Nick Momrik: Trying to get a hole-in-one
This Stanley vise caught my eye at an estate sale last year. I think I paid $3 for it. The jaw snapped at some point and someone did a rough weld job to put it back together. The other side reads 743 – 2 IN.
I finally got around to cleaning it up. Most of the work was done with brass wire wheels on the bench grinder and drill. Then a little hand wire brushing and sandpaper to get the corners.
Do you think I should paint it? I kind of like the bare metal look.
At our gym a couple sets of weights on the lifting platforms are in kilograms, which can be confusing in America. It doesn’t have to be confusing though; the math is actually quite simple.
In order to make the conversion you need to know that 1 kg is roughly 2.2 pounds. If you go out a few more decimal places it’s actually 2.20462, but that extra only ever makes a difference of a pound unless you’re setting world record deadlifts, so you can pretty much throw it out and call it close enough.
So…
1 kg = 2.2 pounds
10 kg = 22 pounds
100 kg = 220 pounds
You shouldn’t even need to think about those, but rarely do our weightlifting numbers fall on powers of ten. What about 53 or 97 kilos?
First double the number.
53 x 2 = 106
Then take care of the 0.2 part. Multiplying by 2 is already done, so take 106 and move the decimal place over.
10.6
Round up to 11.
106 + 11 = 117
Easy! How close does that come out? 53 x 2.20462 = 116.84486. Spot on. How about 97?
97 x 2 = 194
19.4
194 + 19 = 213
Here’s one where the extra 0.005 would have made a difference because 97 x 2.20462 = 213.84814 or 214 when rounded up. Close enough though. 😉
All of these air tool “bullets” need some type of organizer. Maybe boxes on small French cleats near the actual tools.
We are having an evening Automattic Town Hall this month, so I had to watch with a beer.
I’ve customized the items in the HackerBox Field Kit and explained everything in this video.
You can find the example code I put together for all of the modules in my hackerbox-29-field-kit GitHub repo.
I plan to keep the kit in my backpack, especially for trips up north when I visit family. Maybe I shouldn’t take this with me on flights though. Have you ever travelled with a bunch of wiring and electronics parts?
If you’re interested in an electronics community, join us on reddit and Discord.
On Thursday it was 64° when I ran outside. Then we had a winter storm come through the weekend.
Since it’s rare to get a storm this late in the year, I thought it would be neat to document it.
My makeshift ruler and stand was a complete failure; it blew over, spun around, and wasn’t readable. I’m happy with the rest of the project though. I really like the worms crawling around, seeing the water freeze, and how the lines of the bricks come through.
I used a Raspberry Pi Zero W and the camera module.
In order to get images for the time-lapse I added cron job that ran a bash script every minute, which in turn called raspistill to capture a photo. It was very easy to set up. Here is the bash script.
#!/bin/bash DATE=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S") raspistill -vf -hf -o /home/pi/time-lapse/images/$DATE.jpg
This is the line I added to my crontab.
* * * * * /home/pi/time-lapse/capture.sh
Before transferring all of the images to my Mac, I compressed the images folder.
tar -czvf images.tar.gz images
Then, from my Mac I could grab them by doing a secure copy.
scp pi@pi.local:/home/pi/time-lapse/images.tar.gz images.tar.gz
In order to stitch everything together, I imported the images into iMovie, changed the crop style to fill, and set a 0.01 second duration.
If there was ever a movie written for my sense of humor this is it. What a treat! I would expect a good chunk of people might not appreciate the film, but it has a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Last night I watched JAY-Z on My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman. I can’t recall ever watching an interview with JAY-Z before this, so it surprised me when he seemed a little awkward and uncomfortable. Especially for someone who might be the best artist of our generation. He had such a different presence than I got from Dr. Dre, another hip-hop legend, in The Defiant Ones. It’s quite possible it was because of editing or the format of the show though.
I’ve been listening to JAY-Z’s music for a long time, but never knew much about him. It was good watching him talk about his life and experiences as well as some of the tough conversations our country is having.
I’m struggling with the “awakening” theme for this week’s photo challenge. While it’s the middle of April, spring is nowhere to be found here in Michigan. It’s 39° outside with a big winter storm starting in the morning. Nothing is growing yet. The best I could come up with is hope, which I what I thought when I saw these rose bushes at Sam’s Club.
