ben lowery

Linkage: May 15th, 2012 to May 17th, 2012

Ben — Thu, 17 May 2012 12:00:25 +0000

Electric Imp: Tiny wireless controllers for just about anything. $25. Awesome.
[Interview] Christopher Schwarz of Lost Art Press: A good, quick interview with the Schwarz.
Instagram: Breaking in the skates on the brewpub floor. #daughters #6thbirthday #smallbusiness #shopsmall
Liquid Photo Page Layout: Flickr is now showing the biggest photo they can on a photo page. Awesome!
Buchanan, the gay president: I love the term "chronological ethnocentrism"
Wolfram’s bibliography omission: "A typical issue that came up was how the book was vetted or checked. In academia, there’s the idea that “peer review” is the ultimate method of checking anything. And perhaps in a world where everyone has infinite time, and nobody operates according to their own self-interest, this might be true. But in reality, peer review is fraught with error, often quite corrupt, and even in the best case strongly biased toward avoiding new ideas and maintaining the status quo. And for a piece of work as large, broad and complex as A New Kind of Science, even the basic mechanics of it seemed completely impractical."

Linkage: May 9th, 2012 to May 13th, 2012

Ben — Sun, 13 May 2012 13:00:26 +0000

Kuroshio Sea – 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world: Video of the "Kuroshio Sea" tank in Okinawa, Japan. The ultimate fish tank screensaver.
Hold Off On Proposing Solutions – Less Wrong: I need a "Jump to Conclusions" mat.
Now You Know: Hotels Inject Banner Ads Into The Wi-Fi They Charge You For | TechCrunch: Can we please get everyone on SSL sooner rather than later?
Fix It, The Repair Manifesto: Some folks in .nl opened up a bunch of "Repair Cafes" where you can take in broken stuff and have it fixed.
Adirondack Foods: Violet Jelly | The Adirondack Almanack: Quickie on making jelly from wild violets.

Linkage: April 29th, 2012 to May 9th, 2012

Ben — Wed, 09 May 2012 15:01:05 +0000

Ten Thousand: Great advice on how to deal with people not knowing things.
Improving HTML5 Canvas Performance – HTML5 Rocks: Summary of current canvas perf trickery
New York’s (now lost) native parrot: "Five million years is a good run. It's just tough when it ends on a hat."
linux – How can I copy a (big) directory over another changing only the files that differ? – Super User: Handy when svn_load_dirs decides to go belly up.
Karl’s Badges – Porky – foursquare: I just unlocked the Level 3 "Porky" badge on @foursquare! Sweet!

Linkage: April 20th, 2012 to April 26th, 2012

Ben — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 17:03:52 +0000

Google selling SketchUp?: Wonder what this means for the free version going forward.
SketchUp renderings…You Have Options: I had no idea you could use rendering plugins for Sketchup. Some of the demos are just jaw dropping.
COFFER on Vimeo: Wonderful integration of old and modern.
Cubism.js: Horizon charts in D3
The design of a signage typeface: The backstory on Wayfinding Sans Pro, a new signage font.

A Saw Bench

Ben — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 14:24:43 +0000

A traditional English saw bench

While working through the Stickley Lost Side Table project, I realized that my current saw bench, a basic five-board bench, was less than ideal for ripping stock. It’s a bit too wide, so when I get a narrow piece out over the edge, the bench is quite tippy.

Chris Schwarz has been teaching a two-day class on building a traditional English saw bench for a while; a few years ago a DVD was produced following the class. I like the design of this bench; it’s has a narrower top, which means you don’t have to stretch as far when ripping. Plus, it’s fairly straightforward to build from basic construction lumber. I picked up a couple 16′ 2×12′s from the local lumber yard and set them aside to dry. I used 2×12′s because they tend to be clearer (free of knots) than shorter, narrower lengths and you can usually get some decent quarter sawn material out of the edges.

I started out ripping the boards I needed from the 2x12s, leaving a bit of room for planing and shooting to length. The top board is about 5″ wide by 32″ long, roughly a hand width by half my height. The bench will end up being 19″ tall, the height from the floor to the bottom of my kneecap. The legs were all ripped out, shooting for 2.5″ wide, but they all vary. They all vary in absolute thickness as well, one of the consequences of working by hand.

After I sawed the boards to rough size, I 3-squared each of the legs (face + two long edges) and then squared up (shot) one end. From there, I marked out the little bird’s mouth that fits into a gain in the top board.

Bird's Mouth on the top of each leg

Cutting the bird’s mouth is just like cutting a tenon. Saw across the top, then down each side to establish a kerf. Then just follow the kerfs all the way to the bottom.

To clean up the joint, I deviated from Chris’s method (disobey me?). I found that lining up the knife lines against a wooden parallel clamp to be too fiddly. There’s a fair bit of slop in the cams on my set of clamps, so the two wooden pieces wouldn’t stay in plane. I just attacked it with a wide chisel and a shoulder plane, working to the knife lines. I also didn’t gang up the legs and plane them like they show in the video; my legs were all different thicknesses and the out face is not a true face, so it would have just thrown all my shoulder plane work out the window.

Top gains cut

The gains were easy to layout and cut. I made a mark 4.5″ inches from each end, then laid each leg against the mark and used that to layout the far side of the gain. I sunk them 3/4″ into the leg, using a cutting gauge to lay out the baseline and a square to mark the edges. Saw down, then pop out most of the waste with a chisel, being careful to watch how the grain runs. It’s very easy to take too big a bite and have the grain run out way below your marked line, especially in this hem/fir/wtf that I used.

Glue, clamps and an overnight wait and the legs were on.

Short stretchers in glue

This morning I pulled the clamps and started work on the short braces. I used a 12″ ruler as a stop block to mark a spot on the inside of each leg, then clamped the short braces in place, making sure the two braces were coplanar by sighting over them from a distance, much like using winding sticks.

I marked the shoulder line right from the piece, then pulled it all back apart. Some more sawing (1/2″ fillister this time) and cleanup with a router plane and the braces were done. Back into clamps and glue for another day long bake.

Hopefully tomorrow I can add the long stretcher that connects the braces, add some nails and finish it off.

Linkage: March 29th, 2012 to April 17th, 2012

Ben — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 17:02:19 +0000

QArt Codes: Sticking pictures in QR codes. Neat.
Marks of Civilization : The Work Itself: "One thing has not changed. Civilization still needs a reckoning to remind itself why it is worth carrying on, to continue struggling against the inevitable forces that cut us all down."
Is Sugar Toxic? – NYTimes.com: Fascinating read on sugar.
Interview: C++–A Language for Modern Times: The language that refuses to die
Banksy on advertising: “You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.”

Linkage: March 26th, 2012 to March 29th, 2012

Ben — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 14:00:20 +0000

Boioioioioinggg!: Sweet little ATV robot that can jump like a sand flea
The Continuous Partial Attention Generation: Mike's thoughts on what watching looked like a few generations ago vs now
Entertaining retrospective on the libertarian-fantasy-clusterfuck that was SeaLand and HavenCo: "Ladies and gentlemen, the datacenter"
ASP.NET MVC, Web API, Razor and Open Source: Wow, ASP.NET is going open source, using Git, and potentially taking contributions from the community. Interesting times.
Woodcut Maps: Handcrafted wood-inlay maps, designed by you.: Seems to having load issues, but very cool veneer-based maps, built from a Google map.

Stickley Lost Side Table: Complete

Ben — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 15:38:54 +0000

Stickley Lost Side Table. Mahogany & Black Walnut.

Finally.

It feels like I’ve been working on this little table forever. In calendar time, I think I’m at 9 months, but I guess that’s what happens when you go from one kid to two. Little bits here and there, dimension some stock, cut a mortise, fit a tenon. All in all, my best guess on this around 30 hours of work, but this was a bunch of firsts for me.

First time working with Genuine Mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla) Man, what a beautiful wood to work.
First table with drawer.
First half-blind dovetails and angled at that
First set of compound joinery, between the splayed legs and the through tenon on the stretcher
First keyed through tenons
First piece of furniture, not a shop project I can beat up.
First time using shellac as a finish.

I learned a lot with this project. It looks fairly simple, but the splayed legs and the cross stretcher with the keyed through tenon make laying things out a bit challenging.

Linkage: March 23rd, 2012 to March 26th, 2012

Ben — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 17:00:06 +0000

Six Stages of Debugging: Truth.
There must be 50 ways to close a popup: menus, dropdowns, tooltips, palettes, dialogs, and more: A rundown on many of the common ways you can dismiss a popup dialog. Popups always seem simple to implement, but when you get down to the things like this, the true complication is laid bare.
[Schoolbox] Unscrewed: The last photo is beautiful
Art Du Menuisier, Tom I, II, III: Pictures from Art Du Menuisier, close up. What a beautiful book.
Take Five: A handy little utility that will pause a variety of music client for five minutes (hence the name) and then resume. Something I’ve wished for in the past, but never cobbled up the time to write. Only $1 for a limited time.
responsivepx – a tool for responsive design: @rem built a wonderful tool for finding where designs break so you can insert media queries to reformat the design. Really nice work. The demo site it at responsivepx.com

Linkage: March 20th, 2012 to March 22nd, 2012

Ben — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 20:00:31 +0000

Chordal on Mechanics: On the three kinds of mechanics. "He has self-confidence enhanced by self-confidence." is my favorite bit.
Suck it rabbit: Screw the Rabbit, I want one of these wine openers.
Without Shame…: Sigh. One day.
On Precise Work and MicroBrewed Furniture: Excellent points. Simple forms, done well are my favorite.
Case study: halving size of iPad app with ImageOptim+ImageAlpha

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