Richard Hartmann: Tabletop games
Wood. I really like wood. Even more, I like working with
wood.
Touching it, following its grain, and contemplating that it was
made mostly from thin air and water.
Normally, I just turn trees into handy pieces of firewood. While
that's already deeply satisfying in the sense that you actually get
to see what you worked for, it's a mostly destructive
task. You kill a tree, you chop it up, only to turn it back into
(mostly) thin air.
As chance would have it, I needed a new table. After dragging
myself through way too many furniture stores, I realized that I
wouldn't be happy with what's on offer. So I struck a deal with a
local carpenter: I would buy from them, but only if I could help
building my own table; I would finally create something larger than
a carving from wood.
After some scouting, the carpenter found five planks of oak
which were 4+ meter long, about 40-60 cm wide, and 8+ cm thick:
If you think this wood looks old, worn, and broken: You should
have seen it up close; it was worse than on the potato-cam picture
;) But that's another great thing about working with wood: by
taking off a laughably thin layer of surface material, you can
renew the whole thing.
We cut off 10 cm from each side as that's what tends to split
and tossed that away. Afterwards, we cut off 80 cm from the wider
side for the legs. Again, the base tends to have more imperfections
and as you don't need to cut long pieces, you have more freedom in
deciding how to cut.
Cutting is an art in itself; tiny imperfections in the wood's
surface can hint at large fissures underneath. The fact that the
wood looks worn and spotty does not help in figuring this out.
After cutting to minimize waste, you end up with a pile like
this:
And a surprising amount of waste, i.e. firewood:
After a lot of planing, the wood becomes cleaner and
smoother:
Then, everything's fitted so that neighbouring planks have their
heartwood running into different directions, and so that the upper
surface gets (most of) the interesting features. This is another
surprisingly involved process and took about two hours.
And no, the potato-cam does not manage to capture the wood's
beauty.
After sanding the sides down to perfection to ensure the glue
can bond really tightly, the table feet are glued and put into a
hydraulic press:
while the tabletop itself shines in all its 287 cm x 107 cm x
6.3 cm glory:
Tomorrow, we will sand down the top and bottom of the tabletop
and prepare the feet. Grooves will be milled into the wood to glue
steel bars into it, as well as another plank that will be glued to
the bottom of the tabletop, running along the middle. Along with
the alternating heartwood, this helps ensure that this beast of a
table will not fold in on itself or otherwise succumb to internal
torsion or gravity.
The final steps will be to fit the feet, sand down the surface
again and then apply two layers of oil.
And while most people may not fancy taking a week off just to
rise way too early and then do unpaid work, I love it.
As I said: I like wood.
If you think this wood looks old, worn, and broken: You should
have seen it up close; it was worse than on the potato-cam picture
;) But that's another great thing about working with wood: by
taking off a laughably thin layer of surface material, you can
renew the whole thing.
We cut off 10 cm from each side as that's what tends to split
and tossed that away. Afterwards, we cut off 80 cm from the wider
side for the legs. Again, the base tends to have more imperfections
and as you don't need to cut long pieces, you have more freedom in
deciding how to cut.
Cutting is an art in itself; tiny imperfections in the wood's
surface can hint at large fissures underneath. The fact that the
wood looks worn and spotty does not help in figuring this out.
After cutting to minimize waste, you end up with a pile like
this:
And a surprising amount of waste, i.e. firewood:
After a lot of planing, the wood becomes cleaner and
smoother:
Then, everything's fitted so that neighbouring planks have their
heartwood running into different directions, and so that the upper
surface gets (most of) the interesting features. This is another
surprisingly involved process and took about two hours.
And no, the potato-cam does not manage to capture the wood's
beauty.
After sanding the sides down to perfection to ensure the glue
can bond really tightly, the table feet are glued and put into a
hydraulic press:
while the tabletop itself shines in all its 287 cm x 107 cm x
6.3 cm glory:
Tomorrow, we will sand down the top and bottom of the tabletop
and prepare the feet. Grooves will be milled into the wood to glue
steel bars into it, as well as another plank that will be glued to
the bottom of the tabletop, running along the middle. Along with
the alternating heartwood, this helps ensure that this beast of a
table will not fold in on itself or otherwise succumb to internal
torsion or gravity.
The final steps will be to fit the feet, sand down the surface
again and then apply two layers of oil.
And while most people may not fancy taking a week off just to
rise way too early and then do unpaid work, I love it.
As I said: I like wood.
My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for 


In
When it all worked fine almost
In June, I bought a new laptop, and a new SSD for it. I used that model
of SSD before (Samsung 840 Evo), although not for a long time, so I
wasn't expecting anything unusual.
Since the laptop is a slower one, I installed Debian as follows:
connect SSD to my workstation, do an install on it (via Virtualbox
connected to the raw device), disconnect and install in the
laptop. First sign of trouble was that the SSD didn't boot reliably. I
said - maybe my Virtualbox method (new method) wasn't right - so I
reinstalled on the laptop, and everything was mostly OK.
Mostly OK because rarely the laptop had issues with seeing the
SSD. Maybe not cold booting, requiring a restart, or giving some ATA
errors on boot (bot nothing afterwards). I didn't use the laptop too
much - I mostly use it when travelling - so I didn't investigate
further.
Trouble begins
Fast forward to two weeks ago: I was preparing to leave on a trip, so
I booted the laptop (everything OK),
In a
That's a lot stronger incentive than some paypal donation button or flattr
link! The details of how it works are explained on
I havent found much details online on how to perform a Moodle course mirror that could be browsed offline using
I was unable to find a good place that describes how to create a simple
self-hosted email setup. The most surprising discovery was, how much already
works after:
Altus Metrum's 2014 Black Friday Event
BLACK FOREST, Colorado USA
Altus Metrum announces two special offers for "Black Friday" 2014.
On November 14, as a great way to say goodbye to a semester, a good friend came to my class again to present a topic to the group; a good way to sum up the contents of this talk is "everything you ever wondered about persistent storage".
As people who follow my blog know, I like inviting my friends to present selected topics in my Operating Systems class. Many subjects will stick better if presented by more than a single viewpoint, and different experiences will surely enrich the group's learning.
So, here is Rolando Cedillo A full gigabyte of him, spawning two hours (including two hiccups where my camera hit a per-file limit...).
Rolando is currently a RedHat Engineer, and in his long career, he has worked from so many trenches, it would be a crime not to have him! Of course, one day we should do a low-level hardware session with him, as his passion (and deep knowledge) for 8-bit arcades is beyond any other person I have met.
So,
A