So I figured we’d go out with a bang here, on Day 30, and shoot for the first new boomerang since the late 90s. Our story today is one of nostalgia, careful work, and some clever handcraft. Alas, it has a bittersweet ending.

Step 1: Outline

One of the most successful designs from my former career was a straightforward L-shape, slightly less than 90 degrees. So that’s what I sketched out on a quarter-inch piece of white pine about 18 inches wide. (I did not find any suitable plywood in my dad’s shop, but as we’ll see, I should have looked harder.)

Step 2: Roughing Out the Blank

Been a while since I handled a bandsaw, but the feel for it came back pretty quickly and we had a nice-looking blank, ready for shaping on the belt sander, then by hand with whatever tools were close by:

Step 3: Prep for Shaping

When I got to this step, I recalled that back in 8th grade, I had a clever jig that sat in a rotating vice so that I could support the thin blades of the boomerangs parallel to the floor for shaping. So replicating something like that took some thinking. I came up with a serviceable jig that used a framing square to brace the blank. Worked pretty well:

Step 4: Shaping, Stumbling Block

I knew that working with a thin board would be risky. Plywood is considerably stronger at these thicknesses on account of the layers of glue, and the alternating grain of the veneers. Unfortunately, shaping the airfoils on each boomerang “wing” requires hacking away at the wood for a while, and given the orientation of the blank, I was pushing with a jagged metal file with the grain. And as I feared, the wing-in-progress snapped cleanly right along the grain:

Coda

It’s certainly frustrating when a project goes awry, and I didn’t have the time or additional materials to try again today. But the process was relaxing and surprisingly easy to get back into after more than a decade. So while this is the last of #30daysofcreativity, I’m not a bit sad completing this project will have to wait for another day.

This is the first eBook that I’ve read cover-to-cover. The publishers say that they want the books to be short enough to digest on a plane flight from New York to Chicago. (More on their innovative publishing model here.) Their claim holds up. I plowed through this on my iPad before even getting out of bed for coffee one morning. When I was done, I understood all the important elements of HTML5 that distinguish it from previous web standards. But more than that, I was entertained. Keith is a smart designer/developer and a wit to boot. This is the first technical book on web technologies that has made me chuckle as I read. Here is is discussing the canvas tag, used for real-time vector drawing within the browser window:

One of the first flagship demonstrations of the power of canvas came from Mozilla Labs. The Bespin application (https://bespin.mozilla.com) is a code editor that runs in the browser (fig 3.03).

It is very powerful. It is very impressive. It is also a perfect example of what not to do with canvas.

Since I’ve been teaching for the past year, rather than keeping up with web development, this was a fantastic way to catch up in very little time.

View all my reviews on Goodreads.com

It has no clip, no strap, no hook of an kind. Nike of course sells shoes with a special pocket for the sensor, but if you’ve got another brand of shoes, you’re left with stuffing the chip into your laces. And from there, it falls out onto the ground, rendering run-tracking data into stationary-point tracking data.

This of course, is a problem for duct tape.

On the one hand, you could just tape the sensor to your heel. On the other hand, having a removable pouch that attached to your laces would be nice too. So I made the latter:

And of course, the running around NC is pretty nice. Not really related to the project, but here are the mountains from the front porch, at dusk:

Update (6/27)

Here’s the chip holder ready for running action. Report is that is worked great today:

Here is where we started:

So I drew up some quick plans:

And after an afternoon of work, some breaks, a lot of remeasuring and cutting, and help from several family members, we arrived at today’s creation:

One of the first things I tell kids to do when they start a new text document is to save it with their name in the title in an appropriate folder I’ve created. “Okay great, now save it,” I say. “How do I do that?” they ask. “You hit the ‘save’ button up at the top,” I say.

But that save button doesn’t say “save” on it anywhere. Instead, it has a tiny, almost indecipherable and pixelated image of a relic of computational history that, in semiotic-speak, “points” to the idea of saving a file to disc. In short, they don’t know what button I’m talking about so I have to point (physically) to it:

The antecedent these icons refer to is something I haven’t used since 2001 at the most recent. And that’s just when I’m pretty sure I still had access to a machine that even had a floppy drive. So here’s the question: will this artifact remain a part of computer culture, or will designers gravitate towards another image, whatever that may be, that says “save”?

That is all.

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(I totally tweeted this last night, so it was on time.)