Category: Life
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I’ve Got Bees!
Previously, I posted about about having hives. Not content to stop there, I have filled the hives with bees! I bought three nucs and moved them into my hives on a dreary Saturday. (After taking this picture, I added another five empty frames to fill the rest of the space.) The nucs were positively buzzing.…
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How to Make Your Very Own Kidney Stone Paperweight
On today’s episode of Finkstructables, I’m going to be walking you through the steps to make your very own kidney stone paperweight. Step 1: Create a kidney stone. I made this stone with my right kidney, but you could use your left one if you like. Now, you want the stone to be large enough…
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I Built a Treehouse
After we moved into our new house last month, my kids started asking for a treehouse. I told them I’d need to see some plans before I could get started, and the next morning, I found this on my workbench: Fair enough. The previous owners said that there had previously been a tree fort built…
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I Told Some Jokes
Every year at Automattic’s company-wide meetup, everyone is required to give a “flash talk” — a four-minute presentation on any (any) topic of their choosing. For a few years, I’ve been thinking of using my four minutes to try standup comedy, and this year, I finally did. All of the jokes are original material, and…
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What’s Old is New Again… and Then Old Again
My father-in-law built this hutch in the 1980s, and after being used as a bookshelf for twenty years, it sat unused in a rabbit shed. My wife asked me to repair it and refinish it. Here’s the main problem: one of the legs broke and had been replaced by a piece of scrap. Such an…
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…And Some Benches
After I finished our kitchen table, I started on two benches: one for each long side of the table. At the last minute, my wife and I decided (a.k.a., my wife decided) to include some storage areas in the benches too. Just like with the table, I started with a design in OpenSCAD: (And just…
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I Built a Table
Before we moved, we sold our kitchen table. We had bought it new a few years ago; it was expensive, but it got so thoroughly scratched and dinged up (and it couldn’t be refinished, since it was basically a plasticky veneer over fiberboard) that we didn’t want to bring it with us. So we sold…
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I Conquered the Ottoman Empire
My wife and I bought an ottoman seven years ago; it was upholstered in some sort of faux leather that was immediately torn by the vacuum cleaner. Over the years, the top began to crack, and more tears appeared on the sides. Buying another ottoman wasn’t in our budget, but neither was staring at the…
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Published Again: WOOD Meets Plastic
The backhoe that I printed in plastic last year is featured in the May 2015 edition of WOOD Magazine. To complete the circle of irony, all of my future woodworking projects will be published in Plastics News.
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Dies Irae: A Composition for Wind Ensemble
In 1998, when I was 14, I wrote a song for wind ensemble: ten brass/woodwind parts and three for percussion. I just recently found the original sheet music (which I think I made using Finale 97), and I transcribed the entire thing again so that I could share it here. It’s called Dies Irae (“Day…
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Printing Construction Equipment for Fun
For Father’s Day, my wife and kids got me this “Construction-grade Backhoe Loader” kit from WOOD Magazine. The kit contains hardware and wheels; you build the rest of the backhoe yourself: I planned on doing this project with my sons (ages 5 and 3) until I realized that the fine detail woodworking involved would bore…
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My Minneapolis Table Has Found a Forever Home
I’m happy to announce that my Minneapolis table has found a home at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
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Data Mining My Family Tree
I wanted to see what trends I could extract from my family tree, so I started writing a collection of scripts to read, manipulate, and extract stats from GEDCOM files.
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Does Minnesota really have more shoreline than California?
There’s a popular piece of trivia that says that Minnesota, ostensibly due to 10,000+ lakes, has more shoreline than California. Sometimes, the ante is upped and Minnesota is claimed to have more shoreline than California, Florida, and Hawaii combined. Other times, it’s simply “Minnesota has more than 90,000 miles of shoreline.” According to Explore Minnesota…
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Eggs and Toothpicks
In our high-school physics class (a dozen years ago), our fun year-end project was to construct a container out of toothpicks and Elmer’s glue that could prevent an egg from cracking when dropped from a height of about ten feet. The idea was to build toothpick crumple zones around the egg such that the egg’s…
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I built a Minneapolis table
Earlier this year, I had an idea to build a table that is an inverted 3-D model of a metropolitan downtown. Take a bunch of 1×2 boards, cut them to scale lengths of the buildings in downtown Minneapolis, glue them together, and you’d have something like this: Invert it, and you can see the city…
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In which I forge a simile
I was talking with my wife tonight about the shutdown of Google Reader; she uses it heavily and relies on a number of features that aren’t all found in the alternatives. She was worried that on July 1st, she’ll be forced to settle for something that doesn’t meet all of her needs. My reply? “The…
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Welcome to Twenty Thirteen
No, not the year, the theme! Twenty Thirteen will be the default theme in WordPress 3.6, but in order to help test it ahead of time, I’ve already enabled the trunk version of it here on my blog. I also took a few minutes to customize one of the default headers so as to give…
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Work with me here.
No really, work with me.
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How I manage my digital home videos
In which I wonder when I’ll have time to watch any of it.