Pioneer Day Projects

July 24, 2019 by Adam in Adam's Projects

Thanks to the Mormons, today is Pioneer Day and I had it off from work.  I started in after a hearty breakfast of french toast, taking Sam's disassembled semi-broken desk and turning it into a smaller work bench for Ben.  The general idea is that Ben can move the sewing machine and glue gun down to the basement area, freeing up the kitchen table which is generally covered in knick knacks.

We have an old Amish-made bit of furniture for an old school TV, which has been fairly useless if really pretty.  I whipped up some shelves and moved in the remaining games, which frees up space on the wire shelves for other things.

Finally, I bravely cut a hole in the basement linoleum floor over one of the bumps.  Sure enough, there's a layer of thin particle board that warped when water ran in from the washing machine drain.  I'll have to think about next steps - a simple patch might due for now, though long-term ripping up the floor is likely the ideal solution.

Autobiography

May 30, 2019 by Adam in Adam's Projects

I'm working on putting together an autobiography of sorts.  It started with just wanting to mess around with html and css and turned into the start of a collection of stories from my childhood.  Part of it is that Sam's been digitizing a bunch of things for mom and it ends up making for good material.  This is a work in progress of the sort of clips I'd like to sprinkle throughout the thing.

Fava Beans

May 28, 2019 by Adam in Adam's Projects

Towards the end of last year we planted a couple beds full of fava beans.  They're good for the soil, enriching with nitrogen, and keep the weeds down over winter.  Now that we're nearly to summer, they've become huge and it became apparent it was time to harvest.  I pulled out the stalks and plucked the beans into a barrel while Joanna chopped up the stalks and tossed them in the compost.  We then spent a half hour getting the beans out, blanched them in boiling water, then peeled off the skin from each bean.  Joanna sauted them with butter and garlic to serve with the rest of our Memorial Day dinner.

It was a huge amount of work, but it sure was tasty.

PIPBoy3000

April 29, 2019 by Adam in Adam's Projects

Over the last few months, dad decided to make a PIPBoy3000.  It's a key piece of equipment in the Fallout games, a little computer you wear on your wrist to interact with various systems - your inventory, a map, the radio, healing yourself, and so on.  With his new 3D printer, dad made an amazing piece of kit, with various parts that light up, dials that turn, a holotape you can insert and eject.  It was incredible.

After he handed it over to me a few weeks ago, I felt obligated to do something meaningful with it.  There's an official PIPBoy3000 app, but it's stuck in demo mode if you don't have the game running and it doesn't do much other than look pretty.

I broke out my web development skills and made my first Ionic app, which can easily be published to a phone.  It's running a little constantly-updating app with a news feed, current weather, and clock.  Of course, it also looks cool with a flickering green screen.  Anything else wouldn't do the hardware justice.