@halcy I had good luck with a Korg nanoKontrol and Processing code some years back. Looks like there’s now a 2.

@piebob Aha! I may build one more like that for a laptop stand for a friend.

@piebob Interesting. Do they straddle the leg that is under the arm of the sofa?

The top is a piece of pre-prepared (glued up, brought to exact dimensions) walnut that I got at Asmbly. After cutting it to size, I stained it and applied several coats of polyurethane. Of course, one of the cats took a flying leap at it while it was drying, so I got to sand and add one more coat of poly than I’d expected, but such is life with cats.

4/4

I built the base in Asmbly’s metal shop.

I knew that I was going to have a problem keeping the frame square. I tried to clamp it and counterpose my welds to minimize that, but that wasn’t enough. The arms supporting the top were noticeably bowed outwards. To fix that, I had to add a strap across the open side of the top frame to hold those parts together.

3/3

I did a design in Fusion. I had 1” square and 3” x 1” rectangular tube leftover from previous projects, so I designed around those.

2/2

New post at https://notat.work/2025/00/side-table.html

Adrienne asked me for a side table to fit over the arm of our couch, so you can set a drink or a laptop down without reaching over to the coffee table.

I’d like to spend more time in mainland Ecuador. Even taking altitude sickness medication, I didn’t have enough time to acclimate to the altitude in Quito. A few more days there and I would have felt much better.

As usual, many more photos on Flickr.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/aneel/collections/72157723884396737/

7/7

We spent a few days not on boats. We’re in the habit of giving ourselves buffer days in case a connection goes wrong, so we had a day on the mainland before going to the Galapagos, a day between the two boats on the island of Santa Cruz, and a day in Quito at the end of the trip. 6/6

I’m still working on processing my underwater footage. I have a good workflow for photos, and mostly kept up with editing down the photos each day. But I don’t have a good workflow for editing video. Because I’m shooting with an “action camera”, I take video instead of still photos. The fish or I always move too much for me to frame a good shot. With video, I can sometimes extract a decent short clip or still frame. But it takes work to find that clip. 5/6

Even the sea lions were chill. I wouldn’t get anywhere near a sea lion in California, but here pups frolic around you, adults come up and sniff you, and many mornings you wake up to find one lounging on the water-level deck of the boat or on the zodiacs. 4/6

I was more taken by the seabirds, though. They are shockingly unconcerned about people, so you can get within a few yards of albatrosses, boobies, frigatebirds, and gulls without upsetting them. 3/6

We got to see a lot of really fun birds and animals. The Galapagos are famous for the finches. The islands are very remote, and finches were some of the only land birds who made it out there. Finding lots of ecological niches empty that would be filled with other birds on the mainland, they speciated to fill the gaps. They’ve evolved into more than a dozen different species with adaptations like beak shapes that let them eat various different kinds of food. We saw many of the species of ground finches, and some of the specialized finches like the Cactus finches and Vampire finches, but we’ll have to spend more time inland someday to see the tree finches. 2/6

New post at https://notat.work/2025/00/galapagos.html

I mentioned in the last post that I missed the last week of the semester. I had a good reason for that: for years we’ve been planning to go to the Galapagos, and we finally did it!

We spent about a week on a boat, visiting various islands and seeing the land animals and birds and going snorkeling to see the fish. Then we spent another week on a dive boat.

@afreytes @piebob The worst is when it’s on a custom domain and you read as far as the subscription nag pop up before realizing

Great turnout today in Austin. More people than I’ve seen at the Capitol in years, despite “credible threats” against the US Representatives speaking and possible thunderstorms. Great energy. I particularly appreciated the drag queen’s choice of “Killing In The Name Of”. #NoKings

@molly0xfff Reading is just looking, right? Lots of people have special glasses for that kind of looking.

@stevegis_ssg Oof. Sorry about that.