Made by Mikal – Page 33

madebymikal.com

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 28, 2014
Post category:Wood

I've been doing a lot more wood work recently, and I decided I wanted to write that up somewhere. Instead of posting it here, I also wanted to play with wordpress as an alternative hosting solution. The wood working is therefore being blogged on a new site, madebymikal.com. So far I've made a Thien Baffle cyclonic separator to stop my dust extractor filling with planer shavings, as well as documenting the process of making home made vanilla essence with turned bottle stoppers for Christmas. Oh, and I found a source of cheap high quality bar clamps in Australia. Not too bad for the week before Christmas I don't think.

Walk up Tuggeranong Hill

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 28, 2014
Post category:Diary

I've had a hankering to do a bush walk for an while, and so I spent some time yesterday walking up Tuggeranong Hill. This was a really nice walk -- the access road for the ACTEW substation provides parking with shade from trees, and its very very close to my house. The entrance to the fire access road for the broadcast repeater at the top the hill isn't well marked, so I ended up going the long way. I think this made the walk more fun to be honest. [kml: 20141226]

Random tip: cheap bar clamps in Australia

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 25, 2014
Post category:Tip Tools

I’ve been experimenting a lot recently with making furniture out of MGP10 structural pine that I machine myself. The first few examples have been work stands for things like my Tormek in the garage. One of the things I need to do when making these stands is to turn a series of machined pine strips into panels. That’s where bar clamps come in handy. I recently discovered where to buy good quality clamps cheaply, and thought I’d share…

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Our finished home made Christmas vanilla essence with turned stopper.

Home made vanilla essence for Christmas

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 25, 2014
Post category:Wood turning

Catherine and I decided to make home made vanilla essence as part of our Christmas gifts for 2014. This turned out to be pretty easy, and result is really good. As part of that I turned bottle stoppers for the little decorative bottles we gave the essence out in. I also needed to explore what glue would work with silicone stoppers, which turned out to be a bit of an adventure.

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Blakely's Red Gum bottle stoppers finished with UBeaut Food Safe.

Turning for December 2014

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 24, 2014
Post category:Wood turning

I gave out a bunch of bowls at the work Christmas party, and to my embarrassment many people asked what wood and finish had been used. I of course didn’t remember because I made some of them over six months ago. I’m therefore going to try and do a better job of systematically documenting the things I make. This post is a first attempt at that.

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My finished Thien Baffle.

Building a Thien Baffle

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 23, 2014
Post category:Hacks

For a while now I’ve been meaning to play with making a Thien Baffle for my garage workshop. The motivation is that whilst I have a quite nice 3HP dust extractor (for those in the market for such a thing — don’t spend $1,400 with some retailers — I am super happy with my $500 unit from Leda Machinery), I want to keep the number of times I change the bags to a bare minimum. I see the dust extractor as a way of controlling potentially dangerous very fine dust, whereas some of the machines in my workshop create a lot of very large shavings — the thicknesser seems like the most obvious culprit here. It would be cool to divert these larger shavings into a bin where I can just use them as garden mulch, and then save the dust extractor bags for the fine and more dangerous dust.

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Ghost

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 15, 2014
Post category:Book

Trigger warning, I suppose. This like a Tom Clancy book, but with weirder sex, much of it non-consensual. Also, not as well thought through or as well researched or as believable. I couldn't bring myself to finish it.

How are we going with Nova Kilo specs after our review day?

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 15, 2014
Post category:OpenStack

Time for another summary I think, because announcing the review day seems to have caused a rush of new specs to be filed (which wasn't really my intention, but hey). We did approve a fair few specs on the review day, so I think overall it was a success. Here's an updated summary of the state of play: API Add more detailed network information to the metadata server: review 85673. Add separated policy rule for each v2.1 api: review 127863. Add user limits to the limits API (as well as project limits): review 127094. Allow all printable characters in resource names: review 126696. Consolidate all console access APIs into one: review 141065. Expose the lock status of an instance as a queryable item: review 127139 (abandoned); review 85928 (approved). Extend api to allow specifying vnic_type: review 138808. Implement instance tagging: review 127281 (fast tracked, approved). Implement the v2.1 API: review 126452 (fast tracked, approved). Improve the return codes for the instance lock APIs: review 135506. Microversion support: review 127127 (approved). Move policy validation to just the API layer: review 127160. Nova Server Count API Extension: review 134279 (fast tracked). Provide a policy statement on the goals of our API policies:…

Soft deleting instances and the reclaim_instance_interval in Nova

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 15, 2014
Post category:OpenStack

I got asked the other day how the reclaim_instance_interval in Nova works, so I thought I'd write it up here in case its useful to other people. First off, there is a periodic task run the nova-compute process (or the computer manager as a developer would know it), which runs every reclaim_instance_interval seconds. It looks for instances in the SOFT_DELETED state which don't have any tasks running at the moment for the hypervisor node that nova-compute is running on. For each instance it finds, it checks if the instance has been soft deleted for at least reclaim_instance_interval seconds. This has the side effect from my reading of the code that an instance needs to be deleted for at least reclaim_instance_Interval seconds before it will be removed from disk, but that the instance might be up to approximately twice that age (if it was deleted just as the periodic task ran, it would skip the next run and therefore not be deleted for two intervals). Once these conditions are met, the instance is deleted from disk.

Specs for Kilo, an update

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 3, 2014
Post category:OpenStack

We're now a few weeks away from the kilo-1 milestone, so I thought it was time to update my summary of the Nova specifications that have been proposed so far. So here we go... API Add more detailed network information to the metadata server: review 85673. Add separated policy rule for each v2.1 api: review 127863. Add user limits to the limits API (as well as project limits): review 127094. Allow all printable characters in resource names: review 126696. Expose the lock status of an instance as a queryable item: review 127139 (abandoned); review 85928 (approved). Implement instance tagging: review 127281 (fast tracked, approved). Implement the v2.1 API: review 126452 (fast tracked, approved). Improve the return codes for the instance lock APIs: review 135506. Microversion support: review 127127 (approved). Move policy validation to just the API layer: review 127160. Nova Server Count API Extension: review 134279 (fast tracked). Provide a policy statement on the goals of our API policies: review 128560. Sorting enhancements: review 131868 (fast tracked, approved). Support JSON-Home for API extension discovery: review 130715. Support X509 keypairs: review 105034 (approved). API (EC2) Expand support for volume filtering in the EC2 API: review 104450. Implement tags for volumes and…