Ofuro Soaker Tub

So it wasn't the most productive way to spend my Friday I suppose, but last week I had some serious interest in Ofuro tubs.  A few things caused it, some pictures from tumblr, references from Archer (animated TV series) and my general interest in Japanese culture.

Here are the two pictures in specific that got me going.

Via Pixiv.net and 六七質.

This image was on the tumblr radar.  If you follow any tumblr blogs, the tumblr radar is really a cool place to see things you might not normally.

Via denOFopulence

I saw this as a reblog from one of the tumblr's I follow and it started my ofuro hunt in earnest.

I looked at several things related to ofuro's and different ways I could go about building one, ranging from concrete to wood and finally settled on that this would have to be an outside thing for my tiny home and that a wooden one would be in the realm of things I could actually make.

Cedartubs.com had some interesting info and pictures that really helped me makes sense of everything.

via Cedartubs

This image really shows the look I would like to accomplish on this tub, but the real money shot was their technical shot (an export from sketchup) that showed the most important design piece, look at the image tell me if you see it?

Via Cedartubs

If you noticed the beveled joint that makes it easy to do a radius bend with wood, you are very observant and have an engineers mind!  I saw that and was stunned by how much easier that was than the complicated chamfering I was planning on doing to get the ellipses shape I favor.

In summary you need a source for Clear Western Red Cedar, a source for stainless steel or maybe copper bands (Cedar tubs calls out a specific grade of stainless) and a heat source.  Clear is a designation of the grade of lumber you are buying, clear means it is free of knots (ie will hold water) so expect this to be fairly expensive lumber, the stainless or copper bands are to hold it together and have aesthetic value to enhance the look of the tub, and the heat source is really just supper nerdy to me, old school heat exchanger.

Take some time to understand what you are trying to build here so you understand that it is not a hot tub, it is not a bath tub, it is specifically for soaking away tension and traditionally has meditative value.  It was also part of the social order of the household with the eldest and most respected using the tub first, followed by the next eldest and respected down.  You shower and scrub yourself prior to entering the orfuro, and should not enter with any fabrics or detergents.

Back in the brew saddle

So on Saturday I got a brew in, I've only got wonky stuff on tap and I needed something to just drink when I'm in the mood for a beer.  I brewed up a British pale ale my LHB store had in their recipe bin.  They called it Docksider Pale ale, if I hit 75% efficiency it will be around 4.7% abv, I don't know as I couldn't be bothered to measure, but I tried a few different things so here's hoping I can hit 75%.  Low alcohol beers (3-4%) are called Session beers, so if I hit my more normal 50% efficiency then it will be a session beer.  I'm dry hopping with Fuggle and Golding hops and just going to drop this in the keg and not fuck about with bottles.

It was the first time I've brewed out back so it was a bit of an adventure for me.  I really need a tent or cover to keep tree debris from falling into the brew kettle, but other than that it was nice to not hang out in the garage for 4 or so hours.

Cue the Psyco music

Excellent song, trippy ass video though.

Networks are hard

So yeah, I got clobbered today.  A change an ex-coworker made to a switch config nearly a year ago kicked my ass today.  Ain't that a bitch?

Long story short see above, much longer version is around 10am I was having a conversation near one of my Wireless Access points.  It's a strange habit I'll admit, but I tend to look at it whenever I'm around it.  Why you ask?  Well these ones have handy dandy status lights, you can see how they are behaving by the color of the light, green is good with no clients blue is good with clients and anything in a red-ish hue is bad.

Well I noticed mine was magenta.

Typically not a huge deal, sometimes they dissociate from my wireless controller and eventually re-connect at their leisure.  Around 11am someone mentioned the wireless was not working so I looked into it.  I had traps in the log that told me around 10:18am every single AP disjoined the controller, not reason given.

Ruh Roh!  Out comes the investigator hat.

I reboot the controller and the configuration server, power cycle the AP closest to me and it joins the controller no problem, so I'm thinking hey that's not so bad.  Trouble is only a handful of my 51 AP's rejoin, and an hour later I only have 5 AP's and 10% isn't going to cut it.  Plus some people are starting to notice.

I have about 1 million square feet (I shit you not) of campus to try and cover so if one AP is down it's not a huge deal, but 46 kind of is.  So I pull out my magnifying glass and thinking pipe (whatever props help me think) and work on probing the recesses of my damn network.  I've got Cisco's network adviser running, a spreadsheet of IP addresses, 5 terminal sessions and my fluke network analyzer looking for issues.  I tracing links and verifying that trunks are working, making sure no ports are flapping, double checking vtp server settings, verifying STP is not doing something stupid, still only 12 AP's are joined and it's like 2pm.  I'm starving and not able to think any longer so I do the sensible thing and go get a Jimmy John's sandwich and play some sodoku.  It was a bad decision, it's Thursday and Sodoku is really hard when you're

1. distracted
2. hungry
3. stupid
4. tired

None of this stops me of course, and I fail at sodoku as I knew I would and return to my desk. At this point I still only have 12 AP's and I don't know why, so I do the sensible thing and start looking at errors in my Fluke Network Analyzer, low and behold I notice and IP conflict on the secondary IP of my master switch and the secondary IP of my wireless lan controller. I fixed that and boom all of the AP's joined. Son-of-a-bitch. I'm going to stab that guy, he's been gone almost 8 months and he is still fucking with me.

Fucking internet I swear

That's it internet, you and I need to have a little talk here.  You creative bastards out there need to stop making new shit until I have some time to finish some of the really awesome damn projects I've already found.

Seriously it's getting out of hand.  I don't have 40+ hours a week to play with projects, or even 10 hours for that matter!  It feels rare that I have even 30 minutes a day to push the ball forward on various projects any given day.  Between cooking, and taking care of my child and a little video gaming mixed in I don't have time.

Alright, so on that note I give you this bit of internet glory:  Making rings out of coins.

This video doesn't have a "How-to" but shows you what they can look like.



This video gives you some insight into how to actually do the work, but the guy is annoying and whines about the quality of his tools most of the time.

Marginally interesting commencement speach

If it speaks to you, or you liked the sandman comic book, or any of Neil's prior works it was pretty good and was tailor made to show up on Lifehacker.  He hit on so many things that Lifehacker seems to post about all the time.  The importance of liking what you are doing in the moment, imagining what someone more competent would do in your situation, advice on freelance work, and a few other topics.  I liked it because in my heart I imagine myself as many things, an artist is one of those.

Come for the Vampire Porn stay for the witticisms?

If you don't have analytics you should totally get an account if only for random joy's like this one.  2.09% of my traffic for the last year has been searching for vampire porn.  If that isn't a win, I don't know what is.

Occupy the Masons

I assume that there must be a common human arc, some strangely connected pulse that people of relatively similar backgrounds are walking to.  The support I have for this is the number of times I find an article in my self-selected news sources that just resonates deeply with me.  Or how often my close friends and I seem to have the same thought or how often I'm able to predict what my wife is about to say.  The wife thing may be a different thing all together so I'll discount that for the moment but the other items seem like a strong enough basis for this feeling I get.

A fairly recent example of this would be this article that Make reminded me of about the Free Masons.  I mentioned it to a friend of mine who immediately lit up to the idea.  He said he had wanted to do something similar, looking for some sort of belonging.

I'm certain others have experienced it as well.  When was the last time you and someone you know reached the same or similar conclusions coming from different perspectives.  For example, a little prior to the current backlash against Genetically Modified foods, I started to get interested in preparing my own foods.  The more I read about others looking into commercial foodstuffs and how they where processed and how that food is affecting our bodies, the more I heard about other people that wanted to start raising their own food. Now you have Urban Homesteading laws (home canning and laws about raising chickens in urban areas are being relaxed).



Not entirely un-releated, Will Smith manages to make me dislike him slightly less.

Cameo's are the new indie

I wasn't sure if I cared to post this video or not, but the two dudes that they flash to repeatedly that made me laugh tipped the scales to yes.  So here you go Cameo's by a "Comedian/Musician", an actor and a model.  If you saw anyone else let me know. Hat tip as always ElectricMustache blog

Random-ish gardening post

Damn spring tricked me!

I got around to transplanting my tomato starts last weekend and it has been a week of 70's for the high but overnight has been dropping off as low as the high 30's.  My poor tomato starts where looking a touch on the yellow side going into the weekend, and now with Sunday and Monday dumping rain and keeping it cold I'm concerned I'm going to loose 2 of them!

Unrelated in any fashion I haven't brewed in what has to be close to 2 months.  I just haven't had the time, energy or funds to take on a brew of late so I've been putting it off.  Every time I pull meat out of the chest freezer though I have to look at the 16 or so ounces of hops I got from my wife's co-worker at the end of last summer.  I need to use them fairly soon or I need to pull them out and start aging them for sour beers.  Cascade isn't the best for aging though so I'm thinking I need to nut up and make some beer.  An ale of some form or another would be a lovely thing to stuff into a keg and keep on tap.

Long form journalism on the web

Maybe it's my age showing, maybe it's the liberal arts college talking; or maybe who knows why but lately there have been some really excellent long form articles on the internet.  It might be better to say, there have been some articles that are very long that I've enjoyed on the internet lately.  Either way, here are a few of them.


Forbes lays out the tragi-comic clusterfuck of HP's long slow decline.

The Verge wrote a interesting article on the practices and process of online scammers.

The New York Times did a piece on frightening children.


That's been the best of my weeks reading, how about you, any good reads of late?  I still working on my Rise of the Meritocracy follow up post.  I want to get it read before I add much more but thus far, at around 1/3 of the way through it I feel like the summary would be enough to get the real value of the book.  Some of the specific though fictional "how it played out" is interesting to see how closely his predictions charted with real history, but otherwise don't add any real context to the crux of his argument in my opinion.  Again, I'm not done yet so my opinion may be swayed.

Perspective and value

Another Ted talk, but worth the time if you have it.  The power of shifting perspective cannot be overstated and I think he illustrated several ways that can help in everyday life. Thanks GAS

Alright the internet was fixed ...

Frack, yesterday was bad enough with everything being full of suck playing with the router but today my upstream provider took a dump in the middle of the day.

Facepalm.jpg

For real, it's fixed then it isn't and so people call me.  Like I'm coated in magic and can make it work.

So my trouble yesterday was a specific firewall rule that was allowing some external partners work for the last 6 months just stopped working in the middle of the day.

So yeah into the router config we go.  It's a piece of crap Juniper so yeah it's not the cisco routers I've come to know and love (seriously if you are a monkey you can follow most of the logic of the cisco, except sub-interfaces that shit is dumb).  Anyhow I have logging on so so many policies and none of them including my block any policy has any traffic in it.

Why?  Because it's a Juniper and the logging makes not one lick of sense.  It doesn't log all traffic, only the things you specifically call out, and even then only when the session is closed.  All in and out traffic is logged in the in policies for instance.

Anyhow my net take away was I added TCP Any and UDP Any to see what damn port that stupid program wanted (TCP 49292 for the curious), and find myself asking how on earth did it work for the last 6 months?????!!?

Yeah, so apparently my router is leaky and sucks at logging which is the worst combination of failure I can imagine.  I'm all Hey Boss guy how about we get a Cisco, and he's all "Hmm, those are only programmable from the command line right?"

For real.

Nice little Melody for the afternoon

I was surprised by how much the lead singers vocals carried this.  She has an interesting sound and a good deal of power in her voice.

I'm currently neck deep in router bullshit

I'm thinking the best way to fix it is to pitch a hand grenade into the damn chasis, and go for a beer.


Side note, people are crazy pushy when the internet is borked.

Absurd Camera making process

So start trying to guess how much the camera kit being made in the video costs.  Any number that comes to mind, I will hide the number in with my handy script for you to try and guess. Hat Tip to The Verge for sharing this. Watching the video really got me to thinking though about how the optics, and the connections for controlling the toggles could all be re-used if the image sensor and processor could be an upgradeable part. The camera itself is just a housing for the sensor, and the rest of the knobs just a way to talk to the brain; the brain and sensor should be upgradeable. Why let this beautiful body for a camera languish with outdated parts at some point? Design the camera around a modular card that houses the brain and sensor with simple connectors (ie a bus interface) that would allow this camera to be upgraded sometime down the line. If you're going to dump this much money into a camera it should be future proofed to some degree!

So yeah Avengers was really fun

It had really everything I feel like I wanted it to have.

I loved that Stark and Banner geeked out together (I identified with that bit a lot)

Thor continued to be a douche, Hulk smashed the holy hell out of everything ever.  Black Widow actually managed to make herself interesting to me in this movie, Hawkeye was a questionable one to include in this particular movie but I never like the archery heroes or villains in the comics so that's just preference I assume.

As far as a "spoiler" don't keep reading below.



Someone explain to me why everyone just started listening to The Captain in that fight scene, Tony says "call it captain" and I just never in any planet would have expected Tony to defer to anyone period.  I think Joss tried to show them gaining respect for each other in the turbine scene, but it was flimsy in my opinion.

And of final note, did Banner finally get control of the Hulk somehow?  First off Hulk had a speaking role, which I don't think was ever part of the Hulk's MO, and second he was sassing Thor in the middle of a Fight (though that could be a hold over from their earlier tussle), and third he gave an iota of concern to Tony Stark not being alive at the end.  All of that made it seem like Banner was more at the helm of the Hulk than I understood him to be based on the comics that I remember reading.  I think an intelligent Hulk is more dangerous than the rampage warrior that is as likely to cause collateral damage as defeat the enemy.

Thoughts?

Indieriffic cover

Damien Rice came out with the song Volcano in February of 2002, (don't get your hopes up too high the rest of the album isn't quite as good as this song) around the time that I personally mark as the start of the folk singer revival we have (The Head and the Heart, The Decemberists, Mumford and Son's, The Lumineers, Group Love, Bon Iver ect.) anyhow Bears Of Manitou decided to post this cover on twitter (which is arguably the first good use of twitter since it's inception) Hat tip ElectricMustache

Damien Rice original on Youtube






As a bonus, I also found this live version of The Lumineers - Ho Hey on the tubes so I threw that one in as a freebie.

Shilling for Me in My Place

Okay so this is a bit of shilling going on here, but it's for a decent cause for both of us.  If you don't read Esquire Magazine you've probably never heard of Me in My Place, they do photo shoots of women in... you guessed it their apartments/homes.  Typically I would say it's Esquire appropriate ie risque not dirty, other times... well some of those clothes are more than moderately see through.  It's a pretty solid tumblr blog to follow (maybe don't read it at work though) so give it a look go ahead but in a few days when you're done and get back here (seriously 2 years of content up there) we get to the shill part.

I subscribe to the MIMP app, which is for iPhone/Pad or android (mobile devices only), and calling it an app is really misplaced it's really a website optimized for mobile device and no you cannot browse it on a computer (who would want to use their large and generally nicer monitor to look at the partially nekked womenz any way?)

Right then on with the shilling and the general complications.  If you sign up here, you can get access to this "app" for $11 for the year, or $2.99 a month rather than $15 and $4.99 respectively.  Seems like a slick deal what do I get out of this and what are these silly complications?  Well if you enter my email address as the referer I get 3 months for one of you doing it, and 6 months for 2 of you doing it for free! That's like $7.50 in my pocket if you collectively spend $22!   Wow the cold math on that makes this shill post a waste of time.  I bet I cost my company more than $7.50 writing this post thus far...... any way on to the complications... I don't share that precious email address with everyone so yeah.  Either way you get cheap scantily clad ladies for a year, I don't have a way to give you my email without you having to have a google+ account so we're at an impasse.

Mini foosball table

So yeah I'm a sucker for the Foosball, I grew up with a table in the basement and a father that played a lot when he was younger.  Needless to say I tend to be better than my peers at the game, but I still lake that finesse and power my father had for the game.  I don't have the space for a full size table in my home, but maybe I can convince my wife about this size.

via Gizmodo

For those that are interested you can see the catalogue here, there are no prices so it's safe to say you cannot afford it, but a boy can dream no?

I'm never going to quit Gizmodo

They are a bunch of crude, pot smoking, stolen iPhone purchasing scumbags but damn it this post on why the Death Star was a bad Investment was the best thing I have read all week.

All week.

and excerpt for your consideration

5) Practice, Practice, Practice. An entire legion of the Emperor's best troops was defeated by a village of teddy bears fighting with sticks and stones. It's just embarrassing. Clearly they needed better training in tactics, marksmanship, and hand-to-paw combat.

Yeah, that happened in an article.  That was 3 kinds of awesome.

I don't understand Pepsi's ad

So Pepsi had an ad on that crazy Beserc Herks site and I thought to myself I like pepsi, what are you guys upto now.....

Go ahead, this is where it lead me.

This clusterfuck of a webpage is supposed to have information on it I think, but I tried to filter by city and it prompted me to subscribe to facebook, twitter or some archaic thing called E-Mail.  I couldn't figure it out, so way to go Pepsi, money well spent on that shitty ad campaign.

More on the Meritocracy

So I posted about this in M last month and have since purchased the book and am working on finishing it.  I'm taking notes as I go and here is why sometimes it takes me a really long time to write posts.  These are my notes.

For chapter 1.  I'm on page 46 of a 200ish page book.  FML.

Kitchen Workbench

Damn you gizmodo for sharing this one.  $300 is steep for a cutting board (regardless of how nice), but I might be inclined to try my hand at making something like this.  Talk about mise en place, rawr.

Image via Gadget Review

Ikea is still fairly awesome

So, I've been re-designing my living room for a little while now to make room for my little boy.  I wanted him to have some open space to tear around in, and put stuff that little finger would find way to interesting away and out of reach.  I posted about the inspiration before, but we pulled the trigger on it on Sunday and bought the cabinets.  The countertop I want to use to finish it up is out of stock and won't be in for quite 4-6 weeks.  It turns out to be fine for my purposes as I need to build a toekick box for the cabinets and figure out how to get all the wires to the areas they need to be (the cable and ethernet jack are far from the TV ect.)  A few weeks ago we mounted the TV to the wall, and after examining the stud placement I think I can get all the components fished through the walls so they come out behind the tv and the rest of the wires will be hidden behind the cabinets in a 3 ¼" void.  The board I will use to create the spacer will serve as the cleat for the countertop once its in and if I'm feeling really fancy I may end up with an electrical outlet similar to this one on the wall or embedded into the countertop.

USB Wall outlet [?]

Prometheus and other thoughts

So I'll go ahead and assume you don't live under a rock and have seen the mounting publicity of the upcoming sure to be a blockbuster blah blah blah Prometheus.

Here's the thing the first two ad spot's I saw for it told a much more interesting story than what the actual movie is going to be about.  Pro-tip it's an aliens horror movie.  So yeah, not going to watch it.  Where it a movie about this,



or this



Instead we get this.




I suppose my disconnect is one is a genuine look at where we could go with AI, and the effects on society should be have the capacity to understand ourselves enough that we could create in the image of ourselves a copy indistinguishable. Bladerunner, started on it and even offered the possibility that we could love the artificial life we created. The premise of their love was so flimsy that the story fell apart in my opinion, but the idea was there. The hard part about movie love is that love is very hard to nail down and show it becoming anything other than infatuation. I know that there are more than a dozen movies and books dedicated to this theme, but I find it fulfilling and interesting every time.

Sound off in the comments if you have a great movie on the subject or book.  On of my favorite look at the future is the novel The Destroying Angel by Richard Paul Russo.  It's the first novel in a series of 3, I found this as the book Carlucci 3-in1[?] or my friends first novel Betahuman [?] .

Random music

ElectricMustache posted this one, so I hope you enjoy it


Cut Chemist feat Blackbird - Outro(Revisted)

If you love that crazy Berserk Hurk

You should clicky this link to help him win the title of Master of the Universe.

We can do this, I command of you my personal army.... or something.

Z is for Zen

Hackaday brings us this little sand drawing machine, a little riff on the sand pendulims I posted about a little while ago.