It was getting pestered by a couple of other birds flying too fast for identification, which only seemed to mildly bother it.
Red Shouldered Hawk
Protected: 2026 Fireflies
Gondola PlottyBot v2
I built it last year and took a bunch of pictures to document the build. Then life happened and I didn’t. Someone noticed I had an undocumented v2 and asked about it, so it was time to fix this.
Corkscrew Sounds a Mystery no Longer
In the Spring and Summer we often hear the sound of one or several corkscrews coming from pine logs. It’s weird in a funny way, and any time we’ve tried to investigate we didn’t find the culprit. Whatever is doing this stops when you move the log.
We finally got to the bottom of it, and found the bug responsible. Its mandibles must be quite strong to make such a ruckus. I’m not sure what they’re digging for, food and protection I assume. I had ran into them cutting wood before, they get bigger. You can see the byproduct of all the digging it’s done.
Yuck
I think it’s a Raghium Inquisitor, or ribbed pine borer. Makes sense.
Copper
Robin found some copper flashing at the hardware store. Hell yeah I’ll etch it.
The glint is good, but it comes with a traveling vertical line that reflects the light source. I need to see if I can treat the surface to avoid that before etching. By happenstance I found that a rectilinear light source (office neon) perpendicular to the etching works better than a single light source pointed at it. It covers more vertical angles of viewing while not diffusing the horizontal effect. Running it parallel, much like a diffuse light source, ruins everything. I should draw how this stuff works a bit.
Smells so Good
It took us years to establish this patch of Lilies of the Valley.
X,Y Coordinates Tradition
I just did my yearly X,Y Coordinates stint with local 5th graders. It’s the 5th time I do it and this year is notable in that I didn’t write anything I wanted to fix for next year. Every time previous I came out thinking I needed to fix a bug, prevent a confusion, or improve something or other. This time it looks like the formula has been refined to its optimum.
Kids will definitely push the limits, and I love that relentless will to push, it’s identical in nature to IT security curiosity. 1 kid wrote some code and then copy/pasted it a bunch of time, no problem there’s an upper limit on instructions. Another tried to hog all the squares by having them draw just a single dot, no problem there’s a cool-off timer that prevents you from blasting through squares. I haven’t had to use it but I also have a censorship mechanism :), I can scribble over any square and the machines will prioritize it.
So this year went really well, I think I can say with confidence now that the magic operates every time, this isn’t just luck with a good batch of kids or other. Every time we launch into “coding”, there’s a moment of sheer teeth grinding where I think it’s going to be a disaster. And every time they are all extremely motivated by the idea of controlling the machines when they hit “submit”, and so they all pull through and help each other out. Once one of them has gotten the machines moving, there’s a real frenzy to figure things out, and then their next drawings get more and more sophisticated. 5th grade might have a few blasé pre-teens who are hard to motivate, and they will inevitably get sucked in. Now they might “whatever” out of the activity after a bit, but even they will want to have done it at least a couple of times :). I particularly like when kids realize they can coordinate action on neighboring squares to do something greater, I purposefully don’t suggest that to them. I’ve gotten good at fending off “learned-helplessness”, not that I was doing it for them before, I’m just quicker to disengage. “You want to control the laser kid? Well you better figure it out”.
The “coding” interface
One of the snag we always hit is kids not able to discern the difference between typing in a URL or doing a search with Google. And a giant middle finger please for all the corpos purposefully blurring lines so kids form the habit early of running anything they might want to do on a computer through Big Corp Inc.
At the end of the day I send the wall plotter on an overnight portrait of a well liked central figure in the school. The next morning when I pick up the machine, the kids get one last wow effect. I’ll make a note of how many “go_to” statements went into the picture, usually several hundred thousands to get them thinking about scale and how curves can really be just a few tiny straight lines. They submit an average of 30 such statements for their cool drawings.
Protected: Spicy Peanut Butter
Shorty Etcher
My office is a little small and barely able to contain all the machines I’ve accumulated. The 3D printer I turned into an etcher for specular holograms was obnoxiously tall, and really doesn’t need much vertical range. I chopped the aluminum extrusions so it would fit in an unused corner of the room. I’ve been doing occasional tests here and there, nothing worth showing yet. Results are very hit and miss, and finding good subjects is hard too.
Mean Lean Milling Machine
I started going through the massive amount of oak that was dropped in my driveway last Winter. It’s fun and fast.
Everything is massive with this oak. I excised some of the cool knots, not sure if I’ll ever do something with them but I figure they might be cool in some project. They need to dry a few years first so now’s not the time to think of what that could be.
Beyond the knots, we thought it’d be kind of a shame not to get a few boards out of such a special tree. It’s oak, it really stood out as a tree, it’s close to 200 years old, and we walked past it for 10 of them. So after researching possibilities, I bought a chainsaw mill with a 24″ bar and a ripping chain. The saw is a monster when fully equipped.
I haven’t taken it on its maiden ripping yet, all in due time. And now I’m dreaming of going deeper in the woods and building a cabin with lumber milled on the spot.