Brighter Fusion Blog

This is a FABULOUS idea! I just read a reference to it in my newly arrived issue of ReadyMade magazine.

http://www.airbedandbreakfast.com

I will say right now that as soon as I get a neat and tidy household with a guest bedroom available, I’ll be signing up for that.

Make $50 to $100 extra income PER NIGHT for hosting a guest!

Maybe I should rename this blog “Extremely Simple Crafts for People Who Like to Shop at the Salvation Army Store”.

Anyway, tonight’s waste of time is the common light-rope-in-a-bottle project, made easier by the fact that I found both the light rope and a bottle with feet and a hole in the bottom at Savers this evening. The wire bail was on it when I found it.

The light rope had two segments along it which had gone dark, but this setup is forgiving of such flaws.

This project is pretty self-explanatory. I stuffed the light rope in through the hole in the metal base of the jar which used to hold a plug which was designed to have a tea light candle in it. While I was stuffing the light rope through that little hole, I dislodged the metal base altogether, which gave me freer access to the inside of the jar.

I tied a big knot in the cord and zip tied it together so it won’t be likely to fall out the bottom and put the base back on using lots of aluminum foil tape. I left the tea light plug out altogether.

Here’s pics.

It does get a bit warm. I wouldn’t leave it unattended or cover it in a mountain of kleenexes.

It’s not really my style, so I’m going to get rid of it. My father expressed interest in it, but I think it’s better to have outside than inside, and I’d feel more comfortable if I knew it wasn’t going to set his bedroom on fire.

I’ll list it on Craig’s List with a warning not to leave it unattended.

View more pics and in high res at the Light Rope in a Bottle Picasa Gallery.

This is my take on the popular project of the wind chime made from a children’s rainbow xylophone toy.

Here is the one posted to Instructables and featured in Make.

This week I picked up a used xylophone toy at Savers for next to nothing. It was mounted on a big plastic tiger.

I felt a bit guilty stealing the soul from a proactive, educational, peaceful toy in order to make a passive noisemaker for the backyard, but I’m sure somebody has done worse by simply throwing it in a landfill. I also felt bad when the tiger’s cute head unexpectedly came off and clattered across the room. I feel guilty pretty easily.

After I extracted the metal bars from the toy, I experimented with various methods of suspension. I was disappointed that the pieces sounded so dull, but they are after all very small. I tried split rings, wire, zip ties, and the ball chain keychains that were specified in the project above. All very dull.

So I broke out some tiger tail (ha!) from my bead box and tried that. Success! They ring quite nicely when suspended on a V of the fine plastic coated cable.

What next? How to arrange them? I liked the elegance of the V design because putting the bars next to each other in the valleys of an extended W would keep each of them loose and wiggly, but constrained to their proper respective positions. They would also be oriented flat sides together, instead of edge to edge as in the design above.

I melted eight equidistant holes around the rim of a small round semi-disposable tupperware container and strung the bars on with a small bead holding the cable at the top of each hole.

Already the chime was a success, but I didn’t like the way bars hit their neighbors, resulting in musical dissonance 100% of the time. I suppose that arrangement might have worked better if the bars were sorted differently than in tonal (rainbow) order, but I don’t know enough about music to get the right order, so I decided that a separate striker would be best.

I began with the idea of one striker in the center, as per usual for a wind chime, but that would be very poor engineering, as it would hit each bar directly on edge, resulting only in a dull thud.

So I decided to hang strikers from the existing holes around the edge, in between the bars. These have the advantage of triggering one note at a time (unlike when the bars hit each other), and at least doubling the sensitivity of the chime to movement. Four is better than eight in that each note has time to resonate before the pendulum returns, instead of being hit from both sides. It results in a much more relaxing, delicate sound, IMO.

What to use for these in-between strikers? Something big enough to hit the bars now and then, with some mass, with a hole to hang it from, and preferably reclaimed from underutilized junk.

I finally spotted them across the room, hanging on the little hooks on the front hall mirror — house keys! I dug around in my boxes of ancient junk in the garage and found four matching silver house keys, all with the “KW1″ cut-out pentagon style that’s so familiar. Perfect!

Lastly, I put a string on a shank button inside the plastic bowl to hang it from and a couple of aborted DVD-Rs on the string to catch the wind (and the light).

I plan to keep my mind open for prettier options than the plastic bowl and CD-Rs, but the result of tonight’s waste of time is much less chaotic and clang-y than most windchimes. I like it a lot as it is.

It is not, however, quite as lovely and calming as this guy playing his giant xylophone chime in Wildwood Park, Chico, CA.:

Consider that a chaser for Microsoft’s insanity.

Hi again!

So, you bought a new Vista Home Premium notebook and just tried Remote Desktoping into your old XP Pro SP3 notebook. What? It didn’t work? Are you sure?

Well, no worries. Just try some of these quick ‘n’ easy fixes:

Let’s start by firing up the Remote Desktop program on Vista and pulling down the Computer field — “Browse for more.” Hey, there’s your WORKGROUP work group! Great!

It says the workgroup does not contain any terminal servers.

Yeah, that would be because the default workgroup name for XP is “MSHOME”. Go rename the workgroup on the XP machine to WORKGROUP. Reboot, of course. You’ve got nothing better going on anyway.

Now let’s go back to Vista to make sure it sees the XP machine on the same workgroup. Not there? Maybe that’s because Vista uses a newfangled protocol — Link Layer Topology Discovery or LLTD — to determine who else is on the local network. The problem is only other Vista machines send out that kind of signal.

Not to worry! There’s a patch for XP. Go ahead and try it. Oh, it won’t install? That’s because that patch is for SP2 only. LLTD is already built into SP3…officially.

What? They forgot to include it in there? Then you’re going to need the rumored sixth version of the patch, but Windows doesn’t give that out to just anybody. You have to write them a nice letter asking for it. Or go get it from this guy.

Now try it again. What, it’s still not in there? That’s because XP doesn’t normally advertise that it’s a terminal service. You need to go into the registry and change the value of the TSAdvertise DWORD from 0 to 1. Rebooting again isn’t going to kill you.

Next up, force Vista to stop using it’s newer encryption methods in order to let it talk to older devices on the local net (including Network Attached Storage disks). Try opening the Security Policies editor (secpol.msc) to change the setting. Oh wait! Secpol.msc doesn’t exist on Vista Home Premium, only all the other versions of Vista. Psych! Set LmCompatibilityLevel to 1 in the registry, then.

This would be a good time to deactivate IPv6 and enable network sharing and discovery. Check your node type too.

Now let’s check that local network again. Try pinging XP from Vista. (Don’t forget that Windows Firewall blocks pings by default!)

Pinging times out or resource cannot be found? Turning on RD in the System Properties may have automatically reconfigured your Windows Firewall, so you now have Windows and third-party firewalls running concurrently, causing unpredictable side effects. Go shut off Windows Firewall again, and open up pinging in the third-party firewall.

Please tell me that you can see the XP machine name when you “Browse for more” in the RD client on Vista.

Great! With the simple preliminaries out of the way, let’s get to business.

XP has RDP turned off by default. To start up the host, go into the “Remote” tab under System Properties and hit the checkbox. Assign a user to have RDP access. Oh yeah, something you should know — you can only assign a user which has a password set, so if you need to, take a side trip into XP’s users control panel and set up a new user or add a password to an existing one.

Now you need to configure your firewall to let TCP Port 3389 through on the XP machine. Set up port forwarding as well on the router if you’ll be remoting in from outside your LAN.

So now if you’re lucky at all, it’s working, but when you connect it says that the other computer is unsafe and not to be trusted. Just ignore that and tell it to shut up. You’re golden.

I’m sorry, you wanted it work in the other direction too? Unfortunately, Vista Home Premium doesn’t support Remote Desktop as a host, only as a client, so run, don’t walk, to this page to give Microsoft $150 to upgrade. Or, you can hack that, and concurrent sessions too. Simply download that zip, go find a termsrv.dll file that actually works on 64-bit switch that one for the one that came in the zip, right click and run the premium.bat file as Administrator, click that .reg file, check your termmgr.dll version, and then run through everything in this post again from the top.

Satisfied? Great. If you’re happy, I’m happy. If you’re not happy, Microsoft is happy to recommend a MCSE certified professional who can help you out.

Now go to the rec center for God’s sake. You’ve been working on this stuff for two days straight!

I bought this amazing copper picture on eBay a couple years ago for $75. I think that’s a lot of money for a decorative object with no practical purpose, but in this case, it was justified.

(See more detailed pics, including the artist’s initials. Don’t forget about the zoom function!)

This picture captivated me. One of the many things I like about it is that it’s not obvious where or when it was made. It looks like a pure fantasy figure, with no references back to any real fashions or other cultural cues. I couldn’t decide if it was arts and crafts, art nouveau, art deco, or hippie art. It carries elements of all of the above.

As I interpret it, she is simply a goddess, with no fears, responsibilities, or taboos to hold her down. She’s perfectly free and perfectly happy.

So I’ve been searching for more pictures like this one on eBay for a while, but it’s hard to find anything similar without some handle on it beyond “copper picture”.

There are Chinese noblewomen and emperors, Communist farmer/laborers, crude and slutty-looking native Hawaiian girls, and that little girl character with the big bonnet in profile, but mythical fantasy figures like this one — very, very rare.

I finally found something that could be from the same guild or artist, but it was astoundingly expensive. (Four figures!) Happily, that auction had a little more provenance info than the first one did. It was from the old USSR and the date was 1980.

The same image, different item, has come up at auction again. This one says it’s a souvenir from Armenia, made in the USSR, “article apthkyn C-221 aAp”.

It’s a young woman with billowy sleeves admiring a pomegranate fruit. I’m currently outbid at $56. It would be a nice companion for the first picture, but I don’t like it well enough to throw down more than $50 for it.

A Google search yesterday uncovered Deb Torby’s blog entry and a lovely copper picture from Tablisi, Georgia (another former republic of the USSR). I think the image has a lot of commonality with my goddess, but I doubt it’s by the same artist. This close-up is the only image she provided, so I can’t consider the picture as a whole.

Okay, so there’s actually no pictures of Obama in this gallery. That’s because I never actually got to see him. The seats for my community pass were located directly behind the scaffolding at the back of the blue stage. I did see a white cuff belonging to Al Gore for a fraction of a second, because he’s so tall and he was holding his arm up in the air.

Anyway, this is a fairly complete documentary of the event done up in photos, from waiting in line outside until the fireworks and confetti stopped. I hope you like them, and I hope I’ve conveyed a bit of the feeling of what it was like to be there.

Just seeing these pics again makes me tear up. 2008 was quite a year, and this day was the highlight of it for me. You can really see the patriotism, power and hope in these people.

(Oh, and as for those people upset about the Dems throwing those flags in the trash, I’ve got mine right here in the living room. They should understand that flags were placed in holders in empty seats throughout the stadium, so it’s the empty seats who were unpatriotic and threw the flags away. The people I saw were saving everything, including confetti made out of biodegradable tissue paper. I have a couple white tissue stars around here too.)

Obama at Invesco Field Picasa Gallery

Here are some pics I shot on the day I met Keith Olbermann. It was Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2008, the third day of the DNC in Denver, CO.

I took the bus down from Boulder in the afternoon. I was a bit nervous about crowds, cops, pepper spray, and never finding KO or MSNBC’s tent, but I needn’t have worried.

As you can see, KO’s big noggin was one of the first things I spotted after stepping off the bus at Union Station in Denver.

Here I am with KO. I asked him to hold the flag for me.

I have to say he was a complete sweetheart to his fans and not scary at all. (Another thing I was a needlessly nervous about.)

View the Picasa Gallery from that day, including pics of Rachel Maddow, Eugene Robinson, Pat Buchanan, and Chris Matthews.

What follows is a blog post from back in July. I didn’t publish it until now because the pictures were stuck on my camera’s CompactFlash card and it would have taken forever to offload them, so I never did.

Until now! Enjoy.

—

I’ve been thinking for a long time now that it would be neat to build a coffee table out of the Zome Tool toy. I think I’ve seen ones made from similar construction toys like legos or tinker toys.

So, last weekend I tried to put together an end table. I used a lot of the shorter sticks and made a lot of reinforcements for stability, but as you can see, the main supports are all blue, which are the weakest shape (being rectangular and easier to bend than the triangular or pentagonal cross sections). I really like the looks of this one, but even with glue on the joints you couldn’t trust it to hold up a lamp.

So then I gave up on the end table and just started experimenting with stronger structures. Here’s a traditional square-bottomed pyramid:

And a neato hexagonal criss-cross structure:

After a couple hours I had to go back to being a grup, so I tore everything apart and put my toys away.

—

See the Picasa gallery for more angles on the structures and my cat, The Doctor.

Hi again everyone,

Well I got a great new camera this year for Christmas. It’s a Canon Powershot SX110 IS in black. The screen is humongous and in general it’s giving me the same superb performance as my old Canon (the Powershot A85) did in the areas of focus and color rendition. It does seem to go too yellow in crappy indoor lighting, but that’s something I might be able to correct in the settings.

The camera’s 9 megapixel and has a 10X optical zoom. Pretty kickin’.

The real news is the magical card that I got with it — the Eye-Fi Home. This looks like a simple SD card on the outside, but some wizard was able to fit a Wi-Fi antenna inside it along with a 2 GB memory chip. As a result, all I need to do to make practical use of my new pictures is to turn on my camera for a minute or two after I get home. The chip detects my home network and offloads the pics to my laptop’s hard drive. It simultaneously uploads the pics to Google’s Picasa photo service as well, into private albums sorted by date taken. I could, in fact, wander by any open network with my camera turned on and my images would upload to Picasa as long as I’m in range. Can you imagine how fabulous that would be for adventure travelers? Also very handy if my camera ever gets stolen or lost.

I had to pay $10 a year for the Picasa uploading, but I passed on the $15 a year geotagging service. If it were based on real GPS, I’d be more tempted. Also, I never go anywhere interesting.

FYI, if you buy a card right now, I’d recommend the “Share” card from Amazon at $70 as the best deal. That includes the $10 a year web share service for free. They have a dozen or so supported services you could upload to, not just Picasa. If you don’t care about money, then go get the Anniversary edition, with 4 GB and web sharing (but no free geotagging), or the Explore with web sharing and geotagging (but only 2 GB storage). Any of the cards can be upgraded with any of the services for a yearly fee.

Well, that’s about it for the camera report. I’m happy.

Alas, it is difficult to show you a picture of my camera or my SD card without using my camera or my SD card. I’m too lazy to go use someone else’s camera and connect the USB cable to move pictures around. Geez, how did I live like that before? Oh yeah. I just left the pics on the camera’s card for months and never showed them to anybody.

Speaking of which, I’m following this up with links to some Picasa albums that I just set up, including some ancient pics I finally offloaded from my old camera’s CF card before I gave it away.