shinyhappyrainbows

I'm trying to decide whether to pull the pin on buying a mini "desk" lathe. One of these... Yes, I know, a lathe is usually a thousands-of-bucks piece of workshop kit, and the average serious machinist is screaming "NO!" at me, at the top of their lungs. But I'm not a machinist, I'm a hobbyist. I'm on a really tight budget, most of my tools are "toys." I'm not dependent on reliability for my livelihood. I just hack about in a workshop to "squander" my retirement on making stuff. And I've always wanted a lathe, but never been able to muster the scratch with all my other expensive hobbies, and I don't have space for even a small workshop lathe. A 10" seems like a great option for the odd, brass bush, or a pully or two. Things like spinning up a knobbed lever from an M12 bolt by machining the hex head into the knob. Turning up a model rocket fuselage in matched, push-together segments, turning and cutting a precis...

It's been my birthday month, I've done my back in and my top secret project is nearly a working prototype. In the words of Homer Simpson, "Can't talk, eating." Too much to do. Still here, will have stuff to say, living life.

I have been trying for years to understand Javascript's syntax. Maybe it's an effect of my possible autism. I'm undiagnosed, I admit, but I recently scored a 95 at monotropism.org, which is 3 points higher than a friend's score and she is diagnosed autistic. I also have ADHD, blind Freddy can see that, so I need structured learning. I have managed to self-learn the basics of C++ with Arduino code, but the advanced concepts can rarely be learned by self-teaching, alone. I'm also carrying a less popular label, in fact it's quite unfashionable, these days - oppositional defiance disorder. I wear this latter with pride, not only because it says I'm "odd." It makes me stubborn, determined, I refuse to let a point go, especially if I am certain I'm right. And one thing I know I am right about, is - WE ARE NEVER GOING TO MAINTAIN STABLE, EQUITABLE, FAIR DEMOCRATIC GOVERNANCE FOR ALL PEOPLE UNLESS WE BREAK THE BACK OF THE CLIENT SERVER MODEL!!! But si...

Social media bugs me. It bugs the fuck out of me. It can be serverless. Completely serverless. (Well, techichally not "completely", but more on that in a minute.) Today I tried an app that, while still maintained, is from 10 years ago, RetroShare. It's a serverless, peer to peer social network. It looks like somebody reinvented AOL, without the A, the O or the L, but it works. So, why is this serverless thing important? How Elon Musk can control his hoarde of nazi minions, how Mark Zuckerberg can manipulate you to anger, then purchase, is the power of the server. You're not the client on a client/server model, you're the product. Anybody who owns a server, controls the clients, or potentially can. That's the importance of peer-to-peer. A screenshot of RetroShare's connection window, showing a new person added to my circle, a real person I know, on the other side of the city, both of us behand our NAS boxes and ISP firewalls. Another way to look at it...

Something I've always been fascinated with are those people who build wooden bikes and trikes. It's something I've wanted to do for a while, too. So, while I wait for other projects' parts to arrive, plug on with yet other projects and generally mess about while I wait for reliable weather to weld my lean steer, steel trike, I decided to design an Ackerman steering plywood trike. This one... The core of this baby is the curved crossmember, or the "wing", as I call it. This render doesn't yet have its brace developed, and the main frame is still the crude draft and needs shaping, but you can see the idea taking shape. The curvature of the wing gives 12 degrees at the steerer head hole centres. It also allows for a single piece wing without having to angle two sides, having a weak point in the middle or having to drill complex angle in flat pieces of wood. All of the correct angls are developed in the shape of the spar and the curvature of the wing. Ot...

I've now completed migrating my Clunkerbike posts over from clunkerbike.com and will now let that blog fade. My bicycle stuff is very design and mullet hack oriented, so I'll still be posting bike and trike things here, now. While I wait for the weather to improve, so that I can get outside and practice a bit of welding for the trike project, I've been working like I'm full-time on all sorts of designs, as well as the usual music and artsy-fartsy projects. (A wooden trike may be built in the not too distant future, as a test for a CNC router I'm planning to build.) This site is probably more intriguing than Clunkerbike - unless you're a bicycle purist to the level of ignoring all other facets of life. So the original Clunkerbike is now an archive. No new content will be added here, the domain will lapse, but the posts will remain up on clunkerbike.blogspot.com but nothing new will be found there. From now on, if you want to keep reading my stuff, I'm he...

Kind of the other inspiration for the Robo-Drums, I've also been thinking about a MIDI Master Clock that started with the WAY TOO AMBITIOUS idea of a central 2-way, DINsync-MIDI-And-Back Master Clock, that I thought would be cool to add tap-tempo to. (Draws HUGE breath after that mouthful!) I dug out one of my Wio Terminal micros, promptly killed it on a distraction, dug out the other and started developing this concept. The left and centre buttons will probably have a gang reserved for straight switching of start/stop and pattern-select, as well as for triggering to Wio Term to do MIDI.sendStart/MIDI.sendStop (left) and MIDI.programChange. (Center.) The right button will be the tap-tempo button. The toggle switches will select normally-open/closed modes for the analogue button-out function. On the tap tempo stuff, I got to thinking about " Kilroy's Blues " •1 , a song I wrote back in the mid "noughties," and how it would be cool to "pedal" ...