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Being snowed in is a perfect excuse to do more bowl carving. After  smoothing the exterior with a draw knife I decided to take a whack (pun intended) at the bowl interior. This is about 15 minutes of hewing with an adze.  Bowl carving is done  with super green (freshly cut) wood and the block is stored in a sealed plastic bag to avoid too much water loss prior to the finished shape. I try to work symmetrically so that between sessions the bowl will perspire evenly and hopefully avoid warpage. The work is usually done on a tree stump to avoid tool damage.

Right now I only have a curved adze. Its hooked inward and elliptical in cross-section and typically it would be used for hollowing out an interior (a hooked adze with a flat crossection seems to be typically use for bowl exteriors but what do I know…I’m a beginner and I only have one tool.) I seem to be spending 1-2 hours to rough out each side and it seems like another hour to smooth.

How we think about and experience transportation is likely to undergo radical change in the coming years. Right now cities like New Haven are trying to anticipate the infrastructure that will be needed in the next few decades. Because of the rapid change of technology those predictions are difficult, yet new technologies also hold tremendous possibility for improving city life.

• Create engraved box on laser cutter

These are instructions on how to make a game called Holiday Grab. It is like the classic game of Operation but in this version you are carefully lifting ornaments of the tree and presents from under the tree. … You can think of it as pretending sneaking a peek at some presents without your parents waking up.

So about 25 years ago I lived in a 5000sf loft space for $500/mo. The windows were falling out and the heat was splotchy but I was young and resilient and it was a great place to host parties with garage bands (NH post crack-war, pre-boom days, ahh nostalgia)… We had to build our own rooms which were more like little boxes inside of a big room so, fresh out of college I commenced to buying tools. One of my first buys was a Dewalt circular saw. I forget the model but it was simple, lightweight, trustworthy and I loved it.

So Gina and I were having coffee this morning and chatting with our friend Katy, when I noticed her 18 month old Paul grabbing hold of a parked bike's chain. Even though I thought this was funny (becuase for no good reason I would have done the same thing ....from his age up until about a couple of years ago) I didn't laugh but warned Katy who noted that he just had a bath (bonus dirt points) and that he really wants to ride a bike and that maybe she should get him a tricycle.

Was finally able to complete a print of the infamous shift knob this AM.  Used Adam vice Eve this time and tried something completely different.  I mounted the (white) filament on Eve and strung it across to Adam.  It was much easier to monitor the slack and several times detected overwraps that would have not have been seen behnd the machine.  I suspect that even minor tension on the filament will cause the type of problems I have been having.  A good solution might  be to mount the reels on the wall where they can be better observed and controlled.  You definitely can't walk away and hope

My computer science teacher and I are trying to make and program an led matrix, (possibly like 5 X 5 or a little bigger). We started off with a scrolling 1 X 5 led matrix, but that the letters were pretty difficult to read and it was too simple, so we moved on to a srolling 2 X 5 matrix. However, that was still pretty dificult to read and didn't look great either. Neither of us have much experience with the hardware for excedding the maximum number of output pins.

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I recently moved from an apartment on a noisy street to a different apartment a few blocks away on the same noisy street.  I have wanted to work on a few musical projects that involve recording live instruments, vocals, etc, for some time.  The loud nature of my living quarters has made this impossible.  In my studio in the new apartment, however, is a rather large closet measuring 5.5' x 4' x 8.5'.  It is not luxurious, but it is more than sufficient for a vocal/small recording both provided it is treated properly.  To get it to a useable state, it will require some bass traps around the sides, some treatment on the door, and foam around the sides and on the ceiling.  

Right now there are several spaces outside of Connecticut  in the Northeast that I'd like to go and check out:

1. NYC Resistor (Brooklyn,NY)

2. AS 220 (Providence,RI)

3. Artisan's Asylum(Boston,MA)

4. MITERS (Cambridge,MA)

Road trip anyone? 

TechCrunch just posted this article http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/15/mail-ru-ceo-starts-25-million-fund-to-spark-personal-robotics-start-ups/ about cool $25MM fund by Grishin Robotics where they are looking to fund personal robotics startups http://www.grishinrobotics.com/. 

Who's in?