Bars of Ham

From Make: Volume 8

So I just finished Orly the Ornithopter from Make: volume 8 and I have some tips. If you’re interested in the project just follow the link and you can download the plans as a pdf.

On to the tips:

• Buy the accelerator (L). It’s worth the extra 5-6 bucks. Without it it’s much messier and much harder to get the pieces to stay in the spot you want them to stay in. If you can’t get accelerator or really don’t want to spend the money, then use the glue stick (M) to help hold the piece in place while the CA dries.
• 16 lb. paper (G) (as far as I can ascertain) is pretty much standard printer paper. Please let me know if I’m wrong about that.
• On step 1c., you should use the glue stick (M). Basically, I coated the whole 2″x2″ piece of 16 lb. paper (G) with it before I started to roll it around the music wire (E) (the music wire is simply a guide). It enables the paper to stay tight as you roll and gives you the ability to remove the music wire before you coat the paper with CA (K).
• They give the wrong measurement for the “crank/front motor attachment wire” on the materials page. I used about 5″ of music wire (E) and simply cut off the excess once it was through the crankshaft tube in step 1e.
• The “Full-scale templates” they give online is not correctly to scale, use the image file I’ve uploaded instead. It’s of much higher resolution and it’s the proper scale. I’ll make and upload the template if there’s anyone interested.

I was a little disappointed when I first launched the little guy. I would wind it up, throw it, and it seemed to actually go less far than if I simply just threw it without the rubber band. For the best effect, don’t throw it. Instead, wind it up and let it fly away from your hand. I was able to get about 3 times the distance with the latter method.

My next goal is to possibly motorize my ornithopter. I have some of those toy helicopters that I’ve received over the last few Christmases (that’s suppose to be the plural of Christmas) and I’ve since broken the rotor of one of them. Hopefully, I can rip the guts out and make a remote controlled ornithopter. I’ll post it up if I do.

After an extremely frustrating battle with hosting, databases, web masters, and money I am finally back online. Lessons to be learned here:

• Read the fine print of promotions
• Backing up your website via FTP is NOT the same as backing up your database
• Don’t take a good situation for granted

It’s not all bad though. I now have complete and full control of my site so I no longer need to rely bother someone when I need something done. I think I’m gonna do a bit of changing to this site and update some of my projects/ideas/accomplishments so that this site actually better reflects who I am, or at least how I want others to see me as…

Sorry to everyone who was asking for the Hardy Heron graphic. I didn’t have any access to it for a while. I now have a backup of it so it shouldn’t be a problem again.

I love physics engine puzzle games. You know the ones. You draw the contraptions, slap on some powered wheels, and try to reach the goal. For me, it really draws on the innate desire to solve problems in new and creative ways. They always remind me of the times I spent as a kid building dams for rainwater and seeing how high I could get the water to go before the dam gave way, or using K’Nex and model rocket engines to try and build a jet boat that would make it all the way across the lake.

Anyway, here’s a (small) list of all the games I could find online that provided this kind of entertainment:

Fantastic Contraption

This is one of my favorites. Get the pink ball/square to the big pink goal using power wheels, free wheels, and two different kinds of connecting rods. There are some amazing designs that people have come up with to beat the levels, everything from catapults to tanks and even using gravity alone to solve the problems. Incredibly easy to spend hours here. My only gripe is that there’s no “undo” button. Link.

Magic Pen

Somewhat similar to Fantastic Contraption but with a much different feel. In this one you have a “magic pen” that you use to draw ramps, circles, hinges, etc. to get the little red circle/square to the red flag but you don’t get to use any power. This one is purely gravity based. Link.

Coconut Run

This one comes courtesy of Johnson Controls. Your goal is to get all of the coconuts to the shredder as fast as you can using powered and free wheels as well as two kinds of connecting rods. I don’t fully understand how this game directly relates to the company’s message of sustainability through ingenuity but oh well.

Though it’s much less refined than the others it’s still fun. I wish they would add a retry button so that you don’t have to rebuild your whole contraption from scratch everytime. Then again, this company’s goal is not to build a great game but to attract attention to their message. Link.

If you know of any other games similar to these post them in the comments and I’ll be sure to add them to the list.

I switch between various distros of linux often. The most annoying part is losing all my data and having to resetup my home directory the way I want it. Carthik from Ubuntu Blog has an easy write up on how to transfer your home directoy to it’s own partition. That way you can continously switch out distros to your hearts content. He writes:

Having the “/home” directory tree on it’s own partition has several advantages, the biggest perhaps being that you can reinstall the OS (or even a different distro of Linux) without losing all your data. You can do this by keeping the /home partition unchanged and reinstalling the OS which goes in the “/” (root) directory, which can be on a seperate partition.

But you, like me, did not know this when you first installed Ubuntu, and have not created a new partition for “/home” when you first installed Ubuntu. Despair not, it is really simple to move “/home” to its own partition.

Read on at his blog…

Although this idea was not mine, nor was it even built by me, I feel compelled to share it with the world since Ricky (the genius behind this idea) is too lazy to put this online himself.

As I’ve said, I did not build this. I did help Ricky build it however. In fact it was in my house and I took the pictures. I believe this entitles me to at least post it online.

materials needed:

• hulk hands
• power drill
• 2″ hole saw
• cold beer

step one

Obtain your Hulk Hands. You might have to search around on ebay or someplace like that because I don’t think they sell these at stores too much anymore.

continue reading…

For those of you who have visited the Ubuntu online store since Hardy Heron came out, you’ve undoubtedly seen the Hardy Heron t-shirt design. It’s a gorgeous design and a t-shirt I’d want even if I’d never heard of Ubuntu. But the two big problems I’ve had with obtaining the shirt were 1.) the t-shirt costs nearly $30.00 and 2.) they sold out extremely quickly.

Since Ubuntu rolls out with a new version every 6 months (next is Intrepid Ibex) I knew my chances were slim that I’d get a hand on one of those sweet t-shirts. Since these guys were open source I figured it wouldn’t hurt to at least ask for the “source file” for the t-shirt design. Here was their reply:

Hi Devin,

Thank-you very much for your enquiry and sorry for the delay in getting back to you.

Unfortunately you are correct, we will be brining out the Intrepid Ibex shirts at the end of this month so we will no longer be producing the 2nd edition mens Hardy Heron T-shirts.

I have attached an EPS of the hardy heron design. Hopefully you can use this to produce a T-shirt for yourself.

Keep spreading the Ubuntu love.

Warm regards,

The Canonical Store Team

So now, for all of you out there that wanted one of these shirts as well, here’s the file they sent to me.

So I own a Sony Vaio VGN-S460P and am in no way particularly sufficient at the computer, let alone Linux (thus why this page did little to help me). But with the amount of difficulty I had obtaining information about my laptop and it’s compatability with Linux I figured I’d post about my experiences.

continue reading…

Damn, I didn’t realize before how low quality this video is……