The Desk Toy design project was delivered from our catalystservice.org order. We used McMaster Caar ordered reamers to get a good fit on the pins.
For a 0.250 pin, to get a sliding, we reamed it to 0.253, but that was still a bit tight. For press fit, we reamed to 0.250. The spring was hand made from a piece of spring wire.
All in all, a successful build!
Today I learned that Creo Parametric has first class support for equations which can be turned into sketch items, and the incorporated into a model. In this example I created a sine wave.
y = sin(x*2) * 100And told Creo to extend it from x=0 to x=900. Here is a picture of editing the equation.
Once I had that curve defined, I created a sketch on the same plane, and then used the “Project” tool to project the sinewave into the current sketch. After adding sides and a bottom, I had a closed shape.
From there it was a simple matter to extrude, offset, cut, and add some colors.
Zech and Ezra made hard candy from scratch. I thought it was great. Next time they will try different flavors.
Fudge version 2. (Version one wasn’t good enough to write about).
This is a cross between two recipes that I learned about. I made use of some of the techniques but did not follow the recipe that Alton Brown explains so well in his episode “Fudge Factor” at https://www.foodnetwork.com/shows/good-eats/episodes/fudge-factor
… start with …
2 3/4 cups sugar
1 cup cocoa
1/4 cup corn syrup
1/4 stick butter
1 cup milk
… and later …
1/2 stick softened butter
1 tbsp real vanilla extract
… and if you want…
Cocktail peanuts (or walnuts or whatever)
Put the “start with” ingredients in a saucepan over high heat and stir constantly with a wooden spoon until boiling. I tried covering it as Alton Brown said, but it just tried to boil over, so maybe I did that wrong?
Turn heat down to medium low and DO NOT TOUCH IT. As soon as the temp hits 232F, turn off heat and just let it set there. Place a small amount of butter on the top to prevent it from drying out. Let it sit undisturbed until it is 110F…. then…
Dump in the “and later” ingredients and stir it AS HARD AS YOU CAN with a wooden spoon. When it starts feeling like it’s time, maybe losing it’s sheen, maybe starting to get stiff, it’s time to dump it into a parchment paper lined 8×8 pan before too late.
I then poured the peanuts on top and worked them down in with a spatula. I though it was ruined, because it just wasn’t setting up.
But I got up the next day and sure enough it was perfect.
This is our second go at beef and broccoli (with peppers, sugar snap peas, and carrots).
For the first try see: https://blog.gahooa.com/2018/03/12/beef-and-broccoli-recipe/
Also first try at fried rice. I thought for sure I ruined it but it turned out okay. Looking forward to doing this again.
So the other day we cooked up a couple of pounds of macaroni, strained it, and added a little bit of butter to keep it from sticking together. Then into a pot with milk, several bags of shredded cheese, some bbq seasoning, salt, pepper, and a can of cream of celery soup. Then it got baked for about an hour with cheese and breadcrumbs sprinkled on top.
It was pretty good. Not bad at all, but not amazing.
Leftovers went in fridge. A couple of days later, I needed a quick dinner for some of the kids, so I threw some of the leftovers in a well seasoned cast iron skillet and heated it up on high heat until it was nicely sizzled.
Best.Mac.And.Cheese.Ever.Period
In my whole life I never had better mac ‘n cheese. I’m not sure exactly what made it the best, but here is a picture, and we’re going to have to try this again sometime.
“For me, the need for Unicode first struck about 12 years ago [1985]. While I had done some internationalization while working in Europe, I hadn’t worked on any of the more interesting scripts. Two programmers, Ken Krugler and I were working on a “skunkworks” project in Sapporo, Japan. Our goal was to produce the first Kanji Macintosh.
Working with our Japanese counterparts was made somewhat more challenging because of the translation issues. In the best of all possible worlds, we would all have spoken a common language. Second best would have been having a technically savvy translator, experienced with software engineering design and concepts. What we actually had was one, lone Apple marketing person, who happened to be bilingual.
Imagine yourself in that situation, having to discuss how to combine Huffman encoding and run-length encoding to compress Japanese input dictionaries. We soon learned the full impact of the phrase “to lose something in translation!”
But then our translator had to leave, and we were left with just vestiges of English on their side, and miniscule Japanese on ours. We then found out just how useful a white-board can be.
Yet one day we hit a stumbling block, and were just not making progress. We had known that Japanese needed two bytes to encompass the large character set, and we had prototyped how to adapt the system software to use two-byte characters. However, we were having trouble figuring out exactly how things fit together with our counterparts’ data formats.
Remember [that] we were new to this, so it didn’t hit us right away. But all of a sudden, we could see the light go on in both of our faces: we had assumed that the standard Shift-JIS character set was a uniform two-byte standard. We were so, so wrong. You needed a mixture of single and double bytes to represent even the most common text. Worse yet, some bytes could be both whole single byte-characters, and parts of double-byte characters. We weren’t in Kansas anymore!
We persevered, and ended up producing a successful product [Apple KanjiTalk]. But — although we kicked around different ideas for a radically new kind of character set — we never did anything with these ideas. That is, not until we heard about a proposal from colleagues at Xerox for such a new kind of character set, a character set originated by Joe Becker, a character set that he baptized ‘Unicode’.”
Mark Davis, President and Co-founder of the Unicode Standard and the Unicode Consortium:
Quoted from Keynote Address,“10 years of Unicode”
September 1997 Eleventh International Unicode Conference #11 (©Unicode, Inc. 1997)
Zechariah (9) asked to use my mobile phone the other night to take a picture of a nickel he balanced on our chess table.
I thought it turned out nicely!
3D Rendering has always interested me, but I’ve never taken the time to mess around with it much.
When I was a kid I used to do stuff like this in Basic. But I didn’t know trig or other similar functions so I was left to basic math and the random functions.
Here is a little turtle program (python) that will make a wrinkled fabric type display.
Anna got to go for a ride the other day. She made it look good!
The Gahooa Perspective 