I am very pleased with my new iPad 2.
With a Speck plastic cover snapped on the back of the iPad, and an Apple Smart Cover protecting the front, I am happy to carry it almost everywhere.
It is a great drawing tool, using apps like Brushes or AutoDesk Sketchbook. I love it.
These are the things I will be doing in the coming year:
I spent part of last weekend going through some boxes. Found a few things I liked, including this oil sketch I did about 20 years ago. Painted on an 8″x8″ gessoed plywood panel.
Kirstin Butler wrote about this over at Brain Pickings. I can’t wait to go find a copy and my local independent bookstore.
Even if I didn’t care about the message of the book, I think I would buy it for the illustrations. But I do care about the message: very, very much.
This is the first post in my “Object of the Day” series: where I plan to describe artifacts from the non-digital world. Things I find interesting for their design or utility, but also things that may be slipping into the archaic. Artifact 1 is a woodworking tool: a dovetail gauge. This artifact’s history is well known to me, since I made it.
A dovetail gauge is used when marking out dovetails, of course. It certainly isn’t required – a sliding T-bevel, or some other angled or adjustable square can be used. The advantages of a gauge like this, however, are it’s lack of adjustability, and it’s light weight. It isn’t larger than the job requires, and that makes it easier to hold in place when marking out the work.
Like most squares, this tool has a stock (made of a dark hardwood here, “wenge” I believe) that butts up against the workpiece, and a blade that serves as a guide for a pencil or scribing tool. One blade is angled, for marking out the tails (in this photo, the tails are marked out – the shaded areas will be removed, leaving the tails between) and the other blade is square to the stock. Drawing square lines along the endgrain of the workpiece is another common task when laying out dovetails, so it is convenient to have the two blades on one tool.
The time I spent making this wasn’t trivial, but it was pleasant work. The brass stock was already a uniform width. Using a sliding T-bevel and a steel scribe, I marked the lines, then cut close to the mark with a hacksaw. I finished each edge by filing to the line, then dressing them with emery paper. I don’t recall the exact steps I used to mount the blade, but most likely I clamped them together and drilled pilot holes through the brass and into the wood. Enlarging the holes in the brass a bit, to create clearance for the threads of the screws would make sense.
I used to ride with ordinary clipless pedals, but whenever I wanted to let someone else use my bicycle, I would swap the clipless pedals for the “rat trap” platform pedals that came with the bicycle. That isn’t too annoying the first time, but it gets old quickly. So, I decided to try the Shimano PD-M647 SPD pedals. The advantage to these pedals? They have an ordinary platform on one side, and SPD clamps on the other. Bike shoes with cleats can use one side, ordinary shoes the other.
It took me a couple of weeks of commuting daily with the new pedals to feel like I had a good idea of how usable they really are. My first impression wasn’t very warm – I found it irritating to step on the SPD side if I was wearing running shoes, and if I was wearing my bike shoes with cleats, it seemed like I was always flipping over the pedal so I could engage the SPD side. Now that I have adapted to the pedals, I like them. It was a compromise, but a good compromise.
In use, whenever I need to flip over the pedal, I slide my foot forward and kind of catch the trailing edge with my heel, flipping it over. Neither side of these pedals are so heavy that gravity will decide which one should be “up.”
I thought about adding a bit of weight to the one side so the other side would always face up – think of the cars on a Ferris Wheel – but that seems unnecessary at this point. Even with cleated bike shoes, the platform side of the pedal comes in handy. Since I commute on my bike, I often prefer to leave one foot unclipped for a short stretch when negotiating a path around standing autos, in case I need to stop. Being able to apply power in a quick start is nice too – I don’t always want to pause for clipping-in.
Sure, a single purpose pedal would be better in either case, but like multi-tools or Swiss Army knives, the value is in having easy access to a variety of functions. Like everything else I have bought from Shimano, these pedals are designed and manufactured well.
Found this video on the Change Your Life, Ride a Bike blog. I like it for a bunch of reasons. It has a nice rhythm, making it pleasant to watch, and it is nice to see the mix of foot, bike, and scooter traffic working well together.
Old Town, Shanghai from Trazmick on Vimeo.
I ported my cell number to Google Voice, moving it from AT&T. It was painless, taking roughly 24 hours to complete.
Since I was out of contract, and starting to consider a move to a new phone and perhaps a new carrier, I thought it would be good to take a break from carrying a smart phone at all. Seems like a good way to observe what I am missing, see what I value most in the device I have spent the last two years using – the iPhone 3G.
What does this gain me?
Should be interesting. Will it be the games I miss, or checking email and twitter feeds?
The honeymoon was already over for some of the other applications I had been using daily. One of the apps I used the most was Cyclemeter, a really terrific tool for tracking my bicycling. When I discovered that there was no way to export in bulk the data, I no longer felt like using it. I could just as easily track my rides in a notebook. If I knew I was going to keep carrying around an iPhone, using Cyclemeter would make sense.