Space-walking Over New Zealand

Cool photo of a space walk on the International Space Station as it passes over NZ.  Christchurch, Farewell Spit, Malborough Sounds and the lower North Island all visible.  Thanks to Twisted Sifter for putting this one up.  Image from NASA on Wikicommons.  It was taken back in 2006, so not exactly current.  Looking forward to seeing SpaceX Dragon etc making visits in the future if US/Russia relations continue to deteriorate.

Computers I Once Knew

When I was about twelve I got my first computer, a ZX81 made by Sinclair, in Scotland of all places.

Wikipedia

The purchase price was NZ$199 and you could do very basic programming (literally Basic programming, as in the language) to run simple games etc.

It came with a whopping 1kB of memory.  To put this in perspective, the computer that I am writing this blog on has eight million times the memory in RAM (8GB), with a further billion times as much memory on built-in hard disc storage (1TB) - all this on a fairly run-of-the-mill new business laptop.

In science and engineer we often refer to 'orders of magnitude'.  A widget maker that processes ten times as many widgets per hour as its predecessor is one order of magnitude faster - quite some achievement on a production line and sure to get the inventor a promotion.

This pales into insignificance when compared with changes in computer speeds (computer accelerations?).  My current laptop is nearly seven orders of magnitude faster at processing calculations as the old ZX81.  If my 1982 computer was a car, say a nippy Toyota Corolla hatchback with a top speed of 150km/h (down hill, with a following wind) that would mean the current 2014 model Corolla could do 1200000000km/h, which is just over the speed of light.

But of course the ZX81 wasn't quite that bad.  It could easily be expanded to a generous 16kB of RAM by plugging in a notoriously wobbly black box into the back of the all-in-one basic unit.  And if you didn't inadvertently wipe your laboriously typed code by knocking the RAM module you could save it.  On what you ask?  A standard screechy, hissy audio cassette tape of course!

Little wonder I never became a programmer.

Entertainment Unit Part 2

Here is the completed entertainment unit in place.

Completed unit

The simple plywood doors run in an aluminium channel routed into the base and top. 

Aluminium track and sliding door

The handles are pieces of solid oak, tapered to match the chamfer on the top.

Oak sliding door handle

The cables run in a 100mm wide gallery at the back of the unit.  Here is a photo with the top slid out slightly.

Power points, aerial and phone sockets in the gallery behind the plywood back prior to cable installation.

The next step is to make the bookshelves which will sit on top of the unit and be attached to the wall.  After this, access to the cables will be through holes in the back of the unit.

Another Beautiful Misty Autumn Morning

Taken from the same spot as the previous blog, outside our bedroom window.  We are very lucky to live where we do.

View From The Bedroom This Morning

Entertainment Unit Part 1

This is a project that I have been working on sporadically for the last few months.  It's a built-in entertainment unit for our living area.  This is the first piece of furniture of any significant size that I have worked on - over 2.4m (8 feet) long.  My other projects have been small tables, chopping boards and a wall cabinet (blogged about previously here).  

Front Elevation

It is intended as a multifunctional piece of cabinetry with the following features:

• Central open shelves for the Freeview box, DVD player or whatever piece of technology replaces them.  The shelves are open to allow the infra-red remote controls to work.
• Storage for DVDs and CDs on the left behind a sliding door.
• Storage for our small stereo on the right, also behind a sliding door.
• A false back to hide the cables, with access to the power points, phone jack and aerial sockets in the wall behind.
• Bookshelves above, random sizes to fit our books and other objects.
• A wide enough lower unit to sit a flat screen TV on, with space each side for guests to sit/perch on during parties.

End Elevation and Sections

The main part of the work is in the lower unit, which is made from oak veneered onto MDF (main carcase), solid oak (trim around the edges) and meranti plywood for the back and doors.

These are not necessarily the ideal materials to use.  It's more a case of what is available and also what is appropriate.  Because the unit is going to be 'built-in' like kitchen cupboards and also because of its significant size the carcase needed to be stable.  Hence oak veneered MDF was used - not my favourite material to work with but it allowed the bottom, sides and back to be fully glued together for strength.

Gluing up the ends to the base

The back and doors are made from inexpensive plywood, which is a little bit splintery as I have discovered, but hopefully will be ok with a few coats of shellac and some wax.

Gluing the partitions, shelves and pre-stained backs in place

The rest of the unit is finished in Danish oil.

First coat of Danish oil applied

Once the second coat of oil has been applied I will bring it inside to see how well it fits against the wall.  Hopefully I've got my measurements correct for the positions of the power points etc, directly behind the central section.  Fingers crossed!

Roofs 101

The roof on your house performs a few different tasks, the main one being to shed rainwater effectively (at least in New Zealand, where it can rain a lot). Given a simple rectangular floor plan, there are two basic roof forms, the hip and the gable, both of which are present at our place:

Hipped roof on our house

Gable on the end of our garage

Other less common roof forms are the gablet, the gambrel, the Dutch gable and the mansard amongst others.  Unfortunately, there are so many different opinions about the definition of each of these that it is difficult do decipher what is 'correct' and what is just common usage (abusage?).

The New Zealand Period House (Arden & Bowman, Random House, 2004) describes a gambrel roof the way a gablet roof is defined in the UK and elsewhere.  I prefer the more descriptive 'hip and gable' which is used in Asia to denote a temple style roof, although the term Dutch gable is often used here, despite it looking nothing like the gable on a Dutch house.

Gablet or is that Gambrel? Or Dutch Gable? Photo: Bill Bradley

A gambrel roof in the US (think hay barn) would be described as a mansard roof in NZ, and possibly the UK, although mansard applies more correctly to a hipped or four sided version, not the one below:

Gambrel or is it Mansard? Photo: Steel Frame Concepts

Back to my copy of The New Zealand Period House, they describe a Dutch gable roof the way a half hip or Dutch hip is described elsewhere:

Half Hip or is it Dutch Hip? Or Dutch Gable? From Houseplans24.com

So you can see that there are very clearly defined definitions for the various basic roof styles.

Well, I'm glad I cleared that one up!  And this is just a roof on a rectangular box.  Introduce a non-rectangular floor plan with bays, lean-to's, valleys, clerestoreys etc, perhaps a flat or skillion roof, then we can look at framed roofs versus the trussed variety, purlins, battens, chords and webs, rafters, stringers, barges, soffits.... 

Public Transport Eh?

I work from home, but my wife has just started back at work in the city, which means a drive and two buses; a drive, a bus and a train; or just driving all the way.  At the moment, as in the past, she is using one of the public transport options but today's experience may be enough to put her off for good.

I will spare you the details, but lets just say the bus broke down on the motorway, the replacement bus didn't stop in time, the replacement replacement bus was going to the wrong place and... ok, you get the picture.  

It got me thinking about the last time I broke down on the motorway in a car.  It was when I was a student and I was driving a rusty old 1970 Holden Kingswood.  Cars now are reliable.  They rarely break down and are vastly improved on my set of student wheels.  One the other hand, I quite frequently see a broken down bus on the side of the road, with the familiar heavy duty tow truck in attendance.  Given that they make up only a small proportion of vehicles this would be somewhat of a concern.  Why is this?  The buses themselves seem relatively new.  Is it that much harder to make a bus reliable, compared with, say, a modern truck?

Reinventing the Door

This novel variation on the common door comes from Austrian artist Klemmens Torggler.  Thanks to Twisted Sifter (again) for the link.

Here's another one made from 10mm plate steel.

Very cool.

The New Era

It's often said that we live in changing times and that the pace of technology and social revolutions seem to be almost exponential.  Since the beginning of the millennium we have seen 9/11, the birth of the Euro, YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter, the Asian tsunami, the Japan earthquake, 3D printing and drone strikes.  But is our era really any different from the past or do we just look at it through our own myopic viewpoint?

The French have the term fin de siecle (literally end of the century) to describe the turn of the previous century but also the political and cultural changes that were happening at that time.

The Scream, Edvard Munch, 1893

Many 'isms' apply to this period: rationalism, materialism, surrealism, positivism, pessimism, social Darwinism and nationalism, which led to the upheavals of the First World War, which in turn led to fascism and the Second World War.  

HG Wells wrote The Time Machine in 1895, in which the protagonist travels to the distant future to learn what becomes of humanity and witnesses a dying earth.  The irony for me is that if I had a time machine, top of my list of destinations would be to head right back to where he came from: the late Victorian era and the turn of the twentieth century.

Here are some random fascinating events that were happening around this time:

The Eiffel Tower was completed in 1889.  It was the tallest building in France until 2004 with the completion of the Millau Viaduct, which I have previously blogged about here and referred to in this blog here.

Wikipedia

New Zealand became the first country in the world to give women the vote in 1893.

Kate Sheppard, 1905

In London, the first proper 'Tube' railway was opened in 1890.  It ran from the City of London to Stockwell (about 5km), under the Thames.

London Underground

By the time of the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, London's population had reached 6.6 million and it has not varied greatly since then.  In 1801 it was less than a million, making the fin de siecle a time of great change, for Londoners at least.