Onetouch Delica 3D Printable Replacement Cap
Downloads
Story
We’ve gone through many of these and it’s always the same part that breaks: 
Since the whole thing costs $20, I figured I’d build a 3D printable model of the dumb piece of plastic that is the cap.
After a few iterations, mass production time
And voila:
works like a charm.
2 Chimney house
Things are getting serious
Over and Under
My brother & I just spent a tough week end tackling 2 projects which are needed to take the house addition through next Winter.
The first project was to cut a hole through the roof for a stove pipe to come out. This will allow us to hook up a second stove: the alpiner. Woodstoves are very low tech and unlikely to break, but I’ll be relieved to have a backup source of heat. At this point we have no idea how much or even if we’ll need to fire both stoves, the addition will be fully insulated for this Winter when it wasn’t for the last one.
High, slippery & dusty, but with a nice view on our energy independence
And our maple syrup independence 🙂 
While I’m up there enjoying the views
When I designed the house addition, I framed a section in an odd way so as to be able to pop out the roof and grow half a floor. I’m not sure if we’ll ever do it but I wanted to have the option. Being up there is a great reminder why.
Ok let’s get to the business at hand, a big hole
I did this one with full climbing gear, I have no idea how I did the previous one without.
I have yet to take a picture of it with the flashing, I’ll be back up in a couple of days to put the cap on.
2nd horribly shitty project, insulating the floors.
from this
to this 
We spend the hole day working in the dirt and against gravity, it sucked just as much as I remember from when we last did it to the original tiny house. Here we’re covering everything with plywood.
Thank you to my brother for suffering through 2 rewarding yet miserable days, to Russ for the climbing equipment, and to Dan for the reciprocating saw.
Trying my hand at woodpile art
although “art” is a big word for this, I’m still pretty happy about it for a first attempt :).
If it’s not keets, it’s chickens
We ordered 12 more Rhode Island Reds, they will be our 3rd “batch”. They are indeed a good breed in the cold. They arrived with their beaks trimmed which is 100% barbaric and we will never order chickens from this place again. The old timer farmer we had gotten them from thus far stopped doing it so we had to look for alternatives. It didn’t even occur to us that this could happen, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised when stepping out of a personal interaction with a local farmer, and into one with an out of state large scale breeder. This shall serve as a great reminder to not ever do that for chickens and anything regarding food or animals. Fuck these guys.
Shrooms
The past few days have been amazing for mushroom of all sorts. The diversity of mushrooms within a few square feet is amazing.
The only one we looked up because it looked so peculiar: American Caesar Amanita.
A day later, same mushroom:
Yoink
“I’m gonna have me some of these”
Random Caterpillar
I stumbled upon this little guy climbing with all his might.
The Wordiest Word
With Markov chain based random word generation, I essentially have tables of the probabilities for letters sequences. With this I’ve always wanted to know what the most English word was. The word with the highest probability of each letter following its predecessors.
I finally bit the bullet and produced it; well them, because it varies depending on the corpus & depth used. All in all it’s not that impressive, just kind of cool to know. I don’t know what I was expecting, some amazing word that would rock my socks off.
Without further ado, here they are:
| Corpus | Depth | Wordiest Word |
| basic_english_words | 1 | st |
| basic_english_words | 2 | st |
| basic_english_words | 3 | struction |
| basic_english_words | 4 | statement |
| basic_english_words | 5 | store |
| unabridged_english_dictionary | 1 | prerererererererere… |
| unabridged_english_dictionary | 2 | press |
| unabridged_english_dictionary | 3 | press |
| unabridged_english_dictionary | 4 | preconcer |
| unabridged_english_dictionary | 5 | preconcertification |
-1 racoon
After the keets were taken out by a racoon, we bought a trap. We left store bought corn in there for weeks, but the racoon has standards and prefers local organic stuff. So instead it destroyed some of our corn plants not 10 feet away from the trap. As with the keets, leaving 80% the food untouched. Their modus operandi: destroying everything and taking a couple of bites is extremely enraging.
The day I found our half eaten corn cobs on the ground, I decided it was time for the big guns. I opened a can of super fancy French canned fish we reserve for special occasions.
I reluctantly shared a tiny bit of it with the trap, and special occasioned the rest myself.
It had been many nights of failure, but this stuff is potent, and so the very same night, the racoon was trapped. Proving once again that French food is to die for.
Notice how it pulled inside 30′ of the string I had attached to the trap’s handle and proceeded to gnaw and pee on it. It’s only fair that it would spend all night being a jerk under the circumstances.
I had setup the trail cam next to the trap,
[mejsvideo mp4=”http://ben.akrin.com/videos/DSCF0604.AVI.mp4″ ogg=”http://ben.akrin.com/videos/DSCF0604.AVI.ogv” webm=”http://ben.akrin.com/videos/DSCF0604.AVI.webm” poster=”http://ben.akrin.com/videos/DSCF0604.AVI.jpg” width=”640″ height=”360″]
and now I know there’s 2… So far though, second one seems to have wisened up to what the trap means, or maybe the stench of pee and fear hormones isn’t an enticing accompaniment to a fancy diner.
The Secret World of Leaves
Some sort of eggs under a zucchini leaf.
There’s a Japanese party at the currant plant.
I have no idea what is going on there, at a first glance, it looks like ants are gathering sunflower seeds (this is a sunflower plant); yet upon closer inspection, other insects are involved and and the seed looking things could be their cocoons. Maybe some aphids the ants are raising?
I found several of these neatly folded birch trees leaves. Some halfway done and tied up with some web. I opened one up but whatever natural cycle this is was already over and there was nothing in there but refuse of some sort. I love the idea that some insect is making a little sleeping bag with available material.
Petals are leaves come on, a bumble bee got in and the other insect decided it wasn’t welcome in that flower any longer.
Slow-mo Bird Song
I love recording birds in slow-mo to hear the complexity of their calls. My brain can’t process them at actual speed.
[mejsvideo mp4=”http://ben.akrin.com/videos/slomo_bird.mp4.mp4″ ogg=”http://ben.akrin.com/videos/slomo_bird.mp4.ogv” webm=”http://ben.akrin.com/videos/slomo_bird.mp4.webm” poster=”http://ben.akrin.com/videos/slomo_bird.mp4.jpg” width=”640″ height=”360″]
PHP file upload to a Google storage bucket
Download
Google setup & use
1- Create a storage bucket for the script to upload into
Go to the Google Cloud Console, click on “Storage”, “Browser”.
“Create Bucket”
Give it a name and click “Create”.
2- Create a service account for the script
Expand the “IAM & admin” section, click on “Service accounts”.
Click “Create Service Account”.
Give it a name, check “Furnish a new private key”, JSON, and click “Save”.
Save the JSON credentials file which you are prompted to download into a safe location.
3- Grant “Object Creator” permissions on the bucket to the service account
Go back to the storage bucket you created
Edit its permissions
The JSON credentials file you just downloaded contains the email for the service account you created, copy it.
And paste it into the “Add members” field, select the permission to be “Storage Object Creator”. This service account doesn’t need permissions for anything else than dumping files in there. Not even viewing them.
Optional: if you want the files uploaded by the script to be publicly viewable, add the permission “Storage Object Viewer” to the user “allUsers”. Accounts are all referred to by email in Google land, but there exist special keywords such as “allUsers”.
Done with the Google setup 🙂
4- Running the script
If you haven’t already, download the script at the top of this page. Decompress it and edit the config at the top.
$credentials_file_path is the full path to the JSON credentials file you got from Google when you created the service account. It should be a secure location.
$destination_bucket_name is the name of the bucket you created
$access_token_cache_file_path is a location where Google’s OAuth tokens are cached, it too should be a secure location.
Run the script with only 1 argument being the file you want to upload. The script can also be included and used outside of CLI, in that case simply call the upload( $filename ) function. 
The script returns the URL to the file in the bucket.
Voilà :
A small milestone
The millionth penstroke on Mandalagaba since the code rewrite last February
There’s more data I’d like to pull out of this. For example the average length of a stroke, average time, how many human lives where spent drawing mandalas, et cetera :).