Means of Seeing what the eye brings

April 10, 2010

Kalliroscope

Filed under: gadgets,philosophy — osteoderm @ 8:26 am

JB dragged me to a garage sale this morning. Newport is a fine venue for a garage sale, as it has such a long and colourful history, and is populated by an army of characters and collectors. Despite this, I tend to avoid such sales like the plague; I have had a bad habit of collecting junk myself, and largely try to avoid any added temptations.

Today, however, and of course I find something worth the trip. I found a Kalliroscope “Pocket Viewer” for a dollar. In the original box, with the original paperwork, but sadly missing the small rotating ball-bearing base. This was a neat find for me; I’d had never before seen one in person, or even in colour, but had long wanted to encounter one.

It all started years ago. My mother passed to me a copy of The Last Whole Earth Catalog, the actual “Last” one from 1971, #1160. Like a paper version of a Google search, the Whole Earth Catalog was an incredible inch-thick 11″x14″ tome, primitive, direct, and optimistic, championing “access to tools” within its pages.

In that particular issue, some articles and items were singled out for special mention. This was signified on the page by an image of a Kalliroscope next to the piece in question. The Catalog itself offered two Kalliroscopes for sale; the small hand-held globe version, and the thinner rectangular “Pocket Viewer” that I found today.

It’s hard to describe what a Kalliroscope really looks like, what it does, or how it does it. I’ve tried to find videos on-line, but haven’t found any good ones. Likewise, the website of the original inventor/manufacturer isn’t particularly helpful. Technically, the Kalliroscope is rheoscopic fluid suspension of microscopic crystalline platelets sandwiched between glass sheets. Practically, it’s a ridiculous little gizmo that you just hold and stare at while it does all this swirly cosmic stuff.

The memory of that Catalog and the inspiration I gained from it while I lived in the bus stay with me. It’s a happy little throwback to a time when sentimentality was forefront in my life. Now that I’ve lived through bitter cynicism and am now entering a strongly pragmatic period, it’s probably healthy to hold on to a few of these positive reminders of previous ages.

April 7, 2010

old tools, new tools, and something in-between

Filed under: gadgets — osteoderm @ 2:18 pm

I recently had an interesting exchange with my dear stepdad, concerning old tools. Specifically, the repair of old tools versus the purchase of new ones. He’s been trying to source some basic repair parts for palm sander, and having poor luck at home, has me helping to import some.

Sad but true, those same simple repair parts -themselves being foreseeable wear items, not at all a cause for tool replacement- will end up costing about as much as a new tool would. Me, well, I’m a bit of a self-annoying tool-snob; I’d probably just replace the sander. On the other hand, I completely agree with the principle of a repair. In practice, I make part of my living with my tools, and the downtime and annoyance of a repair isn’t usually worth the savings. The latest greatest best and fastest tools are almost always more than I ought to afford, but doing self-employed on-call yacht-repair work, I can’t really afford anything less.

Rarely, some sort of sentiment takes over. I’ve worked in several shops, both amateur and professional, that included in their inventory one of those ancient 3/8″ B&D electric drills; you know the ones, with the heavy cast-aluminum housings, lousy ergonomics, and arm-ripping low-speed torque. They tend to look like crap, with paint and chips and mangled cords, but have somehow managed to keep running years past any modern expiration date. They almost always come with a story; Dad’s cousin’s first drill, the drill that spun out that broken easy-out, the only tool that could tackle that cross-member bolt…

I have one survivor of my own. When I bought my last boat, I found a suspect-looking old Makita GV5000 in the bottom of a locker. The sander had seen some water and had the remains of a few cockroaches stuck in the vents. It squealed horridly, but ran. I ended up sanding half my keel with it, then used it to polish all my stainless pipework. A few years later, when I was being picked off my foundering boat mid-Atlantic (thanks again, captain & crew of the MSC Malaysia!), that same cruddy old GV5000 was one of the few possessions I managed to come away with.

Last winter, I started a job that required a whole lot of disc-sanding. I dug the GV out of storage and gave it a spin… the horrible squeal was back, worse than ever. Well, by this time I figured that the sander had earned some love, so I took it for the 20-minute drive to the nearest full-service walk-in industrial tool repair center to see what we could do. There, a very friendly gentleman patiently explained to me that a full set of bearings and brushes could be ordered, but that the cost of the repair would end up totaling almost half the cost of a brand-new upgraded GV5010. While I needed the tool for work, the repair was a lousy deal, and the replacement was more than I could afford. In the end, I did as I had a few years back: I blew out the brushes with compressed air, hosed down the bearings with teflon spray, and just kept working the tool. It quieted down and made me money for 5 weeks. I still have it.

Lately, I’ve been trying a middle path with factory-reconditioned tools. I’ve had excellent luck with these, purchased through online merchants. Usually, they come with all the usual accessories, cases, paperwork, etc., as well as a complete warranty. The real difference is in the cost, oftentimes half that of the same tool new. They way I look at it, it’s like getting your own tool repaired, except with a new warranty. Buying reconditioned comes with some shortcomings; there may be far less selection available, and some reconditioned tools may not come boxed. My reconditioned DeWalt tools come with an unsightly “R” hot-branded into the plastic case, which I can live with.

Ultimately, it shouldn’t be about the tool, but about the work, about the job. I believe that in the right hands, excellent tools lead to excellent results. However, given skill and patience, that old tool can do just as well.

March 5, 2010

advertising… have I really sunk this low?

Filed under: gadgets,learning — osteoderm @ 8:06 pm

Yes. I have. Sorta. All 2.27 of my regular readers will have already noticed that my previously-unsullied blog now contains advertising. Damn my eyes.

“What gives?”, you might ask? Okay, so here come my lame-ass excuses: I’ve recently started doing a little freelance web-design, mainly in the form of social media marketing consultation. As part of this increasing work, I’m digging just that little bit deeper into a few of those aspects of the web that I had previously been only aware of, not fully knowledgeable in.

This here blog has always been the place where I test out new ideas, new WordPress versions, theme variations, widgets, etc., before putting them into my other “real websites”. My usual WP theme, Tarski, looks visually plain, but actually offers a heap of back-end behind-the-scenes code customization, which I am usually fucking around with one way or the other.

For advertising, I’m playing with Google AdSense. For those of you not “in the know”, it works something like this: you put some pre-generated ad-unit code into your markup, then Google “crawls” the website to try and figure out what it’s about, who is reading it, and then displays targeted ads that are supposed to match up.
Sometimes this is uncannily accurate; the ads seem perfectly matched to the content and readership. Sometimes this is uncannily bizarre; the ads seem to have no connection to the site, the readers, to reason, to sanity, to good taste, or to any known law of the known universe. In either case, the ads are constantly shifting and changing, so you never really know what you’re going to get.
Ultimately, Google pays the website owner based on how many ads are shown, and/or how many ads actually get clicked… eventually. At this point, for me at least, it’s been an interesting experiment in patience.

One particular post on this site gets 40-60 visitors every single day (I know, right?), so I figured, “What the fuck, why not?” It’s not a massive amount of traffic, but maybe the ads will buy me a coffee or two someday.

In the meantime, please lemme what you think about these ads. Too annoying? Too weird? Too sell-out? I’ll see how it goes; deletion is just one click away.

January 24, 2010

browsing

Filed under: gadgets,learning — osteoderm @ 9:33 am

As much as I enjoy and use Google services, I’ve found myself engaged in a gentle resistance against all Google, all the time. So it was with just a little quiet sigh of resignation that I installed Google’s new Chrome web-browser on my machine.

I’ve been using Firefox user since 3.0. I flirted with Opera for awhile, back in my Windoze days, but got hooked by the speed gains of Firefox 3.5, as well as the great add-on collection and support. IE finally has picked up a few of the features of both these other browsers, but now that I’ve become a Linuxophile, all closed-source Microsoft crap has been banned from my pc.
But on to Chrome. After a day of browsing and testing, Chrome is looking… fast! The interface is very minimalist, but most all the features are still there, even if a few of them are buried. Even with a few extensions (google voice and gmail checkers, adblock), the browser window is a very lithe affair. The “omnibar” (combined search and address bar) works well enough, but it’s not obvious what service you’re using to search with; Google is the default, of course, but I find myself preferring Firefox’s discrete search box with its obvious selection of search engines.
The big deal about Chrome is still the speed. On my machine, it benchmarks 80%-300% better than Firefox. With HTML5 video fully-enabled, youTube, vimeo, etc., show blazing smooth lag-free playback, although I do note a touch more pixelation. But that speed! My box is no powerhouse, but Chrome and public DNS make for a seriously snappy browsing experience.
I am, however, noticing a little trouble here and there. For instance, my WP admin page shows a few render goofs, minor mangled buttons, etc. Also, the trade-off for Chrome’s multi-threaded approach seems to be a slightly greater static memory usage and a tendency to keep the CPU at full-blaze. Not enough to fail on, but evidence that Chrome is still very much a bleeding-edge browser, based on truly new technologies.
Firefox, for me, is not usurped, just shuffled a bit to the side; I’ll still be using Firefox for critical work, content creation, and alongside other CPU-intensive tasks. But it’s that raw speed, combined with the uncluttered interface and large viewing pane, that may well keep me using Chrome for casual browsing.

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