Shambling Towards Perfection

A few days ago in one of the online programming groups I'm in someone was asking for help with a regex. I recommended using a non-capturing group, since she had specific things she needed to return at the end. Usually when I use regexes I'm just checking for a match or not, so I've rarely bothered with capturing or not capturing, so I decided to read up a bit. Found this excellent resource , which I shall have to remember in future, and started browsing around it looking at the wealth of info on all aspects of regexes, when a thought occurred to me. Did we learn about this stuff in Automata, Languages, and Computability (AKA the mother of all theory classes in the CS masters degree, most of which I have forgotten)? Is that part of CS regular expressions, or strictly a programming language implementation regex thing? Where is the line for that, anyway? I started Googling, and turned up several excellent answers on the CS Stack Exchange, which I really ought to browse more...

I'm apparently incapable of keeping this thing up-to-date. One of these days, however, I will actually finish recording how the Death Star came to fruition. In the meantime, have a video of the finished product.

Once we finished cutting out our triangles, we started painting them. We brushed on acrylic paint instead of using spray paint, as it seemed logistically easier. Finding a place on campus to spray paint 75 triangles and finding enough time when it wasn't windy would have been a pain. It took much less time to paint than cut, so we were done with all the triangles within 2 weeks. After we had enough triangles painted, we started gluing them together into panels. The geodesic dome pattern we used has a single pentagon at the top, then a ring of 5 hexagons, then a ring of 5 pentagons, then a ring of 5 half hexagons (to make a flat bottom). This makes for a total of 11 panels plus 5 half panels. We used wood glue for this step. This turned out to be a good choice, as the wood glue starts setting up pretty quickly, so once we got the triangles properly positioned they didn't slip around too much. We did use binder clips on the glued edges to hold them together as they dried, j...

For my next electronics project, I am building a gigantic cardboard and LED strip Death Star. Background: My department at work enjoys decorating for the holidays. We always talk about how we should have really awesome decorations, being IT and all. After last Halloween we agreed we were going to do something truly epic for the next Halloween, and we agreed we'd need to start working on decorations right away to have enough time to make something super cool during our lunch hours. Thus we voted on the theme for Halloween 2018 in November of 2017. The theme we picked: Star Wars, of course. We had some vague ideas of making a big Death Star, and hanging some inflatable decorations, like this excellent Millenium Falcon . In January we started to really try and figure out what we were doing, and over the course of a couple of lunch hours we generated a plan: we'd build a giant cardboard geodesic dome and paint it to look like the Death Star. And if we had enough time, we...

It's been nearly 2 years since my last post, so I figured I should actually update this again. I've continued to take pottery classes and make awesome stuff, but my bigger current obsession is combining crafting and programming via microcontrollers such as the Arduino. For my first venture into this realm I wanted to do a small project just to get familiar with Arduino and working with electronics. I haven't done anything with circuits since high school physics (Lego Mindstorms in the robotics class during my masters doesn't count; there was no wire or resistors or anything like that), so I had to relearn pretty much everything to do with electricity. Anyhow last fall I followed a tutorial for an Arduino-powered sound-reactive LED strip . The only tweak I made was changing the threshold for noise; the tutorial assumed a louder environment than the quiet office where I mounted this. We had holiday music playing in the background at work, so this was part of our decorat...

Yeah I couldn't think of a witty title today. But anyway. Tuesday was the last day for wet clay, and also our first raku firing. So first, I had to glaze the mushroom and oval box. I decided to save the fairy hut for tomorrow, when we'll be doing naked raku. I used some bright red underglaze on the top of the mushroom, plus turquoise crackle, tomat's red (I think), and copper luster. Anyway I was trying to go for a pretty brightly colored, contrasting top. I put white crackle on the stem, and then also a few dots of alligator rust on both the top and stem to make it look a bit warty. I forgot to get a picture after that was glazed. For the box, I did black glaze on the zigzags on the bottom, turquoise crackle on the flat part of the top, and glass red on the knob. Both pieces came out great, although I did have 2 small cracks in the mushroom's top. One of the instructors had a piece that cracked, too, and she builds stuff like woah, so I wonder if the temperat...

So apparently the theme of this session is plates. I didn't mean for that initially, but it's turned out to be a great platform for all these different decoration techniques. On Saturday, I got a dragon egg and two plates smoothed and ready to be decorated. These are all made with 412/stoney white cone 10 clay. The dragon egg I'll be decorating tonight via the surface erosion technique , where you paint on a resist and then sponge away material, leaving the painted parts raised above the rest of the surface. I'll be using an acrylic medium, not shellac like in that link, as I won't be doing anything nearly that complicated. The plates though I was actually able to decorate on Saturday. For the first, I used an embossing tool to trace a design of Betty White. I'm hoping it looks like her, anyway. I'll use an oxide wash that's wiped off to highlight the carved in design. For the second plate, I used the " mocha diffusion " technique wh...