One of my next projects I’d like to work on is designing and building a custom dining table. The table we have now was a simple bare-wood pine table we bought probably 15 years ago and painted flat black. For years it was our office desk, where one of us sat on each side; then we converted it to our small dining table. It’s still going strong today, with remarkable durability. I haven’t even repainted the tabletop.
But we want a larger proper dining table that we can use for the family. The current table doesn’t get much use, but we’ve now got a proper dining room that we’d like to use for its intended purpose.
My idea is a long and relatively narrow thick panel, with some kind of simple cross-member base assembly. This is the rough SketchUp model so far:
I’m designing it to be extendable with a leaf in the center, with the support apron rails forming an enclosed box in which we could store the leaf element when it’s not in use. For typical day-to-day we wouldn’t need it extended — only having that as an option for larger events and things. I don’t want to have to store the leaf somewhere where it’ll get buried out in the garage or take up space elsewhere, so it’s best if it stays with the table. The whole thing is designed to be 90” when fully extended. I’ve worked out the measurements so I think this approach will work with a leaf size that’ll be storable within this hidden box underneath. No one would even know it’s there.
The design doesn’t have any of the finishing touches I’m imagining working in somehow. The chamfers, round-overs, joinery. The vision right now is to do this with probably 10-quarter white oak (for the top) and maybe 8-quarter for the legs and base components. It’ll be a fun project if or when I can find the time to do it. I’ve wanted to tackle a more substantial furniture project for a while, and it’d be gratifying to build something that the family can use and enjoy for the years to come.
Jerry Brito writes about the growth of independent writing on Substack, prompted by a Mike Solana tweet:
From a technical perspective, Substack does not belong on Solana’s list next to Bitcoin and Signal. Signal is a company, but they have almost no information about their users—no names, no messages. Bitcoin is not a company, but instead a permissionless decentralized network, and “it” can’t decide who can use it or for what. Substack, on the other hand, is a centralized service that permissions who’s allowed on and what they can do, and it is subject to official and market pressures.
Comparisons to YouTube or Twitter are closer than to BTC or Signal, for sure. But even with Substack being a centralized platform, the risks are lower in the text or email medium; there’s high portability to move to other platforms at will. If you can move your content and your subscriber list, you can bring your audience. The primary advantages Substack has are that are hard to replicate (today) on your own hosted system are the publishing tools and monetization layer (though not impossible). Trying to disintermediate YouTube yourself would be hard, and transporting your Twitter network isn’t possible. SMTP, hypertext, and DNS are still open.
The problem with “best tool for the job” thinking is that it takes a myopic view of the words “best” and “job.” Your job is keeping the company in business, god damn it. And the “best” tool is the one that occupies the “least worst” position for as many of your problems as possible.
It is basically always the case that the long-term costs of keeping a system working reliably vastly exceed any inconveniences you encounter while building it. Mature and productive developers understand this.
Matt Haughey went nuts on a custom lighting setup for his home office. I ran across this searching for some wirelessly controllable LEDs for my office bookshelf. Mine won’t be this crazy, but I wish I had the patience to do something like this.
