shop lights that can daisy chain. I was able to add a bunch of them with no issues. Now I can see what I’m doing in the workshop which is wonderful.

I also replaced the old fluorescent bulbs in the existing fixtures with LED conversion bulbs

Next project, shop expansion to do the next next project

After the hall cabinet project I realized that I needed some additional tools to do nicer and more precise projects more easily. I said that I would wait until I came up with a plan for another “upstairs quality” project and then I would expand the shop to do that one. The next next project that came up was to build a custom folding bed/couch for the guest room/library upstairs. It will have a storage chest as the headboard to store bedding and other linens and such. I’ve got the design drawn up and it will allow us to move from a “full” size futon bed to a “queen” size bed in our library. This will be nice for guests and for us since sometimes when one of us has a cold we sleep in there to let the other one get some rest. I’m also going to build some storage into the base as well.

But first I need to expand the shop so I got a nice sliding compound miter saw, a table saw on a folding rolling stand, a drill press, and a belt and disk sanding station. I’m going to build a miter saw bench that will also support the drill press and sanding station. The table saw folds up and gets stored across the room and most likely used in my garage since it won’t be much use in my shop space.

Picture a bench under these tools with a pegboard behind them and eight drawers underneath them ( I really need the storage ) and a nice 30x30 work surface at the end. The front edge of the bench will be kept clear and the miter saw recessed so that it’s deck is flush with the bench top and thus will form the infeed and outfeed for the miter saw. I’m even going to put T-track into the bench top with a removable stop and an embedded ruler on the infeed side for quick measuring and repeated cuts.

Ok, that’s the update, I’ll post about the shop project soon… I’m waiting for materials to be delivered today!

Electronics Project: (epilogue) IR Light Source for Time Lapse photography

I was able to build a battery pack using two three AA modules wired in parallel ( when you wire batteries in parallel they keep the same voltage but they sum their runtime at a given current ). I got a waterproof junction box to keep them safe outside and I mounted that on the back of the original light source case. I ran the wire through a hole between them and soldered them to the battery leads from the old flat rechargeable battery that was in the light originally which I had removed. The two boxes are screwed together with a couple of 3mm x 5mm (or so) screws with nuts and washers. I also sealed around the box with latex seal/adhesive so it is very secure. Here’s what it looks like inside:

Here’s what is inside the battery case… I attached the battery strap to the case with a small screw

With the batteries out to show the wiring holes and screws…

So, as usual with engineering, simpler is better. I ran a test over night last night and the light source ran all night and into the early morning, plenty of time for what I want to do. When I get an interesting video I’ll post it.

Building Project: Weaving note desk

My lovely wife Dana took up weaving a little more than two years ago. She is making more and more complex fabrics on her rigid heddle loom. She often needs notes available to follow the complex pattern and she asked me if I would make an add-on for her loom that would hold them in a convenient position. The constraints were to not be permanently attached to the loom and to not be in the way of any of the weaving or the mechanism of the loom.

I came up with a design where would clamp the desk to the leg of the loom stand and have a standoff that kept it away from the knobs and such on the side of the loom. I measured her usual working angle and matched that with the desk surface, about twenty degrees. I created a clamp out of three pieces of plywood and a t-bolt and knob, two of the pieces slot into the front piece and then the t-bold goes through them and pulls them together against the leg. The front plate provides a mounting surface for the standoff and the upright of the desk. I tripled up the plywood ( maple cabinet grade plywood I had left over from another project ) and created a mounting block at the top. I cut that at twenty degrees and screwed the desk surface to it. I added a bottom edge stop to the desk to allow for a tablet to be placed on it in addition to paper notes.

I made a chipboard template of the clamp parts and cut them on the bandsaw, the slots I cut with the forstner bit and a coping saw and finished the fitting with a wood rasp. I used screws to attach everything in case I needed to make additional adjustments in the future. I sanded all the edges and surfaces and put some paste wax on everything to protect it.

It got a test run tonight and it worked great!

Electronics Project: IR light controller for time lapse camera (part 1)

I’m a software engineer, I’ve had no training in electrical engineering other than hanging around my electrical engineer brother more than thirty years ago. This has not stopped me from attempting to hack an electronic solution to an issue that I was having. The problem was that I bought a time lapse camera which was supposed to support shooting in darkness with infrared light. Which it does. However, it doesn’t have an infrared light source, so you have to provide one. Getting a battery powered IR light source that will last all night is more expense than I wanted. I found an inexpensive IR light source from Polaroid however it has a one hour run time. I noticed that the camera had a port on the side that looked like a flash control cable port… it was labeled as such in the documentation but there was no mention of how to use a flash, how to enable the flash, etc… writing to the company produced no response. I thought perhaps the cheap light source would last all night if it was only on when I was actually taking a picture.

So I got a cheap flash control cable and cut one end off and stripped the wires and using a multi-meter I found that indeed there was a signal there that was in sync with shutter. I remembered that a transistor could be used as a switch and I wondered if anyone made a module for that which I could just trigger using the output of the flash control wire. And thanks to all the STEM classes and such there is such a module and I was able to wire it up between the battery and the light and make the light go on and off using a 9v battery. However, the voltage from the camera trigger was 1000 times too weak to turn on the MOSFET so I then I remembered a thing called an OPAMP which could take a small current and multiply it by a gain. I got one of those and put it between the camera and the MOSFET. I needed a 5v or better power source for the OPAMP so I put two blocks of three AA batteries in series ( which gets you to 8v ) and the OPAMP board had a handy constant 5V out so I could power everything downstream off of that. This also converts the light into having replaceable batteries instead of internal recharging which is faster and easier because you can use one set and charge one set with no waiting.

I could show that the light was going on now when the shutter ( well really focus and shutter ) signal was on, which was great. I was so proud of myself. Then I did a test. I put the whole rig in sealed up box (no light) covered all the red/green led’s on the boards with a small cover box and set up a time lapse with IR of an old mechanical watch with hour minute second hands. I got…. complete blackness. Turns out that the signal to the flash turns off before the shutter actually opens, makes sense because flash units have a specific flash timing to be on for an amount of time after the trigger.

So, I needed a way to keep the light on after the trigger. I thought about perhaps a discharging capacitor? But it seemed like it wouldn’t have time to charge before the shutter? I searched around and found a cool universal timer module that has a trigger mode. It will turn on it’s output and keep it on for a programmable duration, exactly what I need! And it appears it will replace the MOSFET in the circuit I have. I’m waiting for it to be delivered to try again.

I’ll write up the results in part two.

Cheers!

P.S. I’ll share the parts and where to get them etc… IF I get this to work…

Building Project: Weaving work bag stand

My lovely wife Dana has taken up weaving and now spinning. Both activities require having a bunch of small tools and supplies near at hand. Dana came up with the idea of a collapsible work bag/work table that could sit next to her when she was working and then be closed up for storage. She asked me to make it for her and using some measurements from things that she was already improvising to do this I made a measured drawing to figure out the design.

I had some nice 1/2” cabinet grade maple plywood scraps from the cabinet project so I was able to create a chipboard template for the legs and trace them onto the scrap. I had a nice length of 1” dowel that was long enough to make the handles and pivots. I had also just bought a set of Forstner bits and had a 1” one already.

I cut out the legs on the band saw and they came out perfectly. I cleaned up the notches for the stretcher and drilled the through holes and partial holes for the handles and pivots. I clamped my belt sander in the vice and used it to do the rough sanding and knock off the edges, I’m still learning finesse with power sanders but it is getting better. I did the finish sanding with my palm sander and applied a nice wax finish to all of the wood. I assembled the frame with small screws and wood glue. I’m thinking I need a brad nailer because even the smallest screws are a risk for splitting thin material like this especially into the end grain.

Dana made a cool bag out of the top of a pair of recycled jeans from the collection of fabric she keeps for projects. She also made a canvas platform to provide a removable table top for holding tools handy. I created a simple hook on the band saw that rotates on the handle and keeps the bag closed when it is stored.

All in all I think it came out pretty well.

Art Project: Berlin Blues

This is my second digital art project, with some images, words and music… About ten years ago I commuted to Berlin to manage a team there. I really fell in love with Berlin and I learned a lot there and I miss not being able to visit it. I’m getting better at the tools for doing the audio. I especially appreciate the auto-ducking feature that smoothly fades out the music to allow the spoken word track to come through.

Enjoy…

This piece was inspired by my time working in Berlin ten years ago. Just based on how much I think about it and respond emotionally to the pictures, it had a big impact on me. I wanted to mash up the electronica vibe of Berlin with the blues to try to express the feeling of being an alien there but also weirdly feeling at home.

Art Project: I remember every day

I’ve been working on combining images, words and some improvised music into a digital presentation… The whole process is a WIP but I thought I’d just share what I come up with as I go. I’m still figuring out the tools, the workflow, quality, etc…

This piece was inspired by a theme that I think about a lot, memory. I was looking through images I captured while I was commuting by train. The words came to me while I was looking at them. The music is a set of changes that I heard and then modified and a melody that I played while I was watching the sequence of images.

UPDATE: I thought it needed a bass line so I added one in, I like this version better:

Robot Project: Treat dispenser installed on robot

Huge progress on the robot and treat dispenser! They are connected and working together! Thanks to a very helpful suggestion from my wife I was able to implement a simple fix for the clogging problem. I cut some thin flexible plastic from the top of a takeout sushi container and cut one end into fingers. I attached it so that it reaches about one “treat height” above the belt. The fingers brush back extra treats that would get carried forward as a stack due to their stickiness but they don’t allow them to get jammed by the fingers because they are so weak and flexible. You can just see the fingers in this picture:

Detail of anti-clogging solution…

The fingers also make the kicker servo and armature more effective. I added a zip tie around the kicker servo to make it more stable and to transfer more of the energy to the treats. This works good and having run multiple full hopper tests I can confirm that it successfully clears all the treats without jamming.

The next thing I needed to do was to mount the dispenser on the robot and as part of that mount the servo controller and the servo batteries somewhere. I got some nice 1.5cm x 4mm standoffs and drilled and countersunk some holes in the treat dispenser base plate and mounted the controller behind the left side servo. I was able to cut a couple of slots and mount the battery pack using a velcro strap next to the controller.

Controller board mounted using standoffs and the battery pack for the servos mounted using velcro strap.

Two new tools made a huge difference in this process, I got a set of small metric wrenches and a set of coarse and fine files. The wrenches allow the tightening of these tiny fasteners so much better and more easily and the files allowed me to drill out the slots and then remove the rest of the material by filing to create nice clean slots without cracking/burning/destroying the acrylic.

File set, not an expensive one but it works great, the small files on the right are perfect for making slots or fitted holes in acrylic. Just use the brush regularly to clear the file when working with plastic. Also, go slow to not melt the plastic with friction.

Tiny wrenches apparently usually used for working on carburetors. The metric ones are wonderful for tightening the tiny nuts on the robot without mangling them.

I was able to use some of the existing holes in the upper deck of the GoPiGo robot to finally mount the treat dispenser on top of it just behind the camera. Handily it also centers most of the weight of the treat dispenser over the drive axles and it doesn’t seem to make the robot more prone to tipping. I was worried because this particular robot only has a single roller caster in the back.

Using the existing holes in the upper deck of the GoPiGo robot to mount the treat dispenser.

I ran a test with everything integrated this morning and the robot was able to move, turn, use it’s sensors and dispense treats with no problems. Here is the video of the run:

I’m really happy with the progress so far, the next step is to make the software part of this project more usable. After messing around with trying to make the robot autonomous I have decided that it just isn’t up to it in terms of sensors, steering and maneuverability. So, I’m going to implement a dashboard and keyboard controls so I can directly control the robot and treat dispenser remotely via an ssh tunnel.

Robot Project: Acrylic treat dispenser

Over the holidays, after evaluating alternatives for cutting the acrylic and aluminum, I got a bench top band saw.

It has allowed me to make all the parts for the feeder quickly and reasonably straight. I even figured out how to make the treat ramp inside to keep them from getting stuck. I used CA glue to bond everything. That was a little learning curve. My new clamping surface plus some masking tape to avoid gluing the parts to the bench worked great. So, here is the assembled unit:

I'm very happy with how it came out. Next is installing the servos and getting it running under power. The placement is going to be tricky.

Robot Project: Adding pi camera and making a mounting bracket

I’ve started hacking away on a prototype program to have the robot drive around the room and investigate the objects it finds with the ultrasound sensor. Part of that was to take a picture, so I needed to get a camera. Raspberry Pi makes a nice add on camera which just comes with a ribbon cable and the camera card. You can just let the ribbon cable anchor the camera to the upper deck of the GoPiGo robot, but it seemed to be too low so that you’d always take pictures of the ultrasound sensor and also not well anchored so when the robot drove around it would flop back and forth. So I needed to fabricate a bracket.

I decided to make it in two parts, a lower right angle made out of .032” aluminum and an upper mounting plate made of the same 1/8” acrylic sheet that the rest of the body parts are made of. I made the cuts in both the acrylic and the aluminum using my Dremel tool and a cutting disk. It worked pretty well just needing to take my time and not heat the acrylic up too much. The only downside is that there isn’t a way to use a guide ( or shall I say I haven’t figured that out yet ) so the cut edges are a bit erratic. The resulting bracket is charmingly imperfect, but completely functional. I secured it to the upper deck with 8x3mm screws, nuts and a compression washer, the mounting plate is attached to the aluminum angle in a similar manner. I almost had an issue because unlike everything else on the GoPiGo the camera board has 2mm holes. Fortunately I had a couple of 8x2mm screws and nuts and I was able to use them to attach the board to the mounting plate. Because of the inaccuracies of my fabrication I had resigned myself to crooked pictures, but due to a happy accident, my inaccuracies canceled out and the camera ends up quite level.

Now back to debugging my patrol code and adding in the image captures.

Upgrading, music projects etc...

The last week was taken up with upgrading Ubuntu on all of our house/work machines. Going from 18.04 LTS to 20.04 LTS ( and in one case a laptop that was hanging around on 16.04 LTS… ). In general there weren’t any major problems, though there was a bug in Libreoffice Writer that was very bad, so bad I’m surprised they released it, essentially embedded tab characters didn’t work any more, they didn’t indent, you couldn’t enter them, they had no effect, it appeared like they were stripped on file open, though they weren’t. Libreoffice patched this bug, but their patch releases don’t end up automatically upstream in Ubuntu so I had to install the patch manually. The other wonderful quirk is that their patch release doesn’t upgrade the packages installed by the distribution, they install next to it… this forces you to make a whole bunch of changes to launch the correct version. I was not impressed.

I’ve also been working on a music project, I am trying to create some videos with words, imagery and music that I’ve captured, created. This week I was working on themes and writing some of the words down that I’d like to also communicate with the music and the images. That process is helping me with editing and “composing". I put composing in quotes because I’m a very untrained composer with a limited grasp of music theory. What I have is some training in improvisation and a loose understanding of chord progressions, scales and structure. I have been building on that to come up with the structure of the piece and I’ve been recording different sections of it and I plan to work on editing/adjusting those down to a final product.

I’m using google apps presentation software to automatically display the images annotated with words and cues so that I can play and respond to them in real time. My goal is to get to a “draft” finished product so I can understand it’s limitations and then iterate. I’m also getting in a lot more practice and that is in itself a good thing. I tried a lot of different recording/DAW software and I finally ended up going back to Band in a Box 2011.5 (the last version I bought) because it provides some excellent automatic accompaniment bass, drums etc… in multiple styles, and actually has some really nice recording features and a decent notation editor. It runs on Windows, so I have it running on my laptop in a Windows 10 VM and amazingly it keeps up just fine and is able to see the MIDI and Audio devices mounted in Linux. The accompaniment helps me a lot to follow the structure I’ve set up and to stay roughly in time ( I need all the help I can get ).

The process I come up with is probably going to be quite unconventional, but I guess that will be part of what makes it my expression.

Cooking: Fermenting and glass followers...

Since we’ve been getting a farm share from our local CSA at Appleton Farms ( https://thetrustees.org/place/appleton-farms/ ) , I’ve been learning how to ferment things to preserve them ( you can only eat so many beets in one week ). I’ve gotten pretty good at various varieties of pickles and sauerkraut variants based on this very good book Fermented Vegetables: Creative Recipes for Fermenting 64 Vegetables & Herbs in Krauts, Kimchis, Brined Pickles, Chutneys, Relishes & Pastes by Amazon.com Services LLC ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KLNAJ0C/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_HS-lFb6ZBKYVZ )

I had initially gotten a ceramic crock for fermenting, but I found that after a while the salt from the brine would leech into the body of the ceramic because it had un-glazed edges and would crack the glaze from inside. This made it so that you couldn’t really sanitize the crock and mold would get into it and would infect your product. I ended up having to discard the crock.

Now I use glass jars, quart wide mouth jars, and this works great and additionally everything is already in a jar and you can just apply lids and refrigerate when the fermentation is done. The only challenge is having a proper seal and keeping the fermenting vegetables submerged in the brine. I had been using plastic bags filled with water which provided both functions, however it wastes plastic bags… So I found two options for glass “followers” (that is what these weights are called) one is a set of solid glass disks made to fit inside wide mouth jars, and the other is using the jam size ball jars which also fit inside filled with water. Both can be adequately cleaned and are reusable. I use a primary follower of parchment paper ( not having fresh grape leaves handy ) then the weight on top, cover everything with a towel to keep the light out.

I have a batch of beet, carrot, onion, cabbage sauerkraut and some dill pickles going now using both methods. I have high hopes, they were both a lot easier to use than water bags…. I’ll report back…

Software Project: terminal-dashboard, progress...

I’ve made a lot of progress on the terminal based dashboard tool that I’ve been working on. It is out there on github now ( https://github.com/jpfxgood/dashboard ) and I’ve made some pre-releases. It is on pypi as well as terminal-dashboard.

The feature set has increased a lot, it handles getting data for graphs from Elasticsearch, ODBC databases, CSV files, JSON files, generic log files, remote systems via SSH. It is integrated with the system keyring so no credentials need to be stored in the config. I’ve improved the rendering and scaling of the graphs a lot, smart shortening labels, shifting stuff slightly to make axis and labels clear, reducing the number of pie slices for clarity, etc… It has a plugin interface for both graphs and data sources, as yet untested… but I’ll get it working…

Next up is writing a test suite for the system and improving the API and user documentation. There are also some minor features like better y-axis scale choices, better format trade offs as the graphs get compressed, performance improvements, check-pointing some of the log readers so that they don’t have to completely reread everything on startup if shut down for a little while, and JSON record format logs…

In the meantime, I’m running endurance tests as well to see if it’s leaking or has any long running bugs…. I still really like the model and architecture, I haven’t had any major refactors and the number of additions and tweaks to the API are rapidly declining… I think the sub-modules for character graphics, graphs, and data tables and data sources are all going to be useful by themselves and I’ve been careful to keep them very decoupled…

I’ll probably do another pre-release next week…

Cooking...

I’ve been getting back into cooking now that I feel like I have more time and mental bandwidth. I used to experiment a lot more and try new recipes and ingredients, but when my work life got to a certain level of intensity I fell back to more of a rotation of greatest hits and familiar things. Without a work life anymore, I find that it’s easier to take my time and look at a bunch of the cook books I’ve accumulated or search the interwebs for something interesting to cook.

It is also farm share season and the constant influx of a box of vegetables from Appleton Farm helps to drive cooking activities and planning for the week. Making dishes or food products that can be frozen or preserved is a part of this too, we can’t eat all those vegetables in one week, but over the rest of the year we do. Pickles and sauerkraut are also great things to make and enjoy later. I also have a fish share from Cape Ann Fresh Catch and this means that I'll be cooking at least one fish dish every week.

I also like classic dishes done in a classic way, they became classics for a reason, they became cliches due to overuse and losing focus on what was great about them. For example I made a classic Caesar Salad a little while ago from scratch, it was amazing especially with ultra fresh romaine lettuce from the farm. It was nothing like the watery bland stuff that you get in most restaurants nowadays… The umami from the anchovies and egg yolks against the bite of the garlic and the acid from the lemon is just amazing.

Cooking, when you can do it in a relaxed way, is extremely satisfying, the process is engaging, the result happens in a finite time, and it is something you can share and so it is also gratifying beyond just consuming the food. When I was much younger I cooked in restaurants as a short order cook, turning and burning as it were, and I learned how to relate to food, how to prep, how to be confident about the process, and how to multi-task to get things out at the same time. I remember closing the restaurant and feeling completely drained and yet calm after an especially intense shift. It also formed bonds with the rest of the team in the kitchen even if you were very different people, the intensity that you shared drove you together for that time and when you were flowing together and it worked it was a great experience.

Software Project: slides-sound v1.0.0 shipped...

So, the final project that I’m going to convert to Python 3 has shipped. I restructured it to a standard python project, converted it to Python 3, fixed a bunch of bugs and things that just weren’t good… added packaging and did some manual testing. It is here on github (https://github.com/jpfxgood/slides-sound) and from pypi by doing python3 -m pip install slides-sound.

This is really an experiment if anything and I intend to keep iterating on it, so possibly massive changes will come. I’m not doing formal tests for this one because honestly it doesn’t warrant it yet. If it ever stabilizes then I’ll dig in and do that.

There were more changes than I expected because some of the packages I used had changed in unexpected ways, some of the way I was doing things was completely inefficient, and stuff was broken because it was just hacked together ;-). So now it is a lot cleaner and less hacked…

You can check out the readme and the doc for further information…

This is the end of the Python 2 to Python 3 saga for now, there are a few other things that I haven’t published that I may convert in the future, but these are the ones I use most often and they’re published.

Here’s a parting video generated using the slides and music scripts:

Pictures from my several years commuting to Berlin.

Software Project: ped-editor v1.2.0 shipped!

A new feature release of the editor. The feature is that either when you pipe content into the editor like “find ~ | ped” or you use the F10 shell command dialog the buffer will update in the background for as long as the command produces output. You can press Ctrl-F in that buffer and toggle following, i.e. the screen will automatically show you the end of the stream and the latest content. If you want to follow a file on disk you can use “tail -f filename.log” as the command and the resulting buffer can be used to view this information. All of the regular read only buffer commands are available, copying content, searching with regular expressions, etc…

There are new tests since the underlying StreamEditor class is used in the StreamSelect component and so the existing tests caught a lot of side-effects that I had to clean up as I did this. I have to say having sensitive tests has made this whole thing a lot safer, I probably would have pushed my first cut on this in the past and then discovered the problems later. Now, it all works and is covered with regression tests.

I’ve also updated the wiki usage documentation with up to date screen shots and more information about how the editor works.

Software Project: ped v1.1.2, pypi and packaging

I finally built a standard python package for ped and released it to pypi which means it can be installed now by doing: pip install ped-editor ( just make sure that ~/.local/bin is on your path ). It is a sign of my brain recovering from years of being a manager ( and by definition very distracted all the time ) that I figured out the packaging stuff in a few hours. I have to say I looked at it many times over the years and I just didn’t get it so I put it off.

I’ve even started following a software development process, running and adding tests, building documentation, pushing releases. I’ve been the one making other folks do those things, but I haven’t had to do them myself for a while. There was considerable grinding and screeching as those old wheels started to turn again in my head.

Now that I have this project in shape I’m going to shift my attention to the backup software ( https://github.com/jpfxgood/bkp ) and do all these things there. Hopefully it’ll go a bit quicker since it won’t include the learning/relearning that I did on this project.

Also, I need to rehab a bike for my wife, but that is a different thread…

Software Project Python 2to3 continued... 66% coverage, >75% in the core editor...

This has been a very healthy process for the editor code, as I’ve been writing tests I’ve also rewritten code to make it much better than when I originally hacked it up. That is the thing when you’re in a hurry, often you’ll stay on a bad implementation track because you’re “close” to getting it to work. It is nice to go back and have the time and focus to reconsider a bunch of things. The tests themselves are interesting, for example I had to figure out how to resize the terminal window to test the code that resizes all the editor panes in response. That code always annoyed me and had a lot of bugs, now it is rewritten and it is very stable.

I’ve been using the python coverage tool to measure the coverage and it has also helped point out a few modules that aren’t used anymore so I’ve been improving coverage through deletion as well. I’m going to try and get the overall coverage over 70% and I need to make another pass over the minimal redraw logic as well… It still has some odd behaviors…

Then on to the backup and sync scripts that I wrote, it’s going to be interesting to create valid tests for those…

Software Project Python 2to3 continued... 47% coverage, 70% on the core editor...

Whoo… a lot of bug fixing, a lot of test cases, and getting all the test cases to work in both non-wrapping and line-wrapped mode… The cool part is that now when I’ve made some minor improvements, the tests are showing me areas that are impacted by the changes and catching side effects. I should have done this a long time ago. I’m done with the core editor module and I’m going to do the module that manages windows and switches between files and such at a high level next. I’m hoping to get the overall coverage over 60% with this one… we’ll see…

Here’s the latest video capture with the coverage report at the end:

This gets me up to about 47% coverage but 70% coverage of the core editor.