Well that took longer than expected…

So the last time I worked on the desk wasn’t as far back as October, but I didn’t get a chance to write it up (work has been a tad busy and other stuff has also been eating time). But with xmas dinner done, holidays finally kicked in for me and after collapsing for a few fallow days, I got back out to the shed in the last day or so. And managed to avoid breaking my neck on the decking outside the shed as well (some anti-moss napalm has been deployed and I’ll have to repaint that decking with some sort of high-traction paint before any really cold weather hits I think, and possibly drill a few sneaky drainage holes against standing water).

So in previous days, I got the dovetail mortice cut on the sides, using my normal technique for a stopped dado joint, which is to chop a small mortice at the point where the dado stops (so the saw has somewhere to go, though I wonder if a stair saw would solve that).… Read the rest

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Xmas dinner

More cooking this year. Didn’t do the turkey, but did do the beef wellington which went well thanks to cooking the steak sous vide after a quick sear and remembering to wrap it in filo pastry (with mustard on the inside) before wrapping it in puff pastry.

Also did a few sides, like cornbread muffintops and pommes dauphin which were the best (or so I thought) – half mashed potato (made particularly dry) and half choux pastry (also made a little dry), and deep fried for around eleven minutes to make large potato-sized golden brown potato dollops that were crunchier than roast potatoes on the outside and lighter and fluffier than thrice-cooked chips on the inside. Gotta love the French.

And for that teutonic paganism balance to the French, apart from the tree and the lights, I cheated on a yule log recipe, bought two chocolate Swiss rolls and did a bit of decorating.… Read the rest

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New Toy…

Way back in the mists of time, I mentioned how we had laser scanners in the CVRG (one of which was mounted on Dagda for a while). We used the SICK for a long while, which is a block of steel that’s pretty adept at toe crushing, only scanned through a partial circle and was enormously expensive (and later we acquired a 3D scanner which was even more expensive but could at least do 360 degrees). That was fifteen years ago though. 

Meet the modern version: 

The YDLIDAR X4, evolved from roomba sensors and possibly a knockoff of a slightly more well-known sensor. Weighs next to nothing, costs $80, fits in the palm of your hand, scans through 360 degrees seven times a second taking 5000 samples in the process (so about half-degree resolution), ranges out to ten meters on a good day with a following wind. … Read the rest

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