Updates for September 2026
Here's what happened in September:
We went to Disneyland at the start of the month for a few days with friends.
I changed the site's home page to only show excerpts for entries, instead of the full text. This makes it act more like an overview.
I started taking a few classes at Needles Studio: a beginning garment sewing class, a chore coat class, and an introduction to quilting class.
I built out the studio's sewing table, adding a larger cutting mat, getting storage sorted out, and adding a pattern projector rig.
For the first time this year, I worked on my notes and published a few new ones:
I compiled a list of Sewing patterns that I want to make.
I got an Adafruit Fruit Jam using a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller and immediately flashed it with Macintosh System 7.
One project I've always wanted to make "from scratch" are Camera sliders.
And I updated a few older ones:
I started reading The Dispossessed but haven't gotten very far in it. And I read a lot of articles, mostly technical:
I Built The World’s Only 2026 WWII Jeep. It Nearly Broke Me
This was a very long read, but worth it to hear about how scrappy auto mechanics can be when pressed. I'm shocked he could just put the thing on the road and drive it for hundreds of miles at speed. But there's a certain elegance to old designs like this. These are systems that work well in concert together. At some point a design constraint is changed or a feature desired, causing cascading changes that might lead to an overall worse product.
Why I Am not Going To Buy A Computer by Wendell Berry
I can sympathize with this viewpoint, but it would be good to note that it was enabled by his particular circumstances.
Thick art is like that: it gives you an egg to crack. It leaves space for some essential ingredient you bring yourself, so that the real action happens in your mind, rather than on the page or the canvas or the screen.
This is a nice way to think about the purpose and impact of art. It's just a little hard to break into the scene and find things that you like. We can't all just stumble into the Museo del Prado.
Why is the human body so crap except for the liver?
This article was so good, I don't even care if it's not accurate.
The city’s Local Roadway Safety Plan prices converting a 2-way stop to all-way stop control at $500 per sign and assigns it a 50% collision reduction factor. Installation took a few hours.
There's a certain optimism on display here, almost saccharine, that we are content with a transportation system delivering this outcome. The structual ineffectiveness on display is painful to read about.
The Birth of EQUAL Control Lever
We spent about two years developing it, but we just couldn’t eliminate the backlash, and it didn’t feel right. The lever would slip slightly when you tried to shift. The mechanism was complicated, the parts were tiny, and we couldn’t achieve enough rigidity.
With any kind of engineering project, your speed is directly limited by how quickly you can get a functional prototype and make judgements on it.
Why Wool & Canvas Ring My Bell
I'm riding my bike to work, or the grocery store, or maybe even down the coast for a few days--not crossing a Patagonian plateau. I'd rather look like a regular person with some aesthetic appeal and a bit of class than someone who won a shopping spree at REI.
This was the inaugral blog post for a moderately successful bag-making business in Portland. It paused production and recently was acquired by another bag-maker, but it doesn't seem like much is happening there. But I loved these posts for their thorough rejection of the status quo.
Only a Few Months Left for Bike + Book + Hatchet
Another business foray that ultimately didn't work out for the owner, but I wish it had.
The trip to Disneyland was short but brutally hot. Our visit overlapped a humid heat wave so we had to stay out of the sun and focus on indoor rides. This time we stayed at the Pixar Place hotel, which was pretty convenient except for the elevators. They don't have call buttons, but instead use a touch screen with all the floors on it that you have to select up-front, before the elevator comes. This can work well11 22 Bishopsgate in London uses this system at a much larger scale: 4 elevator bays serving alternating floors, each with 8 elevators. but this hotel's implementation of it is pretty bad. One morning we got up a bit later and every elevator on its way down was full, with no way to request a free elevator coming back up. In the end, I had to carry a stroller down 12 floors of stairs.
When we got back from Disneyland, I found someone selling an Antelope Camping Equipment backpack on Facebook Marketplace. Twenty minutes and $35 later, I am the proud owner of a later model coated-nylon external frame backpack. These were made near where I live in the '70s and have some unique design points. I want to deconstruct it and sew a new pack out of Sunforger canvas.
My interest in sewing peaked this month and is now tapering off to a more sustainable level. I started three separate classes at Needles Studio, a local sewing store: introduction to garment sewing, a chore coat project, and introduction to quilting. This is probably too much to start with, but I really wanted to learn how to make a chore coat. I'm working with a 10 oz. canvas twill fabric that is tough on the domestic machine they have there. For the quilting class, I have to complete the top by the next session and I only have one of sixteen squares done. I did set up a proper sewing area in the studio, complete with an ironing board, work lamp, and saddle stool. Cutting out the pattern, then pinning it, and then finally cutting the fabric was so time-consuming that I bought a cheap projector to mount above my cutting table for projecting the pattern, avoiding the first two steps. We'll see what I get up to in October but am not accepting any costume requests.
Aside from that, I'm looking forward to biking a bit more in the shoulder season. I'm picking up a new bike soon and will probably have a lot to say about it in a month. I also want to get more art for the walls and wall-mount my pen plotter so I can start using it again.