Apathetic Thursday

Snapped this photo the other day while out and about. Somehow this doesn’t quite seem to capture the spirit of the season…

Just picked up on this quote today from techdirt:

Anne Sweeney, the president of the Disney-ABC television group, claims: “You don’t need TiVo if you have fast-forward-disabled video on demand. It gives you the same opportunity to catch up to your favorite shows.”

I’m willing to bed that Anne doesn’t watch much TV. As far as I’m concerned the commercials on TV are getting worse not better, and seeing as the television programing isn’t much better, there really isn’t much point to watch TV, except for a handful of shows which are on once a week, and will be on DVD in another 6 months… commercial free.

But what makes even less sense, is that on Anne Sweeney’s bio page there is a link to a 300dpi profile photo. (It’s not just her, the other team members have this as well, but if you ask me, it’s weird. Although, the quality and clarity of the photo is quite amazing… …)

Hot off the twitter feed, by John Gruber:

 I’d sooner attempt to fashion my own homebrew HDMI cable out of melted pennies and hollowed-out Slim Jims than pay $60 for one at Best Buy.

I just wish Best Buy would catch on that most of their potential customers feel this way.

It occurred to me the other day that the entire saga of the musical chess set was not documented on Apathetic Thursday. The only story I could find was within the comments on the flickr photos. So I think it is time to remedy this problem.

How it All Started

My friend Jonas and I simultaneously reached a point in our lives where we came to a sudden and shocking realization. We had a friend, named Bob, who was about to get married. We were both really happy for Bob, but this whole wedding thing involved a lot of planning and thinking and somehow, a $10 t-shirt from Target which read “Game Over” just wasn’t going to cut it for a wedding gift.

We were in a bind, it was still August and the wedding was in December, but we needed to come up with something fast. I was going to school in Minnesota and Jonas was going to school in Wisconsin so work time would be limited to the last few weeks of summer break, Thanksgiving break, and maybe a day or two before the wedding.

We finally settled on building something, and quickly developed the concept of a musical chess set. Bob and his bride (Laura) are both into music and we figured this would be pretty close to perfect for them. Now all we had to do was build it.

We started off with some Google searches for notes and staffs, finding some we liked, we modified them to the correct size and printed them off for templates.

The wood we had to use was a bunch of butternut that my dad and I had cut down and planned into boards a few years back. We carefully traced out the initial pieces on our boards, which were about a quarter inch thick and began to cut.

Crafting the Pieces

We were cutting the pieces using my dad’s scroll saw. Sadly, the scroll saw was on it’s last legs and required a bit of encouragement to keep it running. Very shortly it reached a point where it wasn’t going to cut at all unless we attached a hand crank to the motor and moved it up and down on our own.

This was a slight setback, because we had only cut a few pieces and this was not something we could do by hand. Fortunately, my dad was ready to buy a new scroll saw and a day or so later we had a new one at our disposal. We quickly started up our cutting work only to cut a few pieces and discover that this saw was also broken.

So far the project wasn’t looking so great. We had been through 2 saws and we had hardly started.

A day or two later we had another new saw at our command and this one was not going to break on us. With it we were able to cut out the rest of our pieces.

The lineup for the pieces was as such:

Pawn: Eight Note, Rook : Sharp, Knight: Quarter Rest, Bishop: Half Note, Queen: Treble Cleft, King: Bass Cleft

At this point we had all the pieces cut out so they all created nice 3D block style musical notation. The only thing left was to cut the bases, which was done on a drill press in half inch butternut wood.

Each piece got stained appropriately and the pieces were fastened to the base via a dowel in the middle. Not every piece ended up with the exact same tilt, but overall it was pretty close. Besides, it was a homemade gift and there’s never going to be anything like it again. (Well… maybe…)

Jonas and I were pretty good a being paranoid so throughout the piece building phase we had every single scenario worked out for our chess set. We were prepared to find Bob selling this on ebay a few days later, we were prepared to hear that Laura had horrific childhood memories involving chess, we were even prepared for other wedding guests to give him the same thing. Although none of these events actually occurred, and all were extremely unlikely, it sure helped to pass the time while we worked.

The Board

The Board was tough, because our planner is only 13 inches, we had to do the board in two sections. This worked pretty well and we simply glued the two half together carefully and we were good to go.

To separate the squares on the board it was decided that we would router a small trough between them. With the help of my dad, who is much more knowledgeable in this area, we were able to achieve this relatively easily. The big thing my dad did to help us was just get it started. Both Jonas and I were deathly afraid of ruining this amazing thing we were trying to create and the big push we needed was to just start working.

Final Stages

Once we had everything made we could stain it. The butternut was nice and light so we chose a nice dark stain and made half the pieces and half the board quite a bit darker.

By now we are talking Thanksgiving break time. I had managed to get home a few weekends to work here and there, but come Thanksgiving we had the majority of the work done, unfortunately we didn’t have a box yet.

My father, aware of our deadline began crafting a box for us out of some black cherry we had recently acquired. Thanks to his help a few days before the wedding everything was done.

The final few touches included lining the inside of the box with felt to keep the pieces snug inside and also felting the bottom of all the pieces themselves. We had some double-backed adhesive which we attached to the felt and die-cut out circles which could then be stuck nicely to the bottom of each piece.

The only thing left after this was a small set of instructions which were written up and printed off. We then soaked the paper in coffee for a set amount of time to age it and burned off the edges for an authentic look and feel.

I believe this was actually the day of the wedding. In fact, when I stopped at a gas station to pick up a lighter to burn the page edges I ran into Bob there who was, I guess, getting gas.

Finally though, we had finished.

Overall the project was tons of fun. I hold this chess set as one of the coolest things I have ever built.

Unfortunately using Airfoil does not solve the problem on the dropping out Airtune speakers. However, I have noticed several things about the issue:

First off, I always thought it was iTunes that was causing most of the problem. I can now see that this isn’t the case. From what I can tell, something happens, what this something is, I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s a microwave or a cordless phone or a computer or a solar flare or what, but something happens. This interrupts my Airport Airtune signal and it drops off the face of the earth. (Maybe it’s being moved to an alternate dimension.) Sometimes it pops back quickly, other times it takes a few minutes, and I assume that sometimes it never comes back at all.

During this time, full signal and internet capabilities exist between my computer and Airport Express, it’s just like Airport said “Oh, hey, I changed my mind. There are no speakers here.”

Unplugging and replugging the Airport resets everything (including the internet connection) and the remote speaker comes back.

What Airfoil IS better at than iTunes is finding the remote speaker again after it is gone. When using iTunes I would find often that restarting iTunes was the only way I could make it see the remote speaker, (barring a several minute wait for iTunes to look around again and actually find it.) But with a 25 Gig iTunes library this is no simple task.

The nice thing about Airfoil is that if the remote speaker cuts out my iTunes music continues to play through my computer speakers, so there is less stoppage as things go from working to not working and vice versa.

What I would really like to find out now is what exactly Airport is fighting. If I knew what it was that was giving Airport speaker amnesia I would be much better equipped to combat it. I know some things about it already, such as it’s more likely to occur in the afternoon or evening, while mornings seem to be relatively immune to this behavior. It never just happens once and it’s done. If it happens, it happens every x number of minutes, with x not necessarily being the same for each interval. (I haven’t timed it out yet, but I think it needs to be done.)

One way or another I would really like to get to the bottom of this, I’ve already invested enough money into it. (iTunes = Free, Airport Express = $129, Airfoil = $25, [AirClick = $50]*) So if anyone knows anything more on the whole dropout issue, drop me a line, I would like to hear your experiences.

* AirClick wasn’t specifically purchased for this purpose, but I use it to control iTunes quite a bit.

UPDATE: I tried it out and it still doesn’t solve the problem. Read about it here: http://apatheticthursday.net/2008/02/23/the-verdict-is-nay/

I think I have just discovered a possible solution for my ever cutting out AirTunes from my Airport Express.

My setup is ideal (mostly.) My Airport Express is sitting not 8 inches behind my laptop on my desk. I am never more than a foot away from my Airport Express. Signal is always great, but for some reason iTunes usually tells me that it can’t find any speakers on the network after only a few minutes of streaming music via AirTunes.

Today, I think I may have a solution, but sadly it is not free. I have not had ample time to test this, but if anyone else is having problems I thought I would throw this out there and see if anyone has given this a shot yet.

I (re)-discovered Airfoil today while reading through some RSS feeds.

After thinking for a bit I decided that I needed to give this a try. Instead of having iTunes look for the Airport Express I would have a different program, namely Airfoil do it. I have a feeling iTunes is the program that keeps looking the Airport Express anyway.

I haven’t bought a license yet but for several 10 minute stretches I was able to play iTunes without having any major glitches. (I did notice one small cut out, but I think it might have been my computer slowing down for a second or so.)

I don’t know if this stops all drop outs, because every 10 minutes I had to hit turn the remote speaker off and turn it back on again to get rid of the major static that comes in, but if I have some free time tomorrow I’ll purchase a copy and see if it solves my problems. If it does, it will be well worth the $25 purchase fee.

If anyone has had some experience with this already, let me know. Otherwise check back in for an update tomorrow.

This is why I love Foxtrot:

And yes, I would totally buy this game.

I had a chance to take some really neat photos of a few Bald Eagles today, it was really neat to have such a great opportunity presented to me, I was ecstatic. Unfortunately, I feel that the photos I did get to take were not as good as they could have been.

Overall it was a great learning experience and I did get some nice photos. If tomorrow is as nice as today was I may have to venture out again to see who is flying around. We’ll see what the weathers like. For now, feel free to enjoy a few of my eagle photos.

EDIT: I think I’ll probably have a few more eagle photos to put up over the next few days as well, so be sure to check back later. (You really don’t need to know this, but it makes me  feel better when the post is longer than the photo that’s in the post so the layout of my website doesn’t look horrible. Yeah, I know, that’s not a good reason for writing more, but oh well.)

Well. I’d say that things went pretty well. We’ll see how they continue on.

Enough said.