Author Archives: Patrick Fenner
Cockpit Clearances
Designing a cockpit to accommodate a range of rider sizes is more complex than laying out the controls to fit one rider; especially having a steering wheel control for such a reclined operator instead of underseat/tiller steering or a moveable yoke. To account for different height riders while still keeping the rider’s eyeline above the [...]
Git Un-Merge
When I last merged a development branch of add-rel-lightbox into the master branch and realised that I’d not finished testing the changes, it was off to the internet to find out how to undo a merge. After a couple of goes at git revert -m 1 refused to do anything, and a little more searching, [...]
Ce n’pas une entrée de blog
It’s crunch time for thesis revisions this week, so there’ll be no blog post. Except this one. Which isn’t one. Back next week. As in: The Treachery of Images
Dotsies on your Reader
Dotsies is probably the Dvorak of fonts — in a good way, of course. It’s better because it’s more compact; but they are both difficult to learn, very few people can use them well, and there’s no incentive to start learning them other than “they are better”. Though Dotsies is part of The New Aesthetic, [...]
add-rel-lightbox now using Simple HTML DOM
When I first mashed together add-rel-lightbox, I used regular expressions to control and replace the relevent parts. This was my fault. Regexes were the only tool I had. It was a bad thing. Parsing HTML with regex is wrong. […]using regex to parse HTML has doomed humanity to an eternity of dread torture and security [...]
Kingsbury K-Drive
The video below of the Human Power Team‘s elliptical drive system is the first time I’ve seen a non-circular power system in motion. Functionally identical to the “K-Drive” of the Kingsbury Kingcycle, the mechanism is first described in 1890, so it might be more correct to call it a “Vietor Elliptical Drive”, it’s best known [...]
Making it Better—Open Source CNC
CNC routers and laser cutters are now common machines. Not ubiquitous, like a hammer, but they are common enough that I can send a pattern for cutting, or visit a lab and operate one myself. However, they still remain expensive, industrial machines. Makerslide took the idea of a standard aluminium extrusion frame system, used for [...]
LaTeX-SVG-to-PDF as git submodule
I’ve mentioned previously that I’ve got a large project in \(\LaTeX\) and while I was using Dropbox as a pseudo revision control and external backup. However, I’ve since been persuaded that a proper revision control system with meaningful commit message is a better way of tracking progress and changes. So I’ve moved the project to [...]
Print your own John Carter
I’ve been coming across quite a few references to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ book “A Princess of Mars” over the past couple of months, from being the story behind Disney’s upcoming film “John Carter of Mars”, to being a classic science fiction text that has inspired many creators. So when it appeared again, as I was [...]
Putting Dotfiles in Git
If you’re a Windows user, then you probably won’t have come across dotfiles before. For Mac (a form of Unix) and Linux users, dotfiles hold certain environmental settings and customisations, so if you work on more than one computer, you might like a way of sharing your preferences between them. And they’re called “dotfiles” because [...]