aklikins

New revision of the card. No big differences except for the slide now includes useful info printed on it, and the instructions go onto the part of the card that doesn't get used.

Paper with a pattern on top, and white on the back seems to work best for engraving. This was cut on the Epilog laser cutter.
Lots of adjustments trying to get things to fold up nicely with the different papers.

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.

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.

Fiddling around with the laser cutter at Techshop. I used inkscape to vectorize some doodles, then cut then out of paper using the Epilog laser cutter at Techshop.

Paper cuts very well, with pretty good detail (see the hatching cut out from the doodle in the front for example). I've tried cutting acrylic as well, and it cuts well too, but in some of the detail areas, it unmelts into a bit of a blob that makes detailed parts harder to extract. Need to try it again with more power to see if it will cut a wider kerf.

I also tried engraving/rasterizing an image. I think it turned out pretty well, almost exactly what I was looking for. It did burn through a little bit in one section, but I could fix that in the image. The image itself started off kind of "pointilist", which I vectorized with some of the settings tweaked a bit so it would blurb some of the points together so it would hold together. Then I "engraved" it instead of cutting it out, but with the power set high enough to burn through the paper.

I'm not sure I understand the point of wide screen monitors. With my useage patterns, about 25% of the screen is wasted, over there, off to the side, full of white space.

Most of the time, I find myself wanting more vertical space than horizontal. Especially, when writing code, or web browsing, or reading email, or running commands in a terminal. Aka, 99.9% of what I do with a computer.

I kind of miss CRT's for that big, almost square aspect ratio. I've been tempted to find a wide screen LCD that I could rotate vertically. Never really been able to get a hardware/software combination that actually worked that way, though in theory, it should be easy.

I think it's about time to put a new desktop machine together (and probably a new laptop as well). So I've been thinking a new monitor setup as well. Currently got a 21" dell.

[And of course, the Civil War nerds will point out the Monitor was actually called the CSS Virginia]



Edit: Real Civil War nerds will point out that I was wrong, and it was the Merrimack that was called the CSS Virginia at the time of the battle.

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?

If there is one skill I have with regards to music, it's that I make can make some really annoying noises.

While driving home, I started thinking about what would be the most annoying musical instrument one could build. More specially, more or less "acoustic" instruments.[1]

The ideas that came to mind were mostly about building wind instruments, and attaching a large number of them to a compressed air source. Kind of like a set of bagpipes, but far more annoying.

A large pressure chamber with say, three dozen slide whistles attached to it. All slightly out of tune. Or a large number of siren whistles. Or both. Maybe a few dozen cheap penny whistles. Or a hundred kazoos.

Something else to put on the list of things to build.

[1] and not including things that are just brutally loud, like a klaxon, or steam whistle, or a Hemi powered siren, or an orchestra of pulse jets, or maybe a fog horn.

I was having a discussion with michael over lunch, about other words for "thesaurus". I could swear I saw one used somewhere that was along the lines of "omnilexigraph" or the like.

Couldn't find anythough, so I created one. It's "lexibus".

Usage example: "'fabiform'? Thats not a real word! It's not even in the lexibus!"

I managed to get a picture of my gloved hand holding a oxy-acetylene torch and cutting through a metal plate into the Durham Herald Sun. It was an article about the Durham Tech Shop and was taken during the oxy-acetylene class. I'd post a link to the article, but the Herald Sun's website seems to be from somewhere in the past.

Tech Shop Durham seem to be making progress getting things setup for the opening, but there's still a lot to do. It take's a lot of work and time. It certainly took us longer to get Rod-O-Rama setup and ready than we expected, and Tech Shop is much bigger.


I've noticed on my blog, that I get more requests to update the spam protection plugin than I get actual spam. I'm not sure if this is good or bad.


If you get a chance, take a look at Not Yet Rain. It's the website for the Not Yet Rain documentary about womens reproductive health in Ethopia. lintqueens been working on getting the site launched for a bit.

I'm not sure why, but it always annoys me when people confuse Talkboxes, vocoders, and auto-tune. So stop doing that.

I managed to get a picture published.



This image of the crowd in the Pentagon parking lot for the Rolling Thunder parade was used in the latest issue of Motorcycle Consumer News in an article by Glynn Kerr

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.

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.

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 ;->

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.

Last night I got a weird call from where I get my glasses. The message was "You need to come by the store to pick up the glasses you ordered in June". Slightly odd. I did order glasses in June, and picked them up shortly there after. Obviously someone made a mistake of some sort.

So this morning I get out of bed, put my glasses on, and manage to break them. The side piece broke off of the frames. I barely touched them.

So now I have to call the glasses place and try to figure out what they are confused about. I tell them that I have the glasses I ordered, so something is odd. Then I get to tell them that I need to come by anyway since I broke that pair this morning. More confusion.

Of course, they don't actually have replacement frames available, so I'm stuck with my old pair that are scratched all to hell and are now driving me crazy. There's a limited warranty, so I can get the frames replaced.

Since the old glasses are bothering me, I try to fix the old ones. That didn't work too well. Glues don't really like attaching nickel alloy to nickel alloy. Even http://www.thistothat.com/ doesn't offer much help. Epoxy's don't work since the contact area is so small. I could glob a big pile of JB Weld on there, but I don't think I could get the lenses out then. Other even less wise repair technique flash into my head. Brazing nickel is unlikely to work.

I'm tempted to wrap a big gob of wire or tape around it. That would be a nice touch, since I'm going to https://opensource.ncsu.edu/FossFair2009 (aka, linux/open source conference at NCSU, aka, NerdCon).

Looking for apps and websites to help run a small business is painful. It seems to be one of those subjects that SEO tends to make impossible to find actual information.

Anyone tried shoeboxed.com? Looks to be interesting, especially for less organized folks like myself.

Anyone have any advice on what works? I'd prefer web based apps, and hosted apps even more. Anything good for bookkeeping, contact management, invoicing, etc?

On the few rare occasions I decide to post something, I can never decide where to post it. My blog? Livejournal? Twitter? Facebook?

Too many options.

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?

Diebold sued over GPL infringement in voting machine software

Just to continue the weird open source/election/government posts.