In an incredible amount of detail, Gord has written up and photographed the whole process:

http://gordsgarage.wordpress.com/2011/11/21/the-full-monty-part-1/

http://gordsgarage.wordpress.com/2011/11/22/the-full-monty-part-2/

In summary, it went from this mill finish:

To this polished finish:

To this anodized finish:

Amazing!

I have a Logitech mouse.  Unplugged it.  Still does it.

Restarted computer.  Still does it.

Tried Magic Mouse.  Still does it.

Gaa!!!

–

Found a forum post https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1829111?start=0&tstart=0

Someone mentioned Wacom tablet.  Yes!  I have a Bamboo Drawing Tablet on the side of my desk.  Someone bumped the pen so it was setting on the tablet.  Each second, it was moving to the position dictated by the pen on the tablet.

Moved the pen.

Everything works.

Hope someone finds this and saves them a headache or 3!

The problem is, squeezing enough limes for a party of 60+ people takes a lot of time (and limes).  After about the fifth lime the first time… I had enough!

I went down to the shop and built a simple but powerful hinged wooden squeezer about 3′ long.  It looked like two canoe oars with a hinge holding them together.  With this contraption, a suitable helper (Eli), and a big stainless steel bowl, we could really crank out the lime juice (gallons).

Since using that a number of times, I’ve thought of some improvements I’d like to make, eventually ending in a fabricated stainless steel mechanism that is easy to use, powerful, and helpful.  The force applied to the lime should be compounded at the end of the squeeze cycle, taking full advantage of maximum leverage to get the last drops out (less waste, less fatigue).

Using the power of four-bars, I’m working up a Solid Works model which should meet most of the above criteria.  I think we will soon build a prototype out of maple, which is a very hard wood.

Here is a picture of it “open”:

Here is a picture of it “Closed”:

The little metal guys normally stand at attention in rows — millions of them (molecules).  When you heat them up red hot, they start dancing and get all mixed up and out of order; not in rows any more.  When you cool them down, they get back into nice neat rows.

However, when you cool them off really fast by dipping in cold water, they get frozen before they can get back into nice neat rows!

If the metal guys are in nice neat rows, and you push on a row really hard, they can all move sideways.  But if they are all mixed up, it’s hard for them to move any way.  

This makes the metal really hard.

As part of Ezra’s box project, he needed to countersink the nails into the plywood.  I should have one, but I don’t have a countersink handy that would do the trick.

So we made one!

1/4″ diameter W1 tool steel rod (water hardened) was cut down to about 3.5 inches long.  Being that I don’t have a metal lathe, I improvised by chucking the metal into my drill and grinding it on the grinder – while spinning.  This resulted in a fairly uniform (albiet scratched) conical point.   We wire brushed it a bit on the grinder to smooth it out, and then took it over to the other side of the shop for heat treatment.

This casual approach to tempering worked well for our purposes.  We heated the metal red hot (just the end) and dunked it in cold water.  Then we polished it up a little bit.

In informal tests, this made it REALLY hard.  If I placed a nail against the top end and banged it, it would scratch the punch.  If I placed a nail agains the bottom (hard) end and banged it, it would flatten the nail without even marking the surface of the punch.

Also, the punch would reliably put small holes in a cast-iron vice and other metal without any noticeable deformation.  Nice!

Here is the pictures:

(Fire extinguisher was about 2 feet to the left, in case you were wondering!)

Here is the longhand way:

git checkout old-branch
git branch new-branch
git checkout new-branch

But there is a quicker way:

git checkout -b new-branch old-branch

… which does the same thing, albiet in one command.

I must say, it’s looking pretty nice!  It is rather amazing to look back at the year, and see in detail what was going on with Eli.

One of my favorites is on page 159 (read the letter on the telephone pole):

Here is a screen shot of the book view:

1. Look cool
2. Be inexpensive to build
3. Be safe
4. Comfortable!
5. Fun

Here is an example page render without the photographs included.  Still need a UI for selecting photographs and positioning them on the white area of the page.

At the bottom, see an ImageMagick Text Example about the python code used to render multiple text areas and color blocks on one image…

It took me a long time to figure out how to use ImageMagick to place multiple text areas on one image.  Here are some keywords for google:

ImageMagick, ImageMagick multiple text areas, ImageMagick pdf rendering, ImageMagick text.

      PrimerFont = join(App.Path, 'Static', 'Primerb.ttf')
      PrimerFontBold = join(App.Path, 'Static', 'Primer.ttf')
      RenderFile = join(TempDir, 'Render.jpg')

      # Build the full image
      subprocess.check_call((
        '/usr/bin/convert',

        # Setup the background
        '-size', '2550x3300',
        'xc:white',

        # Title Bar
        '-fill', 'grey14', '-draw', 'rectangle 0,0 2550,300',

        # Summary bar
        '-fill', 'RoyalBlue4', '-draw', 'rectangle 0,300 2550,600',

        # Description Bar
        '-fill', 'LightGrey', '-draw', 'rectangle 0,600 2550,1050',

        # Now draw the Name
        '(',
          '-density'    , '300',
          '-fill'       , 'white',
          '-background' , 'grey14',
          '-font'       , PrimerFont,
          '-size'       , '1650x150',
          '-gravity'    , 'West',
          '-pointsize'  , '20',
          'caption:'    + self.Book.Name,
        ')',
        '-gravity', 'NorthWest', '-geometry', '+150+150', '-composite',

        # Now draw the Date
        '(',
          '-density'    , '300',
          '-fill'       , 'white',
          '-background' , 'grey14',
          '-font'       , PrimerFont,
          '-size'       , '600x150',
          '-gravity'    , 'East',
          '-pointsize'  , '20',
          'caption:' + Activity.Date.strftime('%B %d, %Y'),
        ')',
        '-gravity', 'NorthEast', '-geometry', '+150+150', '-composite',

        # Now draw the Summary
        '(',
          '-density'    , '300',
          '-fill'       , 'white',
          '-background' , 'RoyalBlue4',
          '-font'       , PrimerFontBold,
          '-size'       , '2250x300',
          '-gravity'    , 'Center',
          '-pointsize'  , '20',
          'caption:'    + Activity.Summary.replace("\n", " "),
        ')',
        '-gravity', 'North', '-geometry', '+0+300', '-composite',

        # Now draw the Description
        '(',
          '-density'    , '300',
          '-fill'       , 'black',
          '-background' , 'LightGrey',
          '-font'       , PrimerFont,
          '-size'       , '2250x450',
          '-gravity'    , 'Center',
          '-pointsize'  , '14',
          'caption:'    + Activity.Description.replace("\n", "\\n"),
        ')',
        '-gravity', 'North', '-geometry', '+0+600', '-composite',

        # Now draw the Page
        '(',
          '-density'    , '300',
          '-fill'       , 'black',
          '-background' , 'white',
          '-font'       , PrimerFont,
          '-size'       , '2250x150',  #entire right half minus 150pt margin
          '-gravity'    , 'Center',
          '-pointsize'  , '14',
          'caption:'    + 'Page {0}'.format(self.PageNumber),
        ')',
        '-gravity', 'South', '-geometry', '+0+150', '-composite',

#        NameFile, '-geometry', '+0+0', '-composite',
#        DateFile, '-geometry', '+1275+0', '-composite',
#        SummaryFile, '-geometry', '+0+150', '-composite',
#        DescriptionFile, '-geometry', '+0+450', '-composite',

        RenderFile,
        ))

However, I’ve been making daily progress on getting the “output” working.  Here is how it is structured in this initial version:

• You can create a book, “Eli Daniel Garber 2010-2011 Portfolio” for example.
• Activities are added to the book, one activity per page.
• The activity summary and description, date and pictures come along.
• You can move the pictures around, crop, and choose the exact ones you want.
• Pages in the book can be sorted any way you want.
• Once the book is “ready”, you can output a print-quality PDF.  This PDF could be printed or sent to a printer to turn into a hardback book.

For a long time, I put up with some less than optimal settings.  But over time, I learned what worked best for me.  The purpose of this post is to share that with you.

Enjoy!

Download from: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

Hint: I prefer the windows installer.  However, whatever you do, make sure you get the whole suite (unless you know you don’t need it)

Launch PuTTY and configure “Session” section

user@host is handy for auto-login.  I prefer to place my server name before my username in the saved sessions because the sort order will be maintained as the list grows.

Configure the “Terminal > Bell” section

I have found it preferable not to disable the bell if it is overused.

Configure the “Window” Settings

This is one of the most important settings.  The default of 200 lines of scrollback is just not enough.  I find 20000 to be more useful.  Also, the window size should be set according to your screen size and preferences.

Configure “Window > Appearance” settings

I find that the Luicida Console 14 point font is very easy on the eyes.  Keep in mind I’m usually using a 27″ or 30″ display at 2560 pixels wide, so I can afford the extra size of 14pt.  However, even on smaller screens, I still find it nicer to be able to read effortlessly and see less than the other way around.  Just give it a try :)

Configure the “Window > Translation” settings

As of a few years ago, Linux began to use UTF-8 character encoding by default.  This means that if your terminal is set to latin1 or similar, then each single multi-byte-character is literally interpreted as multiple latin1 characters, mostly drawn as out-of-place accented letters and various symbols.

So in my experience, it is best to use UTF-8 when connecting to Linux.

Configure “Window > Selection” settings

You need to decide here if you want an important safety precaution.  Under the “Compromise” setting above, right-click will paste whatever is on the clipboard… even if you were just blogging about sudo rm -rf /

So, think that over pretty hard.  The first option of “Windows” will bring up a right-click menu with a convenient “Paste” option.  Also, you can simply us SHIFT+INSERT to paste in PuTTY.

Configure “Window > Colours” settings

If you can read dark-blue-on-black, then your vision is in another “spectrum” than mine.  Check out the difference here:

Simply select “ANSI Blue” and change the RGB values to 112, 112, 255.

Configure “Connection” settings

It is helpful to send a null packet every once in a while to keep sessions alive.

Configure “Connection > SSH” settings (Update)

David Aldrich pointed out in a helpful comment that  ”I also think it is probably worth enabling SSH compression if working over a slow connection.”

Configure “Connection > SSH > Auth” settings

If you use SSH Agent forwarding (eg pagent) to allow you to “hop” from one server to another, then PuTTY must be told to enable Agent Forwarding.  There are some security issues with this setting when connecting to an untrusted server, so please understand them first.

Configure “Connection > SSH > Tunnels”

If you want to connect to a MySQL or PostgreSQL service running on the host you are connecting to, but have all communication encrypted and sent via SSH tunnel, here is how to set that up.

Keep in mind that your Windows OS you are on must have the source port free, so if you are ALSO running MySQL locally, then pick a different local port number like 13306.

Once your SSH session is established, then you can connect to localhost port 13306 and it will be tunneled to the remote server on 3306.  Cool!

Finally!!! Don’t forget to save your session.

(hint: press the “Save” button)

And that’s it!  The basic PuTTY settings that I use which work quite nicely.

Hope this helps.