Desktop Seige Engine Contest

Aka Easter Egg Chuck 2009. We had an Easter Egg Chuck in 2007. It was awesome. This time we're doing it again but smaller. I don't have exact dates for the contest but I'm guessing right around Easter!

The Rules

Torsion, Gravity, Elastic powered throwers only.
No pneumatics or chemical launchers.
Must fit in a 5" x 5" x 5" cube. (throwing arms may extend beyond the box)
No throwing arms over 12" long.

Devices cannot require contact outside the 5x5x5 cube when cocked, and must be freestanding in their ready to fire position. Throwing arms may extend outside this cube but must not be in contact with anything outside the cube. (AKA no slingshots or wrist rockets)

Build out of whatever makes you comfortable. Lego, Mechano/Erector sets, wood, carbon fiber, aluminum.

We will be throwing Plain Pastel Easter M&Ms.

There will be separate judging classes for torsion devices, and for gravity devices.

Put questions in the comments and I'll answer them in the post.
If you say live in California but participated last time and want to play again, you should mail in an entry, yes you Steve. Or you know anybody else who wants to mail one in. We will find a designated operator for your device.

Rules Clarifications

• Cavorter asks "Is there a limit on methods of winding torsion engines? For instance, does it have to be hand cranked or can it be motor assisted"

  
  Powered methods of winding/setting a torsion device are fine. If you want to use a mini winch to cock the device, or a drill to tighten your tension bundle go for it. Devices which use the motor to throw the projectile are out however.
  

• Chilly asks "Can I enter more than one device?"

  
  Sure, you can either in the same or different classes. I am planning on building two myself.
  

• Chilly asks " And do we need a rule that the machine, when cocked and set to fire, doesn't need to be held in place artificially? (i.e. - a wrist rocket with the handle cut down to less than 5" would be the automaticat winner in this contest)"

  
  Uh.. yeah we need a rule to fix that, because what fun would that be. Devices cannot require contact outside the 5x5x5 cube when cocked, and must be freestanding in their ready to fire position. Throwing arms may extend outside this cube but must not be in contact with anything outside the cube. (AKA no slingshots or wrist rockets)
  

Why White Balance Matters

In 2007 when I got my Digital SLR I took the free classes offered by National Camera where I got it. I learned many fine things. Maybe not as much as the people who hadn't read their manual before they got there, or the people who hadn't had any structured camera instruction. One of the coolest things I learned was a strictly digital related skill White Balance. First off what is white balance? Wikipedia has a lot to say here But for those who don't want to go read all that, as I understand it digital camera takes a bunch of optical data and collects it on a sensor. If you're not shooting in RAW mode and editing your pictures in Photoshop or some tool like that, you're shooting in JPEG mode and it has to set values for the data. To set those values it makes some assumptions about what the world looks like, that there should be so much dark, so much light. Essentially that the world is a uniform 18% grey color.

Most cameras, even little pocket ones have a few stock settings, AWB or Auto, Florescent, Daylight, Shade, Cloudy, Tungsten, Flash, and Custom. AWB or Auto is where most default to, and many people never change it. It does a fair job. The others are mostly related to the sorts of light you are under. Florescent fixes the green skin tones that appear in pictures of very fair people in office and the like.

Custom is really the way to go if you have the few seconds to do it. It's easy. You do need something that is that mysterious 18% grey, or well any uniform light or medium grey, will work. I have used the inside liner of my camera bag. I have a lens cloth that happens to be an ok grey card. Serious photographers will tell you that a card is better, but this fits in my pocket and works ok. Cards are allegedly be better because of more uniform flat reflective surface. A sheet of paper will also work but might end up with slightly overexposed pictures.

So how do I use this? Well first I notice that Auto is failing me. See the golden hue of my living room. It's not realy this orangey golden. Also frequently it's tidier than this, but that isn't really relevent to the issue at hand.

Then I get out my grey cloth and I take a picture of it. It should be flat not all wrinkly but it doesn't seem to matter a ton in indoor light. You will notice this doesn't look too grey either, it's sort of a goldeny weird grey caused by the lights in my basement. Now the steps here vary but on my Canon Rebel XT I open up the White Balance settings. I then change to Custom. Then I go back up to the menu and choose the Custom WB option and it then shows me images, starting with the most recent one taken and gives me an option to select an image to white balance against. So I pick that one of my grey cloth.


Then I take the same picture again. Notice the more natural coloration. One last thought be sure and check your white balance as soon as you start taking pictures, especially if you use a custom white balances. Because the white balance you shot in your basement, or in your lightbox, or at the park, may be radically wrong in the other locations, but it will keep trying to use the last one you set.

Maybe tomorrow I'll do some white balance photos, in the great outdoors with all the snow. It's stunning what a difference it makes.

Making Bacon

I borrowed a book Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing by by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn, from Lauren. She brought it over the day we made sausage. It's available at Kitchen Window here in town for those who want it or presumably all over the internet for the rest of you.

I became obsessed with all the amazingly lovely sounding sausages and things in the book. So I read it cover to cover and decided to start trying things in order. Lauren was right with me on this plan.

So we started making bacon a couple weeks ago. First I ordered some Pink Salt (aka nitrates) off the internet. Then I set, my minion, Kate to finding a local source for pork bellies, which apparently the meat people call side pork. After calling everywhere she found Finer Meats on Nicollet when asked if they had side pork the reply came "Of course, we're Finer Meats!" Other great attributes of Finer Meats for pork belly includes no minimum purchase and ready availability and a great reputation as a good meat place in Minneapolis. They got us a 10lb slab in about three days. We were all excited but put the curing off a couple days so that it wouldn't need to come out of the cure and be smoked when I was unavailable. In this time we learned that the downstairs fridge at Lauren's place is broken. Sad, lost, 10lbs of side pork.

Finer Meats came through again, just a few days later, I always call and check, but mostly they say they have it or will have it in a day or two. This time it was 9.8lbs with the skin on. Lauren cut the meat into thirds while I went and found an old earring to use in the photographs just to twit a friend of a friend in California. That's why our pork belly has a nipple ring. It was taken off immediately after photography completed and is not actually involved in making bacon.

We then used the basic cure as listed in the the book to cure 1/3 of the belly. We made a sweet cure insprired by their sweet cure using maple syrup and some other spices (which we noted but I don't have the notes right now). And a savory cure with different spices and pepper. All three sections were packed into food saver bags and left to cure. They have now been down for five of the seven to possibly 10 days they need to fully cure. They are firming up nicely. This is apparently part of the process and what the salt/nitrates do to them. We hope to pull them on Friday and smoke them then.

The folks at Finer Meats seemed pretty excited when Lauren talked to them and said they would slice the bacon for us on their big meat slicer if we brought it back in! So I suspect we'll try slicing on our own and possibly use them if it turns out to be really challenging. Complete pictures are available here.

I suppose quarterly would be faster than my current update cycle. At least I didn't go half the year. I even missed my traditional Halloween post about how many kids we got. 56, for those keeping track.

Trap, well we finished out the season in dead last. I squeaked a victory over Erik for team high gun. I think it was like eight raw points over a possible 525 over the season. So just over 1% better.

We're not shooting the official fall league. The gunclub raise the prices too high to make us want to shoot league rounds. So we're shooting practice rounds since most of us are members with punch cards. Odie's keeping score. He's got some sort of wack handicapping system based on bowlling and the usual trap system, to try and make it less of a foregone conclusion who's going to be High Gun.

Knitting wise, well I knit a bunch of slippers out of bulky Lopi and now I can't get them to shrink quite far enough. So I'm currently a titch thwarted. It looks like at least one pair can be worn by an intended recipient, but not the pair I had intended for her. Oh well I know lots of people with many sizes of feet.

I'll be going to Seattle later in the month to be helpful for Heidi who is having surgery.

my perfect saturday

It all started when I got let out of work early on Friday. After a week that had been stressful and amazingly challenging, upgrading the backup software for the university. Then I went and hit two grocery stores looking for things for a friend's party. Ok that part wasn't as fun. I came home and had a lovely dinner of little bits of fancy cheeses and cured meets, and fresh vegetables.

I then helped Lauren work on her party prep in our kitchen, cause the place she is renting has a not so great kitchen. Very late in the evening we went to the house where the party is being held, as I type this even. It's a baby shower for someone I hardly know so I'm not there, which makes me just about as pleased as can be. But we get there and unload all the food into the fridges and freezers there, and then I helped Jon set up the screen tent in the back yard.

then home and to bed, where I slept late. Then I got up and went out to goodwill and st. vincent de paul to find a punch bowl for the aforementioned baby shower, which I delivered when I delivered Lauren to the party. Then I hit Mills Fleet Farm on the way home and dug through their tralier parts department until I found what I was looking for. I now have a 5 wire to 4 wire converter installed on my car so when I go fetch my boat tomorrow I won't blow fuses if I happen to hit the turn signal and the break at the same time! I also got a can of TRI-FLOW. It was recoomeneded to my by Rebecca my locksmith friend. She's right, it is a ton better than WD-40. I then proceded to lubricate every lock I could find, including the ones on my car, and Lauren's car and the ones on the house. Also the seat adusters on both of our cars as well.

Now I have ordred pizza and am sitting downstairs getting ready to watch the season finale's for all the shows I like.