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Xmas dinner

Food

More cooking this year. Didn’t do the turkey, but did do the beef wellington which went well thanks to cooking the steak sous vide after a quick sear and remembering to wrap it in filo pastry (with mustard on the inside) before wrapping it in puff pastry.

Also did a few sides, like cornbread muffintops and pommes dauphin which were the best (or so I thought) – half mashed potato (made particularly dry) and half choux pastry (also made a little dry), and deep fried for around eleven minutes to make large potato-sized golden brown potato dollops that were crunchier than roast potatoes on the outside and lighter and fluffier than thrice-cooked chips on the inside. Gotta love the French.

And for that teutonic paganism balance to the French, apart from the tree and the lights, I cheated on a yule log recipe, bought two chocolate Swiss rolls and did a bit of decorating.… Read the rest

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New Toy…

ElectronicsGeneralHardware
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New Toys!Robotics

Way back in the mists of time, I mentioned how we had laser scanners in the CVRG (one of which was mounted on Dagda for a while). We used the SICK for a long while, which is a block of steel that’s pretty adept at toe crushing, only scanned through a partial circle and was enormously expensive (and later we acquired a 3D scanner which was even more expensive but could at least do 360 degrees). That was fifteen years ago though. 

Meet the modern version: 

The YDLIDAR X4, evolved from roomba sensors and possibly a knockoff of a slightly more well-known sensor. Weighs next to nothing, costs $80, fits in the palm of your hand, scans through 360 degrees seven times a second taking 5000 samples in the process (so about half-degree resolution), ranges out to ten meters on a good day with a following wind. … Read the rest

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Sliding dovetail postmortem

Desk ShelfWoodworking

So looking at the pieces of scrap I was practicing on yesterday, I see that the power-cut dovetail has a consistent angle but the edges are anything but sharp and there’s a problem with blowout:

While the hand-cut version is messier but holding:

A bit more practice would clean that up. It’s slower, but it leaves you with all your fingers, which is a plus. The back end broke out because of short grain:

But you can see that the gaps aren’t as bad at the back end due to the angle being inconsistent. There are a few different hand methods to cut the joint – I was paring the angles with a chisel but there are more accurate methods. I guess I’m doing some more practice for a while and the doing this by hand.… Read the rest

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