Bollocks to this...

 I'm off to St. Julien de Lampon, France, for some kicking and punching.
Back in a week.

Shelves

I ran out of shelf-space again (see also: Misusing Benno), so I gave Ikea some money and they solved my problem.

New spice/stuff shelf in the kitchen:

And a neighbour for Billy & the Bennos (to the right, above the radiator):



Unfortunately there is now a new problem:  I've run out of shelf-space...

Creux du Van

In an effort to defeat the summer slump (23 days since my last post? Or is it... 23 days later? dum-du dooom!) here a few quick words about last weekend's trip.

We went to the Creux du Van, a funny semi-circular cliff near Noiraigue, Neuchâtel. If you start of at Robert's Farm, it's a short, easy three to four hour hike:

Creux du Van (iPhone, spotty coverage) at EveryTrail

I used my iPhone to navigate and record our track, but it took me a while to notice that you can't use "Trails" in sleep mode, i.e. you have to leave the screen on. This is why coverage is a bit spotty for the first part.

The view is spectacular, but we really should have gone at six in the morning, instead in the afternoon (ha, as if that would ever happen), because in the evening most of the wall is in shadow:

(as you can see, I selected the wrong white-balance for this shot (and many others) - my credibility as a very amateurish photographer is in tatters.)

At the top, it was all bucolic alms

and frolicking cows:

Searching for the right wight balance (sigh) in the fading light:

and heading home.

Step lightly

around me, for I am following a new course here at the EPFL: Impact of environmental pollutants on human physiology by Dr. Caroline Vandevyver, or, as I like to call it: How to poison somebody and make it look like an accident.

When we did the whole introduction/why am I here-spiel I said: "I want to learn how to poison people, just in case."

Dr. Vandevyver's reply? "I can teach you that no problem!"

I love PhD-courses!

True Atheism

or: why I wanted to build an iBible, and why the bible is not a real book.

A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine (hey Chruss!) married. And he and his wife-to-be had a religious as well as a civil ceremony. Since I was invited, I had about two hours of hymns (sung badly by the mostly non-religious guests), sermon and ceremony to look forward to - catholic weddings are an involved affair. Naturally, my atheist mind turned to how to avoid being bored out of my mind, and thus the idea of the iBible was born - a hollowed-out bible where I could hide my iPhone in, thus pretending to follow the ceremony or something while reading something more interesting.

Unfortunately I did not have enough time to put my nefarious plan into action, so I had to suffer like the sinner I am. But, last weekend, I decided to build the damn thing anyway(read all about it here), because you never know when the next wedding will sneak up on you.

My plan was to buy a nice hard-cover bible, and hollow it out, so I went to the local flea-market to look for one. Unfortunately, they were fresh out of bibles. Loads of excellent-looking, antique hard-cover books, but no bible. So I turned around to leave, thinking to myself: "It's a pity there are no bibles, I really wanted to build a book with a secret compartment. But I wouldn't want to destroy a real book for that!"

Then I stopped, and started laughing in the middle of the flea-market. I haven't ever been religious, but even non-religious people seem to have a certain respect for the holy books. Not me though - although I love books, I only seem to love the real ones, you know, like fantasy novels or somesuch.

In the end, I did buy a real book to cut up. I tried hard to chose something of no real value, literary or otherwise, and of course ended up destroying the œuvre of the first nobel price for literature, Sully Prudhomme. Some days, you just can't win.

Oh, the shame

The "book of bad French poetry" I cut up for my iBook Mark I? I just googled the author, a certain Monsieur Sully Prudhomme. The first winner of the nobel price for literature, for, and I quote:

"in special recognition of his poetic composition, which gives evidence of lofty idealism, artistic perfection and a rare combination of the qualities of both heart and intellect" 

Oh, the shame...

image: wikipedia

iBook Mark I

A couple of weeks ago I had occasion to want a way to read a book on my iPhone discreetly (catholic wedding services are looong), and thus the idea of the iBible was born. Unfortunately I did not have enough time before the wedding, so I had to suffer through the sermon, but more on that tomorrow. This post is about how to make your very own iBook (couldn't find a bible at the flea-market), or just a book with a secret compartment.

Thisis also described in the Make weekend project 12

You'll need:

Wood glue and a book - hard-cover is best. I got this one for five francs at the flea-market last week-end. Next, dilute your wood-glue with water, about 50-50 should do. You want it quite runny, but still thick enough to glue the pages together.

Decide on the depth of your secret compartement, and put a blastic sheet between that and the rest of the book. Apply the wood-glue with a brush on the sides of your compartment. Then put some weight on your book (so the pages don't warp) and let dry.

Next, open up the book, get an exacto-knife and cut out your compartment.

Get your trusty glue again, and glue together the walls of your compartment  on the inside. Let dry under weight again.

Here is the end-result, the iBook! Now I can pretend to read bad french poetry from the 19th century, while secretly reading the latest fantasy-trash. This is of course only a first try, I still haven't given up on making an iBible!

Why I hate Labview

I have harped about this before (and most probably will again): stay away from LabView if you want to keep your sanity. Point in case:

First of all, this is not an overly complex program. Or at least it wouldn't be, in any other language. It only has to control three instruments, using fairly simple syntax. But thanks to LabView's oh-so-simple "graphical" programming metaphor, you have lines and shit going everywhere. Furthermore, I've begun to not propagate error messages from module to module properly, just to cut down on the number of "wires" so I still have a small chance to understand what is going on in my main program. This does not make debugging easier. And now this:

Insane object indeed. I think I'll look into migrating the whole shebang to Matlab.

Thieves, thieves!

Oh yes, the internet is full of thieves. There I was, hands in my pockets, whistling as I wandered down the back-alleys of the internet, when I came upon a small display of a corner-shop hawking inks. I was not interested in inks, but the display (or article, if you have to destroy my metaphor. Thank you very much. Read it for yourself here.) was about invisble inks, and invisble inks are spy-stuff, and spy-stuff is cool. So I had a closer look, and I saw this:

Wait a minute, I thought. I know this image! That's one of mine! Indeed, somebody had stolen my image. Filled with righteous wrath, I contacted the company behind the blog display - oh sod it, this metaphor has been ridden to the ground like an old nag in an endurance race anyway - per email. And whaddayaknow, they actually replied ("We are so sorry" - that you found us out [<-my interpretation]) and offered to take it down.

Now I don't actually want them to do that, because I am in truth a bit chuffed that somebody liked my photo enough to use it to illustrate his article,  so I only asked for attribution, with which they complied.

So. Go read about 7 Amazing Types Of Invisible Ink & How You Can Use Them, and think about my glory as a photographer. Also think on how a bit of cropping by some englishman made my mediocre photo (original here) quite a bit better.

Remote surveillance

Yes, I have joined the dark side.

With the increasing automatisation of my experiment (courtesy of my slave student R.), it is possible for me to  leave it running for two hours or so, gathering data. Pressure, voltage and oscilloscope are all controlled by the PC, via Labview (urg). Unfortunately there rests always the small possibility of the experiment gaining sentinence and taking over the world (or crashing and leaving the RF generator running at full power, which would melt my electrodes), so surveillance is a must.

Now, I could have delved deeply into Labview to find out how to write an interface to control it over the intranet. If you have ever used Labview, you know how much joy that would be. Or I could do the following:

The small round blob with the pink tape on the right? That's a webcam, aimed at generator and scope. I've got a small gadget running in my google desktop that shows it's picture, so I'll know at once if something iffy is going on...

New car battery

After the latest bout of removing car battery, charging car battery, putting car battery back in I had enough, and bought a new one. It's an SLA (sealed lead acid) battery, so no more watering the battery. It holds the same charge (60 Amp-hours) as the old one, but has double the peak current, nearly 600 amps. Does that make any difference for my car? I have no idea. (This is something that fills me with dismay. I know nearly nothing about the ton of steel that carries me around from time to time. I think I will buy the repair manual for it, and do some light reading.)

Here they are, new and old, sitting next to each other:

Photo courtesy of the crappy iPhone camera. Why the iPhone camera? because I discovered Flickit, a marvelous software that takes a photo and uploads it to Flickr immideatly. Now, if, lets say, the man wants me to delete a photo, I can do so with the reassurance that it will live on on the internet, forever.

Anyway, here is my battery sitting snugly in the running car. (Note the professional anti-corrosion coating!) Afterwards I discovered that my old battery was just fine, I had only forgotten to shut off the interior light of the car. Sigh.

Colour!

I've finally taken the plunge into colour: watercolour to be exact. And surprise! It's frustration all over again. Now that I can finally sketch something (when I have a reference) and be half-way happy with my sketch, colours have snook up on me and slapped me in the neck.

Gradient?  Highlights? Shadows? Arrgh!

Anyway, here is my first oevre: I only spent five minutes or so sketching it, and then a looong time swearing over the watercolours ;)

Bare-bones Vacuum Coffee

I think it was in Make-magazine #17 that I read about how to make your own vacuum coffee. Vacuum brewing is a very elegant (and not to mention tasty) method of preferring my drug of choice:

You heat water in a closed vessel, closed, that is, except for one (air-tight) connection to the jar with your coffee-grounds. The pressure of the boiling water will press it into the coffee-jar, where it will steep. When you remove the heat from the first vessel, the cooling water-vapour will contract, and air pressure will push delicious coffee back through the connection. Above you can see how commercial variants work, I built a rougher version diagrammed below:

It has the advantage of being sheap, easy to assemble, and you can conceivably burn down your house while making coffee! To build it, I used the following materials:

The hardest to get is no doubt the glass flask, I was lucky to get one from the lab for free (we are not allowed to use glassware anymore - too "dangerous" ). I don't have glass tubing yet, so I make due with some plastic tubing. Inelegant, but free. As a heat source I use a cheap blowtorch. The sieve  (making sure that the grinds don't clog the tube) in the coffee jar is a tea-filter, and the coffee jar itself is just a small bowl from my kitchen. Then there is of course my awesome coffee grinder.

 In assembling everything, make sure that the tube connecting the flask to the coffee jar reaches nearly to the bottom of both containers. As you can see, my filter doesn't enclose the tube at all, so I have to make sure that the coffee grounds does not overflow.

 
And then... the heat is on!

Soon, if everything is airtight, the water will climb the tube and gurgle into the coffee grounds.

Stir the coffee a bit, and leave the heat on the flask for a minute or so, so that the coffee has time to steep. Then remove the flame. The hot air/water vapour in the flask will take a minute or two to cool, and then...

delicious coffee will start to climb back into the flask!

Mmmhhh, coffee.

Who watches the watches?

A couple of weeks ago my trusty Fossil wrist-watch coughed and died, after more than ten years of continous use. So I shopped around a bit, and in the end decided to get a Timex e-Tide. I choose the Timex (which is a sacrilege in and of itself: How can you buy an American watch in Switzerland?) because I had two main criteria while searching for a new watch:

• It had to be analog - I detest digital watches
• It had to do more than just show the time -  I wanted to have a built-in compass at least.

After some searching, the only watch that came close was the Timex. Tissot has the feature-wise very nice e-Touch, which unfortunately also has an additional digital display and is therefore fugly.

Timex doesn't have a shop in Switzerland (I guess they got kicked out by an angry Swiss mob armed with watchmaker-tools and cheese), so I ordered it over Amazon.

Here it is, next to my poor, dead old Fossil:

As you can see, the Timex is quite a bit bigger. I new that from the specs, but wasn't prepared for how much bigger a mere additional half-centimeter of radius would look. Now I am unsure. I quite like the design of the Timex, and while the tide-indicator is a bit useless in Switzerland, the compass and the temperature-sensor are fine (it's always good to know an uncertain average of your body-temperature and the ambient temperature). Only - is it too big for my delicate wrist?

What do you think?