David de Groot 𓆉 @dadegroot@mastodon.social
Photographer, cook/foodie, IT geek in and around Cedar Creek, QLD, Australia 🇦🇺
GPG/PGP Fingerprint: 5226 260E C3D1 B4B3 1FFA C96E 2C50 1C76 FA25 897A
Testing out an install of Publish or Perish for work and needed to look up some papers to test it with. Thought to myself, which academics can I search on and voila, @lauraritchie came to mind.
Worked a treat :-)
Large BBC sound effects library is now available for free download for personal, educational, research & non-commercial use
There are about 16,000 clips
Possibly the ugliest functional bottle opener ever made.
Was demonstrating the forge to a mate today and we made this. It definitely works well, but isn’t going to win any awards for workmanship.
Anvil now mounted at the right height n a freshly cut stump. #blacksmith
And finally, the results of the forge firing. A coal rake for the forge made from an old tent peg.
First firing of the now fully operational forge.
I’m using charcoal in this and it is powered by a hand cranked blower.
Finished the forge tuelle complete with ash dump. The plastic hose connecting the steel pipe and blower is temporary until I come up with a better plan.
Made completely without welding, and fully operational.
The tuelle for my forge is coming along nicely. A bit more to do on it yet, but hopefully will be operational by this evening.
It’s the bit that connects the blower to the fire pot.
Bounce bounce bounce
Did something a bit different for dinner tonight, turned out brilliantly. (no photo I'm afraid, I ate it)
Gnocchi served with pumpkin pieces cooked in butter, garlic and nutmeg, with bacon pieces fried with anchovies thrown it at the end, and some small cubes of grana pandano cheese.
Very tasty indeed.
#Amaroq for Mastodon v1.1.9 update: the floofy companion returns! 🐺 Many fixes and improvements for bugs plaguing folks for the past several months, as well as a much needed overhaul of VoiceOver support across much of the app. By far not as comprehensive an update as I would like, but I feel you all have waited long enough. :3 Expect more to come! Full notes on the App Store. Awoo~! 🐺
Whoohoo Amaroq update.
Tonight's #hammer handle is a little baby one. One of the off-cuts of the eucalyptus branch made for a decent small hammer handle.
I tried something different with this one, using an offset tooling on the lathe, meaning I got a nice oval shape on one side of the handle (it would have been both sides, but the wood split on the tail end where the spindle poked in - my fault, should have left a bigger piece on the end).
As some of you know, I have a recipe site: http://degroot.id.au/recipes
But even so, it came as a bit of a surprise to have a call from a talent scout yesterday while at work, asking if I'd be interested in appearing on Family Food Fight (which apparently is some cooking game show thing on Ch9 - I certainly didn't know that, as I don't watch TV).
Needless to say, I did not accept the invite (who wants that sort of pressure? not to mention supporting commercial TV - Bah!)
Making is all about screwing up.
It's about having the confidence to screw up in increasingly creative ways.
It's the art of getting it wrong with such flair and panache that you can't help but be entertained by your own ineptitude.
It's the ability to foil so many of your own plans that you are left with no option but to stumble into a solution that works.
A solution, that when found, leaves you awestruck by what you have accomplished.
And it is in pursuit of that awe that the Maker makes.
This afternoon, Jonathon found a long, straight-ish branch off what appears to be a bloodwood. I got him to save me a length, and tonight I cut it into #hammer handle lengths, and having done that, decided to make another handle.
This one is longer than the last one, head seems to be about the same weight. I shaped the handle more this time, so it's not perfectly round. There's a small slip-guard on the bottom.
#woodwork
Recently I bought two boxes of hammer heads for $10 (absolute bargain!).
Anyway, this afternoon, I decided to make a handle for one of them.
I grabbed a dry eucalypt branch I had under the house, cut a length, and turned up a handle on the lathe.
Some sanding, planing, rasping later, and voila! One functional (and pretty) 1.5lb ball pein #hammer.
I cleaned up the clay/termite mud firebox in the forge last night.
Today, I dragged it out from under the veranda and lit a small wood #fire in it ( which turned into a somewhat more vigorous wood fire when I added a garden blower to the mix #pyro ).
It worked well though, the clay mix is now well set and hardened. I'll add a bit more around the top edge to protect the stainless steel a bit more, but otherwise that portion is pretty much done.
Oh reddit. "During the Cold War, Finland secretly smuggled more than ten thousand vowels from Czechoslovakia. That's why the Finnish have sentences like 'Älä rääkkää kääkkää kääkänrääkkääjä!' and the Czechs have 'Strč prst skrz krk.'"
Inspired by @lauraritchie 's Dawn Chorus the other day, here is the dusk chorus from my veranda.