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.

• 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.

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.

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…

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.

step 2

Use the 2″ hole saw and power drill to drill a hole in the Hulk Hands at the point where he himself would be clenching a beer. Drill down about an inch and tear out the foam that has been drilled into. Continue this until you’re about 3 inches down or until a beer bottle fits snugly. Careful not to tear too much out, else you’ll go through to the handhold.

step 3

Look awesome

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.

why I went for gOS:

I got this laptop as a hand-me-down from a company loaded with Windows XP. And it was frustrating. The computer ran very slow when opening programs and took nearly 5 minutes to boot up. Worse, I couldn’t get it to connect to the internet, wired or wireless. Every so often the wireless would work, but at speeds comparable to 56k for a maximum length of 10 minutes. I figured it may have been due to some kind of software loaded on the computer to prevent malware but I could never find any such software to disable. I finally figured I would just upload Linux and hope for the best.

After some research I couldn’t find any sort of definitive advice for which version of Linux I should use. I finally settled on gOS for the fact that it was a lightweight version of Ubuntu (which I’ve used before) and I wasn’t absolutely sure that it was a software and not a hardware problem that caused the slow running of this computer.

version 1.0.1

With the loading of version 1.0.1 I found my computer to be capable of connecting to the internet if I used an ethernet cable but it still had some trouble connecting wirelessly. Trying to setup the wireless connections was very frustrating as it would continually tell me seemingly conflicting information as to whether or not I had the correct password for my wireless network. I eventually gave up on trying to connect wirelessly and stuck to ethernet connections.

While connecting to the internet now worked, Firefox had a tendency to freeze up if I was running either an online video game or if I was watching an embedded video and tried to close the window.

And for some reason I could not control the volume of the speaker. It was just stuck on one setting and refused to change. Come to think of it, the only setting I could change using the Fn key was the screen brightness, and that was only to dim the screen. Once dimmed, I could not get it to turn back up…..

The only other technical problem I really had was that files I saved to the desktop would just not show up. I could still find the file by going through the file browser but when I tried to access the file it would report a fatal error saying “This isn’t suppose to happen”, reset the screen, and the file would show up on the desktop with all the other files rearranged and be fully accessible. Weird.

version gOS 2-beta (gOS Rocket E)

I couldn’t get this version to run off the live CD. Best I could find was that it had to do with the incompatibility of the Vaio’s bios with this version. Skip it. Rocket E is missing several essential functions (detailed here) that are part of Rocket G.

version gOS V2 Rocket (gOS Rocket G)

This is the current version that I’m running and thus far I’m decently happy with it though there are still problems that I’m having:

• The “Avant Window Navigator” does not show up. I have no idea as to why this would be. I haven’t done any of the updates yet and perhaps that will help….. This doesn’t create any real problems as I can still access programs through the gOS button at the top left of the screen, and any windows that I’ve minimized I can still get to by using alt-tab.
• Firefox still has a problem with embedded games or videos and me closing them. I’d say about 20% of the time when I try to close a window with an embedded video or game Firefox will freeze. I just have to force quit and reload Firefox and it works fine again.
• While trying to install programs I am occasionally confronted with one of two error messages
  or I can understand the second error, but the first one I have no idea how to fix. I’ve tried doing what it says but the ’synaptic’ package manager gives me no help and I sometimes get the message even if I have no other program that is similar (as far as I can tell).

Other than that, gOS runs fine on my computer. If anyone has any suggestions on the problems I’ve been having, or any mistakes I’ve made in this post (very probably) let me know in the comments.

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