CHRISTMAS CREATIONS

Christmas and Boxing Day were quite nice. At home alone, the main 
tradition was my tinkering away at my little projects. In fact I 
finished off my Christmas present to my mother, which wasn't ready 
in time to give it to her in advance when I met her in Portland. 
The commercialisation of Christmas tends to ignite the 
deeply-repressed anti-capitalist radical within me. Largely 
irrelevant as a religious festival in this country, Christmas is 
the time of year where people are obligated to buy junk for people 
who don't want it. My mother gave me a large coffee mug even though 
she knows I don't have hot drinks, and some Christmas-decorated 
salad tongs even though I doubt she really thinks I do any 
entertaining here. But I did also get a rare second-hand copy of 
the official owners workshop manual for my car, put together by 
Jaguar New Zealand at the end of the car's production run in the 
mid 1990s, which I'd requested explicitly (to much complaint from 
my stepfather who had to find it - but that's what you get if you 
ask me exactly what I want).

My resistance to Christmas consumerism is effected by my building 
return presents myself (for my mother, since my father is well 
ahead of me in anti-Christmas sentiment and won't even hear mention 
of the day's significance), rather than buying junk in the stores. 
This is a fun challenge, although with about the same outcome of 
giving away things the recipient doesn't really want. It's true 
that my mother's house is now becoming more of an archive of my 
electronics projects than my own, not least because I'm obliged to 
actualy finish her ones properly (although it's true some never did 
quite make it beyond something of a Christmas-day tech demo where 
"if I could just get _that_ to work it would do this:").

This year I left aside the clever eletro-trickery and just made a 
simple lamp, built around the unique lithographic shade of this 
design found on Thingiverse which I printed on my 3D printer:

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1981306

Actually, while battling the usual failings of my hacked-about over 
ten-year-old 3D printer the build platform came adrift and messed 
up my first attempted print near the end. Then I tried again and it 
happend again. But then I put the two mostly-printed lithograph 
boxes together and discovered that they actually make a borderline 
acceptable picture joined together, so I fitted small bits of 
fencing wire in the corners to make them friction fit together and 
had myself a lantern.

It seemed better suited to hanging than just sitting on some boring 
plastic base, so then I started gathering up various bits of junk 
and came up with a wall-hanging arrangement suspended from a 
weathered stick by some old rope. The Christmas-day task was wiring 
up the LED board from a broken LED light bulb (the power supply is 
usually the part that fails in those, not the LEDs themselves) to 
run at low power inside Mainly a task of cutting PCB tracks and 
solding up an alternate circuit with the LEDs in parallel instead 
of series so that a sensibly low voltage can be used to power them.

Then I attached a round mirror made from shiny aluminium (since 
doing curved cuts in a glass mirror is well beyond my glass-cutting 
ability) to immitate old wall-mounted candle holders, and glued in 
the stick supported by a bit of narrow bamboo used as a dowell (in 
a display of precision drilling which I'm quite proud of). So by 
the end I had a display of either my talents, or my diminishing 
sanity. Probably more the latter since it looks like this:

gopher://aussies.space/I/~freet/photos/litho-light1.jpg
gopher://aussies.space/I/~freet/photos/litho-light2.jpg

But that's just how it goes when I try to be more artsy than 
electronicsy. And, as I'm sure my mother will say, "it's very 
unique".

On Boxing Day I tried to find a box to keep it safely in, but it 
turns out I've made another one of my creations that's impossible 
to transport (should've kept the stick detatchable rather than 
gluing it in really). I'll just wrap it in paper and be explicit 
about the unwraping procedure. In the mean time I decided to hang 
it up on my own wall in my bedroom, since girls are all scared off 
well before they get as far as there anyway.

Then I also finally fixed my LED Christmas tree VU meter - a 
Christmas creation from many years ago which got wrecked when I 
tripped over the cable and it got all bent over when it fell to the 
floor. After suffering again through the consquences of picking a 
conductive material to stick uninsulated wires through, where they 
can bend and short out, I've now run all the cables under this PC 
which it sits atop. So next time I trip over a cable the whole PC 
case will fall off the table as well - much better. There are some 
old pics of the LED Christmas tree here:

gopher://aussies.space/1/~freet/photos/vu_tree/

Boxing Day was actually quite a worry, very hot with strong north 
winds. A fire in the Grampians national park burned so fiercely 
that the smoke swepted down here, but no fire actually nearby to go 
with it. Also it didn't get quite as hot as I expected since the 
combination of smoke and cloud blocked the sun, so it didn't even 
get above 30degC inside without A/C on. Shame it wasn't like that 
on that day the power was off.

Now it's friday and I need to decide what I'm doing, no longer on a 
public holiday but still my month semi-off. Somehow I feel obliged 
to get back to work today, before probably getting back to slow 
progress on my water tower / 4G antenna tomorrow (4G is still 
dropping out on me from time to time - it'll be interesting to see 
what happens when the yearly music festival starts soon and it 
suddenly needs to serve everyone there again too). I might 
compromise and try sorting out the piles of boxes that build up 
with inadequately-sorted electronic parts in an area next to the 
front door. It's a job that never feels enough like work to do 
during business hours, but too much like work to do on weekends. 
Perfect for today then.

 - The Free Thinker.