12” board sawn by hand and eye - not bad!

What happens when I work at home.

Bandsaw has arrived!

The known is finite, the unknown is infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land.

— T.H. Huxley

Random photo of me at work

Mariner’s star

I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.

— Albert Einstein

The bitterness of poor quality lingers long after the sweetness of a cheap price is forgotten.

— Anonymous

I just tumbled!

I’ve recently noticed some big names in the design community getting on the Tumblr wagon these days so I thought I’d give it a try. When I redesigned my blog a few months back I noted what I hoped it would become—a stream of everything going on across all my various sites. Well, it looks like that’s exactly what Tumblr is doing (although I haven’t seen any flickr integration yet).

So I’ll give it a shot. The first step will be somehow importing all of my old stuff here, updating my domain, and getting myself to post something more than once every couple months.

I currently use Jekyll to keep up my existing blog, but it’s less-than-easy to post new entries, I have to admit. While I like the simplicity (just create a new text file, write Textile or Markdown, build and upload), it’s on my laptop (which I don’t always have immediate access to) and messing with the syntax gets tiring. Here I can post from wherever and post whatever I like, from full-blown blog posts to just an image. Neat.

Hopefully this will become a place I can point family to and keep them up-to-date (did I mention I have a baby on the way?).

Woodworking is like making a 3D puzzle

Woodworking is taking over more and more of my free time. I was working on my latest project at school this evening and thought about how woodworking is really just a giant puzzle, but in three dimensions.

The difference is you make the pieces yourself and there’s no picture on the box to help—you create that too. It’s very challenging and very rewarding. Sketchup is a great way to visualize this complex combination of puzzle pieces. Flipping into x-ray mode shows you the insides of your pieces, specifically the joinery (assuming you took the time to model it):

It’s hard to believe that it’s possible to keep track of all that and actually make it out of wood. But, slowly but surely it comes together. You end up with a lot of saw dust, wood chips and a few boards that are within thousands of an inch of where you wanted them. In most do-it-yourself projects around the house, 1/16th of an inch is about as accurate as you need to be. But in fine furniture you really do deal with thousands of an inch. And it’s actually easy to do with good tools. Taking off half a thousandth of an inch is common.

Back to our puzzle. What if after about 10% of your puzzle is assembled you can’t really count on the picture any more? As the pieces of your project start coming together there are always slight differences in widths or heights from your plan. These add up as you assemble your project. So you need to compensate for it. You start taking measurements off the pieces themselves and count less and less on your plans. By the time you’re done you aren’t even using your original project diagrams any more—the project itself becomes your reference.

Woodworking has been around almost as long as we have and it’s amazing how much there is to learn. But apply those time-tested techniques and, after tens or hundreds of hours, you don’t have a puzzle any more but a box or a table or a chair that you made yourself using only your hands and mind, and with little care will outlive you and even your children.

encosion - Ruby Library for the Brightcove API

I’m working on a project at work that allows a user to upload videos. We use Brightcove to host and present our video so I wrote a little library for working with their API. It’s called encosion and it’s over at Github . I haven’t completely duplicated the functionality of theirAPI yet since all I needed to do was read and write video, but I encourage others to contribute and add on to the project!

Ruby library for the new Google Analytics API - Gattica

Just released a new Ruby library on Github called Gattica . Gattica is a gem that lets you talk to the newly released Google Analytics API . Check it out and let me know what you think!

Gasohol library released - easily search a Google Appliance Server with Ruby

Another release today, this time it’s a small Ruby library for searching a Google Appliance Server called Gasohol . I’ve been working on a prototype search at my job as a full Rails app, but I removed the part that searches and parses results from the GSA and open sourced it.

As always, check out the readme for usage instructions. I plan to turn this into a gem eventually, but for now you’ll need to pull the files down manually and drop into the rest of your code. More to come!

Radiant extension for searching flickr

I’ve just released an extension for Radiant CMS which lets you search flickr and returns an unordered list of the thumbnails that match. The extension is listed in the Radiant Extension Registry and is hosted on its own page on Github . Just create a directory in/vendor/extensions called something like flickr and drop the extension in there. Restart Radiant and you’re good to go!

Check out the README for usage.

Launch! Sketchup for Woodworkers.com

For the past year and a half now I’ve taken up woodworking as a pretty serious hobby. I’m currently enrolled in my second woodworking class at Palomar College and a major part of the class will be designing our own project from scratch. Using Google Sketchup is an option but not many of the students know it (and I don’t envy someone using a 3D software package for the first time). I’ve been using Sketchup for a while now and wanted to share what I’ve learned with the class.

So this past weekend I hunkered down with Sketchup and Photoshop and put a site together. Sketchupforwoodworkers.com will be a resource of tutorials and more that are specifically designed for woodworkers just starting out, or ready to move to the next level, with Sketchup. Even if you’re not interested in building your own bedroom set but have always wanted to dip your toes into 3D, check it out!

Technical Details The site is powered by Radiant and hosted by the fine folks at Linode.