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Today’s CNC Carving: A Chisel Rack
In today’s “new meets old” news, I’ve used my CNC router to carve a rack for my chisels. I designed the rack in Easel, Inventables’s CAD/CAM software, which only took a few minutes. The chisel holders are just circles superimposed on rectangles to allow each individual chisel to fit vertically in the rack, and the…
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Generating Dovetails in OpenSCAD
I’ve written an OpenSCAD library for generating dovetail pins and tails. No longer will beautiful dovetail joints be solely in the domain of skilled woodworkers; now, anyone with a 3-D printer or CNC router can participate too. Include it in your OpenSCAD script like so: use <dovetails.scad>; dovetail_pins() will generate just the pins of a…
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Today’s CNC Carving: Doll Bunk Bed Insert
My wife and I decided that we were spending far too much money on factory-carved objects, so we bought our own CNC router — a 1000mm X-Carve from Inventables. I finished setting it up today, and the first carving on the agenda was a replacement insert for my daughter’s doll bunk bed: The bed broke…
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Improve your Christmas gift opening with Randomizer
My wife and I wanted to find a way to do an orderly one-at-a-time Christmas gift opening this year rather than the usual everyone-at-once free-for-all, but while also still keeping all the kids mentally present, rather than having them zone out until it was their turn. We decided to randomly choose the next person to…
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Ryuki, a magazine variation on the Ryu WordPress theme
I’ve been using the beautiful Ryu theme by Takashi Irie on this site for a couple of years, but I’ve always wanted to have the homepage display more than just my latest posts. To address this, I’ve written a child theme for Ryu that allows you to select categories to feature on the homepage alongside…
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Alexa, start a new post called, “I’m blogging this with my voice.”
I’ve written and published an Alexa skill that lets you check your blog notifications, moderate comments, and start new draft posts on your WordPress.com or Jetpack-enabled blog, all by speaking to any Alexa-enabled device. The skill is called “Blog Helper“; you’ll find it in the Skills section of your Alexa app or by saying, “Alexa,…
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I Built a Tool Rack and Custom Tool Holders
We moved into a new house this summer, and it has a separate workshop with a built-in workbench. As I unpacked my tools, they ended up on the workbench in no particular order: If I ever wanted to be able to find any of my tools or have space to use them, I needed to…
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Reenact is dead. Long live Reenact.
Last November, I wrote an iPhone app called Reenact that helps you reenact photos. It worked great on iOS 9, but when iOS 10 came out in July, Reenact would crash as soon as you tried to select a photo. It turns out that in iOS 10, if you don’t describe exactly why your app…
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“Alexa, just play along with the joke.”
One of the biggest complaints in the Alexa skill development community is that the language required to invoke a third-party skill is so stilted. Instead of being able to say, “Alexa, what’s the temperature outside?”, you have to say something like, “Alexa, ask WeatherBot 3000 what the temperature is outside.” It adds a gatekeeper layer;…
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I wrote my first Alexa skill… almost.
I wrote my first skill for Amazon’s Alexa-enabled devices. (A “skill” is a way to add functionality to Alexa; other platforms would call it an add-on, plugin, or extension.) It was supposed to be a way for your kids to find things to do when they’re bored. Here’s how my blog post about it was…
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I made shields out of satellite dishes
I recently had occasion to remove four satellite dishes from my roof that will never be used again. My 7-year-old son asked what I was going to do with them; I said I’d probably throw them in the trash. He said, “Or you could make some shields…” So I made some shields. It turns out…
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Programming My House: Multi-Circuit 3-Way Switches
I’ve been outfitting my home with “smart home” devices: light switches that I can turn on my with phone (or voice, via Amazon’s Alexa), hinges that report when doors open and close, and motion sensors that report activity around the house. I use Samsung’s SmartThings hub, which provides access to a handful of official “SmartApps”…
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Interpr.it Will Be Shutting Down
In which I give up on my favorite domain name.
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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 Built a Tilt-Out Trash Can Cabinet
Just looking for the plans to make this? You can get the PDF plans for this double tilt-out garbage can cabinet on Etsy or download the SketchUp file for free. I’m going on a work trip later this month, and Christina asked me if I would be able to build something to hide the kitchen…
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Today’s Functional Print: Twist-In Shelf Supports
In today’s “shake it up baby” news, I’ve printed some hard-to-find twist-in shelf supports. The shelves in our new living room have vertical metal tracks that don’t just accept a push-in support clip; the support must be turned 90º in order to interlock with the track. These supports aren’t sold at any of the national…
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This is a post. It’s a post about a post.
We just moved into a new house, and the 20-year-old signpost is showing its age. It had deteriorated at the bottom, so it was no longer set in a hole and was just leaning against a tree. I decided to restore it and make use of a gift that the previous homeowners had left us.…
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Create LEGO-compatible Angle Plates with LEGO.scad
In response to a comment here, I wrote the first OpenSCAD module for generating complex brick shapes using my LEGO.scad project. LEGO.scad is great for creating bricks and wings of all shapes and sizes, but it isn’t suitable for making complicated shapes like angle plates. LEGO sells 90º angle plates (pictured); the new module can…
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Export iMessages and SMS conversations as HTML
A couple of years ago, I explained how to get instant message conversations exported out of iChat as HTML files. Now it’s 2016, and Messages has replaced iChat, and iMessages have replaced all interpersonal communication. So how do you get HTML transcripts of your iMessages and text messages? Here’s how: with my new OSX Messages…
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New WordPress Plugin: Unpredictable Image Filenames
I’ve written a new WordPress plugin to help protect uploaded images from being accessed just by guessing the URL. Many cameras and smartphones number their images in a predictable format. For example, iPhones use the format IMG_0001.jpg. If you include IMG_0345.jpg in a blog post, an unsavory third party could start regularly trying to access…