3D modeling / printing, building, I.T., self sustainability, trip to a new life

Only a year after buying our chunk of land we are building a house. The dream we came to pursue in Vermont is finally happening, 4 years in (we had planned on 2). Vermont felt right going in, there simply could not have been a better place, better people, better circumstances to surrounds ourselves with to make it happen. These 4 years were more than necessary to make the adjustments needed for such a lifestyle change. We are extremely appreciative and in debt to everyone who helped a couple of flatlanders get acquainted with all the awesome skills we wanted to develop. To this list of skills that is so nicely summarized in the “categories” of this blog, we are adding “building”.

house

We spent all Winter learning how to build a house & designing it. It completely blows my mind that we live in a time where all this information is available online. I spent countless hours reading and watching videos on building techniques. Not only is information ubiquitous, so is stuff. Every specialized tool or object referenced in these videos is available to purchase online, with reviews, and unboxing videos…

Preparations in no particular order

  • septic permit, the only paperwork/requirement
  • Sketchup design
    • extensive reviews by multiple trusted builders
  • research & acquire needed tools
    • skill saw
    • clamps
    • rip & plywood blades
    • generator
    • run generator and charge devices with it to avoid surprises
  • create guides for sawing
    • 2×6 with 22.5 angle
    • plywood 4′ & 8′
  • find cheap recovered windows & fix them up
  • visit local lumber yards to get material pricing & delivery fees
  • buy portable shower & potty
  • emptying our current house of superfluous things we’ve accumulated to get ready for downsizing
  • budgeting
  • scheduling
hunting, nature encounters, poultry, self sustainability

Make sure to turn the volume up, gobble gobble.

[mejsvideo mp4=”http://ben.akrin.com/videos/IMG_3519.MOV.mp4″ ogg=”http://ben.akrin.com/videos/IMG_3519.MOV.ogv” webm=”http://ben.akrin.com/videos/IMG_3519.MOV.webm” poster=”http://ben.akrin.com/videos/IMG_3519.MOV.jpg” width=”640″ height=”360″]

all out geekery, I.T., Lego / Duplo

I’ve been wondering for a while if I could represent a picture with Duplo pixels in a way that would do it justice.

Introducing the Duplogrifier!

Duplogrifier will take any JPEG and turn it into an arrangement of 2×2 Duplo bricks. Now truth be told, the answer to my original question is “no”. There are not enough colors available and it would take a obscene amount of bricks to build something visually acceptable. However it leads to some fairly cool results.

2015-04-15: added 6 more “pixel” colors.

You can play with it here:

Lego / Duplo

We are dangerously entering the realm of projectiles.

IMG_3134

I MacGyver’d a sling with rubber bands & a rubber balloon.

IMG_3140

I’m helping the counterweight a bit since Duplos don’t have much mass; there is definitely room for improvement in other regards, the sling release specifically. currently it takes a few trials to get a good trajectory.

[mejsvideo mp4=”http://ben.akrin.com/videos/trebuchet.mov.mp4″ ogg=”http://ben.akrin.com/videos/trebuchet.mov.ogv” webm=”http://ben.akrin.com/videos/trebuchet.mov.webm” poster=”http://ben.akrin.com/videos/trebuchet.mov.jpg” width=”360″ height=”640″]
Medieval warfare? More like Medieval fun times.

I.T., unix / linux

[bash]#!/bin/bash

tunnel_entrance_port=13306
tunnel_end=username@re.mo.te.ip
destination=127.0.0.1
destination_port=3306

# Use netcat to connect to tunnel entrance port. If its exit code is not zero, the tunnel needs to be brought up
nc -w1 localhost $tunnel_entrance_port > /dev/null
if [[ $? -ne 0 ]]; then
echo "creating new tunnel for MySQL"
/usr/bin/ssh -f -N -L $tunnel_entrance_port:$destination:$destination_port $tunnel_end
if [[ $? -eq 0 ]]; then
echo " tunnel to $destination through $tunnel_end created successfully"
else
echo " an error occurred creating a tunnel to $destination through $tunnel_end"
fi
fi[/bash]

I.T., unix / linux

[bash]#!/bin/bash

# default username for this model
export MODEMUSERNAME=admin
# default password for model
export MODEMPASSWORD=user12345
export COOKIE=/tmp/cookie_jar
export CURL=/usr/bin/curl
export PING=/bin/ping
export GREP=/bin/grep
export CUT=/usr/bin/cut

$PING -c 5 google.com > /dev/null 2>&1

if [ $? -ne 0 ]
then
rm $COOKIE > /dev/null 2>&1

export OUTPUT=`$CURL -v -c $COOKIE ‘http://$MODEMUSERNAME:$MODEMPASSWORD@192.168.1.1/resetrouter.html’ 2>> /tmp/output`
export SESSIONKEY=`echo "$OUTPUT" | $GREP var | $GREP sessionKey | $CUT -d"=" -f2 | $CUT -d"’" -f2`
echo "kicking modem with session key $SESSIONKEY"
export OUTPUT=`$CURL -v -c $COOKIE "http://$MODEMUSERNAME:$MODEMPASSWORD@192.168.1.1/rebootinfo.cgi?sessionKey=$SESSIONKEY" 2>> /tmp/output`
fi[/bash]

I.T.

We’ve been using the Google Drive API uploader for quite a while now. The main lesson we took away from using Google service, specifically from their API is that things will break for more or less valid reasons. That’s not to say we’re unhappy with the way things are going, by and large Google provides amazing service.

To answer quirks, we’ve done everything from handling 2 http response codes to crawling folders to add & remove user permissions or they wouldn’t see the folders that were shared with their groups.

The last bug we’ve had on our radar for a while is that of the Video files that mysteriously would go unprocessed.Screen Shot 2015-01-15 at 16.27.21Leave them for days they will never get encoded. Everything about the file is right but specifically the md5 checksum reported by Google. The only way to have it processed is to re-upload it. After months of chasing down such files we finally found a programmatic way to “kick” the processing.

When a file is in this state, it does not contain the “thumbnail” attribute, this is how you find them. Then if its “createdDate” attribute is older than X hours, you can run API calls to copy it and delete the original.

Screen Shot 2015-01-15 at 20.15.23

Of course this assumes you’re already knee deep into API land.

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