Lots of Projects and Adventures on the Horizon

Pretty soon I will be updating with a post on my fabulous DIY wedding, taking place this coming weekend. My fiancee have been working hard on a celebration that shall be replete with hand-painted birdhouses as centerpieces, yard sale dinnerware, a swingin' crowdsourced band, and all sorts of other goodies.

Following that, we'll be leaving our fair cottage in the country and moving into an apartment in Brooklyn for my first semester at NYU's ITP program. It's a fantastic graduate school, which can name the founders of ethernet and 4square as alumnus, along with professors such as Clay Shirky, and Tom Igoe of Make: Magazine.

Speaking of Make: Magazine, I hope I'll be seeing some of you at the first ever NYC Maker Faire. It's in Flushing Queens right near the Unisphere, and I will be heading up a team of folks to facilitate the construction of a 33 foot wide recycled cardboard "Moonisphere", which will be at roughly the same scale as the unisphere, and coincidentally, at around the same scale distance away! It's going to be a great time and if you come, I'd love if you could pick up a utility knife and a glue gun to help us out.

Between composing video game music and planning for the wedding, I haven't had much time for projects, but here's some eye candy: the media shelf in my house, including DVD, VHS, SA-CD, CD, cassette, vinyl, card games, board games, video games, and lots of odds and ends. We are anti media-discrimination in this house, and utilize all this stuff regularly for our entertainment.

My Studio in the Throes of Music Production

As some of you may know, I am a musician when I'm not being a geek. I played for many years in New York City with lots of different groups, mainly the band Kinetic.

I was recently hired to write and compose music for a video game that's in development, so it was time to convert what is normally my hacker studio into my music studio.

I work fast and messy, so here are some pics of my 20 hour audio tirade. Funny how after all that, you can still see tools and materials poking out of the shadows...

Mighty Cat Scratching Post

I've been a cat owner for a while, and (through research and patience) have found the solution to keeping feline friends from ripping apart my couch.

Half the battle is in giving your cats a sturdy scratching post - nice and tall so they can stretch out, bottom heavy so it won't tip over, and made of something they can dig into, like sisal hemp.

I saw the opportunity to build these when visiting the Tilly Foster Farm in Brewster NY, where they happened to be demoing a host of antique farm equipment engines. One of the exhibits was a working 2 horsepower dragsaw, slicing cookies off a giant tree limb. The owner was letting people take the cookies for free, so I helped myself to two.

These became the bases for my mammoth scratching posts.

First I drilled out and cut a nice big circular hole in the center using my jigsaw.


Then I traced an identical circular piece out of plywood, with which I could attach the actual post (2x4s with the corners cut, then wrapped and stapled with 1/2" sisal rope) with screws. Once done, I drilled some nice beefy screws diagonally into the piece of tree limb to keep it steady, making sure to countersink the screws and fill in all the gaps with my homemade wood filler (screened sawdust and wood glue).


Next I thought up a novel way to make the tops of the post look nice, because they had just the end strand of the sisal stapled to the top - not too aesthetically pleasing and not too pleasant for cats either. So I found a smaller branch that was the same diameter, and cut it to size, making sure to make a crevice for the sisal to sit (first sketched out with a sharpie, then routed out with a spade bit and a rasp bit)




Liked it so much I built another!

Frankenstein Guitar Amplifier Build

I'm moving from the country to the city soon, and have been making a steady attempt to consolidate and downsize beforehand.




I've had several dead and dying guitar amplifiers in my workshop for quite some time, and I had ruminated enough on how I was going to hack them all together into something unique. So, check out the pic and video of it below, and be sure to read the
instructable for some more detail about how this was all done.







Frankenstein Guitar Amp Build - More DIY How To Projects