Haptic feedback is still an area where real books win over e-book readers such as Kindles. Being able to tell how far through a book you are by the feel of it, by the balance and thickness of the pages adds something instinctive to the reading process.

My idea is to have a little linear actuator with a small weight on it that spans the width of the ebook device. Just a very small motor (the type you get in phone vibrators) and a small worm-gear (like you get in floppy disk drives) would do, and wouldn’t take up much space. The weight would gradually move across from left to right as you moved through the book. This would allow you to assess your progress through whatever tome  you were currently reading just by feel.

Like most, I grew up in a house. These perform a number of functions. A safe place to sleep, eat and raise a family come fairly high in the list, as do entertaining guests and storing things. The house doesn’t undergo any substantial change in order to fulfil these different functions. It largely stays put. In effort to impress the guests you might re-arrange the furniture, clean the windows or hide the cat. The prime change is in the disposition of the house dweller, who changes their mental state in order to fulfill the task of getting through another day, feeding the children again or keeping the guests entertained until it’s time for them to go home.

Don’t ask me what this does.

Today I chanced upon some logs. So I took them home…

… and went at them with a hatchet…

I reckon that’s a few weeks’ worth of warm evenings some time around winter 2012.

Some people are worrying about the cost of heating their homes. I’m out scouting for wood.

Any woodologists able to identify what this might be and if it’ll burn obligingly? Failing that, practising xylologists?

Immediately after leaving university I joined a software company, and stayed there for 2 years and 8 months. It was serious slice of life. I’m glad I spent it there, but I’m also glad I left. Over the almost-three-years, my self-control wavered from time to time. I enjoy a joke, and if there’s a practical element, all the better.

In his goodbye speech, my manager went over the list of things I had done in my time there, including several practical jokes.

Microsoft Windows sets the bar high for software developers. Their standards of usability and UI consistency are something that few developers are fully able to attain.

With that in mind I present to you…

Guess the icon!

What’s this

Yes, you guessed it, it’s Intel’s Active Management Technology Status. And it’s disabled.

Not that you’d know.

During my time as a student (and during my time as a human) I’ve done a fair bit of lighting design and teching for student theatre. Here is a list of shows I have worked on.

2010

**Bent **(Lighting Designer; O’Reilly, Oxford)

**Paradise Lost **(Lighting Designer; O’Reilly, Oxford)

**The Blue Room **(Lighting Designer; O’Reilly, Oxford)

2009

**Captain Improv **ICE

**Much Ado About Nothing **(Lighting Designer; O’Reilly, Oxford)

**The Tempest **(Lighting Designer; Moser, Oxford)

**The Truth **(Lighting Designer & Op; OFS, Oxford)

I like instruments and have somewhat of a menagerie. Here are some of the less embarrassing inmates.

Squeezeboxes

Here is a Castagnari Lilly. It’s a small, single-voice D/G melodeon. Because of its size and the fact it has one reed per note, the reeds are mounted directly on the board rather than in a reed-block. It sounds a bit like a concertina. The buttons are much smaller than a normal melodeon so it’s easier to play fiddly things.

After a brilliant Swanage Folk Festival, I got my box home and, to my horror, heard a slight hissing sound. Nightmare. A few seconds’ listening suggested it was coming from behind the grille. So off it came.

 

Somehow the wax on the pallets had melted and allowed a valve or two to slip out of place. The wax melts at a very low temperature (a bit too low in my opinion). I carefully used a soldering iron to warm the armature (not the wax itself!) in short bursts. It took very little heating indeed to allow me to move the valves back in place.

My third- (or perhaps fourth-) hand Dino Baffetti melodeon has some pretty impressive basses, but the tonics on the chord side (key-note) have slowly started to sound a bit out of tune. Jon Spiers suggested that whilst it might be a problem with the reeds, the shape of the chamber also affects how reeds speak. It was noticeable that the tuning was fine at low volume, but at higher pressure the tone bent up as much as 50 cents. I took apart the chamber and bellows to see if anything was amiss, but it all looks in order. I did notice that the dust filters on the air vents were looking a bit mucky and that that might be causing the problem: