Psychic Origami

Back in 2006 the new Battlestar Galactica series was going strong (and was still rather good). So it was almost inevitable (in hindsight) that someone would make a Cylon pumpkin for Halloween. That pumpkin was featured in a Halloween copy of Make magazine I bought and then held on to …

When I was younger I built and flew a couple of radio-controlled (R/C) aeroplanes. These were made from kits and were of a fairly modern style, with foam core balsa-covered wings and covered with heat shrink plastic (attached using a small iron). The two planes I finished used small …

About a year ago I started on a project to make a temperature controlled nightlight. I was inspired by seeing these lovely LED lamps styled as mushrooms growing out of pieces of wood. Those mushrooms were made out of glass, which was somewhat beyond my skills. However I then saw …

I quite enjoy some casual macro photography and am always taking pictures of various projects (which are usually on the smaller scale). For those types of photos you ideally need good light and a steady hand. When you don't have good light then a tripod helps a lot, but a …

About a year ago I made a table for William's birthday. This year I decided to make him a chair to go with the table.

I learnt quite a bit making the table and that coupled with a few other projects (a raised bed and a small phone stand amongst …

For the a period of 18 months or so I slowly ported my chess by rss site (chrss) from Turbogears 1.0 to Django. When I started the port Django 1.1 was the latest version. I took so long to finish the port, that Django got to version 1 …

So William is a year old now and to celebrate that fact I decided to make him a table. Now given that my last piece of woodwork was a doorbell, hastily constructed using a coping saw on the doorstep of the previous house, this could have gone badly. Luckily it …

Quite often I'll get distracted with an idea/piece of technology and mull it over for quite some time. Most of the time I play through these ideas in my head and don't do anything with them. It's often just an exercise in learning and understanding. I'll read up on …

If you want to associate extra information with a user account in Django you need to create a separate "User Profile" model. To get the profile for a given User object one simply calls get_profile. This is a nice easy way of handling things and helps keep the User model …

For some reason I got seized by the idea of creating some electronics for our Halloween costumes this year. In previous years I have gone as far as dying my hair green for Halloween, but that is just an evening's work. This year we were having a more sedate affair …