Studio One: Higgins Design: Modular Bush House

Queensland designer Kevin Higgins has produced a modular prefabricated and easily transportable Bush House titled 'Studio One'.

The passively cooled Studio One creates an elegant light filled space that seems to float above the forest floor. This is architecture that imposes a minimal impact on the environment both in terms of installation and use.

Studio One: Modular Bush House

Envisioned as artists retreat attuned to the Australian climate the Studio was designed and created in the Eumundi hinterland of Queensland's Sunshine Coast. The Studio is designed to accommodate one or two people in tropical comfort; taking just one day to erect and if needed, a day to disassemble to transport to another location. The Studio can be bought as a 'build to lock-up and first-fix' or in kit form for self-assembly.

Throughout his career Higgins has adapted Japanese post-and-beam construction methods to produce lovingly crafted joinery in Australian hardwood, balancing the use of both natural and manufactured materials to make dwellings in perfect tune with the Australian climate.

Getting a tablet into my cat...

So how do I get my cat to take his worm tablets! We've tried wrapping the tablet in ham, in smoked salmon, hiding it in steak, to no avail. Leo deftly eats around the offending article or discovers it in his mouth and carefully spits it out, again and again.

I feel the only choice is the grab and insert technique, they way the Vet does it so seamlessly where the cat seems almost willing, grab, spread the jaw and place the pill at the back of his throat. Like so.

Just so, but first, let's see what the Internet says... Give a cat a pill

Sourcing a prism for a camera lucida

So this little exercise records my attempts at recreating a camera lucida for a budding artist. I was inspired to do this after briefly sponsoring the NeoLucida kickstarter project (link). Unfortunately the price point for shipment to Europe was quite high; shipping costs accounting for a large part. But the idea stayed and so I figured I could source the central element locally. A small glass prism. Sounds simple (that's what Oisin said)... The essential design elements as below (from Wikipedia)

Thus began a small voyage of discovery as I sought to uncover who, in Ireland, has the skills and tools, to work with glass.

Some remaining possibilities:

• Blackrock Glass, a local glassier known for custom cutting glass shelves and the like (link) 
• Jerpoint Glass, an artisan glass studio in Kilkenny (link)
• Karl Harron Studio in Strangford (link)
• The Glass Society of Ireland (link)
• and perhaps other artisans through Craft Ireland (link)

Out of consideration.

• Dublin Crystal (link)? No, they source their stock from international suppliers, they only cut and engrave in Dublin.
• Heritage Crystal in Waterford (link)? Similar story except they do blow glass and cut it into crystal but the production director wasn't interested in doing anything bespoke like this.
• Scholer Crystal from Austria? One of Europe's biggest contract crystal products producers (link) but they don't really do bespoke.

Updating the minecraft.jar file on a Mac

So the Minecraft files on a Mac are stored in

~/Library/Application Support/minecraft/ 

In the command sequence below you can see the space " " in Application Support is actually present but represented by the forward slash escape sequence to force the space to be read in at the command line).

An easy way to get there is, from the Finder > Go > Go to folder; and enter "/Users/myname/Library/Application Support/minecraft/bin".
Another way is to use the Finder shortcut "cmd+shift+G", and enter "/Users/myname/Library/Application Support/minecraft/bin".

Anyway, the above gets you to the installation folder.

To install the minecraftforge mod pack access the latest .jar and launch it. The new installer finds your Minecraft files and unpacks/downloads the files to the right location.

The following notes applied to pre-1.5.2 Minecraft...

cd ~/Desktop
mkdir ADD_MOD_FILES_HERE
cd ADD_MOD_FILES_HERE
jar xf ~/Library/Application\ Support/minecraft/bin/minecraft.jar
rm META-INF/MOJANG_C.*
ADD_MOD_FILES_HERE $
jar uf ~/Library/Application\ Support/minecraft/bin/minecraft.jar *

Pointers:
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/jar/update.html
http://minecraftformac.tumblr.com/post/19686390830/unjarrejar

Home energy saving measures.

Our annual usage 2017-18:
3,172 kWh - electricity from 8-Jun-2017 to 16-Jun-2018
7,049 kWh - gas from 8-Jun-2017 to 16-Jun-2018 (635m3 x 11.1 conversion factor)

Compared to a typical national market estimate for an average household of 5,300kWh electricity and 13,800kWh (source: bonkers.ie)

Our annual usage 2015-16:
3,024 kWh - electricity from 23-Jul-2015 to 21-Jul-2016
6,100 kWh - gas from 22-Dec-2015 to 22-Dec-2016


Use the SEAI BEH self assessment survey (link). Result: No recommendations. The house already has:

• Solar hot water heating for hot water cylinder.
• High efficiency condensing gas boiler system for primary heating and hot water.
• > 4 inches of glass fibre ceiling insulation in the attic.
• Mixed Solid Wall and Hollow Block and Timber Frame construction.

Checklist the SEAI credits list (pdf file, link).

Own plan as follows:

• Replace halogen low voltage MR16 bulbs/transformers with GU10 high efficiency LED bulbs on direct 240v supply.
• Fit additional ceiling insulation in the attic.
• Complete upgrade of windows and front door (street side, North facing).
• Fit shutter blinds to internal window frames.
• Computer logging of internal temperature, electricity supply, weather station data.
• Conduct thermal survey of the house.

Our goal, perhaps unrealisable, is to get near the Passivhaus requirement for energy-consumption of 120 W/m²/K.

References:
Passive House on Wikipedia (link)
W/m²/K is Watts per square metre per kelvin; see Wikipedia on thermal transmittance (link)

Pi Projects (generally no soldering iron required)

The Register has done its homework and come up with some of the easy Raspberry Pi construction projects.

• Coffee table arcade game
• LAMP server (that is Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP, and server as in a computer server)
• Pi/Kindle Chimera
• Pi Netbook
• Info kiosk info projector
• Weather station
• Cloud server
• Pi scales
• Pi-BX

The projects are summarised on www.theregister.co.uk.

Python and Minecraft on the pi.

Right, first for a copy of Minecraft: Pi Edition visit pi.minecraft.net/. And background information on Minecraft on the raspberry pi; see www.raspberrypi.org).

Copy the file (e.g. minecraft-pi-0.1.1.tar.gz) into your home directory.
Expand it; I used the tar -xvf command to unpack the gzipped and tarred up distribution.

tar -xvf minecraft-pi-0.1.1.tar.gz
cd mcpi
./minecraft-pi

And this starts Minecraft from the xterm.
At this point you can play Minecraft as you would expect on any conventional computer.

Now for the spice; using Python to send commands to directly to Minecraft, taking command of or interacting with the environment.

Well Python comes with the Raspbian “wheezy” Linux distribution for pi. It's already there waiting for me.
Following instructions from numerous other early explorers (best and most interesting for beginners I judge to be that by prmrytchr).

From a new xterm and staring in the mcpi directory...

cd api/python/mcpi/

Then start Python, and tell Python to import the minecraft.py functions and connect to my local running Minecraft session. My xterm looked like this.

Python
Python 2.7.1 (r271:86832, Jul 31 2011, 19:30:53)
[GCC 4.2.1 (Based on Apple Inc. build 5658) (LLVM build 2335.15.00)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import minecraft as minecraft
>>> mc = minecraft.Minecraft.create()

The >>> indicates that the Python session is running so now I can type in some of the suggested Python instructions.

>>> mc.postToChat(“Hello, Minecraft!”)

And I see the message display in my running Minecraft game.
I can get the game to report my player position...

>>> mc.player.getPos()

Even if my player is at the spawn point I should probably can use this position (x,y,z) to do stuff. Like this to place a mushroom at the coordinates...

>>> mc.setBlock(x,y,z,40)

Now from Ger a quick command to test set all the numbered block types in sequence.

>>> for i in range(50):
>>> mc.setBlock(i, 53+i, 25, i)

Useful links for further progress
www.minecraftwiki.net beginners guide
www.minecraftwiki.net tutorial
www.stuffaboutcode.com
A maze generator: www.jonasavrin.com

And when you've finished shutdown X to the console then type sudo shutdown