Boiling day
More mistakes made this year, due to scheduling & weather constraints we let ~100 gallons of sap freeze in the tanks. Because I filled them too much, a thaw actually pushed a lot of concentrated sap out the top… lessons learned…
The stuff dripping out the top of the tank tastes quite sweet, and it’s fertilizing the lawn.
Fortunately we are also avoided a lot of mistakes we learned about last year. Boiling is much smoother a process now.
Helping?
Totally safe, no problem
The smell…
Finishing on the stove
Not captured in pictures, carrying 8 gallons of boiling liquid back home at night, on snow and ice, with a thrown back. Having a shed and proper snow handling equipment will make an amazing difference in the years to come.
Feature feature feature draw feature feature
Since the success of the Mandala maker, I’ve been pumping out a ton of features, improvements and bug fixes. They are too numerous to list but a few stand out.
- Collaborative editing using websockets for drawing mandalas with multiple people on the same session.
- Drawing without mandalas, there are only so many Mandalas one can collaboratively draw and so I created http://draw.akrin.com which leverages all the Mandalagaba goodness for drawing and removes the mandala specific layer.
- Read only mode guided by artists who like to livestream their drawing, I created a read-only mode to the collaboration. This way, people can watch but not participate.
- An iOS app was born
- High resolution renders are possible for $2, the charge helps with server costs and makes it a bit fairer if one was going to make money using the tool.
- Not visible but noteworthy nonetheless, an intricate server strategy was put in place to alleviate future waves, load balancing had to be built from scratch because of the collaboration layer.
- many, many, many other little things 🙂
In terms of use, while the initial tsunami is dead, the project was picked up by artists and educators. I can’t post all all the pictures for privacy but I can’t tell you how awesome it feels to receive pictures like these:
Kids enjoying a Mandala making lab somewhere in China
Artist Peter Draws created more amazing work:
The mandala maker was deployed on big touch screens which turned it into a more social activity much like arcade games.
Here’s draw.akrin.com: Click to pop out.