JoshuaWeber.com

Christmas Eve 2009

Josh — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 03:50:53 +0000

Here are three shots taken on Christmas Eve. The first is a quick six second exposure, and the second and third are about ten minutes a piece. I would of liked to snap a few more long exposures but the cold weather zapped my battery.

Winter Sunrise

Josh — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 05:43:19 +0000

These were taken on the morning of boxing day of Christmas 2009. I rode our snowmobile out just before sunrise to a nice hill in a field by my grandparents farm, set up my camera on a tripod, and waited for the sun to peak over the horizon. These shots cost me my tripod, it was about -25 that morning and the little plastic pieces were not the least bit happy to be outside in that weather. Perhaps I can still fix it though…

Making of a Banjolele – Part 1

Josh — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 23:29:39 +0000

This was a project that I had started before Christmas with the intention of it being a Christmas present for a special someone, but alas I have yet to finish! Since I am back at school again I have some nice blocks of dead space between classes which I figure is a perfect time to make some posts about the process that I am going through to build this stringed instrument.

Note: Take everything I do while making this with a grain of salt, I have never done this before and am making up many things as I go along. This is definitely a learning process for me.

For the neck of the banjolele I went with a strip of red oak sandwiched between two pieces of maple. After these were glued together and allowed to dry I attached a template of the side profile of the neck.

A few cuts later…

To save on wood used I only made the neck block as thick as the bottom end of the neck, this meant that the pegboard would need to be widened using two small “ears.”

The next step was to cut out the rough profile of the neck using the bandsaw. Doing this first would save me hours of shaping with a file and rasp.

With that I had a rough neck ready to be shaped and sanded.

Making some Pi

Josh — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 00:35:00 +0000

This Pi may not be as appetizing as a piece of pie, but it makes up for it by granting access to tightly sealed glass bottles that can be found at all the popular math parties.

Made out of 3/8th inch aluminium with a small loop to be attached to a key chain.

Foggy mornings

Josh — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 02:45:35 +0000

I love riding my bike to work on foggy mornings, it just seems so much more peaceful.

Content! Building a fence

Josh — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 01:48:54 +0000

It has been quite some time since I have added anything to here. I could go on to make excuses why, but really, I don’t have any.

Rather than starting off with up to date content I am going to throw up some things from the summer. To start it off I would like to show you a lovely picket fence that I helped to build this summer. This is the fence that we replaced. It still looks great considering it is 40+ years old! But alas, some areas are starting to rot pretty bad leading to boards that fall off easily.

It was a formidable task to make all 270 pickets needed to complete the entire span. I started off with eight foot lengths of 3×1″ spruce boards (I believe that the original fence was also spruce). After I cut them all in half I started the fun task of giving them a point. This took a while but was a cake walk compared to the next task, cutting notches. Now seeing as I really didn’t want to spend the next four weeks carefully measuring and cutting out notches I decided to make this handy dandy jig, and used the appropriately named jig saw, to cut out the notches. This made the job a snap, with each piece taking only 30 seconds or so to cut. After that was all done I managed to get out of painting them all (Yes!). But I was not done yet! There is still the task of attaching them. Once again I had no desire to carefully measure and space each and every one, so out came another jig. In no time at all the fence was up and ready to protect the farm from the rogue zombie hordes of the prairies.

High speed photography: Part 3

Josh — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 03:33:58 +0000

Here are the rest of the shots from this weekend. I love the way they turned out! Now to clean everything up…

High speed photography: Part 2

Josh — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 06:10:12 +0000

I’ve got some results from tonight, I think it turned out quite well. More tomorrow hopefully!

High speed photography: Proof of concept

Josh — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 06:24:52 +0000

Now that school is done for the semester I can turn my attention to more exciting things… like high speed photography! I am in the process of building a setup that will allow me to perform the basic procedure of: trip a sensor -> delay -> fire a strobe. This will allow me to capture movements that cannot be seen by the human eye! Here are a couple of proof of concept images of the initial test setup. Hopefully later this weekend I will have the system tweaked to my liking, allowing me to create much higher calibre images.

2008 Psychosis

Josh — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 02:35:53 +0000

It’s sad to see such an amazing event come to an end, I’m just glad I had the chance to experience it.