randomhumanity

A better reflector

My first hydroponic system worked fairly well as it was, but one aspect of it that I thought could be improved was the lighting. It was white on the sides, which is reflective enough, but something metallic and shiny would be better. Also it was wooden, badly painted, and just not all that stylish. So, I decided to take another stab at it

One of the things I had considered for the new system I’m building was aluminum reflectors for the lights. I abandoned that idea when I discovered that for that one, the sheets alone would have cost about €160, but I decided to use the idea for the smaller system because I still wanted a chance to work with metal.

I picked up a 250mmx500mm sheet of brilliant aluminum (one side is mirror-like and comes protected by blue plastic), some thin steel bars, some small hooks and some short nuts and bolts from B&Q. The aluminum was about €20, the rest brought it to no more than €30. If you’re building several or building larger fixtures you could definitely do it cheaper with wood and reflective sheeting or paint, but for a small one-off system this is quite economical.

The intention was to bend the steel bars and use them to hold the aluminum in the shape of a parabola, or at least a curved reflector that will send most of the light downwards. I started out by putting holes to match my bolts in one end of each of the steel bars, and another about 230mm down. You will probably need a drill press to do this. Be patient or you’ll wear out your drill bit before the job is done (like I did :S). I curved the bars around a centrepoint between the two holes by pulling them against a fixed object on my workbench. This isn’t very exact, but you should be able to get a curve that is approximately the depth of a bulb and a reasonably close match between the two.

I didn’t actually cut these to length until after I had fitted the aluminum

Next I drilled a bunch of holes in the aluminum. For the bracket holes I actually drilled one side and then curved the aluminum inside the bracket to find the position for the hole on the other side. This is probably unnecessary, you could just find the position of the hole before you bend the bracket. The other holes are to support the actual light fitting (I am just reusing the ones from the previous fixture) and a hook for the chain that will support it.

I reused the light fittings from the previous reflector. All I did was put a hole through the centre of a block of wood and use a cable tie to secure the light fitting to it. The block of wood gives the bulb enough clearance. If I was really clever I’d have made the curve parabolic and used the block of wood to place the bulbs at the focal point, ensuring the maximum possible amount of light headed straight downwards. But no, I just went with a rough curve and the wood I had lying around. The block was glued to the previous reflector, but for this one I used a cable tie through the same hole and the two drilled in the aluminum.

There are more suitable fixtures than this available if you’re not as impatient as I am.

Finally, I screwed some small picture hooks through some holes in the aluminum and into the wood blocks of the light fixtures. This allows the whole thing to be suspended from a length of chain, allowing for easy raising and lowering. It also gave me an opportunity to try out the macro function on my new camera!

Here’s the finished product doing its thing. I don’t have any real action shots yet because I’ve been waiting on some shelves to house this system, but I think this should give you the general idea

I might paint this sucker black to match everything else, but it also looks good as-is.

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I don’t see the argument begin. By the time I look around it’s already in full swing; Or simmering maybe, the rage building but not bubbling over, still a self-conscious clinging, whispering concern, still protecting each others dignity, but I can see that won’t last long. With my headphones on I can’t hear what it’s about, but it looks important. A life or death decision is being made, lines drawn and sides chosen, the big guns dragged out and primed to destroy.

I have the solution: with music pumped to me alone the petty conflicts of the outside world are nothing but a vaguely amusing backdrop to my own thoughts. Life and death decisions don’t concern me. They’re a context with no object, a ridiculous circumstance with no possible connection to my life. As I turn and notice the couple arguing one of my favourite songs comes on, and I rejoice despite their pain. I don’t know who it’s by, but it starts: “I could feel at the time, There was no way of knowing, Fallen leaves in the night, Who can say where they’re blowing…” I move my lips soundlessly and imagine that the woman, looking up at her boyfriend, or husband or whatever, pleading, berating or maybe saying goodbye, is singing right along with me, her troubles forgotten.

The other occupants of the shop huddle at the window, gripping the serated edge of the frame gingerly, and watch the riot. It’s calmed down some now, become concentrated in tense stand-offs with an exoskeletoned enemy, but excited youths still gather missiles and head to the front. The stink of revolution will linger for days, the bitter and cynical mumbling of the citizenry as the burnt out cars are hauled away and the graffitti scrubbed off the artwork.

I do see the screaming start. He says something that I guess has a note of finality, but she holds onto his jacket as he turns towards the window, yells and beats his back until he’s forced to turn to her. I imagine he says “Relax honey, God will protect me,” to which she retorts “Maybe your god plans to make you a martyr, ever think of that?” But probably the screaming and arm-waving that manages to draw stares even from the riot has nothing to do with God. Maybe they’re debating the finer points of Marxist philosophy, this is/isn’t the start of a mass movement, we should/shouldn’t engage in violent insurrection. Maybe he just slept with her sister. Maybe she’s saying “As free as the wind, And hopefully learning, Why the sea on the tide, Has no way of turning…”

I don’t see the riot shifting, but suddenly there’s a rush of bodies past the window. Bloodied heads with red eyes take cover with us, dragging the choking stench of tear-gas behind them, groping for the corners, for protection. The couple forget their differences and cling to each other as the police sweep in with truncheons and shields and pig-faced gas masks. Through my headphones, an anonymous voice sings “More than this, There is nothing.” He steps in front of her, playing protector, but he gets a truncheon to the temple and then she gets the same, both wrestled to the ground, swamped in a wave of navy blue. There’s one in front of me too, black holes for eyes, raising his arm to strike. A sharp sting of static bursts over my headphones, louder and more grating than anything I’ve ever heard; It doesn’t stop when I rip them off.

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Fröl and I were recently given a condo in Riverchapel, SL for free. It’s a small space, and we’re only allowed rez 50 prims, but hey, how much can you really expect for nothing, right? I have yet to meet our landlord Stoner, but apparently his reason for offering these spaces gratis is to generate traffic for the region. Presumably this is the same reason for the idling avatars that are frequently loitering around the region’s more central attractions, the rows and rows of random and questionably valuable stuff for sale. It’s a bit like living above a seedy street market, but I suppose Stoner has to pay his tier somehow…

Stoner's Condos. The land in Riverchapel was actually sold since I wrote this, and the towers were rebuilt in Putnam.

Wait, what’s this tier thing, exactly? It’s not rent since you supposedly own the land. An appropriate metaphor might be a council tax, except of course that there are no roads to be maintained, or grass to be cut. There is, in fact, no land at all. A tier, when you look behind the virtual curtain, is a hosting fee. The US$1,675 that a private island will set you back actually reserves for you a single core of a server, on which you can only run LL’s region software. The US$295 you pay a month is a hosting fee to continue sharing that server, as you would pay for web hosting or other application hosting.

You’d really have to go out of your way to find a deal as bad as that elsewhere. In fact, I couldn’t. Any hosting deal that approached that monthly price offered significantly more server power (4x at least), total control of the server’s configuration, and no setup fee. If all you really want is a patch of virtual land, $15 will get you a virtual server capable of hosting a single OpenSim region, 65,536m2 for the price of 2,048m2 in an SL mainland region. LL have been able to maintain this illusion of scarcity and charge these outrageous prices until now because they ran the only show in town, a walled garden where they could do as they pleased.

That, however, is changing. OpenSim is an open source virtual world server which allows anybody to set up their own grid which the SL viewer and others can connect to, or to run a single region server which can be attached to other grids. These independent grids can even be linked together to create a web of virtual worlds which an avatar can potentially navigate at will with an account on a single grid. LL aren’t oblivious to this change, and actually helped bring it about when they released the source of their viewer a couple of years ago, but they have been slow to fulfil their promise to release the code of their server software. In the meantime OpenSim has been catching up rapidly in terms of stability and features, even implementing features that are missing from LL’s software.

It’s far from perfect; most days I log into OSG I encounter a variety of weird and annoying bugs. Other grids are more stable because they follow SL’s model of centralised server control and don’t update to new versions of the software by the hour. The grids are also sparesly populated in comparison to SL, and don’t have the same variety of objects. But imperfections aside, what OpenSim offers that SL can’t is control and choice: the freedom to choose the hardware you require, modify the software to do what you need, or just to move easily between grids to find one with the theme, organisational structure, pricing or people you feel comfortable with.

We were also given some free land in OSG recently. It’s an 3952m2 space in a scenic atoll region surrounded by mountains, and we can rez 2714 prims where ever we want  rather than being confined to a tiny little box. There’s a bunch of other islands around, the residents of which spend a lot of their time building cool things and giving them away as presents, or thinking of ways to help newbies find their way around. Further afield there are freebie shops, test regions for a new jointed physics engine, and somebody has set up a link to a small grid they’re working on. It’s an exciting place to be. When I asked our landlord Snoopy why she offers free parcels, she said it was to allow people to get a first impression, so they can get to know each other and a community can develop. And that’s a reason that needs no excusing.

Our island in Heaven

Down and Out in SecondLife

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This was intended to be blog about the development work I was doing with Google’s Lively virtual world in mind. I had planned numerous scripts to provide dynamic content for lively picture frames, a configurable bot to chat and perform services in world, and maybe even a text-based (at first!) client for Linux and MacOS devotees like myself.

But before any of that even got off the ground Google made this announcement, rendering all my work completely pointless, and the work that so many others have done to create cool objects and rooms and community.

So, I don’t know what it’ll be about now…

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