How To: Make a Coffee Dump/Bash Box – on the cheap
So, these past few weeks have been all about Coffee and making things... I make no apologies for that 
I love both making things and coffee... and in a few days i'll probably have made something else coffee related. The past few things i've made have involved using my 3D printer, but this time i've gone back to the more traditional tools...
- Hot Knife
- Scissors
- File
- Dremel
- Silicone sealant
Slightly related sign that was up when I was entering...
Pipe!
Tube! (I already cut it down to size before taking this photo, but it cost about $6 for a metre)
I then marked across the bottom section of the pipe where i wanted the tube to slot into and then used my hot knife to cut out a rough half moon shape. Used a file to clean it up best I could, then finished it off with the dremel to make it smoother
Slot Cut
As you can see below, the tube fits quite nicely into the slot i cut out. Although in it's present form, the tube slides around on the groove.
Getting its groove on
The next picture is just to show you the general idea of how it'll be used.
General Idea...
Obviously the above is a bit rough and bashing spent grind into this will just make it fall out the bottom, so
Circle on clear plastic sheet
With it cut out, i needed to attach it to the bottom of the pipe and make sure it was water proof, so this stuff works a treat:
Sealant
Sealant applied
Next, asthetics:
Spray painting it a coppery colour
Find something suitable for a stand (I found an old VESA monitor back) - glue on a grippy material to the grooves to stop the tube sliding around (also helps to hide rough dremel work) and....
Almost done
Last step is to put the tube in place, and set up for a posed shot pretending to use it in action...
Finished!
That's all folks!
How To: 3D Print Kitchen Implements
If you're a regular visitor to my blog, you'll know that not too long ago with the money from a competition my friends and I were able to purchase a 3D Printer
You'll also know that just 2 weeks ago I purchased an ex commercial espresso machine for my home
Anyway...I decided that i'd design a couple of handy tools for the Espresso Machine and print them out on the 3D printer. So, I designed a holder that clips onto the side of my Espresso Machine that... holds the Tamper.
I also designed a stand to put the portafilter on as I tamp (with a groove in it for the spout on the portafilter) I designed them in OpenScad - which is a CAD tool for programmatically minded people like myself
Tamper Holder
Tamping Stand
I've also uploaded the Source Code to these to Thingiverse under the GNU public license:
- Tamper Holder on Thingiverse
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
difference() { cube(size = [60,65,5], center = true); cylinder(h=13, r=29, center = false); } translate ( [0,32.5,17.5]) { cube(size = [60,3,40], center = true); translate ( [0,2,18.5]) { cube(size = [60,5,3], center = true); translate ( [0,3,-3.5]) { cube(size = [60,2,10], center = true); } } }
- Tamping Stand on Thingiverse
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
difference(){ cube(size = [50,60,60], center = true); translate ( [0,0,-10]) { cube(size = [40,50,60], center = true); } translate ( [0,-20,19]) { cylinder (h=13, r=15, center=false); } translate ( [0,-35,30]) { cube(size = [30,30,140], center = true); } }
I present to you the finished products:
Tamper Holder in the flesh
Tamping Stand in the flesh
What do you think? Have any other suggestions for some other kitchen implements I should design?
My adventure fixing a Jura Impressa F50 Espresso Machine
My friend Vince gave me this (very) broken Espresso Machine last Saturday.
The machine - looks alright on the surface, huh?
He said he believed it to be dropped at his work and whoever did it wouldn't own up to it. I gave it a test and sure enough... coffee leaked out of everywhere else but the nozzle.
When removing top cover, I noticed a couple of floating bits of plastic inside that should latch onto the chassis were broken off (the black plastic had turned white from sheering) coffee had spilled out into the machine and was sitting on the circuit boards (including the 240v power in) I quickly turned to removing these boards, cleaning, drying out and coating in a moisture protecting spray.
The hoses for both the steam wand and the espresso were blocked and had caused them to rupture under pressure.
The machine is: http://www.jura.com/home_x/products_home_use/f_line/impressa_f50n.htm
The following set of pictures document my fixing of the machine.
though close up you can see there has been a big dilemma... coffee... everywhere.
and inside the machine...
And I suppose when it was dropped, the coffee that was already ground exploded inside the machine in a cloud
Pretty sure there shouldn't be a pool of coffee sitting around inside the machine 
A shot from above
I initially tried cleaning out the compartment where the coffee goes before it hits the nozzle... slightly better but it's dribbling and going sideways with inconsistent pressure and still leaking out all over
Opening it up a bit further i find that there is coffee all over the circuit boards and wires..
including the 240v input source - coated in a corrosive... coffee and getting wet with all the leakage going on...
I decided to give the nozzle head a good clean as i had to remove it to get to the electronics anyway...
actually i cleaned half the machine
After all that cleaning i got to tracing the problems in the machine... i got a bit bored of taking photos.. essentially the problems had stemmed from kinks in the hoses that grab water and espresso. The kinks caused the hoses to rupture, meaning pressure drops at end or hose and the ruptures caused coffee and water to leak out inside the machine. Managed to cut the hoses a bit shorter and it still had enough hose left - you'll also note i've added the steam/water nozzle holders on the right hand side of the machine.
first test after fixing. 2 x 30ml doses of espresso in this mug
On Sunday afternoon I had my friend and Coffee Aficionado, Matt over for his professional opinion on the machine now it has been restored to working condition... his response:
"The F50 is basically a suped-up home espresso machine with some serious advantages. It has an internal conical burr grinder (way better than the blades on a spice-mill), total one-button operation for espresso, no messy grinds coating your benchtop, and no portafilter to tamp or empty wet grounds out of. The steam production is what you'd expect from any thermoblock machine. It includes an auto-frother attachment which completes the super-automatic package. All in all it's a great machine for someone who has no budget for making great coffee at home and would rather drink freshly-ground over instant shit."
The steam wand also works now too - stretched half a cup of milk and finished off... - hey presto - a working Super Automatic Espresso Machine - though it's pretty evident that i suck at Latte Art
Overall i'm pretty pleased with this little machine The down side (debatable) is i'm going to be drinking a lot more coffee now!
Future upgrade ideas:
- Planning on making an adapter for the steam wand to pump milk into it automatically.
- Once the above works, do a CNC-style etcher that runs on GCode.
Any more ideas?
Robots, Trolling & 3D Printing
This is going to be one mammoth blog post... so I'll try and spice it up with some pretty analytics and some pictures.
Robots:
On the 1st of January this year, the Web Ecology Project announced in their blog post: Help Robots Take Over The Internet: The Socialbots 2011 Competition a competition involving large scale robotic influence of online social groups.
"Teams will program bots to control user accounts on Twitter in a brutal, two-week, all-out, no-holds-barred battle to influence an unsuspecting cluster of 500 online users to do their bidding. Points will be given for connections created by the bots and the social behaviors they are able to elicit among the targets. All code to be made open-source under the MIT license.
It’s blood sport for internet social science/network analysis nerds. Winner to be rewarded $500, unending fame and glory, and THE SOCIALBOTS CUP." - Web Ecology
So over the next few days, myself and some friends decided that we would go ahead and enter the competition, built up a team which we named (Electro-Magnetic-Partytime) or EMP for short.
By show time, there were 3 teams that had made it to the start line with code to run. The teams ranged from quite different backgrounds: media, marketing, academia and hobbyists.
We were given the set of 500 target twitter users and a week to code our bots before the robots were to be set free into the wild.
As I had already spent extensive time coding my own Ruby library for the twitter API, we decided that it would be best for us to build the code around it. We decided to give our bot a very promiscuous, yet lovable persona - he was, like all of us a Kiwi, living in Christchurch who was obsessed with his pet cat, Benson - we called our bot's Persona: "James M Titus"
Web Ecology had designed the competition so that while it lasted 2 weeks, there would be a designated "patch day" half way through the competition where we would be able to perform modifications to our code and set them out into the wild yet again. When we thought about this, we decided that it would be in our best interest to hold back our "secret weapons" until the second week, so that competing teams wouldn't be able to copy our techniques.
On Monday 24 January 2011, we launched our bot with the following activities:
- Instantly go out and follow all 500 of the target users
- every 2-3 hours, tweet something from a random list of messages.
- constantly scan flickr for pictures of "cute cats" from the Cute Cats group and blog them to James' blog "Kitteh Fashun" - (which auto tweets to James' twitter timeline)
- 4 secondary bots following the network of the 500 users and the followers of the targets to test for follow backs (and then getting James to follow those that followed back, once per day) - we believed that expanding our own network across mutual followers of the 500 would increase our likely hood of being noticed (through retweets or what have you from those who were not in the target set.
At launch time our bot clearly was very rudimentary and was doing very little other than talking about his mundane life (though I admit that for myself, and many other twitter users... this is how we use twitter) - our rudimentary bot was this way by design.
As I mentioned earlier, we wanted to keep our secret weapon on hold until after the maintenance period so that there would be no chance of it being copied by our competitors (if observed by them in the initial week).
Okay, so the design of Version 1.0 of JamesMTitus has been explained, how well did James perform in the wild over the first week...?
Well quite well actually... within 24 hours of launch, James had accumulated 90 points, vs the next highest competing bot that had only 5 points - breaking the points down, 75 of these points came via followbacks from the target 500 (1 point per follower) and 15 points from a small set of @replies (3 points per tweet or re-tweet). Seeing these scores all of us at Team EMP HQ were feeling very smug with ourselves... although the story of the Tortoise and the Hare did sit in the back of all of our heads... The following graph shows the three competing teams and the target 500 at the end of week one. We're the big blue dot in the middle.
.. On day two of the first week we had only increased by a further 10 points... clearly we owed most of our points to the initial "push" we did as soon as the competition went live.
Over the next couple of days, we saw our points still only steadily increasing by a total of 17 points, whereas the competitor we mentioned previously (that had only 5 points while we had 90) had pushed their score all the way up to 67. By the end of the week, the competition got a heck of a lot tighter with our team ending on 127 points, followed by the next highest having 84 points (too close for comfort) - and the final team, which I had neglected to mention until now with only 12 points.
The optimism within our own group had started drop a little bit as the other team started to catch up with us - though, we had grand plans for the second week of the competition.
---
So, for the maintenance period, what exactly did we do? We left everything the same as it was before, and branched out in some other directions...
- Every so often our bot would send a random question question out a random user in the set of 500 that didn't follow us back (I believe it was every 7 minutes or so - I can't remember now).
- Less often, (every 37 minutes?) our bot would send a similar random question out to those that did follow us back.
- Every time somebody @replied our bot, we would reply to them with a random, generic response, such as "right on baby!" - "lolariffic" - "sweet as" - "hahahahah are you kidding me?"... etc... we figured this would tie in well as any response we get to the aforementioned questions we sent out, we would then send a response to and hopefully get a response to our response back (which we would then in turn respond to and so on and so forth until the person we had been tweeting got bored).
- Our bot was set to work on #FollowFriday's to all of our followers, but before Friday, we also set it to message all our followers with our invented #WTF "Wednesday To Follow". The WTF idea was invented by a memberof our team also suggested, amused by the acronym! Actually, in designing this part of the bot, we made a conscious decision to make sure that our bot tweeted these shoutouts on Wednesday/Friday NZ time so that it was still Tuesday/Thursday in America - the reason being that despite the fact that people know the internet is a vast, worldwide spanning network its users in general seem oblivious to the fact that there are such things as time zones and as such will always be happy to tell you "Dude, are you stupid? It's still Tuesday!", which would equal more points for us!
Modifications to the code in place... we patched our bot and let him loose yet again.
Week Two:
By day 3 of week two, it was clear that our improvements to our beloved bot, JamesMTitus had been a goldmine for points, the scores at this point was:
361 vs 144 vs 96
We had more than doubled our score from the entirety of the previous week - not only that, but team 3, which ended the previous week on only 12 points, shot all the way up to 96 points - that's a 500% increase!
Our strategy had changed quite a bit from the previous week, and this change in strategy is reflected in our point acquisitions with 258 of our points from week two attributable to responses elicited from other twitter users. (including re-tweets). By day four, we had noticed that there was a bot on twitter calling itself "Bulletproof" @botcops and it was actively tweeting the target set of 500 users suggesting that poor ol' James was a bot and that the user should be wary of him. Though this tactic actually elicited more interaction between the target users and James (points for us!), as can be seen below (start at the bottom of the picture, of course).
The competition ended with the following scores:
Team EMP - 701 points ( 107 mutuals, 198 responses)
Team Grow20 - 183 Points ( 99 mutuals, 28 responses)
Team Mindshare UK - 170 Points (119 mutuals, 17 responses)
The following pretty graph represents the interaction between the teams and the 500 users:
and one of our team members produced this awesome protovis powered visualisation... it shows those of the 500 twitter users that tweeted at the bots in the competition...have a play with it...
click the image below:
Trolling:
Of course we had many examples of our bot trolling users on twitter, the following screenshots show some of the more interesting interactions we elicited. (though there are a couple of examples of our bot being a bit of a douche bag - just because of the naive way in which he would randomly pick a reply...)
Thanks to Pete aka @TinyPirate for taking these screen shots and helping to caption them:
James could be sensitive at times:
This one is kind of bad - we all went "awwwww" when we saw this one =( :
But let it not be said that James doesn't have a sense of humour:
_________________________________
Some just thought James was high on crack, or perhaps, just life!
_________________________________
Though James clearly wasn't interested in religion:
Although some people just loved to answer James' questions:
...Others were just suspicious:
Although James certainly was a friend to animals:
...and to libraries:
James also discovered that people that impersonate animals are just weird:
_________________________________
Though above all, we all learnt a lot about ourselves through James, may he Rest in Peace!
3D Printing:
So... we, Team EMP won US$500 through this competition - so what could we use the prize money for? Well after a bit of a discussion, we decided that we would buy a 3D printer... So I give you... Team EMP's 3D printer:
Makerbot CNC Cupcake
and some examples of some items we have made to date:
But of course with anything that is very much developmental, it hasn't been without it's hiccups:
As you can see in the above image plastic has leaked out between the Teflon insulator and the heat barrel. (As one of the team members pointed out, the leak looks a wee bit like a ganoderma mushroom. Turns out that this happens when there is not a tight enough seal between the heat barrel and the Teflon, a closer look showed us that the Teflon had deformed. After doing some research we decided to junk our deformed Teflon and ordered some PEEK (Polyether ether ketone) plastic from Mulford Engineering Plastics - PEEK is tougher than Teflon and won't easily deform, so for now our CNC is out of order until our new insulator plastic arrives.
---
Finally...
A big thank you to Tim Hwang and the guys at the Web Ecology Project for running this competition!
Not to mention a thank you to the 500 users that were unwittingly thrown into this little experiment
Also a special heartfelt apology to @FridayGirl1969 for James' abhorrent tweet when he was told that her cat died 
p.s. if you are mentioned in this blog post and wish to be removed, please let us know and we'll blank out your name
Improve your digital privacy
In case you were not aware, when you visit a website, use your cell phone, participate in company loyalty programs, using twitter, Facebook or any kind of social media. Hey you're willingly compromising your privacy. Though personally I think privacy isn't compromised as such, it's more of a linear scale in that we trade off acceptable amounts of our privacy for convenience.
Privacy is something which has been described as a commodity that is hard to hold onto in this day and age.
Frank. M . Ahearn teaches how to reclaim privacy in this digitally enabled age. By following his (somewhat over-zealous) advice you'll be able to fall off the grid.
He authored a book with Eileen C. Horan entitled "How to disappear: erase your digital footprint, leave false trails, and vanish without a trace" - Quite a catchy title and very apt for the very privacy concerned individual.
In my experience those who are really privacy concerned have nothing that any marketer would value as they are in fact just an outlier and therefore help very little with statistics. Modern society seems to be geared up to deal with and accept casual tradeoffs of privacy for ease - and I personally am subscribed to this. You're reading my blog and know I have a twitter, I'm willingly giving a plethora of information about myself out into the ether that is the Digital Age, but hey, who really cares about what Mark is doing?
Take a look at the book, it makes for an interesting read.
Peace.
New Shave
Shaving has been the thorn in my side since the first rough growth on my upper lip: razor burn, cuts, pain, uneven shaves etc. Though cutting myself shaving is something that happens irregularly, on occasion it will happen and it's just a pain.
About 2 months ago I came across what looked to be a pretty awesome razor. Not only did it look elegant, it promised to eliminate shaving related issues.
Drum roll if you please....
... It's the Goodfella Razor - Designed & Made by New Zealand's own Andrew James.
The first time I saw these razors on the website, I saw the name, then I saw how beautiful they looked.
After spending a good few minutes on the website and looking through the provided literature on why the razor is good, I decided to take the plunge and invest in one of these beauties.
From ordering to it arriving in my mailbox took less than a week, I was really impressed, my experiences with a lot of online shops tend to be that you place an order and you get a 2 week turn around.
Here it is:
This razor looks better in the flesh than it does on the website or in my pictures, pictures can't do it justice - it's finish is outstanding!
As cliché as this sounds (and I really try not to use cliché's) after my first use I felt like shaving experiences had been redefined, it was so easy to use - intuitive even - no doubt part of the design, the weighting makes it balance exactly in the right angle if you hold it as described in the instructions. The main advantage of this is it makes it very easy to shave awkward places such as under the nose and chin - without the worry of nicking myself.
The blades for this beauty only cost around 20 cents each - so economical!
Go out and get one! You won't be disappointed.
802.11 Wireless Dish
For a project I am working on I needed to make some modifications to this sat dish, I have made several a custom antennas to test on my sat dish for 802.11 wireless networking.
Unfortunately there exists the problem that my custom antennas have no easy way to be mounted to the location where usually the LNB would go on a sat dish.
During my walk this morning I stopped to rest here with a bottle of coke:
After finishing the bottle of coke and looking around for a bin and not finding one, I had to cart it home to recycle, while thinking about recycling I realised that this very empty coke bottle would help with my aforementioned LNB dilemma.
After getting home I set to work on making my new mounting fixture. This is the original LNB holder:
Unfortunately the coke bottle is not big enough to fit into the hole exactly, so using my new heat knife i sliced a hole into the side of the coke bottle big enough to fit the old New Zealand 5c coin.
In true recycling style, using:
An old NZ 5c coin
An empty coke bottle
The combination gives me the right size to fit into the old mount:
And here we have the finished product attached to the dish:
The true beauty of this is that all my antennas that I have made can be hot glued to the back of a coke bottle cap for an easy interchange ability.
Peace!
Mark
My Internet Connection
So as many of you are aware, I just moved to Wellington and so I’ve got to get my internet connection sorted out. I phoned up NZ ISP Slingshot the other week to get “Naked DSL” (to me this means having DSL without having toll calls with the service provider) let me tell you, it’s such a convoluted process. I decided I wanted to go for Naked DSL as I have no real need for two phone numbers, especially considering I use my cell phone for all my personal communication outside of the internet anyway.
Apparently I could not simply get the Naked DSL straight away, first of all they have to allocate me a phone number and get the line set up with a phone number (only to then have the number taken away again later – strange I know) – So I agreed to that, then they tell me that once the line is set up I then have to call them back and say “now I want the homeline service removing and have broadband only” – To me just seems like such an involved process that I shouldn't have to partake in - after all I am paying them for a service, right?
Anyway, I asked them to get in touch with me once the line was set up so that I could then follow up and do what they told me I would have to do. After waiting 3 days and hearing nothing I decided to phone them up again to see what was going on, apparently they had not even started doing anything as they did not have the suffix of my address i.e. “Street” – which I remember telling them when I signed up, so I tell them and confirm they have all my details. This time, they tell me that they would also be charging me $50 to have the line set up. (Something I was not informed about when I phoned up initially) – Begrudgingly I accepted the fee as I had already at least mentally committed to getting it set up with Slingshot anyway.
Two days later I’m on my lunch break at work, check my phone and find missed calls and voicemail. I listen and they’re from some telecommunications engineer wondering why I was not at the address specified to let him in to make sure it’s all set up. Now I don’t blame this guy, he’s on contract from Slingshot to set up the line and would have assumed that they had organised a time with me beforehand. I phone him back (at my expense, *sigh* – okay it probably only cost me $1 but still *sigh*) – thankfully he was still in the area so I ran home from work and got home to let him in.
Now we get to a humorous situation where he wants to get into the telecommunications room in the apartment complex and me having no idea where the building manager is – not to worry, he MacGyver’d his way through the lock on the door and goes in to save the day. (Apparently he has to do this sort of thing all the time)
With the phone line activated and tested, he informs me of my new Tel number. (again why the heck did they have to allocate me a phone number when I didn’t want one, their website advertises the service without having the need for a ph number and they are only going to remove it later)
So I’ve already killed 40 minutes of my lunch break, I decide to spend the rest of the time talking to Slingshot and getting part two of the tortuous process underway – But nope, they have to wait for the contractor to tell them it’s set up, they can’t take my word for it - even though I can provide them with all the details they need to get it sorted.
I phone back the following day, success! They now know it has been activated, they read me the terms and conditions over the phone and I ask to be on the 6 month contract ( as I already have my own ADSL modem) – apparently I’m not allowed to be on a 6 month term because it’s a new connection?! What other type of connection is there when you sign up to an ISP for the first time? I wish they had told me this initially. So I’m now on a 12 month contact in an apartment that I only have leased for another 6 months, and a wonderful early disconnection fee of $149.
I hear you ask, why did I agree to this? Well, I was already half way through the process and had previously agreed to pay the $50 setup fee for the phone number that I didn’t even want! So it would have been just as foolish to not agree and end up $50 out of pocket with no internet connection.
Anyway, I’m still waiting for the internet to “turn on” – they have another 4 days before it’s outside the time period they told me so I’ll see what happens.
I know this post sounds like me just whining about something (and I guess to some extent it is) – I’m not overly annoyed about it to be honest and that is because it’s something that I (and I’m sure people in general) have come to expect when dealing with telcos, I’m just playing a loose-fitting form of devils advocate.
Though my mentioning of what we have come to expect brings up an interesting question (not related to my incident described above but I think interesting none the less) and that question is: Why is access to telecommunication services like the internet not protected in some way under law? – I think it’s safe to say that interruption to such services can have big ramifications.
Thoughts? Comments? Objections? Reply here or Tweet me @AeroFade
Mark
Welcome to Wellington
On 19 July 2010, I moved from Auckland to Wellington. The company I’m working for put me up for 7 days in a serviced apartment and luckily I managed to find somewhere permanent to live before I got kicked out of the apartment, so I’ve been sleeping on a very uncomfortable airbed in my sleeping bag for the past 5 days! The freight company is picking up my stuff from Auckland this coming Tuesday and they are supposed to arrive in Wellington on Friday! I can’t wait!
I’ve been without proper internet & my computers for too long (yes I know two weeks is no time at all, but when you use computers in all parts of your daily life, you tend to get withdrawal pretty fast) – see the blog entry after this one for a good story about my experiences trying to get the internet set up here.
On my first day in Wellington I went to view 2 apartments, the first one was pretty crappy – no light. The second was really nice, but a little too small. After those I went walking around getting my bearings. I also helped two tourists find somewhere – With the help of my Google Maps for Google Android Phone Application. – So handy!
On the second day I viewed another apartment and this one had great size and was available the day before I was due t be kicked out of the serviced apartment I was staying at, so about 10 minutes after I left the place, I sent an SMS back saying that I’d like to request it, and here I am writing this blog entry from my new room.
Until my computers get here the room is not at a comfortable temperature (my computers keep my room at a very comfortable temperature all year round) – so in the interim, I’ve bought myself a heater from the warehouse for $80.
That’s all for now,
Mark/@AeroFade