Photo Singularity #11

Photo Singularity #10

Basement Desk

Well, it took a while, but I finally got it “done.” At least in that I’m using it at this point. I’ve been working at this thought pretty much all of 2010 off and on. I was wanting to get it done before 2011 and it was put into position on New Years Eve. It’s made out of cedar and plywood. It’s not as precise as I would like, but I think it’s pretty good for what could be called by second woodworking project. The biggest challenge was the basement floor. Not Level At All. However, a few shims and some repositioned screws, it was made to work. Anything round will not stay put, but not much round stuff is put on it at this point. I’m just happy it’s in and usable. Eventually, I try adding a couple of drawers and a door to part of it, but I’m in no rush for that.

Photo Singularity #9

Kansas City Mini Maker Faire

Took a trip today in order to check out the Mini Maker Faire in Kansas City. We saw a wooden submarine called the Argonaut Jr and they even let us crawl inside. They’ve even used it for an actual dive with only one small leak that they patched up with a cotton ball and Gorilla glue.

There were other projects such as a Jacob’s Ladder, Mousebots, Makerbots, Tesla Coils, and much more.

Mom, Dad, and my Uncle were all very quick to offer me up as a target for some target practice. Those marshmallows can hurt you know.

There was a home-built foam cutter that could cut out just about any shape from a sheet of foam. Combine them together and you could come up with some pretty interesting pieces of art.

The Kansas City Space Pirates were in attendance, demonstrating their bot for the future Space Elevator. It’s part of the challenge to build a bot that can be powered by lasers so that it can climb a cable to space. Now if someone can just make a cable that is strong enough to go to space…

Then we had a funnel cake to finish the day.

Planets and the Perseid Meteor shower

Well, I’m a bit slow in posting this, but last Wednesday night we had a good night stargazing. We had around 25 people here checking out planets in the telescope that I purchased last year. The planets visible were Mars, Venus, Saturn, and Jupiter. I had purchased a new eyepiece for the telescope recently and it definitely was worth it. With it, we were able to see the color of Mars, the phase of Venus, the rings of Saturn, and four of Jupiter’s moons. If you were patient and looked very carefully, you could even make out the band on Jupiter! Throughout it all, meteors were appearing all over the sky. Turned out to be a pretty good night.

Photo Singularity #8

First of the season and a sign of good things to come!

Photo Singularity #7

Photo Singularity #6

My new login screen background.

Change the background of the login screen

To specify a new picture to use as the background for the login screen, open up Terminal and type…
defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow DesktopPicture /path/to/image
If you don’t know the path, instead of typing it, just drag the image you want into the terminal window.

To revert back to the default picture…
defaults delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow DesktopPicture