Tricorders and Gardens

Had to work Saturday, got into work at 5 am, it was drizzly and dark, and left about 11:30 am to blue skies and sun. The worst part was that instead of the predicted rain it was beautiful and sunny.

Did some planting in the garden that afternoon, and made a "custom" setup for marking rows. All out of scrap wood I got on the curb from a woodworking shop, last week in fact. Also made row markers with scrap slats from the same pile by cutting them into 12" long pieces.

The main features of the row markers are that they are 36" long and are themselves row distance measures. One has 2 screws for winding string that are spaced 24" apart for measuring out the string for estimating row length. The triangular pieces are a handy foot pressing pad to seat them in the ground. All from free scrap wood.

I was also making furrows to plant in by riding my mountain bike down the rows.

Sunday morning I kept thinking it was Saturday. Working Saturday really puts me in bad sorts on a weekend.

Though I missed Tag Sales Saturday, N made it to some with his mom. He got a pair of flip open walkie talkies to "convert" to tricorders. He is 7 and really into star trek right now. He really wanted a "real" tricorder but they are out of his budget. I am thinking that he will eventually find one at a TS for a quarter or in the free box.

So N hits me up to help him make a tricorder from the walkie talkies. We came up with a nice template from the nokia maemo forums.

We resized it to print on hp photo paper so it would fit on the walkie talkie right and did the cutout and double sided taped it to the walkie talkie case. We did a second one where I used the radial arm saw to cut the top off to make it more sized like the st tricorder. Cut a piece of 1/8" plywood to fit and filed and glued to the case. Found that a silver sharpie marker was a decent match.

The first picture is the gutted walkie talkie case. The second is the case cut down with "decals" applied, and the third is a "real" tricorder, I think it is a playmates toy one.