obligatory obscure reference

You can buy the 2M ground plane antenna mount at my shapeways store.

Currently I’m testing a cradle for the NookColor, expect to see it for sale in another week or two.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve come up with a simple mount for making portable/storable 2M ground plane antennas. They aren’t nearly as sturdy once they’re deployed, but they’re easy to fold up and store behind the seat of your truck, carry on your bicycle, etc.

If you have a MakerBot, RepRap, or other 3D printer, I’ve posted the STL over on Thingiverse. If you don’t have access to such a printer I’m in the process of setting up a store on Shapeways.

I’ll have more photos soon, including some ideas on how to store/transport the antenna.

[edit in 2016: I have sent/received no boxes in the pat 5 years and should take my name off the TGIMBOE list.]

Received another TGIMBOEJ last week, and while I forgot to take photos I can at least write down what I took out and put in.

But first, a warning out adding stuff to a TGIMBOEJ box: If you add electronic components, especially tiny ones like caps or resistors, make sure they are in a sturdy bag. Two of the DC motors in this box have a collection of tiny components stuck to the coils and will probably need some cleaning/debugging to get working again.

What I took out: peristaltic pump and some end stop sensors

What I put in: printer power supply, bunch of gears, a couple of motors, lots of machine screws, some cables, and some other random bits from a printer I tore down. I also reboxed it into a new box and bagged up as many of the components as possible.

enjoy!

I found a box of flyers and I’m not afraid to scan them. Posting a few a week in this flickr group.

Yesterday I received The Great Internet Migragory Box Of Electronic Junk (TGIMBOEJ) Box Code INTJ-24. I don’t want to spoil the surprise for the next recipient, but it was full of really good stuff in there that someone doing robotics or kinetics will appreciate, most of which I didn’t need. However, there were a couple of limit switches I need for my x/y table and this really strange thing with clear plastic tubes that I started playing with to figure out what it was. It turned out to be some micro-air pumps which are the perfect solution to this weird problem I’m having on one of my spare-time projects. It’s not that I didn’t know they existed, I just hadn’t played with them so I didn’t “get it” in terms of what I could do with them.

In appreciation for this bit of random luck, I decided to “split the box”, putting most of INTJ-24 and some stuff I had lying around into a fresh box and taking some of the items out and putting them (with more stuff) into a new box, JET-1.

INTJ-24 is scheduled to go out tomorrow, JET-1 will go out as soon as I hear back from one of the potential recipients.

After a lot of work by Kevin Sousa and his gang, Salt of the Earth is finally open. They’re an unusual restaurant so I’m not going to do the usual sort of review.

First off, I’m not going to tell you much about what we had for dinner other than we really liked it, the service was great, and the price was right.

What I am going to tell you about is Salt’s process and the dining experience.

Several years ago I met local chef Bill Fuller at a party and he said something that really got me to thinking, that he considered cooking a process. I was in design school at the time so it sounded good to me because design is all about process, but our first dinner at Salt really made the case for cooking as a process.

At its foundation, Salt is not your typical Pittsburgh restaurant. Their menu is seasonal, regionally sourced, and is so subject to last minute change it’s not even printed on paper it’s just written on a huge chalkboard on one side of the restaurant. (Bring your glasses, I should have…) What’s on their website is a good example of the sort of thing that they are serving, but it’s probably not exactly the same as what’s written on the wall.

It’s also a different sort of menu in that it’s effectively a very large chef’s tasting menu. There’s a selection of cocktails, wine, beer, starters, large plates, and last plates that are designed to work together and support one another. There’s the typical tasting menu rule of “no substitutions” and while they have a bar, they only have the ingredients for the drinks that are on the menu.

Normally I find this sort of thing a bit, well, stuffy to be honest. I grew up with the dinner rule at home of “this isn’t a restaurant, you eat what’s in front of you” and to some degree tasting menus strike me that way. “I don’t care if you hate tomatoes, I’m going to serve them to you anyway!”. I go to a restaurant to be waited on and have a choice bigger than “what leftovers do we have in the fridge?” and “What strange thing did someone come up with based on the overstock in the restaurant freezer?”. I don’t want to be told what to eat, I want to pick and choose from a vast range of choices.

This is where Kevin and his crew have really nailed the menu. It’s a tasting menu but with enough variety and creativity that you don’t feel like you’re choosing from only a handful of dishes. The dishes are simply listed by primary ingredients and flavors so it’s easy for pretty much anyone to find something that they will like. It’s also in plain english, so you don’t need to speak a foreign language or have a huge foodie vocabulary to understand items like “Hanger Steak: potato, shiitake, cherry barley”. Should you have a question — “cherry barley?” — the servers know the menu cold and can explain exactly what it is you are ordering.

When our cocktails and first plates arrived I discovered that my spicy (chili!) cocktail matched the spiciness of my first plate, but a sip of my partner’s very sweet cocktail matched my first plate in a completely different way. For my large plate I ordered a more “earthy” that also complemented the dish just as well, but differently, than my partner’s drink. Obviously I can’t try every combination of cocktail and dish, but thinking back on the menu it’s hard to see where I could screw up without trying. Each drink and dish had nice complementary flavors both within the dish itself and when combined with other things on the table.

Ok, so where’s the process that I think Bill Fuller was talking about?

I say it’s in the continual evolution of dishes based on feedback from customers, availability of ingredients, and the Salt team’s creative energy.

Normally I order a cocktail without much thought of how well it will go with my first course, often before I even look at the menu. Salt’s menu is well designed so your choices are limited to things that work well together. Many places have a list of “signature drinks” without much regard to the food menu, but at Salt each of the base spirits is represented with a cocktail tailored to match the ingredients of the dishes.

The same is true for first plates and large plates. I didn’t realize until later that even with a number of first and large plates that it was hard for me to pick dishes that would conflict with one another. The spiciness of my first plate did not overwhelm the earthiness of my large plate, and my last plate wasn’t a sugar flavor carbo bomb that made me forget what I was eating 10 minutes earlier.

Without going into the specifics of my meal, I feel good saying that if you go in with an open mind, talk to the water, and trust that Kevin and his staff have put together an excellent menu, you will not be disappointed. Yes, we really enjoyed our dinners, but it’s ok that what we ordered might never be on the menu again. Whatever replaces it will be as well thought out and planned as what we had on our first visit.

As for the physical space at Salt, it also benefits from well-thought design and architectural work. The first floor is a communal eating area with an open kitchen, the second floor is a reservation only-mezzanine. In the communal area you can sit at the kitchen “bar” or at one of the huge tables shared by different parties. Instead of feeling like a dorm cafeteria it feels like a large family get together where you just don’t recognize all of your relatives.

Too many times I’ve been to a restaurant with great food but diner-unfriendly atmosphere: harsh lighting, not enough lighting, too much noise, tables too close together, not enough room for the waitstaff to move, you get the idea. The architects behind Salt’s new building have done a truly amazing job of putting together a friendly, homey, comfortable space.

Salt is the result of a lot of creativity, imagination, design work, and hard labor. In my opinion, the effort has paid off and Salt is going to become a major player in the Pittsburgh restaurant scene.

My first Instructable, how to make a heated build platform for the Makerbot.

Also, we still have heated build platform kits in the store.

We upgraded our Droids to 2.2 today, and while one upgrade went fine, the other went not so fine. As in, reboot loop hell not so fine.

While it was up and barely responsive I noticed that there was a message about an operation being performed on the SD card, so I pulled it out and restarted. Droid worked just fine without the SD Card — no lag, all the apps were there, no crashes/reboots, etc.

Put the SD card back in, original problems happen. Phone is completely unusable.

Ok, I figure I’ll just back up the SD card and format it then use it again in my Droid. I removed the SD card and mounted it on my Mac in a USB adapter, drug the folder over, then watched as the number of files that needed to be copied slowly crept into the 10s of thousands.

Which, as you might guess, ain’t right.

After a little exploring, I discovered that /DCIM/Camera contained a directory /DCIM/Camera/Camera which had the exact same files as /DCIM/Camera. Including a subdirectory named “Camera”. Turtles all the way down means the SD card check probably was consuming all ram/cpu on the Droid and causing the crash/reboot.

Luckily the fix is simple — copy everything *except* the Camera sub directory to another file system, delete /DCIM, and re-use the card.

That being said, it’s 2010, why do we still have trivial inode errors in *nix filesystems? (I’m looking at you, Rubin. Seriously, wtf?)

FINALLY made it to a HackPGH member’s meeting. It’s a nice little space, not in the best part of town, but at least there’s parking and the like. Many members have donated time and equipment to help set up the space, now they’re needing help with things like putting in A/C wiring and continuing to build out the space.

So what sort of things to people do at hacker spaces? Well, whatever the members think would be a fun project. Say, for example, building and launching a high-altitude balloon or learning about fizzy drinks.

If you’re in Pittsburgh, and you’re looking for a studio space to hack on technology or take classes, haul yourself out to the next Hack PGH open house night or take a class, you won’t be sorry.

I’ve been really focused on the paying work (which is all NDA), so I haven’t much to post lately.

However, this is kinda cool, my Makerbeam kit finally showed up:

..and I’m already using it to make temporary brackets for stepper motors: