Business card caliper
This is a project I've been experimenting with at Techshop Durham. It is a laser cut business card that folds up to create a working caliper. I'll probably make some for myself, Rod-o-Rama, and lintqueen.
The card in "ready to hand out" mode
Card assembled, ready to use. These particular examples were actually cut out of paint chip cards (lintqueen's idea).
After snapping out parts.
Folding over the slide
Next step in assembly.
Assembly completed.
In action, measuring an 8mm hex key. Accuracy and precision are not too bad for something folded out of paper.
It's cut and engraved with the epilog laser cutter at Techshop Durham. Initial design scratched out on paper, transferred to Inkscape, final tweaking in Corel Draw (actualy, lots of tweaking, since it did a horrible job importing the svg).
It still needs some refinements, like better instructions and possibly an illustration or two. I have some minor aesthetic tweaks in mind as well, but this version is mostly complete.
The corel draw source file is here. That file could use some cleanup, and I'd like to get it back into a open format like svg, but that will do for now. Consider it under Creative Commons.
Business Card Caliper by Adrian Likins is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.adrianlikins.com.
N sources of nerd guilt
Things that cause tech guilt.
- I should backup more often.
- I should use any/stronger crypto on everything.
- I should really change my password
- I should blog/twitter/facebook/otherwise broadcast desperate attempts to get people to pay attention to me more
- I should blog/etc less
- I should update this system
- I should really automate this task
- I should write this code using WhizBangTech instead of the way that works and I actually know.
- I should optimize this code
- I should document this.
- I should file a bug report about this.
- I really should refactor this code.
ring ring, fedoraphone!
I managed to get one of my machines installed with a os version I didn't want, and no way to change it. Normally, this means it's time to koan/cobbler to get it re-provisioned. But I couldn't log into the machine to do anything. I could of reinstalled it from a cd/dvd, but I hate burning cd/dvd's for that. I could of written an image to usb key and installed from that, but I didn't have any with me.
So I decided to try what Mark Cox; did and try to boot it from my phone. I more or less just followed the steps he mentioned, though I had to get some 3rd party software to expose the storage card as a usb device.
But that aside, it worked. Not the fastest way to boot, but it got the live image running so I could do a hard drive install. Kind of cool. Wonder if there is anyway to support i386/x86_64 live images on the same card?
video killed the irc star
Red Hat Magazine Spotlight on Func
Video put together by Red Hat in which Seth Vidal, Michael DeHaan and I comment intelligently about func.
Or at least, that's what the clever editing will hopefully lead you to believe.
it will blend
Spent most of Sunday trying to learn how to use Blender (Blender the 3d modelling app, not the home appliance. I've already gotten my KACBO [Kitchen Aid Certified Blender Operator certification]).
I knew it was a fairly impressive app, just from seeing what the kids did at the Red Hat High blender course a few years ago.
It's not the easiest thing to learn how to use, especially since I haven't really tried any 3d apps in about 10 years. The last time I tried it, it was all CSG based apps for building models for POV-RAY. Blender is mostly a mesh based modelling tool, like most modern 3d apps.
The main motivation being a combination of sites that offer web based 3d printing like shapeways.com and the possibility of Techshop Durham getting a 3d printer in the future.
I only made it through a couple of the tutorials so far, but it's been fun. Just need to figure out something cool to design and print.
gum
I posted a small script I use to help manage the git repo's of func to github. It's named gum[1].
The basic idea is you include a gum.conf config file in your repo, that defines where you can find all of the repo's and branches of the project in question. It's got a couple of commands to add list the repo's, add a repo, or add all of the repo's. It always names the branch in the form remotename-branchname.
I wrote it since it seemed I would end up with a different version of the git repo on every machine I used, and I got tired of tracking down remote and branch names to add them to each src checkout I was using.
[1] mainly to annoy skvidal ;->
reading is hard
I read a lot of mailing lists. Mostly for various open source software projects. Most of them for work.
It would be cool to have a mailing list summary page. The page would scan the mailing lists, and post the content most likely to need attention. For software projects, this is stuff like:
- Patches (http://ozlabs.org/~jk/projects/patchwork/ does this for patches to some degree)
- urls to bug reports
- urls to pastebin or gists sites that are likely to contain errors or patches
- things that look like error messages (segfaults, stack traces, etc)
- links to SCM (either direct urls, or urls to web interfaces, github, bitbucket, etc)
Mailing list archive software could probably do this. Mailman has support for "topics" that are defined by regex's. But the interface is poor.
And of course, an RSS feed for all of the above would be nice.
wrt54g firmware
I'm setting up an old linksys wrt54g router with an open firmware. It's currently got the latest version of <a href="http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato">Tomato</a> installed.
Anyone have any preferences for openwrt/etc and/or why?
shell history meme
Just thought this was kind of interesting.
work machine, user
[alikins@grimlock ~]$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -nr|head
283 git
259 cd
173 ls
69 vim
36 su
19 cat
12 git-branch
11 man
10 cp
9 grep
work machine, root
[root@grimlock alikins]# history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -nr|head
123 make
109 rpm
87 ls
81 certmaster-ca
78 vim
76 func
64 cd
53 cat
44 yum
37 /etc/init.d/funcd
conFUD
The main day of the fudCON talks were today. Seemed to go pretty well. I pitched two sessions, one on OLPCs/Asus EEEs/ultraportables, and another on func.
The OLPC session was more of a meetup/get together than a talk, and seemed to go pretty well. Unfortunately, it got scheduled against the Fedora.tv/Vaniv/Percolote talk, so I missed that.
My real talk was func, and the talk seemed to go well. I tried to keep the slides pretty slim and lightweight, and breezed though them pretty fast, but I think it went okay. I didn't seem to get any of the vaguely aggressive questions in the Q&A these sort of talks usually get, so I'll take that as a win.