On my to-build list, I want to make some simple floating picture frames for a few canvasses we have in the house. Those are simple enough to build, but I also want to add reinforcement splines to the mitered corners, for both the structural support and as a design detail.
Using a few examples I found (especially this one from Woodcraft by Suman), I drew up this design that’ll allow it to be reusable, support using hold-down clamps, and stop blocks for batching out cuts. Jigs like this can make somewhat complex cuts dead simple and...
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...
I discovered this series from my neighbor last week, and already ripped through the full 38-part series.
Lifelong shipwright Louis Sauzedde meticulously walks through the steps of building a flat-bottomed skiff from scratch. He goes from raw slabs of white oak and fir stickered in his backyard, through milling, planing, assembling, and finishing the full boat.
I had this long, wide, high-on-the-wall shelf in my office that was there since we moved in. I had wanted to take it down and do something different, but just left it there while I considered some alternatives. I considered a piece of furniture, moving my desk arrangement, and different variations of shelves that could work. Eventually I decided I wanted some simple, long shelves to give me plenty of space, and to put them up high over the reading chair area.
I wanted to get back to woodworking, and thought this would be a good chance to design something...
Colette had this idea to build an outdoor chalkboard for the kids to use, hung on the fence. I went yesterday and bought some materials to put one together. I also found out in drawing up the plan that chalkboard paint exists, which is amazing. I’m not sure how exactly it works, but I bought some and we’ll find out.
It only requires some basic ingredients:
Cement backerboard (like you use for moisture-resistant surfaces)
I just merged in a new project I worked on over the holiday to add a library section to this site. You’ll see it under “Books” from the top navigation menu.
Based around the library database I’ve been adding to over the last few months, I built a way to convert the record data for each book into content pages for the website. It uses Jekyll’s Collections functionality for building custom content types to use. Once you have the basic templating set up, creating new content records is as easy as making...
I’ve been an avid user of Goodreads for tracking books for the last ten years. Tom MacWright wrote a post and a script utility last year to export and format items from Goodreads into pages that could work in a Jekyll site, like his and this one. On my profile I track more than just what I’m reading; I also log start and finish dates, ratings, reviews, and more. Getting a feed somewhere on the website would certainly be cool (I have a branch now with this in progress). On my way to...
Inspired by a couple of others, I released a micro project of mine called Terra, to provide a fast way to run several geospatial tools on your computer.
Because I work with a variety of GIS datasets, I end up writing lots of scripts and small automation utilities to manipulate, convert, and merge data, in tons of different formats. Working with geo data at scale like this challenges the non-software developer to get comfortable with basic scripting and programming. I’ve learned a ton in the last couple years about Unix environments,...
