Do you have an old Pez dispenser?

I’m in the process of designing a disc magazine for the open source disc shooter.  Ideally, I would like it to have a snap-together design and use rubber bands where possible.  However, it occurs to me that any standard or readily available piece of hardware could be useful too.  To that end, I thought that a Pez dispenser might operate in a fashion very similar to what I require for a disc magazine.

However, I don’t recall ever taking apart a Pez dispenser to examine the spring inside.  Given the length of a Pez dispenser and the thinness of the discs I’m using, this spring could very well be ideal.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a Pez dispenser handy.  I’ve searched Google and Flickr for people having looked inside the dispenser, but haven’t had any luck.

So!  Do you have an old Pez dispenser?  Would you mind destroying it, examining, photographing, and posting details about it?

Design idea – printable calipers

There are plenty of lasercut calipers on Thingiverse.  I suppose the problem with a 3D printable caliper is getting the accuracy down.

However, why not take the accuracy out of the equation?  It should be simple enough to create a printable little caliper that has a thin slot for inserting a printable paper ruler.  The easiest way to achieve the thin slot would be to make the calipers out of two separate pieces that fit together.   Then the calipers could be designed to have a little window for viewing the sliding edge of the calipers against the paper ruler.

Yes, you could print one of the business card ones on cardstock, but why not just print a durable plastic one if you can?

ProfileMaker – Crippled, but back…

At least for the time being.  :)

I’m guessing that only about 10% of ProfileMaker users were using the complete profile feature.  For those of you who didn’t use it, this feature would use your inputs to create an entire Skeinforge profile, zip the whole thing, and e-mail it to you. 1  However, this 10% use case was probably accounting for a huge portion of the server load.

I’ve disabled the e-mail-a-profile feature to see if this will help.  Let’s cross our fingers and hope!  As a friend of mine always says, these are good problems to have.

  1. Pretty convenient, really. [↩]

Alas, poor ProfileMaker, I knew you well…

I launched ProfileMaker on March 20, 2011.  After serving up more than 3500 awesome Skeinforge profiles, my website hosting company has actually started to complain that I’m using too much of the shared hosting environment’s resources.  As a result, I’m going to have to disable temporarily and potentially discontinue ProfileMaker.

I suspect it is the Skeinforge profile creation feature that has caused the most trouble.  Every time this feature it used, it creates a temporary file and incorporates it into a full Skeinforge profile, which is then ZIP’ed for e-mail delivery.  It’s possible that disabling this one feature may dramatically reduce my site’s server load.

And afternoons that make me sleepy

Cigarettes, and carrot juice
And get yourself a new tattoo
For those sleeveless days of June

I’m sitting on the Cafè Xeno’s steps
With a book I haven’t started yet,
Watching all the girls walk by…

Could I take you out?
I’ll be yours without a doubt
On that Big Dipper

And if the sound of this it frightens you,
We could play it real cool
And act somewhat indifferent

And hey June, why’d you have to come,
Why’d you have to come around, so soon?
I wasn’t ready for all this nature
The terrible green green grass
And violent blooms of flowered dresses
And afternoons that make me sleepy

But we could wait awhile
Before we push that dull turnstile
Into the passage

The thousands they have tread
And others sometimes fled
Before the turn came

And we could wait our lives
Before a chance arrives
Before the passage

From the top you can see Monterey
Or think about San Jose
Though I know it`s not that pleasant

hey Jim, Kerouac
(The brother of the famous Jack),
Or so he likes to say.
Lucky bastard

He’s sitting on the cafe Xeno’s steps
With a girl I’m not over yet
Watching all the world go by

“Boy you’re looking bad
Did I make you feel that sad?
I’m honestly flattered.”

But if she asks me out,
I’ll be hers without a doubt
On that Big Dipper

Cigarettes, and carrot juice
And get yourself a new tattoo
For those sleeveless days of June…

I’m sitting on the Cafè Xeno’s steps…
I haven’t got the courage yet
I haven’t got the courage yet
I haven’t got the courage yet.

Cracker – Big Diper

Sooo… what’s going on with you?

Today:

  • I’ve got a meeting out in Monterey today at 10:00AM and then I have to swing by San Jose back to the office.  Just the driving alone will end up eating most of my day.  I’m hoping to be able to get back to the office by 4-5:00PM.
  • Day 2 of my diet.  My diet basically consists of not eating like a pig and monitoring what I eat using FitDay.com.  It’s basically a free online food diary where you enter the food you’ve eaten and your weight and it tallies the calories, fat/protein/carbs, and gives you all kinds of nifty graphs.  Finding the food can sometimes be an adventure, but overall it’s quite easy.  I first used the site about six or so years ago and every time I’ve stuck with it longer than about two weeks, it’s helped me lose weight.  The problem for me is that right up until the one or two week mark I’m always hungry.  :)
  • Eating a big bowl of oatmeal with raisins and honey right now.  I’ll grab some coffee on the way down to Monterey.  I’ve got a bunch of music burned to an MP3 disc for the trip and will probably end up listening to NPR most of the way.

Okay, go go go!