Thoughts Aloud.

My wife's father had removed a wooden propeller from his Stinson 108 many decades ago, replacing it with a metal one. He kept the prop as a keepsake and passed it on to his daughter. I made her this mount, which is 47"x 27" using virtually every tool in my shop. Turned out pretty nice. Weighs about 65 lbs. with the propeller attached. The finished project: And with the propeller attached: A humble beginning as a drawing: The foam core of the cowl: Refined a bit: After sanding, a long, drawn out process: A raft of other components were required. The base, 1 1/2" thick oak, stained golden oak and clear coated with oil based poly: A "crankshaft" which was made on the indexer with a 5/8" hole down the center. The aluminum plate to mount the prop with, made from bezeled 1/4" plate: And last, but not least, the grills. These were the most difficult part but hardly visible. I made these freeha

Oh, my head is full of snot! So flying is something I cannot. Tho' Kleenex is my friend,  I hope this will soon end And I can finally put away my Neti pot.

Robot dancing? This is both weird and cool. https://youtu.be/kHBcVlqpvZ8

Today I figured out how to use gdal_rasterize to create water polygon masks for my new tile sets. It's a heck of a lot easier to use a mask then to process unionized intersections of polygons on the fly. Here's a mask of the greater New York City area. White is obviously water.

Change.org petition to keep G+ alive. Pointless but what the heck. Sign it. https://www.change.org/p/google-inc-don-t-shut-down-google-plus-54f15bea-1d8c-4be9-a53f-e2ceee1302f4?signed=true

Funny and sad.

I made this speaker stand from wood I harvested on our property. The legs are about the smallest thing I've ever made but required as much work to make as full sized table legs. I used one board 11" wide and 1" thick for this project and have several tons of nice oak left. Bits: 1/2" end mill, 1/4 ball" nose, bottom cleaning planar bit.

Just finished rewriting ALL my mapping code to eliminate the Google Mapping API. On July 22, 2018, Google upped the price to use their mapping API by 25 times. That's a 2500% increase in cost. That changed the charge for using their API from what it would take to finance a 10 year old Honda CRV to a mortgage, taxes and insurance on a million dollar home. I am now using OpenLayers for all my mapping needs. Cost: $0. Well, except for the bandwidth and that's insignificant. Thanks Google!

Great quote (from the movie "Only the Brave"): "If you're looking for sympathy, the only place you're going to find it is in the dictionary, between shit and syphilis."

Just created a new website to go along with my soon to be (self) published novel "Human Dog". It has five short stories that describe the universe and some background. https://humandog.world

This is an interesting video showing the NASA-awarded 'marsha', a 3D-printed vertical martian habitat. While it looks weird, the science behind it appears to be sound and reasonable. https://youtu.be/XnrVV0w2jrE

A nice beach on Beaver Island, Michigan.

My daughter holding up a "toy" lighthouse on Beaver Island, Michigan.

What happens when you take a bunch of amateurs who have watched WAY too many TV home flipping shows and let them loose in a $540,000 house that was in pretty good shape? https://youtu.be/_q5KQpCPY1U BANKRUPTCY! The house is going on the block next month. I doubt anyone except the bank who holds the note will be interested. Oh, $40k in back taxes are owed.