Category: project

  • My first woodturning commission

    This week a colleague approached me to ask if I could make something for him.His house, which he’s been renovating, still had an original doorbell from whenever it was built. The door bell was a round metal plate with a button in the middle, inset into a wood ring which was screwed to the wall.…

  • Turning a burr

    Burrs are very interesting bits of wood. They are odd growths that occur on the surface of tree trunks. I’m fascinated by what causes them to occur, since they are basically a mass of knots. Wikipedia on burrs Burrs typically have all sort of faults within the wood. But the wood is so dense both physically and…

  • Witter – a basic python twitter client for Maemo

    So I wrote last week about developing a basic twitter client. And this week I got the main stuff done, and wanted to share the code example here. 

  • Developing applications for Maemo

    When I first got my nokia 770 I intended to develop for it. I had a few ideas of what to write, but discovered apps already existing for just about everything I could think of. I also discovered that it’s not that easy developing for maemo.

  • First steps in a new software project

    This week I started a brand new project. This time it’s the start of product development, rather than just an internal project to get something running. And it really is new, so everyone is new and we’re setting up everything from scratch. So this is my list of things to go from nothing to a…

  • Pen turning

    Well it had to happen eventually. Given a lathe for enough time eventually you’ll give in to the allure of pen turning. I had started talking about giving it a go, and not long after Kat found herself in Turners Retreat with her dad. Being awesome, she bought me some supplies for turning pens.

  • The Mallet of many mistakes

    In last months woodturning magazine there was a project-in-a-day feature for making a mallet. I caught my eye because the head of the mallet was made from lignum vitae, a very dense hard wood which is normally found in the balls used for lawn bowls. As it happens I was recently given a couple of…

  • Automation isn’t free, and change isn’t either.

    When I started this blog I intended it to be about both woodworking and software engineering. It’s pretty clear that my focus has been woodworking, and more specifically woodturning.However, that’s not to say I’m not busy thinking about software engineering, I just don’t often think to write about it.

  • Stripping paint from chairs – chair 2

     With the first chair I tried a couple of approaches to stripping off the black paint. First I tried a hot air gun. Which was not terribly effective. So I moved on to paint stripper and wire wool.

  • Making a chess set part 2 – The Bishop

    Feeling good about how the king had gone, I set to work on the bishops.I decided that the thing to do would be to turn 2 head-to-head in a single length of wood. This would mean I only pay the ‘cost’ of work holding once for two pieces.