Cycled over to the U for treatment and scans, taking care not to collide with half-awake students. On the way back, the students streaming out of lectures seemed more animated.
Category: Living
A “de-colonized” meal at Owamni
Walked over to Owamni by the Sioux Chef where Dwight had reserved this window table for an excellent “de-colonized” meal with ingredients restricted to those available to pre-colonial indigenous Americans. The chef has won several James Beard awards at this nationally recognized restaurant.
LEGO machine to align plates stud-side up
Lined up recently introduced large LEGO worm gears as a conveyer for 1×1 plates, much like an Archimedes (water) screw. An unexpected bonus was that the plates were consistently flipped stud-side up. This replaces all my work in recent weeks on pneumatic devices to flip 1×1 plates. Click through for a short video I made today.
A bunch of happy
Dwight brought dahlias home from the Farmers Market, signalling an early start to my birthday season.
Over-engineering a closet
Installed a super-quiet, low-speed fan to ventilate the closet by our front door. Next up: paint the grill to match the wall and design the perfect algorithm to control the fan. I’m considering factors like humidity and temperature inside the closet versus the rest of our home, and whether we’ve been outside, all using existing sensors, plus the weather and time of day. Or, I could just put it on a timer!
Stillwater via rail trails
It was glorious weather for a bike ride on part of the Gateway Trail then the Brown’s Creek Trail to Stillwater. Here we’re cycling back out of Stillwater after stopping for coffee and calories. On the left, the former railroad depot has unevenly morphed into a K-5 charter school. (Dwight took this photo of our friend and me.)
Table service at Lake Harriet
Cycled our favorite loop via Lake Harriet where we stopped for breakfast at Bread & Pickle. Here I’m delivering the always-fresh coffee while breakfast sandwiches were being cooked to order.
A LEGO plate flipper
Successfully prototyped a machine, shown here, that accepts a LEGO 1×1 plate, regardless of whether it’s stud-side up or stud-side down, and spits it back out stud-side up. (Motorized pneumatic valves, an air compressor, and a computer are off-camera.) This afternoon I worked on my next challenge: a feeding mechanism to supply this machine from a queue of randomly oriented plates.
Affirming life at the Dakota
Tonight: dinner and a high-energy evening with Aloe Blacc on his ‘We Stand Together’ tour at the Dakota.
The irony of a Carnegie library
Worked with an adult English language learner in this beautiful Carnegie library as I do most Friday mornings. The library, located in a disadvantaged neighborhood where 38% of residents live below the poverty line, was built with funds from a benefactor who accumulated immense wealth on the backs of working people and presided over the worst labor conflict in American history.