So today I was a bit under the weather (which is a polite way of saying that I was having a philosophical dispute with something I ate and was conducting a brexit poll of my own) and working from home (which is a polite way of saying that if you work in IT, being confined to where the king goes alone is not enough to get you out of work because we invented both the laptop and wifi). So over lunch I took the clamps off the core of the benchtop glueup to see would it immediately fall apart (because as we all know, a litre of titebond II regularly fails to hold wood together). Continue reading →
Monthly Archives: June 2016
29
Jun 16
CHIP
The $9 computer kickstarter project finally arrived.
Granted, it’s been beaten to the punch by the raspberry pi zero, but out of the box it has some nice touches…
It’s wider than the zero but a bit shorter. Female headers, so that’s a bit more robust and easier for breadboarding and the pinout is printed on the header (you can see that more readily below). 
Nice insulating back cover so that you don’t need a protective box for it on the bench from day one (wouldn’t recommend deploying it without a box of course, but the pi zero really needs some protection even on the bench).
I do like that touch of the pinouts on the header.
Haven’t had time to fire it up and play yet, but first out-of-the-box impressions aren’t bad…
26
Jun 16
More Horses and Glue
I managed, one or three boards at a time, to get the glue faces of the benchtop boards planed smoothish (from rough-sawn) over assorted weekday evenings in the hour or less that I had free. Hell, I even managed to paint the sawhorses out of sheer frustration (and to test the colours of the paint intended for the shed).
Then this weekend I finally got a sunday to work on the top (I was waiting for a full day because everyone says that with pine, plane it flat and glue it the same day or it’ll warp on you out of spite). Out came the boards… Continue reading →