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On-the-fly Digital Events Flyers

Maxwell Omdal — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0000

When I helped open Sequoia Fabrica Makerspace in 2023, there was an ever-expanding list of tasks split across 3 Board Members and the Community. Literally everything had to be made from scratch. I was context-switching between building a workbench for our woodshop, programming our website, running member orientations-the list goes on and on.

It was an invigorating time, and I'm so happy to see the successes the space has had in growing from 0 to 50 members. It certainly kept me busy and left little time for exploring down other avenues. I learned a tremendous amount about small businesses, operating physical facilities, and running a community.

The biggest lesson was that operating a small venue is hard. This was purely volunteer work for me, so I had the stability of my day job to keep me grounded. That kept things stable, but my demanding job also meant my free time to bring this makerspace online was limited. The time I did have really needed to be focused on maximizing productivity so I could make sure our space didn't crash and burn.

At the start, I had a "build it and they will come" mindset. I thought if we could provide useful equipment in a well designed facility, people will come out of the woodwork and become members.

This was a total fallacy. Discoverability is everything, and it always has been. How you get discovered has certainly changed since the dawn of the internet, the search engine, and social media. But the fundamental Bullsh*t behind the "build it and they will come" mantra has remained unchanged for as long as there have been small businesses to build. You need to get yourself in front of the public is often as possible. If you are lucky and have a big, local, and supportive clientele, that can happen by word of mouth. Even with our makerspace having an outstanding reputation and many class attendees, this alone has not worked for us.

Our primary driver for events discovery is Instagram. Love it or hate it, that's the truth. It's where people are at. For some it might be Bluesky, Mastodon, a flyer at the local coffee shop, a banner on your street corner. The point remains that discovery takes Small Venue Operators serious effort. I started getting into making digital events fliers for Sequoia Fabrica's Instagram so our classes would fill up. It's tough to do well! That's why SMB owners will hire social media marketers or designers to make their campaigns for them. At Sequoia, we are lucky enough to have many smart people who can successfully manage this campaign work. Much of that, however, is thanks to our status as a community-led nonprofit. That gives us the kind of clout that allows you to convince people to do free labor for you. There's nothing wrong with trying to profit off a business, but it is much harder to find someone to manage your events flyers for free in that situation. So you are stuck either managing it yourself, adding it to the plate of an employee, or contracting it out. That is expensive, and time consuming. And all of that just to get people in to you venue! All that work on top of your actual job, which is managing the facility, running events, payroll, on and on it goes.

Even with Sequoia Fabrica's pool of volunteers, it can be a challenge to crank out quality digital/physical flyers for every class. So I've begun the process of exploring solutions that will automate the task of designing these flyers.

Before building anything, I looked at what was out there today. There is no shortage of tools for creating social media posts. You can use tools like Canva to design your flyers, and they even have bulk templates if you just want to post the same thing with different hero images and titles for each class. That's probably fine for many people. I thought it was boring and monotonous. It might catch a user's eye once, but not twice.

There are also tools like Bannerbear that are geared more toward automation pipelines. You integrate it with whatever tools you already use, and can create new content on-demand by just providing the content to fill out a template. Again, same as with Canva bulk templates, you'll be using the same template over and over, just with different words and maybe a different image. With both these tools the onus is still on you to be the designer.

Lately, I started looking at AI tools for creating content. That market is saturated. Tools like ViralCanvas, The Brief, AIFlyer, Moda, and more. These are essentially wrappers around one of the big AI labs that convert your prompt into an image. You're still stuck being the designer, but now there's an extra layer of abstraction between you and the result. Instead of interacting directly with your canvas, you write a prompt. I'm not convinced this approach will ever provide consistent, beautiful, and on-brand content for small venue operators who aren't designers. We need something that just gets the job done.

So I started seeing what I could build myself. It's never been easier to generate proofs of concept. This week I made some sample projects. For now, I'm calling the project Runeform.

None of my prototypes are where they need to be yet. POC 3 is the closest to something actually useful, so that's the direction I'm taking it. More to come as I build this out.

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New Workflow Annotation Tool: diz.flow

Maxwell Omdal — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0000

Introducing diz.flow!

I made this in an afternoon this weekend using Claude Code, mostly from my phone. It solves a very specific problem, that might only irk me.

Trying to add arrows to diagrams drives me NUTS! Excalidraw is an absolutely fantastic tool, and I love using it during meetings to explain concepts, or creating small diagrams to drop into impl docs to explain stuff to a small group. I think it is the closest thing to what I'm looking for, but there's a couple limitations when it comes to workflow annotation. For one, I'm not aware of any way to automatically connect to boxes together with a directional arrow. And second, adding text to a box in Excalidraw requires extra clicks with my mouse. I'm deathly allergic to extra clicks.

I'm on Mac (most of the time), and they have some handy default annotation tools. But let's be real, Apple isn't known for making decent tools for their power users. Their markup tools are way too one side fits all. I need something ridiculously opinionated, and ridiculously fast. And I want my arrows to SNAP to the boxes!

Before continuing, let's take a step back and let me explain what I mean by "workflow annotation".

In my mental model, a "workflow" is something that I do on a computer, or IRL that has a series of non-ambiguous steps. Go to this page, then click that button, submit the text field, etc, etc. 99% of the time, when I want to explain to someone else how to reproduce something, or illustrate my workflow, the workflow is strictly sequential (A always goes to B always goes to C). So that might differ from the mental model of a "workflow" to someone familiar with no-code solutions that have branching actions. Just know for this purpose, all workflows are sequential!

Now that we have that out of the way, let me explain what diz.flow can do. In "move" mode, you can drop in images (mainly screenshots in my case), arrange multiple images if you like, then in the "draw" mode, you add sequential annotations by click-and-dragging bounding boxes, then providing an optional text blurb and hitting ENTER. When you are done, hit ESC, and you will exit the "flow". If you need to add multiple flows in one view, you can immediately start making more bounding boxes and it will automatically create another flow in a different color. Each bounding box in the flow is connect using a directional arrow.

That's it! It saves me SECONDS every time I want to create one of these annotated screenshots. Not much really, but I've already noticed, that the "annoyance" barrier to quickly creating something like this to share with someone has dropped low enough where I'm making them all the time already.

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Website refresh

Maxwell Omdal — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 00:00:00 -0000

I did a quick refresh of my website. I did some changes to the formatting, and I was also curious about how SVG noise works, so I added some texture to the background. I kind of like it, although I think there is more tweaking required. I'm trying to go for this paper-y feel, as if it were e-ink, or well, actually paper. I really enjoy skeumorphic design in digital media.

While I was looking for help with SVG backgrounds, I found this really neat page called nnnoise. There's actually a lot of great mini-tools from this creator. Check it out.

I didn't figure out how to blend text with the background in a way that feels like it's not just sitting on top. I will continue to mess around with that in the future.

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Thoughts on Teaching Others

Maxwell Omdal — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0000

Thoughts on Teaching Others

These are some incantations I tell myself when I feel like I'm not good enough to teach others how to do something.

You don't need to know all the answers, you just need to be one step ahead.
You don't need to be an expert.
Be honest when you don't know something, and try to figure it out together.
You will learn as much from students as the students learn from you.
Each time you try, you will do it a little better.
People come to learn. Don't trick yourself into thinking they don't want to be there.
"Give it away and you get all." (This is a theme from the book Home Baked.
Always be learning.
Just try your best.

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Chest of Drawers 2

Maxwell Omdal — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0000

Chest of Drawers 2

Refinishing another chest of drawers left on the street in the neighborhood

I've got a thing for street treasure. I wrote up a similar post last year about a chest of drawers I found on the street in a sorry condition. Well, it happened again.

I went down the restoration rabbit hole last week. I think it’s the last time. I appreciate that other people are skilled enough to take some ugly dresser and make it beautiful, but the mess is too much for me to handle. I hate using chemical strippers, and I hate the cleanup. And for some reason I can’t be bothered to put an apron or some work clothes on, so I ruined multiple pairs of pants in the process. Anyway, here are some before and after shots.

This was right when I got it. There was a just-hatched spider egg on the underside of the chest and I had yet to find that. I know pine is not selected for its natural beauty, but this mucus green color? Yuck 🤮!

I’ve found many dressers on the street (I think this is the third one I’ve brought home), and this one was the lowest quality. No interesting flourishes, cheap wood, friction-fit drawers, etc. But I still liked it enough to take it home. They’re all snowflakes, right?

After several passes with Citristrip, the supposedly friendly paint stripper, I started wrapping it in cellophane to keep the stripper from drying out. This worked mildly better than without, but still a disgusting and messy process.

Now I’m paint free! After most of it was removed with chemical stripper, I hauled it over to the makerspace where I took my trusty RO sander and got to work. Obligatory reminder for readers to always wear a mask and use dust collection!

The tired drawer faces got a face lift. A new profile with the router, and I stacked two round over bits for the top profile. I was pretty satisfied at this point, despite it taking much longer than I’d hoped.

Now with all the old paint cleaned up, a few boxes repaired and those spiders gone, I went about picking a stain and finish.

Now I suppose I could’ve left the pine it’s natural color, and perhaps I should have. But I had a can of Minwax “honey” oil based stain that I wanted to use up. I also considered experimenting with iron acetate.

And I’ll be honest, at this point, I just wanted this project over with. Like I said, I’m over this furniture restoration thing, at least the paint stripping part. So I just wanted a quick and easy stain and finish. After the Minwax stain, I used another can of Minwax brand paste wax (rip SC Johnson Paste Wax) as the sole finish.

I then went digging for some knobs, and I didn't have any at home, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to visit San Francisco's famed second-hand builder's supply store. It's a good visit if you live in the area. Lots of interesting bits and bobs torn off old San Francisco homes.

You can still see some corners where I didn't get all the paint off.

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Oh Blogging, What a Bother!

Maxwell Omdal — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0000

Oh Blogging, What a Bother!

Sometimes, I'm not so certain if I enjoy blogging, or if I enjoy the idea of blogging. I know I like making things, both physical and digital, I know I like reading blogs, so why would I not enjoy blogging? I'm not sure, but I'm starting to question it. Maybe what I really need is time away from screens after a day job spent in front of them. It's also been an awfully busy start to 2025, with some stressful national politics.

Maybe what I need is to get off the internet altogether.

I'm just not sure. And maybe that's OK too! I'm still here writing something, aren't I? What I really think I would like to have on this blog is documentation of the in-real-life things I've built. I see two great benefits to this. The first being a personal log of my creations, a way to reflect and consider how the quality and complexity of projects I take on changes and grows. The other is being able to hopefully inspire others to build things themselves! I see a lot of blogs about digital technology, photography, current events, and sometimes art. What about the makerspace movement? What about everyone's own personal Hackadays. That's the type of blog I'd like to read more of. There's plenty of YouTube channels in that vein, but I don't need any more video in my life! I don't need to tell you, dear reader, that YouTube and blogging are far from the same thing.

Do you have any blogs to recommend to me?

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I Made a Sign

Maxwell Omdal — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0000

I Made a Sign

I made a sign! It has LED lighting inside it, I haven't figured out how to power it safely while it's outside though. That might have to wait until I can seek help from a professional.

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Blog Challenge

Maxwell Omdal — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0000

I was inspired by other bloggers to share my answers to the bear blog questions (Adapted by Kev). So here are my responses.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

I started my website in my last year of college as a way to place all my work from university and my brief stint in research in one place, so I can look back at and remember what I did. Here are some examples. I don't do as much technically interesting things anymore, but as I started reading more of other's blogs, and getting on the fediverse, I became interested in sharing the projects I make, experiences I've had and lessons I've learned. In 2025, I've made a resolution to really ramp up my blogging.

As another bonus, having blogs I can share with family and friends is really nice. If I want to share a project, or how to make detergent, I just send a link to my blog post. It's a lot more fun than just sending a really long text.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?

Everything is hosted on Github Pages. I've cut my teeth at Sequoia Fabrica self-hosting sites, and I also self-host a bunch of services behind Tailscale, So I'm sure I could figure out how to use a cloud provider to spin up my own hosting. But Github Pages is so damn easy, and it just works, so I don't see myself changing that for a while.

All posts are published to my blog through git. I push a new commit, and a Github action builds and pushes changes to another branch that holds just the static content for the site. Everything is in a public repository here. There's a python script I wrote that will take all the blog posts, convert from Markdown to HTML, and copy them to a static directory. There are some improvements yet to be made, and I'll incrementally revise it. I'm not interested in an overhaul. Even though I know there's some issues, it works well enough. All the shiny cool tools like Hugo, 11ty, BearBlog, etc. seem like a lot of fun, but I kind of like knowing all the steps from start to finish of how my blog gets published. Since the site is built as a bit of a playground for me, I prefer running it all myself.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

No. I published one article on Medium which is rather embarrassing and should be deleted.

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that's part of your blog?

I write either in Obsidian, or Vim. Usually, the first draft is in Obsidian, I'll copy and paste to my site's directory, and edit in Vim. It would be cool to build a custom web portal to publish to my site. My least favorite part of the workflow now is adding images because everything is placed in one resources folder, then I need to provide the markdown file with the correct relative path, and type the name of the image in correctly. It seems simple, but I always mess this part up.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

I don't have much written down on this site as of now. I'm trying to change that. I like writing in the morning before work sometimes, but usually it's just when I think of something to blog about. I really enjoy sharing projects big and small. When I finish a project, I like to share it.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

No editing, no simmering, just press GO.

What's your favorite post on your blog?

My Favorite Things of 2024. I wish more people would publish content like this. Stuff that's not YouTube affiliate, but actual tools, books, software that you liked using over the last year or so.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

No redesigns in my future. If anything, I want to rip out some of the original stylistic decisions I've made so it is even more bare bones. The only future plan that I care about this year is publishing more content.

Oh! I suppose it would be nice to publish from mobile. Rigging a solution for that might be on my 2025 roadmap.

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10 Minute Mini Corkboard Enamel Pin Display

Maxwell Omdal — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0000

10 Minute Mini Corkboard Enamel Pin Display

I was waiting for paint to dry, so to keep my hands busy I made this little cork board to display some of my and my partner's pins (yeah I know, it's pretty empty as-is). It's just cork adhered to a hardboard backing. I cut it out on the bandsaw.

Some related links I found:

Cork, by all accounts I have found from 5 minutes of searching, is a pretty sustainable material link
Cork is also derived from the bark of the Quercus Suber tree, which is a type of Oak tree!
Harvesting the cork does not require cutting down the tree. The bark is removed, and the tree remains to continue growing
Interesting Business Insider video on Cork Production in Portugal, the biggest producer of cork.

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A Sneak Peak at a Sign

Maxwell Omdal — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0000

A Sneap Peak at a Sign

I've been working on an entrance sign for Sequoia Fabrica, and here is an early preview. There's some internals to this sign that will make the final project sing, but it's not quite ready yet. I think I'll do a full write up about it once it is complete.

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Using Style Transfer and CNC to Produce Printblocks

Maxwell Omdal — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0000

Using Style Transfer to CNC Produce Printblocks

In college, I wrote a final paper about Generative Adversarial Nets for Artistic Image-to-Image Translation where I explored how GANs can be used for image style transfer. In my experiments, I never got great results.

That college paper was much more down in the dirt with the model than what I've tried recently. For an event, I needed to create a bunch of printmaking blocks very quickly, and they needed to be centered around San Francisco Landmarks. To accomplish this, I took a look at diffusion models. Using Dall-E 3, I was able to apply a woodblock print style transfer, and with some further processing, I could vectorize the output and send it to a CNC machine to manufacture the stamp. In the example below, it shows the original public domain image, the result of style transfer on the image, then the linoleum block, and the final print.

The Tools

I used OpenAI's ChatGPT interface to apply style transfer (I know, this is not to be confused with "Neural Style Transfer" which is a specific set of algorithms) There was quite a bit of clean up in Gimp, then Inkscape to remove blurry lines, clean up the fog. The stamp was carved on a Nomad 3 CNC with a 90º Vee Bit, with further cleanup by hand with some carving tools.

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Syncing and Backups with Rsync and Borg

Maxwell Omdal — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0000

Syncing and Backups with Rsync and Borg

I have a relatively simple self-hosting setup at home. My biggest and most important service is Nextcloud. For quite some time, I've been running this with basically no backup, which is super risky, and I was starting to fear the day when the SSD fails. So to save myself from worrying, and save my previous photos and documents at some future date of failure, I decided to take some action while I was home for the holidays and had a little free time.

Cloud vs. Local

I considered a couple options for backups. One would be cloud provider solution, such as BackBlaze or Rsync.net, but I didn't think that was a good fit for a couple reasons. First, it's expensive, BackBlaze would be $12/mo for 2TB, and then more money any time you need to recover your data. Micro Center was selling a 2TB Hard Drive for $80, amortized over a year of use, that would come out to < $6/mo. So if I can get more than 6 months from a drive at that price point, it would be a better deal than BackBlaze already.

So with that knowledge, I purchased a Toshiba Canvio 2TB Hard Drive at an even better deal of $70 at a Micro Center brick-and-morter store. One of the reasons I wanted to do this while I was home for the holidays is so I could setup my backup device in a different location than my actual server to satisfy the "1 copy off-site" part of the 3-2-1 Rule.

I also picked up a Raspberry Pi 5 with 4GB of memory, and a couple accessories to get things fully set up.

The Process

After doing a little research on file synchronization and backups, I came up with a two-step process to backup all my docker volumes. This way if something were to fail on my local device, I could restore it from the offsite backup, or even roll back to an old backup. The nice thing about having it all containerized is that, as long as I have my docker volumes and docker compose files, restoring the server should be fairly straightforward.

I'm relying on two neat utilities called Rsync and Borg which provide file synchronization and backup tools respectively. I use Rsync to transfer files over ssh to my offsite machine, then Borg to create a snapshot every week.

Backup Script

You can find the complete script here. Below is an illustrative version of the code.

# ----------------------
# Abridged Backup Script
# ----------------------
remote_backup_dir = os.getenv("REMOTE_BACKUP_DIR")
local_backup_dir = os.getenv("LOCAL_BACKUP_DIR")
borg_repo_dir = os.getenv("BORG_REPO_DIR")
backup_drive = os.getenv("BACKUP_DRIVE")

def mount_drive():
    run_command("mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/backup")


def sync_files():
    rsync_command = (
        f"rsync -az --delete --exclude-from='/etc/backup-config/exclude-file.txt' -e 'ssh -c aes128-ctr' {remote_backup_dir} {local_backup_dir}"
    )
    output = run_command(rsync_command, False)
    logging.info(f"Rsync output:\n{output}")


def backup_files():
    logging.info("Backing up files...")
    borg_command = (
        f"borg create --stats --progress "
        f"{borg_repo_dir}::dockerData-{{now}} "
        f"{local_backup_dir}"
    )
    output = run_command(borg_command)
    logging.info(f"Borg output:\n{output}")


def unmount_drive():
    run_command("umount /mnt/backup")


def main():
    parser = # setup parser
    args = parser.parse_args()

    if not args.sync and not args.backup:
        logging.error('Either --sync, --backup, or both must be specified.')
        sys.exit(1)

    try:
        mount_drive()
        if args.sync:
            sync_files()
        if args.backup:
            backup_files()
    finally:
        unmount_drive()


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

In order for the backup script to work, you need to add some environment variables. I provide these in a .env file, but you could also add to a .bashrc file or just provide on each run.

REMOTE_BACKUP_DIR=you@computer:/path/to/data/
LOCAL_BACKUP_DIR=/mnt/backup/data
BORG_REPO_DIR=/mnt/backup/data_borg
BACKUP_DRIVE=/dev/sda1

Before running, make sure you set correct permissions on both servers, and configure an ssh key for the offsite machine to access the main server.

To automate the execution of the sync and backup, I've set up two cron jobs. One that runs on Sundays and performs synchronizations and snapshots. Then another that runs every other day and just performs synchronization. My idea is that if I were to break something on my primary server while doing some configuration or testing, the Rsync mirror will allow me to recover to a valid state, or repair accidentally deleted data. If something worse happens, like my SSD gets corrupted, I can restore from the Borg Snapshots, which is a little slower and a little more work.

Conclusion

This is not a perfect solution, it's not even foolproof. But it seems to work OK now. I have a little more testing to do before I'm comfortable with it, but it does feel like I can breath a little easier knowing if I F**k something up, I'll probably be able to recover from it. The next logical step would be to buy another drive so the offsite backup and synchronized repositories are on separate disks, then set up alerts to monitor for a failure so I don't need to manually check it. I'm not going to mess around with RAID right now, but maybe some day.

Now, going back to the provider solution for a second. I still think it's a good idea to store your data with a secure cloud for another layer of redundancy, it's just not my first choice. Part of the reason I'm trying to better protect my data is because my family is running into issues with Amazon Photos and the lack of control they give their users. So it just didn't feel right to rely on another cloud provider for a backup solution.

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My Favorite Things of 2024

Maxwell Omdal — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0000

My Favorite Things of 2024

Every year, the Tested network publishes a series of videos with the staff about their favorite things of the year. Here's all the ones from 2024:

I really enjoy these videos. I'm a bit of a tool nerd, so it's a real treat seeing professionals describe some of the tools that have been the most satisfying and productive to use. I think the tools in someone's metaphorical tool belt also say a lot about that person's philosophy of work.

So I thought I should share some my favorite things from 2024! It's not all tools, but a lot of them are.

None of these are affiliate links BTW.

My Favorite Things of 2024

Knipex Cobra Water Pump Pliers. I actually received a pair of these last Christmas, used them for a bit, then I lost them :(. Halfway through 2024, I bought a replacement. I had the 4 inch, then I replaced with the 5 inch ones. Both are great, I kind of wish I still had the 4 inchers, since they do not use a push button mechanism to release the jaws, and they are just a little more pocketable. I shuttle my stuff between home and Sequoia Fabrica by bike frequently, so having small tools is really convenient. The pliers themselves are fantastic, they can get a grip on anything, and their unique shape helps prevent rounding over bolt heads.
Spiral Shank Flush Template Router Bit. Template bits in general have become a new favorite item for me. Along with a laser cutter (or a steady hand at the bandsaw), it has become a total joy to make templates. I'm working on a sign (more on that later), where I had to route out every letter individually. This wouldn't have been possible freehand, but with a palm router, a template bit, and a template, it was a breeze. It's really unlocked new possibilities for me, especially in a small shop.
Makita Cordless Track Saw. I think any track saw would make me just as excited, but this is the one I got. I bought it used off Craigslist, and it took a little adjusting and getting used to, but this machine is fantastic. In a woodshop without a table saw, it's practically required. My biggest frustration is having to set it up and tear it down every time I use it. However, there are some cool things you can buy or make (or this) that allow for some easier setup and alignment with the track saw, which I hope to find some time to figure out in 2025.
Nextcloud. Nextcloud is my self-hosted solution to file storage. It's like Google Drive, but I can host everything myself, so there's no question of data ownership, and I have complete control over who can see it, and how I access it.
IOS Background Sounds. This one might seem a little weird, but always having white noise on my device, without having to fiddle with an app or make sure it's downloaded, is absolutely fantastic. I have tinnitus, so whether I'm home or away, having white noise is a necessity when I sleep. For whatever reason, I've been woefully unimpressed with the market of white noise apps available. Portal is the best I've seen, but I don't want to pay for a subscription since I only use the most basic functions (But if you like it you should buy it! I met Nick, their founder once, and they are a great person making a great product).

Alright so that's the cut for 2024. Maybe I'll do this again at the end of the year/start of next year.

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New Year's Resolutions

Maxwell Omdal — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 00:00:00 -0000

New Year's Resolutions

For the past few years, I've written up some resolutions for myself.

Last years resolutions and reflections:

Exercise more. I did pick up biking, which was a step in the right direction, but I walk less and seem to spend less time outside in general. I guess opening a makerspace takes up a lot of free time.
Join the 100 days to offload challenge. I blogged 8/100 times. 2023 was 8 times. I’m trending flat! Well it’s supposed to be a challenge, and I’d rather fail again at a challenge than not try at all so I’m keeping it on the list. I have a couple blog posts locked and loaded for 2025 already. Maybe that's cheating, but it still got me writing more!
Read less news. Despite this being a horrible year for news, I escaped the doom scroll that I fell into during the pandemic. It took a few years to escape it's gravitational pull, but I think I'm doing better. We will see how things go in 2025 :/.
Be more intentional with time. There's only so many hours in the day, and you have to make the most of it. I spent less time doom scrolling (positive), but more time scrolling overall (negative). I've deleted TikTok, YouTube and Facebook from my phone because I can't keep watching these 5 second videos at every otherwise quiet moment I have during the day.

So here’s my list:

Join the #100DaysToOffload challenge . This made the list last year and I only posted 8 times. I’m not too confident about it, but I want to try again. It's a stretch, I know, considering my blogging history. But what is there to lose? I tried last year and failure didn't make me run away from this blog.
Be OK with the Silence. This is similar to last year's goal of Be more intentional with my time. But since that didn't work too well last, year, I'm going to try and narrow it down. What does the silence have to do with intentionality? Well, usually when there is any moment of quiet, a moment where I am not actively engaged in work or some variety of activity, I feel the need to pull out a screen and look at something. This is not good for my mental health or productivity. I need to be OK not always having something to do or something to look at. Relaxation is good. Enjoy the quiet times while you can.
Eat Healthy more consistently. I like to think I eat a rather healthy diet, but in busy weeks, everything falls off the rails and I'll eat anything in front of me. Even when I don't have to, there's something in my brain when I'm stressed that tells me to just eat, even when it's not something I want or I'm not hungry. I'm better about it when life is more routine, but I can't always rely on routine to keep me healthy.

What didn't make the list:

Make more stuff. This was on the list back in [[News Years Resolutions 2023|2023]], I always want to make more, and I think I will do this naturally, I don't feel the need to keep an eye on this.
Read more. My reading habit has fallen off the rails since graduating College. I used to religiously track what I was reading, how much. That got me reading more, and consistently. Now I rarely pick up a book. I'll read my RSS feed, but that's the most I'll do. I'm currently Reading The Power Broker, but not on track to finish it in this century. In years past, I'd read 20-30 books, I'm not sure I've read more than 5 this year. I'm just telling myself - for now - that that is OK. Without diminishing the importance of reading, I feel like there are more important things I need to focus on right now.
Exercise More. Exercise is critical to well-being. I acknowledge I fell short of my goals for 2024, and I'll be working on that going forward. I'm still prioritizing diet over exercise right now. Because of my daily habits, and tendency to walk/bike everywhere, I'm going to get exercise in without trying, even if it's not as much as I would like.

What are your resolutions? Shoot me an email.

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AI For Development

Maxwell Omdal — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0000

AI For Development

I occasionally tinker on my computer after work hours on personal projects, albeit infrequently, especially when compared to the magnificent work done by some of the engineers I follow. Most of my time currently is wrapped in building a community makerspace, but there are some quiet evenings I find myself writing small utilities, or working on this blog.

Since the time I have and am willing to spend on computer-related projects outside of work is dwindling, I want to go from idea to product as quickly as possible. I love having the know-how to make things with just a computer terminal and a browser, but if I'm being honest, I'd rather spend my free time away from a desk. At my job, copilot-type assistants haven't been approved for use by engineering. But I have started incorporating them in my personal development workflow. I've found Zed to be a compelling IDE focused on modern techniques and AI for development (but if anyone from Zed reads this, please improve your vim emulator!). I've tested out ChatGPT-4o quite a bit using the Chatbox GUI. Alfred also has a handy ChatGPT workflow (this has fallen out of favor for me as my requests to these chatbots have become more verbose).

What I want out of LLMs is a way to work faster. I don't expect it to do my work for me, but if it can just get me started sometimes I'm able to get things done quicker. It's doing a bit more than covering boilerplate, and a bit less than implementing APIs. But ultimately, if I can just get things done faster, I can do more of the stuff I love. Sometimes that stuff is building more software projects, but a lot of the time, it's getting away from my desk. A lot of the programs I write are to make my life more fun or functional, like adding light strips with custom firmware to my room, or, to borrow a phrase from Al, automating the boring stuff. I've found LLM's to be really poor at implementing new code, but it can usually get a refactor about 80% correct. So, that's 80% less time I have to spend refactoring (minus maybe 10% for the time it takes to review the bot's changes). That's a win. That's a speed improvement that makes me more likely to attempt something. It also means when I run into speedbumps because I don't know how to do something in a particular language, or I can't debug a stack trace, I'm able to get through those quicker.

I think Simon Willison has one of the most realistic grasps on LLMs for software development. He writes really great quality long-format and short-format articles on the topic. He also references others in the field, so in a way the blog is a bit of an aggregator for content. I'd also give this article from Jamie Brandon a read on why speed matters in software engineering projects. It's one of the very few fields where throughout a career you can expect to improve your productivity by a factor of 10.

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Finished a Workbench

Maxwell Omdal — Sat, 15 Jun 2024 00:00:00 -0000

Finished a Workbench

I just finished constructing a workbench for Sequoia Fabrica's woodshop. I'm fairly happy with it, it's one of my first large-scale projects. The table top was a challenge to assemble because it was all construction lumber. Working around knots and laminating all the boards together was really tough, but I'm happy with how it turned out.

Design

The workbench is designed to hold 3 filing cabinets for tool storage, with a platform for holding the shop vac. It's entirely built out of construction lumber to keep the cost at a minimum.

A tool well is added to the back to make it easy to clear up your work surface while in the middle of a project.

10 dog-holes are placed in the front left of the bench for workholding. They are spaced every 6in, and I designed a laser cut template to handle this. There will also be a Twin vise designed and manufactured by Andrew Klein attached to the front face of the table, which will further augment workholding.

The table is just shy of 8', which might be a little long for a typical workbench. It is ~2' deep. The woodshop is very small, under 100 sqft. So going big here was a decision I perseverated over for a while, but ultimately decided having a large main workbench is the a more efficient use of space than several small tables.

Conclusion

Overall, I'm very satisfied with how sturdy the table is. The finish color is OK (used Danish oil), and I think it being made of Douglass Fir, it's going to get pretty dented up. We will see how it wears. At least I know how to repair it. I use a track saw a lot, and I really think the track saw begs for something that's not up against a wall. because the track needs some overhang. I'm looking forward to adding the vise, because I think it will make this a great bench for hand tool work, power carving, etc.

What's Next

I think the next thing is going to be two portable square tables that will be placed on quality casters. Then if you need more space, just roll them out of the room. If you need more worktop, bring 'em back in.

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Boquets to Art at the De Young Museum

Maxwell Omdal — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 00:00:00 -0000

Boquets to Art at the De Young Museum

This past weekend, my partner and I went to San Francisco's De Young Museum to see the exhibition annual "Boquets to Art". It was a fun event that takes over the entire museum, pairing artwork to flower arrangements in whimsical and creative ways. Here are some pictures from the event.

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Refinishing a Chest of Drawers Found on the Street

Maxwell Omdal — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 00:00:00 -0000

Refinishing a Chest of Drawers Found on the Street

Recently, while walking to the neighborhood library, I found a chest of drawers, or dresser in an alley with a free sticker on it. It was in rough shape. The paint was falling off, it was scratched, and the drawers' tracks were worn thin. San Francisco for whatever reason seems to be the land of setting stuff on the street and hoping someone takes it. I guess it's because a lot of the time people do take it. Well, that day on my way back from the library, I became the person to take the street junk. I shouldn't act like that is out of character for me. Much of our apartment is furnished from stuff we've found on the street, and sometimes if we are feeling fancy, stuff we've purchased secondhand. It's a bit of a game, kind of like dumpster diving. Sometimes, you go for a walk and there's some great find right around the corner!

One of my favorite finds was an antique dresser manufatured by Sligh over 100 years ago. It had seen better days, but the piece was still beautiful. It had this warmth to it. You could feel it's age in it's character. Something about the way it had worn would speak to me when I opened it. I'd think about all the hands that dresser had passed through, and I'd think how many more hands will it go through.

That last part is really important to me. This piece of furniture has been around for 100 years, how many more years does it have left? The Sligh dresser was set on the street for trash pickup, so it had just about seen it's last trip around the Sun. I feel purpose in saving these things and redressing them so they can continue to be loved.

We didn't end up keeping that dresser. I spent a lot of time repairing the drawer slides, fixing up cracks and finishes, but it was ultimately just too big for our room. However it was enjoyed thoroughly for the year and a half we had it. And it makes me happy to know I was able to pass it on to someone else, who I hope is continuing to use it. I enjoyed breathing life back into this centenarian object.

So when I saw the chest of drawers by the library, I felt ready for my next dresser restore. This one was in worse shape than the last one, particularly the finish.

Someone had clearly tried painting over an old finish that was wearing. Sometimes that works. Most of the time I think without addressing the original finish properly you're going to run into problems.

Underneath the paint, it looked like some sort of surface finish, maybe a spar varnish. Not sure.

I scraped off most the paint and finish by hand with a scraper, then in delicate areas I used Citristrip. If you want to do furniture repair, avoid using chemical strippers as much as possible. It doesn't make your life as easy as you'd hope. They make huge messes, and they are just disgusting to work with, even the ones that are supposedly more "natural". Try and get as much done by hand as possible. It will take some elbow grease, but maybe that's just a way to save yourself from a gym membership.

So with most of the finish removed, The wood had some discoloration from stains and some difficult areas still needed to be cleaned up. Luckily for me, the dresser was all solid wood. The construction of the chest is very simple solid wood and butted up joints nailed together. A little utilitarian when compared to some fancy dovetail drawers, but whatever, I like it for what it is. Since it was all solid, I could sand it to heck. The top also needed some planing since it had cupped. It was kind of strange the way the top was adhered and warped.

I'm pretty sure it was replaced after the original construction. The top appears to be Poplar. I'm still learning to identify woods, but I think the rest of the body is either cherry or soft maple. May also poplar :shrug:.

With everything all cleaned up and sanded to 180 grit, I applied some Total Boat Halcyon amber water-based polyurethane. I really enjoy working with this stuff because it's so hard to mess it up. It goes on real nice, with a cool gloss, and I don't have to worry so much about VOC's when working with it. Clean up is also simple since it is water based and can be brushed on. However, it's quite expensive. When I last bought it, a quart was $46 on Amazon!

Anyway, without further ado, here's the final product! Notice some of the drawers are sagging, I think I can replace the drawer slides at a later date, but for now I'm happy to lubricate it with a little wax and call them good.

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Building a New Workshop in San Francisco

Maxwell Omdal — Sun, 02 Jun 2024 00:00:00 -0000

Building A New Workshop in San Francisco

San Francisco will soon be getting a new community workshop. As a part of an organization, myself and others are building Sequoia Fabrica. It will be a non-profit community workshop with the mission to provide access to tools and knowledge without the barriers to entry at many for-profit organizations. Since opening our doors in March, we've also distinguished ourselves by offering a wide variety of workshops and classes which is all thanks to the members and volunteers who have founded and kept the space going.

I am the President and Woodshop Grove leader for the time being. I hope as Sequoia grows, we're able to add more members willing to take on leader and instructor roles. So far, it's been going well, although I'll say I think starting anything that requires money and legal establishment can be a bit stressful.

What I really look forward to doing is running classes and building an inspiring space. I've looked at other Bay Area woodshop classes, and the pricing is absurd. I don't fault the small businesses for charging $300 for a stool making class, because they are trying to make a living from it, and I think that's a great think. But I don't think that should be the only option. If you want to pay $300 to make a stool, or learn basic woodworking, I think you should do that, and you will probably get a more refined experience for it. What myself and the others at Sequoia are concerned about is the missing tier below that. We want to offer classes for cheap, led by volunteers who are doing it just because they care to, without the pressure of needing to do it for income. Many people have all these different hobbies they could talk about, or put to practice without end. Our space is for those people. It's for sharing, building, and learning. Long-term, I would like to be able to host classes that are completely free, including materials cost. We can do this if we're able to build a strong enough foundation of donors, and hopefully some grant money, and that will take time. To me, that time and effort will be worth it, because we'd be radically breaking down the barrier to entry for people to get into fine crafts and maker culture.

I don't think the "class/event" structure is for everyone. Some spaces like Noisebridge, which I've mentioned before haven't made that the priority focus, and that works for them. Some makerspaces, or whatever you choose to call them aren't prioritizing events as a way of serving the community. I wish there was more of this across the board, but I also understand some spaces might prefer to harbor an environment where members can just make use of the equipment at their disposal. Sequoia does give members 24/7 access to use the space for their personal projects, but it is also made clear this is not a rental workshop. Members are as much volunteers as they are space users. So to be a member, you kind of have to buy in to the idea that what we're doing is of benefit to the community and you are down to help with that.

I like classes. I like taking them and I like teaching them. I'm not an expert craftsman, but you don't need to be an expert to teach a class, you just need to know a little more about the trade than what you will get to in the class. An elementary school math teach doesn't need to know Calculus to be a great teacher.

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Homemade Laundry Detergent Recipe for Lazy People

Maxwell Omdal — Sat, 04 May 2024 00:00:00 -0000

Homemade Laundry Detergent for Lazy People

2 parts Borax (400g)
2 parts Washing Soda (400g)
1 parts Fels-Naptha Soap (200g)
Steps

Grind 200g of Fels-Naptha soap with an old coffee grinder. Anything works really as long as you can get it down to powder.
Add 400g of Washin Soda, and 400g of Borax to a plastic container
Seal the container and shake to mix
Use about 2 tablespoons per load

Notes

I’ve tried using Zote soap, another popular laundry soap, but its way to hard to grind into a powder. The soap is not nearly as dry as fels naptha, the texture is slightly oily.

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This is now available on RSS!

Maxwell Omdal — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0000

This Blog is now available via RSS!

I took some time this weekend to add an RSS feed to this blog. I will eventually add a visible link, but for now, you can find it at dizzard.net/rss. It may have some kinks to work out, but the solution was quick and dirty. I implemented it using Feedgen. Like most of my personal projects these days, ChatGPT sped up the process significantly.

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How to make Beeswax Candles

Maxwell Omdal — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 00:00:00 -0000

Beeswax Candles (Dip)

For Sequoia Fabrica, I'm running a candlestick making class. I'm not an expert at this, but like most things in life, you just need to be one page ahead in the book to explain to others what is going on. These are my notes on candlestick making.

Prerequisites

You will need:

A burner (induction for portability)
Large boiler
4 Deep jars (alternatively, a double boiler and 2 jars)
Scissors
Cotton wicks
Beeswax (2-3lbs)
Cold water
Washers or bolts (any small scrap of metal you can tie a string around)

Steps

Heat the wax in a double-boiler style. If you don't have a double boiler, just fill jars with wax and place in a pot full of water. Beeswax melts at 144 to 147 °F, keep this in mind while melting. Low and slow is better, so try not to exceed the temperature significantly. The water should never come to a boil.
Once the wax is fully melted, prepare a container, or a couple jars with cold water. Don't make it too cold, because that will cause issues later. Get some tap water, add one or two ice cubes.
Now, cut the string to be twice the depth of your melted beeswax, plus an extra 15-20cm. Tie to each end a couple washers. Since wax floats in water, this will help it sink. The washers are optional.
Now you start dipping. This is the repetitive part. Dip in the hot wax, let it drip off, dip in the cool water, let it drip off. The repeat.
Continue step 4 until you have your desired candle size. The final candle should be between 18-20mm in diameter to fit in most candlestick holders. You can measure this by marking a string at a 56.5mm ($pi times 18$), and wrap around the candle. Sometimes it's easiest just to start with a candlestick holder and work until you've got the size you want.

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What Does Apple Watch Do

Maxwell Omdal — Sat, 11 Nov 2023 00:00:00 -0000

I’ve worn an Apple Watch on and off since the Series 2, which came out in 2016. I’ve owned two watches. One disappeared one day. I have no idea where it went. For a while, I wore two family members’ watches because they never used them. Then I bought my own.

Buying that watch was a really stupid move. I don’t think the Apple Watch is totally stupid, but I think for the vast majority of users, it’s just a glorified pager.

For myself, I found the most compelling use of the watch was paying for the bus. Something I could also do with my phone in my front pocket or the wallet in my back pocket.

It’s not that I didn’t try to love the Apple Watch. I wore it every day to see my health trends, I designed and 3D printed a custom dock to minimize the effort to charge it, I even bought a case I could pop on while I was woodworking so it could stay protected and remain on my wrist. I tried using it for Siri, controlling my smart home, sending messages, monitoring workouts (ok this use case is good).

The problem is that the watch never tried to love me back. The features just aren’t useful. And I think more people need to come to terms with this rather than just buying it because of the Apple hype train. Siri sucks on the wrist, especially if I’ve got a phone near me idk who’s gonna pick up my call to “hey Siri”. When it does pick up, it takes way longer than my phone to provide feedback. Same for controlling my smart home. It doesn’t update nodes in the home app until I actually open the app on the watch, so when i want to turn off my bedroom light, I need to wait 5 seconds for it to realize the bedroom light is currently on in order for me to turn it off. This is just a waste of time to sit there and wait. In fact I’m coming to think smart homes in general are still far from being useful. It’s health monitoring appears to be very detailed and accurate, but as someone who deals with health anxieties that stem from my whacky brain rather than actual diagnosed health issues, having all this data on myself doesn’t actually seem to be benefitting me in any way.

Regarding workouts, I find the watch makes me less likely to exercise because I have this pressure to wear the watch every time I leave the house for a run because if I’m not wearing it, then the run never happened. So if I don’t have a charged watch, or I forgot to load up some music or a podcast on it beforehand, count that run out.

My least favorite, yet most common use of the watch is for field notifications I don’t need to be looking at in the first place. Why do I need my wrist to buzz every time I get an automated email to my work inbox that I don’t read anyways? Why read “Mom just sent you a photo. Open iPhone to see”? What’s that doing for me? Is it anything positive, or is it just getting me to check my devices more.

If you use the watch a lot for tracking workouts, or you have some health issues you want to monitor, I think you should by all means go for it and use a watch. But for any other purpose, I’d say it’s not worth the expense, nor is it worth the mental stress the notification machine puts on your brain.

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Principles of Operating a Shared Workshop

Maxwell Omdal — Sun, 08 Oct 2023 00:00:00 -0000

Principles of Operating a Shared Workshop

These are some of the thoughts I have compiled over the last year volunteering my time helping maintain a wood-shop at my local hackerspace, Noisebridge. Noisebridge is a very unique space in that it operates as an anarchist space with one guiding principle: Be excellent to each other. There can often be conflict between passionate people at the space doing their best to make things better, and not being able to agree on what "better" really is. I'm putting my thoughts down on what I've observed to work. I'm certain not everyone will agree.

Everything must have exactly one place of belonging

If the space is big enough to require redundant items, each duplicate should be clearly labelled as to where it belongs. I.E. if there are two solder stations, each soldering iron should be labelled with the station it belongs to. Keep in mind that Hackerspaces are rarely big enough to require redundancy. Noisebridge has some duplicate items because of accessibility issues with our multi-floor layout, but beyond that, we strive to be as explicit about where things belong as possible.

Floor Space is sacred

In a workshop, you are constantly moving around. For your safety and efficiency, floors and worktops should be cleared at the end of each use.

Keeping tools and supplies off the floor is also essential. Use vertical space on walls, add shelving, and remove unused tools if necessary. The floors should be the cleanest part of your shop.

Maintainers must be ruthless in enforcing rules about keeping things clean**

Again, I'm talking from experience at an anarchist hackerspace, where the doors are open and all are welcome. So based on how restricted access your space is, your mileage will vary.

There should be a zero tolerance policy for things left on work tops. If someone's project is not stored correctly, they must address the problem immediately or the project must be removed from the space. Workspace must be protected at all costs, otherwise the purpose of the space is brought into question. Is it really a workshop if there is no space to work?

Agree upon limits to what tools are to be kept in the space

Non-industrial spaces are extremely limited in square foot and resources. Having a couple accessible and well-maintained tools should always be prioritized over accumulation of tools in various states of usability. From my experience, the more tools added to the space, the harder it becomes to work because you are trading square footage for more tools. You are also trading time and resources maintaining those tools.

Labels and rules should be explicit, but mutable

Nothing is set in stone at an anarchist space, or any space for that matter. Assume you will have to make changes in the future, but you should try and mitigate excessive churn. Robustly structured environments should be able to support the activities people expect to use it for, and it should also be able to adapt if the community agrees we want to support new sorts of activities.

This might manifest itself as putting some of your otherwise stationary tools on casters so you can rearrange the shop easily. However, this should be done carefully. Increasing the flexibility of the space also makes it easier for rogue agents to act in ways that benefit their own interests rather than those of the community. This balancing act is often best addressed in practice by keeping a watchful eye over the space, and mentoring others to do the same. It is also important to define shared values as a community to help individuals know how to behave when working on their own.

Project storage rules should be clear and upheld

A workshop should not be treated like a U-haul storage locker. This is often the biggest source of accumulation and detrimental to the preservation of floor space. If you even have the space for project storage, with the community to outline how long a project should be allowed to be stored, and stick to the agreement by promptly removing projects that exceed the deadline.

This may seem harsh and upsetting to an individual who leaves their project longer than the allotted time, but there are sacrifices you make when committing to a project in a shared workshop. Try to work with people before they reach these deadlines to make sure they are aware of these expectations. This can be one of the hardest things to do because of the time and difficulty associated with contacting individuals for project updates, and even just figuring out who's project is who's.

Closing thoughts

You don't have the same freedoms as you do in your own space, but if you can give up these freedoms you gain the benefits of more square footage, bigger variety of tools and resources, and most importantly a community to build with. Living in San Francisco as a 23 year old, having access to a wood shop that is solely my own is fiscally impossible.

Yeah, a lot of the time working with a community is hard. Like, rip out your hair hard.

When I'm feeling that stress, I need to remind myself that working with a community doesn't just bring up the bad things. It also brings me tremendous joy to work with other people, teach, and learn alongside them. It's become rare that I will go to the wood shop and just work on whatever personal project I have in mind. Most of the time, I will be working on something for the space or chatting with someone about a project or something unrelated to woodworking altogether. I've come to realize shared workshops are not just about giving people the resources they need to build their own stuff. The community of makers and hackers is itself something that requires building.

Notes

This is an excerpt from a book I'm reading about cohousing, where it is common that several homes will share one workshop. I found some of the outlined principles interesting.

Making Workshops Successful

It may be hard to imagine that a workshop used by 50 or 60 persons could possibly function smoothly. Potentially, a shared workshop can help residents save money and produce better work, and it can be more fun in the process. It can also be a chaotic free-for-all. In comparing the systems of different cohousing communities, we found that the following practices promoted the usability and safety, and decreased the frustration, of a shared workshop

A. Accountability Keeping the workshop locked and having two or three people "in charge" makes users feel accountable to the person they get the key from, who will be upset if a tool is missing or the shop is left messy.

B. Buying In, or varying degrees of investment. Some may want to have better power tools; they should buy and store them separately in a locker or tool box. Others may not even want to invest in a good set of hand tools (and should not plan on borrowing them). Thus, there can be two or three levels of investment. (Cohousers generally advise against various levels of investment for common facilities except when a small group wants to purchase something less than half of the residents are likely to use, such as a table saw or a sailboat.)

C. Children. Some feel that children should have full access to the workshop (except power tools), to encourage their spontaneous creativity. For safety and to prevent abandoned projects, others feel that children should be permitted only under adult supervision. Between the permissive and disciplinarian attitudes there is a practical middle ground. Adults should aggressively teach interested children "shop manners" - safety first, how to clean up, and how not to abuse tools. Once they have demonstrated competent shop manners, children should be given equal access. Until then, they might have a separate bench, with their own tools.

D. Day-Glo. Successful workshops paint their hand tools the most awful Day-Glo fluorescent colors available, 'so you can see those suckers 50 yards away lying in two feet of grass'. Besides, no self-respecting person would want tools that color in their house.

I agree with most of this, but I think Buying in would need to be adjusted for a space that wants to welcome those who otherwise could not afford access to such a space, and I don't think the section in children should be just limited to kids. Everyone should have to show some basic competence with respect to safety and clean-up.

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The Green Imperative By Victor Papanek

Maxwell Omdal — Tue, 09 May 2023 00:00:00 -0000

The Green Imperative By Victor Papanek

The book focuses much more around Design than I initially expected. It's not very in your face about what I thought would be the immediate demand to put the environment first. Papanek instead meanders around the influence of design on consumption, with a particularly strong distaste for Mid-Century Modern design and the Bauhaus movement. The connection he draws between simple, undecorated furniture and human consumption is a little unclear to me, but he's spending a lot of time talking about how humans have a long tradition of adding superfluous decorations to objects that would otherwise be purely utility.

It's actually a lot more related to Caps Lock than I expected. Discussions of design collectives, the things that prevent designers from designing for just purposes, etc.

I just feel that too much has changed since it's original publishing in 1995. The Green Imperative, in my opinion, takes a rather lackadaisical approach to designing for reslilience in the face of climate change, but the world Papanek was living in was different than the world we live in now.

Our biogenetic heritage governs expectations of size, weight, distance, speed and time. 'Old' measurements like mile, pound, yard, foot, stone, reflect what we can lift or carry easily, and how we used our bodies as templates for measurement. As explained in Chapter 4, the eidetic image that we carry with us through life gives us another system for judging harmonious relationships and scale. 'Invented' measuring systems, like the metric system, are as meaningless to us as is the time displayed on a digital watch.

What the hell is Papanek saying here? All units of measure are made up. How does 12” in a foot make it more harmonious? The page before this Papanek is talking about how the slums of Rio are positioned at the highest, most beautiful place in the city because that’s where people would go naturally. I’ve got a few more pages in me before I call bullshit on this goon.

Chapter 6: The lessons of vernacular architecture

Honestly, I feel like this whole book so far has mostly been about Papanek’s obsession with vernacular design.

Chapter 7: Form Follows Fun

What do you do when the real place looks like the copy of a fake - Student

This dude has some serious distaste for the young and new. He starts the chapter with two quotes from students that gives the impression that youth cannot appreciate something that is real, and not carefully curated.

Even though designers realize that the objects they bring into life will last only briefly in the marketplace, they still wish that - even in everyday use - their 'babies' might somehow remain unblemished and 'perfect'. At international conferences the design chief of a firm that made cigarette lighters would meet fellow designers who still carried their original black lighter. After years of being kept in a pocket with keys, a penknife or whatever, nicks and scratches on the black finish would cause the original brass casing to glint through. The designer would obligingly offer a free replacement then and there. I remember saying to him myself, 'No thank you, all the scratches are just beginning to give it character, making it unique!' In his search for perfection, he was never able to understand that things can't remain unchanged. In an age in which fortunes are spent on beauty creams and lotions to stretch out a semblance of youth, it is difficult to explain that material choices should be made so that objects can age gracefully once more.

I vibe with this. I still have a hard time realizing this in my own thoughts though. Often I find myself disatisfied with blemishes and marks of wear.

One of my design clients in Japan is a subsidiary of a large automobile company. Visiting their design laboratory, I saw a photograph of former President Reagan pinned on a bulletin board. 'Reagan is one of the greatest Japanese car designers, I was told, 'He bullied us into exporting fewer cars to America. So now we produce much larger cars for the American market. We export fewer numbers, but make a much higher profit with these over-sized models.'

Of course Reagan is to blame for this too! This belongs on r/fuckcars. And of course , when you start to think he’s gonna say rationally that importing larger cars to the US is bad because it contributes to visual, noise, and air pollution, without providing much, if any practical benefit, who is allegedly advocating for buying less because it is green says in the following paragraph:

… tiny is not necessarily better.

GODDAMMIT! I feel like this entire book wss written just to piss me off. He rounds this section off by saying washing dishes by hand is more water-efficient than dishwashers. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt here since this book came out in the ‘90’s, but modern dishwashers use significantly less water than hand washing no matter how you cut it.

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How to capture code snippets from Obsidian and add to Alfred Snippets

Maxwell Omdal — Sun, 07 May 2023 00:00:00 -0000

How to capture code snippets from Obsidian and add to Alfred Snippets

At work, I'm often looking through my Obsidian notes looking for a certain code snippet to run to update a build version, deploy my server, or some other mundane task I can't be bothered to memorize. And it's nice having obsidian because then not only do I have a home for these little snippets of code, but I can also provide some notes on the snippets, like what it does, why it's written a certain way, what to try if it fails, etc. Sometimes I need this context, but a lot of the times I just need the snippet of code.

Instead of having to take all these snippets, scrub through them to find what's important, and manually add to Alfred, I thought I could do it in an automated fashion. It seemed like a good opportunity to use awk, even though I didn't really understand how it was used. All I knew is that awk is good for parsing through files in a stream, and really that was all I needed to know.

I just had to come up with a way to identify the files I wanted to include as snippets with as little work as possible, and that is where my little scripts name comes from! Introducing sniper, the handy-dandy tool for cloning your obsidian code blocks in Alfred snippets. All you have to do is prefix a code block with the Sniper keyword "snipe" in a markdown comment. This isn't a "smart" utility, so you got to make sure the comment only contains the word "snipe", and nothing else. Here's an example:

To get your flagged snippets to appear in alfred, you will first want to create a new snippets group. Open up "Settings -> Features -> Snippets -> Collections" and click the little "+" button. Then type in the name of the collection. I named mine "Random Code Snippets", but you can name it whatever you want, just make sure to update the bash script variable $ALFRED_SNIPPETS_DIR so it matches your collection.

You also need to update $ALFRED_SNIPPETS_DIR so it know where your Alfred config directory is. You can find where your alfred preferences file is by going to "Settings -> Advanced -> Syncing". I keep mine in .config with the rest of my dotfiles

My directory path looks like:

ALFRED_SNIPPETS_DIR="$HOME/.config/Alfred.alfredpreferences/snippets/Random Code Snippets"

The Code

OK, so with the basic setup figured out, you just need this snippet of code (snippets all the way down)!

#!/bin/bash

# Script for swiping snippets (sniping) from obsidian into alfred

ALFRED_SNIPPETS_DIR="$HOME/.config/Alfred.alfredpreferences/snippets/Random Code Snippets"

snipe () {
    MARKDOWN_FILE=$(echo $0 | cut -c3-)
    FILENAME=$(basename "$0")
    UUID=$(uuidgen)
    SNIPPET_FILENAME="$1/$FILENAME [$UUID].json"

    SNIPPET=$(awk 'BEGIN { start=0 } /%%snipe%%/ { start=1; next } start && /^```/ { code=1; start=0; next } code && /^```/ { code=0; next } code { printf "%s\\n", $0 } END { }' "$MARKDOWN_FILE")

    if [ -z "$SNIPPET" ]; then
        return 1
    fi

    touch "$SNIPPET_FILENAME"

    ENCODED_SNIPPET="${SNIPPET//\"/\\\"}"  # Replace " with \"

    printf "{\n" >> $SNIPPET_FILENAME
    printf "\"alfredsnippet\" : {\n" >> $SNIPPET_FILENAME
    printf "\"snippet\" : \"%s\",\n" "$ENCODED_SNIPPET" >> $SNIPPET_FILENAME
    printf "\"uid\" : \"%s\",\n" $UUID >> $SNIPPET_FILENAME
    printf "\"name\" : \"%s\",\n" "$FILENAME" >> $SNIPPET_FILENAME
    printf "\"keyword\" : \"\"\n" >> $SNIPPET_FILENAME
    printf "}}\n" >> $SNIPPET_FILENAME
}

# Clear out anything already in directory
rm "$ALFRED_SNIPPETS_DIR/"*.json

FUNCDEFS=$(typeset -f snipe) find . -name "*.md" -type f -exec sh -c '
   eval "$FUNCDEFS" &&
     unset -v FUNCDEFS &&
     snipe "$@"' {} "$ALFRED_SNIPPETS_DIR" \;

I added this to a directory on my path ~/bin so I can easily execute it. To use it:

Navigate to your Obsidian vault directory
Run the script (e.g. sniper) without any arguments
That's all. Note that this erases anything already in the snippets collection, which is why I encourage you to create a new one.
Sometimes, I've noticed the snippets don't update immediately, so I had to clear Alfred's cache (Settings -> Advanced -> Clear Application Cache)

Notes

Yeah, this could probably be done with an Obsidian or Alfred extension, but this is one of the simplest possible options for me, and I like knowing what's going on.
This is not so much a tutorial, but if you have questions, let me know. ChatGPT helped me a lot with the scripting, but I learned a lot too.
I encourage you to take a look at this and play around with it. There are some limitations, like only allowing one snippet per file. The filename is also used as the snippet name, so if the file name doesn't really correspond with the snippet, that might be confusing. But hey if you keep atomic notes (which I totally definitely do (not)), it shouldn't be an issue.

That's all for now. Happy hacking :P

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Writing a Discord bot with Python and aiocron

Maxwell Omdal — Sat, 22 Apr 2023 00:00:00 -0000

Writing a Discord bot with Python and aiocron

I wanted to write a Discord bot to provide simple scheduled alerts for the hackerspace I am a part of. We have a channel for the woodshop, and every so often, we need to empty the dust collector and scrap bins.

After some basic research, I found it was pretty straightforward how to set up a bot in the discord developer portal, so I'm not going to go through that here, but if you need help, you can check out this realpython article.

Instead, I want to focus on a snag I ran into while trying to use aiocron with discord.py. The python discord library now offers some neat tricks for timing method runs with the annotation @tasks.loop(...), but this doesn't let you schedule async method calls by day or time, so you have to provide some extra code to make sure you start the loop at the right moment in time for it to work correctly. aiocron is neat because it uses crontab format for scheduling method calls.

Now, when I first tried to get this running, I encountered issues with the event loop. My understanding is that the discord library made some changes in it's 2.0 version that allows you to create your own asynchronous loop for running the bot. If you don't use this loop, I'm not sure how you set up other asynchronous code.

import os

import discord
import aiocron
import asyncio

TOKEN = os.getenv('DISCORD_TOKEN')
GUILD = os.getenv('DISCORD_GUILD')
WOODSHOP_CHANNEL = os.getenv('WOODSHOP_CHANNEL')

trash_message = "This is your friendly reminder to take out the shop bins and empty the dust collector!"

bot = commands.Bot(case_insensitive=TRUE, intents=discord.Intents.all(), help_command=None)

loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()

@aiocron.crontab('0 12 * * 0', start=False, loop=loop) # every sunday at noon
async def trash_reminder():
    woodshop_channel = bot.get_channel(int(WOODSHOP_CHANNEL))
    await woodshop_channel.send(trash_message)

async def main():
    async with bot:
        trash_reminder.start()
        await bot.start(TOKEN)

loop.run_until_complete(main())

By using the variable loop as my async loop, I can provide that to the crontab annotation, and voila! Things start working.

Now, if you are like me and don't know that format off the top of your head, what I did is ask old ChatGPT, who gave a prompt answer and description. Work smarter, not harder!

Not so much of a tutorial, but I'm hoping someone finds this code snippet helpful, because I couldn't find an example of this myself. I did, however find some people running into similar issues.

Anyways, happy hacking!

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This blog post is automatically published

Maxwell Omdal — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 00:00:00 -0000

Automated Blog Publishing

Previously, I wrote a blog post about deploying my blog with Github Pages. Now, I want to be able to write blog posts from my phone and publish them without touch git. So I thought it would be neat if I could edit the files on my iPhone by connecting to one of my always-on raspberry pi's, and automate the deployment of the blog from the raspberry pi. If this works, I'll write more about it. I'm still testing things out, and I'm trying to get watchdog to handle the watching for me. If this post is live though, the automated publish worked!

P.S. it also handles blog updates (this is an edit to the original post)

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Earth 🪐 to Localhost

Maxwell Omdal — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 00:00:00 -0000

Earth 🪐 to Localhost...

This is the first note I've written on my locally-hosted network attached storage setup. This is currently running on the Apple Filing Protocol. This is possible thanks to the reimplementation of the AFP protocol by the Netatalk project, which is a "free and open source AFP fileserver."

AFP I guess is deprecated on Mac's, so they cannot serve data via AFP, but they can still login to other networks running the protocol. I'm running this on my raspberry pi, which is awfully slow, but who cares? Once it's loaded, it's loaded. I've got access to my files, and they are mostly text, so it really doesn't matter.

There is a problem though. The iOS files app does not support the AFP protocol. Even though it's Apple's own protocol, as far as I can tell, it was never supported on mobile. So next step for me will be converting my notes file server to the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. This was originally created by Microsoft, but an implementation called Samba allows Unix-like devices to interface with Windows, and other Unix-like devices. Pretty neat! I don't use Window often, but I do have a PC, so I'd like it to be supported.

An aside...

Today is also the last day of January. One month down in 2023!

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Interesting Blogs and Bloggers

Maxwell Omdal — Tue, 27 Dec 2022 00:00:00 -0000

Some Interesting Blogs I've Stumbled Upon

I will update this from time to time as I find more people I want to share. These are mostly technology focused.

MacOS App Developers

Ryan Hansen
- maker of rectangle.app
Evan Travers
- makes some interesting apps for productivity

Digital Gardens

Bloggers

Derek Kay
Jeff Atwood
- founder of stack overflow
Matt Mulenwhegg
- The founder of Wordpress/Automattic
Martin Tournoij
- random little open source projects, like [[Goatcounter]]
Tim Pope
- Pope is a total nut and the king of vim plugins

Game Developers

Zach Gage
- Made that iOS fishing game you liked so much

Unix/Linux Developers and Ricers

Waylon Walker
- My go to for #tmux keybinding help. He has some great guides for this. Update ([[2022-12-17]]): these days I'm not using tmux, I replaced it with kitty terminal, which fits pretty much all my needs.

Obsidian

Kevin Quinn
Chris Grieser (PseudoMeta)
- Chris makes a lot of great plugins/addons for various apps like Obsidian and Alfred

VR/AR

Karl Guttag

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Thoughts on Hackerspaces

Maxwell Omdal — Wed, 21 Dec 2022 00:00:00 -0000

Thoughts on Hackerspaces

What is a hackerspace to me?

It's a free place for a community of individuals to gather, share knowledge and resources, and build the things they want to see in the world. It makes me think of co-housing in a lot of ways. Although there is no required financial obligation, there is a requirement that you treat others well and share your knowledge and skills when you can. Noisebridge, the hackerspace in San Francisco I've been finding myself at recently, has only one formal rule: Be excellent to each other. It may sound a bit cheesy, but for the most part, it seems to be working. The space has been running for 15 years.

NB is officially a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, but the word organization is loosely interpreted here. That is because it's also described as anarchist in its nature meaning there is no formal structure in the space. That's not to say there aren't regular meetings, but there is no hierarchy, no reports. People have self-assigned responsibilities, but there are no obligations. This I think is essential to any well functioning co-space, and I would think the same would be necessary for a healthy cohousing community (if you add a landlord, then the cohousing community just becomes an apartment building that happens to have laundry in the basement).

With any radically inclusive, shared space, you are bound to deal with something you don't like. Sometimes people will leave a mess, or you'll find something to be broken. Maybe someone doesn't put something back in the right place, or they might even steal it!

But with all this also comes radically wonderful things. People donate their time and resources to make it an amazing space. There is no other place in the city with access to as many resources as NB, paid or otherwise. With 3D printers, industrial laser cutters, full format laser and inkjet printers, an embroidery machine, screen-printing equipment, a full woodshop, metal shop, and so much more, it really is a place where anyone can come and build just about anything. Humanmade, which is also a non-for-profit makerspace in SF's SoMa district doesn't even have as many tools as NB, and that place costs $3000 a year!

Since these hackerspaces are freely accessible to all, they are very much a reflection of the city they are in. That comes with all its benefits and its baggage, and I'm here for both. This space is unique, and since it is ran by the community for the community, you have an equal opportunity to make it the kind of space you want it to be. If there is something that you want to see changed, you can change it without going through a bureaucratic process. You just do it. And that sometimes leads to those conflicts where you find someone changed something you liked a certain way, but as long as the community continually communicates and tries to be excellent to each other, it works out. It's never going to be exactly how you want it because it's not just your space. But the thing is, for just about everyone at these spaces — it is infeasible to have a space like this to yourself. You give up some control, and you get an awful lot in return.

The hackerspace fits into a theme I've been exploring this past year and I have to write more about as I continue exploring it in 2023. I'm not yet sure how to group these thoughts together, but it circles around some of the ideas I see in socialism, anarchism, communism in a general sense and more specifically third spaces, cohousing, community centers, resource sharing, donation circles, free and open source software, decentralized networks, and the small web. I'll try to share more. I think I need to sort some of these thoughts out, but I just want to find ways for people to share more, because I think it's good for us psychologically and it reduces waste.

Happy Holidays, see you in the new year 🥳!

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I'm Counting Goats!

Maxwell Omdal — Wed, 21 Dec 2022 00:00:00 -0000

I'm Counting Goats!

Queue “I’ll be watching you” by The Police, because I’m now spying on all the viewers of this blog!

Just kidding. Well, sort of. I wanted to have some metric of how many people are viewing my blog, not because I’m going to sell ad space, or leverage that information for some other malicious reason. I just wanted to know if anyone reads it! And like I said, to respect my readers’ privacy, I wanted to take as little data as possible. That’s why I decided to use GoatCounter. It keeps a count of when someone’s checking out my site, but it’s not tracking all the personal data that google analytics is going to.

It was super easy to set up, you can inspect this page and see the script yourself. It’s just one line :).

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Deploy Github Pages with Jinja and Github Actions

Maxwell Omdal — Tue, 14 Jun 2022 00:00:00 -0000

Deploy Github Pages with Jinja and GH Actions

This blog, like many others is hosted on Github Pages. Github Pages is a great (and free) way to post small static sites like personal websites. The annoying thing is that you have to push build code that would usually be included in your .gitignore file. So if you don't want to have to build your site locally, and include the build files in your repository, there is an option for you that leverages Github Actions.

Now, if you haven't heard of Github Actions, you should check it out. It's Github's platform for CI/CD, and it's easily configurable with .yaml files. There's nothing special you have to do for a repository, you just include the action files in the .github/workflows directory.

My site repository is currently being deployed with a github action written by @JamesIves. The sample .yaml file looks like this:

name: Build and Deploy
on: [push]
permissions: 
  contents: write
jobs:
  build-and-deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout 🛎️
        uses: actions/checkout@v3

      - name: Install and Build 🔧
        run: |
          npm ci
          npm run build

      - name: Deploy 🚀
        uses: JamesIves/github-pages-deploy-action@v4.3.3
        with:
          branch: gh-pages
          folder: build

There's very little here we have to change to get this working for us.

First, make sure this section matches the branch your github site is hosted on. You can check which branch is currently used by opening your github pages repository then:

Settings -> Code and Automation -> Pages -> Source.
```
with:
    branch: gh-pages <- make sure this matches "branch"
    folder: build
```
Now we need to update the "Install and Build 🔧" section. There are a couple things we have to do for this to work, and it will vary for you depending on how your site is being built. I'm generating the static pages of my site using the Jinja web templating engine, and then I inject style with Postcss and Tailwind. This means I need to run a python script to generate the HTML files, then run a postcss injection to transform my css. I've got all this configured in my 'package.json' file, so whenever I run npm run build, all this is taken care of. At least that all happens smoothly locally. When running this on some ephemeral virtual machine, you have to actually make sure all the dependencies are downloaded first. For the postcss dependencies, that's as simple as running npm install assuming you've correctly set up your packages.

For Python, it is a little different. I'm not the biggest fan of dependency management in Python, but I recently came across a tool called pipreqs which solves the challenges I associate with generating package requirements for Python. To build a requirements.txt file with pipreqs, just run pipreqs in your project directory. You will want to include this requirements file in your git commit, because we will then use it to install all the pip dependencies on the VM used by Github Actions!
```
- name: Install and Build 🔧
  run: |
    npm ci
    npm run build
```
becomes:
```
- name: Install and Build 🔧
  run: |
    pip install -r requirements.txt
    npm install
    npm run build
```
Lastly, I didn't want the gh-pages branch to be updated each time a change is made to any branch, so I changed the yaml field at the top of the file for when the action should be triggered:
```
on: [push]
```
becomes:
```
on:
    push:
        branches:
            - master
```

And there you have it! Check out the final file here

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Migrating from tmux to Kitty

Maxwell Omdal — Sun, 12 Jun 2022 00:00:00 -0000

Migrating from Tmux to Kitty

So sitting at my workdesk waiting for my local changes to compile and deploy, I often find my mind wandering towards the world of Unix ricing. Some people do it for beauty, others do it for maximizing their productivity. Regardless of the reason, before I go into any of this, let me preface the article by saying that all this is completely unnecessary. Pretty much any terminal will do the trick. But once again, I'm twiddling my thumbs waiting for deployment, so I need something to do. Why not finally migrate my terminal work from tmux in iTerm2 to Kitty?

If you haven't heard of Kitty, first of all, I commend you for not wasting as much time as I do reading about development tools instead of actually working! Kitty is a modern GPU-accelerated terminal emulator available for Linux and macOS. It's written in C and python, and it's pretty extensible. It has support for plugins called kittens, and comes with some default ones like a theme-switcher and ssh utility.

Kitty offers much of the functionality of tmux - things like pane management, custom keybindings, remote control. But, Kitty does have some distinct advantages in my mind. For one, Kitty is a terminal emulator. Tmux is only a terminal multiplexer, and thus also requires a terminal emulator. I'd prefer to simplify the number of tools I use for my work. Kitty can replace both tmux and iTerm2, and adds some features on top like the cool cat that it is. Already mentioned is plugin support, which iTerm2 does technically support, but I always got confused trying to configure it.

Next and most exciting is the inline native image support. Now some terminals support something called ==sixel graphics==, which I'll admit is pretty neat. Sixel to me is a bandage fix for graphic representation in the terminal because it's not representing imgages as native images, but rather performing some computation to build images out of special ASCII symbols, which means when you try to translate or transform the image in any way, things get weird. Why deal with that when kitty has your back? It can even render GIFs!

kitty +kitten icat ~/Downloads/kitten_falling.gif

Another reason I think Kitty is great is that it's text file configurable, which makes it way easier to share configurations between my work and personal computer. You can find an up-to-date copy of my kitten config file in my dotfiles repository

Reproducing my tmux configuration in Kitty

I'd changed all the keybindings in tmux to match how I navigate everything else. And since I use vim keybindings in all my editors, I thought it would be nice to keep "HJKL" in use with tmux for navigating between panes and windows. I wanted to navigate between panes by simply pressing ctrl-[HJKL] to jump between windows vertically and horizontally, and if I wanted to create a new window, I'd press my tmux prefixer, followed by a directional key to specify where I wanted to add that new split. Kitty as far as I know doesn't have prefix keys like tmux, so I wasn't able to keep that around, but I'm OK with that. Instead, I just added another modifier key. So when I want to create a new pane, just press ctrl-opt-[HJKL]

# Create a new window splitting the space used by the existing one so that
# the two windows are placed one above the other
map ctrl+alt+k launch --location=hsplit --cwd=current

# Create a new window splitting the space used by the existing one so that
# the two windows are placed side by side
map ctrl+alt+l launch --location=vsplit --cwd=current

# Rotate the current split, chaging its split axis from vertical to
# horizontal or vice versa
map ctrl+shift+r layout_action rotate

# Move the active window in the indicated direction
map ctrl+shift+h move_window left
map ctrl+shift+l move_window right
map ctrl+shift+k move_window up
map ctrl+shift+j move_window down

# Switch focus to the neighboring window in the indicated direction
map ctrl+h neighboring_window left
map ctrl+l neighboring_window right
map ctrl+k neighboring_window up
map ctrl+j neighboring_window down

# Switch tabs
map ctrl+cmd+l next_tab
map ctrl+cmd+h previous_tab

enabled_layouts splits:split_axis=horizontal

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Path Planning

Maxwell Omdal — Tue, 15 Sep 2020 00:00:00 -0000

Path Planning : Bat Guy Vs. The Clown

Max Omdal

This Path Planning project is an interactive simulation with several interactive parts. Primarily a superhero and supervillain play a game of cat and mouse. Batma... err.. "Bat Guy" and "The Clown" are caught in this battle. As Bat Guy, you have the ability to control bats by dropping signaling devices that they will navigate their way through a maze of water towers to reach. You also will need to make use of your other Super gadgets, like explosive projectiles, and miniature self-driving probes. Read on to learn about all the features in this application, as well as how it was implemented.

Download Source

Features

3D rendering and smooth camera navigation
Improved Agent & Scene Rendering
Orientation Smooth
User Scenario Editing
Realtime User Interaction
Multi-Agent Planning
Crowd Simulation
Press P to open Debug Mode

Controls

To orbit the camera, use the arrow keys
To move your character use WASD keys
Use the left mouse button to set destinations and launch probes
Use the right mouse button to throw explosive projectiles
Press Q to drop a bat signal
Press ENTER to activate bat signal. Uh Oh! The Clown has a tag on our bat signal, and when we activate it, he'll track us down!

Path Planning & 3D Rendering

This program uses the A* search algorithm with a probabilistic roadmap to provide a planning graph and a system for an agent to travel from a start position to a goal position. The obstacles in the scene are all cylindrical. The bats are simulated using a boids algorithm, and a global tethering point is progressed along a path. A force is then applied to the boids to move it towards the tether point. Because the path planning does not directly place each individual boid out of the way of obstacles, we also check for collisions with the obstacles to avoid.

Note that while the rendering is in 3D, the path planning is still in 2 Dimensions. This reduces the complexity of our roadmap, and lets us approximate each obstacle/agent as a circle.

Crowd Simulation

There are two techniques used here for crowd simulation. The time-to-collision technique is used to handle interactions between the probes and The Clown. When The Clown isn't moving, try sending a probe to his location. You will see how it's path is blocked. Then, as already mentioned all bats are simulated with the boids algorithm. They will all successfully avoid each other and obstacles. Multiple bats can share a single path, so

3D Modeling

Most of the 3D environment was made by myself, but for the characters, I started with a base model on Free3D made by Prodigy114 I rigged, added some materials, and gave bat guy a cloak and mask.

Conclusions and Future Work

This demonstrates several concepts of Crowd simulation and Path planning. There are some known problems. Sometimes, if you do not place at least one of the bat signals during each turn, it may crash the program. Future work on this project could involve higher fidelity animated models, using voronoi maps for the bats to increase their spacing between objects, and creating a response system to handle when the enemy is hit by one of the player's weapons.

Demo

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Particle Simulation

Maxwell Omdal — Sat, 15 Aug 2020 00:00:00 -0000

Particle Simulation and Flocking: Scarecrows

Maxwell Omdal

This is an implementation of a particle system and boids algorithm. The focus of my implementation was to provide the user with a system for configuring causal interation. This was done by accounting for collisions and providing an outlet class to resond to such collisions. Each particle system can have its own CollisionTrigger that acts in response to each particle collision with a set of rigidbodies. In my case, I used this for a rain Simulation to spawn a splash effect when the rain hits the ground. Each collision can respond by spawning its own particle system. This can be done recursively, giving artists the option to make infinite particle system loops. Below is the source code.

All models were generated in Blender. I found the site ScratchAPixel helpful for implementing collision detection and raycasting. Conrad Parker's notes on the Boids algorithm also proved useful.

Download Source

Controls

To orbit the camera, use the arrow keys.
To switch between the rain and flocking simulation, press SPACEBAR
To interact with the flock, click on a surface. The birds will swarm
To move the rain cloud, use the WASD keys
Use the M and N keys to add or subtract boids from the scene. Total boids is displayed in the top left

Boids Algorithm: Crows Flocking

For the boids algorithm, I followed a standard implementation with the three rules: match the flocks velocity, avoid others, and fly towards the center of mass. I wanted to make sure the birds could break off into smaller groups, so I added a test for the distance between each bird, so only birds close enough to each other could be affected by one another. I also added a fourth rule: fly towards the tether. This allowed me to prevent the birds from flying too far away from the camera, and also allowed for some interesting interaction. Lastly, I added collision detection for each bird, so they could perch themselves on a surface when they intersect it.

Interaction

To interact with the birds, you can click on the mesh, and a scarecrow will appear and the birds will swarm. These birds aren't scared of no crow! It's more of a revenge of the birds thing.

Behavior and Boid Rendering

Other than the tether point, and a bounding box to keep the flock together, I wanted the birds to interact with the environment. When they ground or the trees, or the roof of the house, they will check for collision. If a bird collides, they will land, and the bird's model will be switched out with a perched bird model. It's interesting to watch as the birds land, then take off again. Sometimes they will land, then fly for only a brief moment before landing again, as if they are searching for worms.

The birds are also always oriented towards their flight path. Because birds will "soar" they will usually be facing forward even if they are dropping altitude. For this reason, the birds orientation is only altered along the Y axis. Their velocities are also reduced in the Y direction to encourage the "soaring" effect.

Particle Simulation: Rain

You can toggle to the rain sim by pressing SPACEBAR. The rain simulation uses a recursive particle emitter system that lets the designer add child emitters whenever a collision occurs. Particles can be rendered as textures, or points. Because I was making a stylized rain simulation, I wanted to also add the ability to "streak" the particle along its path. The chimney on the house illustrates the use of a textured particle emitter.

Challenges, Efficiency and More

One thing that kept coming up was collision detection error. I actually use a decimated mesh for collision detection to reduce the number of triangles I need to check for intersection. Also, in order to improve render speeds, if a bird is greater than a certain distance from the camera, they are rendered as points instead of meshes. This did not yield big improvements (maybe 2-3 fps), so it might be better to switch back in the future. Deciding how to organize the Particle and Boid classes also proved difficult because I wanted to make them simple to get started, but extensible.

Frames Per Second

The flocking sim yields about 30-40 fps on my Macbook Pro 2016, and the rain sim slightly worse. The flocking sim has 675 birds altogether (later, I was able to achieve 1000+ boids running at higher than 40 fps on a Desktop with a more powerful processor), and the particle simulation has 1000-2000 particles drawn at a time. Rendering the smoke in the chimney is the most expensive part of the rain sim. I had a hard time capturing the frame rate, because when I used the video capture tool, my frame rate would suddenly drop. I did take a picture here:

Demo

At :13, I demonstrate placing a scarecrow to attract birds. Throughout the video, I orbit the view by using the arrow keys. At :35 I press SPACEBAR to open the rain simulation.

Gallery

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Fluid Simulation

Maxwell Omdal — Wed, 15 Jul 2020 00:00:00 -0000

3D SPH Fluid Simulation for Painterly Effects

A Project By Maxwell Omdal

Download Source

Download Paper

Controls

To orbit the camera, use the arrow keys.
To interact with the painting, click and drag particles around the canvas
To pause and view the painting, press SPACEBAR

Demo

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Cloth Simulation

Maxwell Omdal — Mon, 15 Jun 2020 00:00:00 -0000

Cloth Simulation Using Numerical Integration: Fans

A Project By Maxwell Omdal & David Kinney

With this project, we implement a cloth simulation using the midpoint integration technique. The cloth is first defined using a series of springs connected in a grid, and then using Hooke's law and numerical integration, we update the position and velocity of the cloth at each time step. However, in a vacuum, cloth does not behave very interestingly, so we implemented air drag and sphere-based collision detection. At the end, we'll introduce our attempt at collision detection on more complex meshes using a node-triangle intersection algorithm, and an octree to reduce computation.

We downloaded this free image of the earth here.

Download Source

Controls

To orbit the camera, use the arrow keys.
To interact with the cloth, click and drag around it and a fan will appear
Reset the animation using the 'R' key
To pause, press SPACEBAR

User Interaction

We wanted a way for the user to interact with the cloth, and we wanted it to feel playful. Since we had an implementation for air drag on the cloth, and a robust collision detection system, we decided we'd let users click on the screen to cast a fan into the 3D space that would adjust the "wind" direction. To help users visualize the direction of wind, we spawn a particle emitter at the fan's location and blow dust particles in the "wind" direction.

Simulating Cloth

The cloth can be modeled as a collection of interconnected springs, and we track the nodes where the springs connect. For each node, we have a velocity and a position attribute. Using numerical integration (the midpoint method), we can estimate the continuous updates in the positions of each node using a discrete technique. Using Hooke's law, as well as the masses assigned to each node, we can calculate every node's acceleration, and integrate to get the velocity and position. For each frame, we can then define the number of time steps we would like to take, or the number of discrete updates per frame. The cloth class is flexible, making it easy for us to add more nodes, change the size, stretch, and color.

The cloth successfully responds to collisions with spheres. If a cloth collides with a sphere, a portion of its velocity is reflected, to imitate an elastic collision, and a portion of its velocity directed into the sphere is lost, to emulate the transfer of energy to the mesh.

Air Drag

In addition to the per-vertex physics calculated for the springs, the user can also direct a wind force by holding down the left mouse button near the center of the screen. This places a fan at the mouse's current screen position and blows a current of air in its direction. The force this places on the cloth is calculated using Raleigh's drag equation and is applied to each triangle in its mesh.

Realistic Simulation

Although our simulation is only an approximation of real physical interactions, we wanted it to appear as natural and realistic as possible. To do this, we compared the motion of a towel when a blowdryer was directed at it, and we tried to match this motion as closely as possible with our fan interactions.

Full Demo

Future Work: Octrees and Complex Meshes

We attempted to create a system for handling triangle-based mesh collisions with the cloth, but we fell short, after not being able to find the proper collision response. One of the challenges with this type of approach is the computational expense of testing thousands of triangles multiple times a frame for multiple nodes. If we have a cloth made up of 2500 nodes, and a mesh with 5000 triangles it would require 2500*5000=12500000 collision tests. In order to reduce this, we implemented octrees that recursively divides our mesh and greatly reduces the number of computations by only checking the triangles in the octant that the node is in. So, for example, if we set the max number of triangles per octant to 20, then there would be 2500*20=50000 triangle-line collision tests and about 2500*3=7500 line-box collision tests for a total of 57500 tests, which is only 0.46% of the tests required without an octree. This is possible because the octree is computed at setup, and only has to be computed once.

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