Brainstorm

Day's end

Still not feeling like going inside and getting ready for tomorrow.

Sunday lunch

Sitting in the sun at the bottom of the garden sipping a blueberry,
strawberry, orange and apple smoothie (my latest addiction) while my
pork chops grill on the BBQ.
I could really do with another couple of days off. Maybe I'll take a
long weekend next week.

Welcome to Pangbourne

Dark skies

Don't walk

At first I was disappointed with the iPhone camera but now I think
it's limitations could be features. The speed of the camera shutter
for example is quite slow but the pixels in the capture cell work
independently of the capture scan. This leads to some interesting
effects.

Note to self: pkgconfig

If using macports sandbox pkgconfig in /opt/local/lib/pkgconfig and also installing packages to the usual place (/usr/local/lib) then set the PKG_CONFIG_PATH

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH

because it will save a world of pain.

Back to School

I have spent much of the weekend attempting to get to grips with XCode, Objective C, UPNP libraries, iPhone SDK and arm-apple-darwin cross compiling. To be frank it's not going too well at the minute. I think that the classic developer ego is stopping me from going back to basics.

I think that I should be able to understand how all these bits fit together but really 10 years of web based interpreted code development has ruined my C kung-fu. Accordingly I am now - after essentially wasting most of my weekend - swallowing my pride and working my way through as many tutorials as I can starting with "Hello World" until I know how to compile a useful UPNP library into a Cocoa Touch framework and get it to talk to my network. I think this may take some time.

Divinity Road Street Meal

We have closed off the street and are having a community meal. It's
nice to have a community.

More camera on my camera

Although it's a bit of a cliché shot round here I think I will have to try for a HDR shot around the same time of night. The range of colours and light here would be good for it.

Queuing at jamie's

Don't know yet if it's a sign of great food or big fat hype, but the queue is long at 6:30. The group of five in front of us just got told that it's going to be an hour and a half for them to get a table. They just shrugged and got in line. Hopefully it wont be that long for us.

Update::
The food was pretty damn good. Not exactly cheap, but well thought out.

The finished table

The finished table, originally uploaded by RickHawkins.

Here it is, in-situ. Very pleased with the result.

So close

I had the box in my hand then the o2 system crashed! Come back in a couple me hours is the advice

Iphone hype queue

Luckily my name is on a list. So i hope anyway.

On a promise

Scouting around to figure out where best to try my luck on Friday so that I can be part of the iPhone 3G hype. Having got the standard "no pre-orders, first come first served, doors open at 7:30" line from all of the O2 shops I tried I happened into the Carphone Warehouse.

I went in to check if because I got my original phone and contract from them (well over 10 years ago now) did I have to get my iPhone upgrade from there? In there I found out that although the O2 shop over the road was opening at 7:30 they would only be selling iPhones to new customers, not upgrades! Seeing as I was planning on getting into town an hour early to give it a shot in the queue I was not best pleased with that news.

All was not lost however as after a few minutes conversation the guy there confided that he was keeping an unofficial pre-order list and that he would give me a call on Thursday to confirm that he had one for me. Sweet! So now all I have to worry about is his black market iPhone pre-order scheme getting busted by the Carphone Warehouse bosses. That and the inevitable shortage of stock on the day.

Table Part 3

So now I have a glued and screwed frame and its all set for the legs. I have just used simple brackets to attach them inside the frame and will use the tops of them to support the plywood top.

The only tricky bit is getting them all evenly spaced from the top and that is more fiddly than anything else.

Once the legs were all on I cut a piece of plywood to fit the hole and screwed in onto the legs.

This is the moment of truth. Is the table anywhere near straight and flat?

Well sitting on the not quite so flat patio it is pretty damn close. I didn't really worry about it too much as it was made to sit on the gravel at the bottom of the garden next to the benches so being level is a relative concept.

Now I can sand off all the rough joins and smooth over the edges. I really must get and learn how to use a plane. I think this is the tool that is missing from my wood craft arsenal.

So with a brief pause for a beer it's time to get the tiles on. This is where I got lucky. The tiles fit very evenly into the top with only a couple of lines needing to be cut from each side. One could argue that it was more design than luck seeing as I measured the tiles when I drew up the plans but given all the tweaks it is serendipitous none the less.

It is now looking pretty cool and once it is grouted and stained I think its going to be worth the effort - and the approximate £50 materials it cost.

Diy

This should really be part of the Making a Table posts. The scene on the patio as I put the legs onto the frame.

More parking

Patio By Night

Patio By Night, originally uploaded by RickHawkins.

Garden looking pretty good now. Lets hope its fine next weekend.

Table part 2

I now have the two bits I glued yesterday clamped and glued and a couple of screws added to the dried glue joints for good measure. It took a little persuasion to get the pieces to line up square what with the usual slight twisting and minor off set of my joins. Still once it was clamped it all hangs together. I should be able to tile it tomorrow.

Cowley road festival

Having abandoned the woodwork for food this was the scene at the bottom of the road. From divinity road to the plain 4 stages several round systems and enough jerk chicken to feed the jamaican army.

I am become tommy walsh

I must of watched way too many home improvement shows as in a moment of recklessness I embarked on a project to build a table for the garden.
Following a very rudimentary sketch I spent about an hour in B+Q looking for the bits I would need. My list went:

1. Wood
1. Timber for the sides - 2.4m planed and shaped 38x60mm
2. Timber for the legs - 2m planed 40x40mm
3. Plywood for the top (as a base for tiles)
2. Mosaic tiles
3. Tiling adhesive/grout
4. Right angle brackets
5. Grout spreader
6. Screws and other sundries I had at home.

So with that all done I started chopping up the wood. The B+Q cutting machine was broken so I had to use my hand saw which meant it was a little more tricky than it needed to be to get the cuts straight but soon I had 4 equal sized bits for the edge and 4 legs.
Now I needed to glue and clamp the wood together to get a nice snug fit before I add screws to the mix. Unfortunately I only have 2 clamps so I will have to do it in 2 passes adding a couple of days to the job. With any luck I can still get it finished in time for the house warming. The next thing I have to decide is if I should go get some long brass screws to fix the sides together or recycle some old Ikea bolts - the kind that have a metal thing to go into perpendicular to the bolt.
The bodger in me wants to use the Ikea bolts but I only have 4 and I think I might need 8. Then again that might be overkill. I will sleep on it.

The rabbit foot spasm band

Dinner, real ale and jazz. Had to come some way out of town to avoid the Fucking american tourists chanting USA! (Have i ever mentioned my dislike of our colonial cousins?) Which turned out ok as we found a jazz band celebrating some the good stuff to come out of the US, namely the music of Louis Armstrong.

Grumpek